Torture report

Reading the "letters" sections in the newspapers, you will discover that many people believe that revealing CIA torture of prisoners will lead to "retribution" against Americans.  Their thinking, to me, at least, is pretty strange.

Back in 1969 and 1970, the USofA authorized the "secret bombing" of Cambodia.  Does anybody  actually think the Cambodians didn't notice?  Only Americans and our allies were kept in the dark.

Early in 2011, hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from a prison in Kandahar Province.  Then, in 2013, Al Qaeda freed hundreds more from Abu Ghrab, in Iraq.  Does anybody think none of those prisoners were tortured?  In Afghanistan and Iraq, torture is no big news.

The people who had to be slapped in the face with the news — not just waterboarding, but torture by goddamned enema, don't live in the Middle East, they live here, in the USofA.

And a bunch of them have been elected to Congress.

The Senator and the CIA

Dianne Feinstein is profoundly pissed.  As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she has loyally defended the interests and reputations of the CIA and NSA for years.  No more.

The Committee's investigation into the abuses of the Bush-Cheney years has produced a report that probably would never have been made public.  On the off chance that it might have been made public, CIA operatives hacked into the computers used by Senate staffers and removed some documents the CIA stupidly provided in the first place — most notably, an in-house report on rendition and torture asserting that nothing useful ever came out of such practices.

Now that Feinstein has gone public, however, there is a slight chance that the Senate report — or at least an executive summary — may be released.  Personally, I'd rather see the CIA's in-house report, but you take what you can get these days.  (Well, maybe somebody will send it to Wikileaks.)

Edward Snowden is a hero.  Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning is a hero.  Certainly, some CIA staff and Bush-Cheney personnel (including, perhaps, Bush and Cheney) belong in jail.  Just don't expect too much of "Professor of Constitutional Law" Barack Obama.

The Democratic Convention, so far...

Okay, we all knew Michelle Obama would be great.  Hell, she'd probably be a better candidate than her husband.  Bill Clinton did a bang-up job last night, and, as always, I have a giant crush on Elizabeth Warren — the only Democrat with the guts to openly chastise big finance.

So far, there has been no Clint Eastwood style embarrassment — which is not to say there has been no embarrassment.  Obama caused it himself by antagonizing roughly half the delegates, caving in to right wingers by insisting on a change in the party platform.

Is Jerusalem the recognized capital of Israel?  Not according to many years of US foreign policy — but, hell, it's in the Republican platform, and we can't risk antagonizing the Jews, can we?  And how in hell did the platform committee write a platform without even once mentioning GOD?  Crap, the Republicans mentioned "God" somewhere between eight and twelve times, depending on who was doing the counting.  (It's really hard actually to read party platforms.)

(As you read this, vast numbers of Evangelicals are rooting for the Israelis to nuke Iran and bring on the Apocalypse.  Obama, of course, really really wants to win a second term — not necessarily because he has a grand vision for our future, but because he is driven to win.  Needless to say, the same is true of Romney.  As Socrates observed a few millennia ago, anybody who really wants power really shouldn't have it.)

Last week, I got a call from an Obama fundraiser.  I did not contribute my measly twenty-five or fifty bucks, although I noted I recently had contributed more than once to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Kirsten Gillibrand campaign, the Elizabeth Warren campaign, and the campaign of my local, hard pressed Congressman.  (I hope some of that does some good.)

Asked the one thing the President could do to make me like him enough to give him money (okay, it wasn't phrased quite like that), I said "Give me back the civil rights I had before 9/11 — and close Guantanamo."  Yes, it was more than one thing, but the fundraiser didn't complain.

Since then, the (Obama) Justice Department has announced it will not be pressing charges against any CIA torturers.  The CIA continues to insist that only three "high-value" prisoners were waterboarded, although a recent report by Human Rights Watch contradicts that assertion.

Four years ago, Obama said he wanted to "look ahead, not behind."  When I look ahead, I want to see the torturers and all those who aided and abetted them in jail.  Fat chance.

Hypocrite. Coward. President.

If I seem to be writing less frequently lately, it's because my anger and outrage are devolving into the usual depression. I never expected all that much of Obama, but I suppose all that financial industry money spent on his campaign affected even a habitual cynic like me, so I swallowed hard and hoped.

Hope. Bullshit.

Let's forget my usual economic complaints for the moment. This week, I heard promises about greater regulation of derivatives, more anti-trust suits, and action to limit predation by credit card. I'm not listening to promises anymore. I'll wait and see what, if anything, actually happens.

Onward and downward: where the hell is Dwight D. Eisenhower (or some reasonable facsimile) when you need him? It's looking more and more like Obama is being cowed by Pentagon bullies, with participation by CIA, NSA, and probably a dozen other agencies whose goddamned initials are top secret. Why has McChrystal replaced McKiernan? Beats me, unless it's that McCrystal is okay with an invasion of Pakistan from Afghanistan, and McKiernan isn't. And what will that consummate bully, Benjamin Netanyahu, bully our president into doing when they meet this week?

Take some action against the torturers? Um, no, 'fraid not. Come to think of it, we can't even release any more embarassing photos. Abolish the military tribunals? Uh, sorry, but that might force us to release some people whose "confessions" were extracted by the aforementioned torture. "Don't ask, don't tell?" Don't ask.

Last week, Dick Durbin observed that the financial industry, despite its setbacks, still had the strongest lobby in Washington -- but what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex still has to be in the running. So, how many of the useless, overpriced "defense" contracts that now appear to be on the chopping block actually will be chopped? If experience is any guide, most of those turkeys will still be alive and well for next Thanksgiving, and for the one after that as well.

Turning point?

"Comes the revolution," my mother used to say, imitating her grandfather's Yiddish accent, "we'll all eat pitches and krim."

It was my introduction to irony, and, as a young child, I totally didn't get it. We ate peaches (canned) and cream (sour) as often as we liked -- and George Washington had won the revolution way back in olden times. I caught on later, though, in the sixties, when my radical friends and I were busy changing the world -- and it seems that Mom first heard the phrase from great-grandpa back in the thirties, when she and her radical friends were busy changing the world.

A sizable chunk of the population of the United States seems to think the revolution will be starting tomorrow, at the Obama inauguration -- to which I reply, "pitches and krim." Disappointment, I'm afraid, is inevitable. George Washington really did win the revolution -- the bourgeois revolution -- way back in "olden times," and the plutocrats have been firmly in charge ever since.

This is not to say that some revolutionary change didn't take place in the thirties, with the coming of welfare capitalism, or in the sixties, with the expansion of the welfare state and the gains accomplished for civil rights. It's just that the changes didn't match the expectations. They never do.

So what can we expect of Obama? Anybody who's been paying attention can see that while he speaks like an idealist, his actions are guided entirely by pragmatism. He will not expend "political capital" fighting the health care lobby, so we will not have the single-payer health insurance system we so desperately need. He will not stand up to the financial industry, weakened as it is, so we will continue the long-standing practice of socializing losses and privatizing profits. (Yes, taxpayers, you soon will own a shitload of "toxic assets.") He will not instruct his Justice Department to prosecute the leaders of the outgoing administration for war crimes, and he's likely to entagle us in Afghanistan just as thoroughly and painfully as Kennedy entangled us in Vietnam.

I think the best we can hope for is the reversal of some of the catastrophic mistakes of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II -- although nearly thirty years of free-market excess aided and abetted by government is not likely to disappear in eight, despite the clear failure of Milton Friedman/Alan Greenspan economics. Still, all of us can be happy that The Worst President In The History Of The United States Of America will no longer be around to make things even worse.

Is that enough of a "turning point" for you? I hope so.