Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray is defying a gag-order and publishing torture memos on his blog relating to the coordination between the Uzbek, British, and American governments. As Kos says, it’s brutal :
Last year the US gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom.
Uzbekistan’s geo-strategic position is crucial. It has half the population of the whole of Central Asia. It alone borders all the other states in a region which is important to future Western oil and gas supplies. It is the regional military power. That is why the US is here, and here to stay. Contractors at the US military bases are extending the design life of the buildings from ten to twenty five years.
Democracy and human rights are, despite their protestations to the contrary, in practice a long way down the US agenda here. Aid this year will be slightly less, but there is no intention to introduce any meaningful conditionality. Nobody can believe this level of aid – more than US aid to all of West Africa – is related to comparative developmental need as opposed to political support for Karimov. While the US makes token and low-level references to human rights to appease domestic opinion, they view Karimov’s vicious regime as a bastion against fundamentalism. He – and they – are in fact creating fundamentalism. When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West?
. . .
The torture record of the Uzbek security services could hardly be more widely known. Plainly there are, at the very least, reasonable grounds for believing the material is obtained under torture. There is helpful guidance at Article 3 of the UN Convention;
“The competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the state concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.” While this article forbids extradition or deportation to Uzbekistan, it is the right test for the present question also.
On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer:
“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.
Here’s what that partnership looks like in action :
At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family’s links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.
And this is the standard that we’re living under with a President who looks the other way while children are being tortured.
To the fools out there who routinely praise the President for having the “moral clarity” to call terrorists evil, how can you reconcile that with the chummy relationship he’s made with tyrants? The lesser of two evils argument doesn’t really work when you chide anyone whose view of fighting terrorism is more nuanced than “smoke them out of their holes” and you verbally fellate the President for being “right on the only issue that matters”. You’re either in favor of moral relativism or you’re not.
Of course, coming up with a worldview that’s logically consistent has it’s troubles, since it would naturally lead to having an open, honest debate about whether or not the United States should be torturing people. Which is why the Administration (and their sycophantic toadies) ignore the substance of the seemingly-neverending stream of torture memos in the hopes of running out the clock (ie. news cycle) with their vehement denials to misstated questioning.
But to take things back to square one, it should be repeated again and again that this would all stop if the President wanted it to. With a phonecall to the Uzbek government, he could threated to eliminate foreign aid until human rights abuses ceased. With a stroke of his pen, he could fire Donald Rumsfeld and replace him with a Defense Secretary serious about curbing detainee abuse. Working with Congressional leaders, he could cooperate with stymied investigations into torture. For the most powerful man in the world, the torture of innocent people could be eliminated tomorrow if he cared enough.
Why he hasn’t done any of these things leads us back to the eternal debate about the presidency of George W. Bush. Is he so isolated from bad news that he has no idea about the abuses that are happening on his watch? Is he a callous monster who thinks the torture of innocents is justified by the “greater good” of whatever the hell he’s trying to accomplish? Or is it a combination of the two? Either way, I don’t know how much longer we can afford to have the reputation of the United States tarnished while we ponder the endless “idiot or asshole?” debate.
Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Busboy, picture framer, t-shirt production artist, sullen copy store clerk
Four movies you could watch over and over: Goodfellas, LA Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Harold and Maude
Four places you’ve lived: Iowa City, Iowa; Hardy, Arkansas; San Francisco; Brooklyn
Four TV shows you love to watch: Arrested Development, Battlestar Galactica (new version), Firefly, The Daily Show
Four places you’ve been on vacation: Paris, London, Lisbon, Budapest
Four websites you visit daily: Eschaton, Kos, alicublog, TBogg
Four of your favorite foods: Malai kofta, chicken satay, chicken curry (gang garee), Ritter Sport Milk Chocolate Coconut candy bars
Four places you’d rather be: San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco.
Four albums you can’t live without: Right now? Kristen Hersh, Hips and Makers; Neil Young, Decade (really three albums, so I’m cheating); The The, Infected; U2, October. Next week? probably something entirely different.
Next four tagged: Bob Harris, Billmon, August Pollak, TBogg. You’re it.
I am trying to celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus in an appropriately capitalistic, if secular, fashion. But every time I try to get out, they drag me back in.
Which is to say, I am unable to resist commenting on Maureen Dowd’s column today. Actually, it’s not Maureen Dowd’s column, per se — to give herself a little extra holiday time off, she’s turned over the bulk of her column to her brother Kevin, a man who has apparently learned everything he knows about the world from Bill O’Reilly talking points.
Go back two generations and you will find the real diversity that made our country the greatest in the world. Immigrants brought their customs with them and were accepted. We were taught by our parents to respect the customs and religious beliefs of other people.
Let’s see. Two generations back puts us roughly at 1946. As my wife points out, it was an era of anti-immigrant laws and Jim Crow — not exactly the golden age of tolerance Mr. Dowd imagines.
The rest of the column continues in that vein, a compendium of right wing lies and nonsense:
To the P.C. Elites: The founding fathers guaranteed Freedom OF Religion, not Freedom FROM Religion. Please go away, you are making my hair hurt.
To Target: You better check the sales and profit numbers that are CHRISTMAS related before you ban the word.
To Bill O’Reilly: Thank you for dragging the P.C. crowd into the open. Maybe they will learn that America doesn’t want to be de-Godded.
To Judge Jones of Pennsylvania: No Intelligent Design? You are going to be hoping for a Big Bang if St. Peter is checking ID’s.
To President Bush: Stay the Course. The same people that are calling for troop withdrawal were under their beds on 9/12/01 screaming “Kill the Infidels!” Let’s fight them there instead of here and bring our troops home with honor as soon as possible.
I guess most of this pretty much speaks for itself, a kind of Rorschach blot defining whether or not the reader is an idiot. But I really can’t let that last bit pass without comment. Speaking as someone who lived in Brooklyn in September of 2001 — one of many thousands of New Yorkers who witnessed the collapse of the towers firsthand — I can assure you that neither I nor anyone I knew spent the next day under the bed calling for the death of infidels. Actually, now that I think of it — isn’t ‘infidel’ the term we generally imagine al Qaeda to use in reference to us? Either Kevin Dowd is indulging himself with a very sophisticated little piece of satire, imagining America haters hiding under the bed calling for their own deaths, or he’s a complete moron who can’t even keep his Bill O’Reilly talking points straight.
We report, you decide.
I hope Maureen had a lovely day off, but it really is extraordinary that the Times would agree to run something that reads like the deranged rantings of a not-very-bright, seventh-tier wingnut blogger.
* * *
One quick unrelated update: Via Kos, I see that the Little Red Book/Homeland Security story was a hoax. I’m usually pretty good at spotting these things — and in fact, I didn’t post anything on this one when I got the initial email until I tracked down the source of the story. Unfortunately it appears that the newspaper in question didn’t exactly exercise due dilgence themselves.
Of course, the story about the government spying on its own citizens remains all too real.
… the more I think about this, the more it pisses me off. This little lying putz has handed the righties a tailor-made propaganda point, perfectly designed to distract attention from the real issue at hand. Thanks, chief.
I’ve gotta hand it to you Mr. President. You may be unable to defeat an insurgency, but you can really beat a metaphor to death :
This new threat required us to think and act differently. And as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, to prevent this from happening again, we need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after.
. . .
You know, there’s an interesting debate in Washington, and you’re part of it, that says, well, they didn’t connect the
dots prior to September the 11th — “they” being not only my administration, but previous administrations. And I understand that debate. I’m not being critical of you bringing this issue up and discussing it, but there was a — you might remember, if you take a step back, people were pretty adamant about hauling people up to testify, and wondering how come the dots weren’t connected.
Well, the Patriot Act helps us connect the dots. And now the United States Senate is going to let this bill expire. Not the Senate — a minority of senators. And I want senators from New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas to go home and explain why these cities are safer. It is inexcusable to say, on the one hand, connect the dots, and not give us a chance to do so. We’ve connected the dots, or trying to connect the dots with the NSA program. And, again, I understand the press and members of the United States Congress saying, are you sure you’re safeguarding civil liberties. That’s a legitimate question, and an important question. And today I hope I’ll help answer that. But we’re connecting dots as best as we possibly can.
Now Mr. President, I’ve got a homework assignment for you.Sometime over the holidays, you need to read the two big 9/11 reports, the Congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Failures and the one published by the 9/11 Commission (which can be found at Barnes & Noble). By “read”, I don’t mean having an aide verbally paraphrase the portions of the executive summary that agree with your worldview, but actually read the whole thing. If there are any big words, try sounding them out slowly and look up the definitions if you aren’t sure what they mean. When you’re done, come back and read the rest of this post.
[ Pause here to read the 9/11 reports and reflect on their contents. ]
Wow, that was a tough one, huh? What did you think? Do you think there are things that our government could have done better? Yeah, that’s right, we should “connect the dots”. Do you know what that phrase means? Look at the picture below :
Now if the picture above was the intelligence failures described in the 9/11 reports, what do you think those dots would represent? No, they don’t represent “evildoers”, they represent bits of intelligence. Number one, for example, might represent the “Phoenix Memo” that described a possible terrorist plot by terrorists to hijack a plane and crash it into CIA headquarters. Number two, could be the reports of suspicious men in flight training schools who wanted to learn to fly 747’s but didn’t want to know how to land. The third could be the FAA directive to commercial airliners that terrorists may try to board planes.The fourth could be the “chatter” that resulted in the PDB “Bin Laden determined to strike in US”. And so on….
So how do we put these disparate pieces of information together? Yeah, you connect the dots, but how does that work? In some places it means making sure any Arabic communications have been translated. In others it means ensuring that information is shared between various government agencies. And in others, it means cutting through bureaucratic red tape. And once those lines are drawn from one to two to three, then it means having someone step back with a view of the big picture and say “Hey, that’s George Washington”.
Which leads me to why I think you need a refresher course in dot-connecting. What happens when you order warrantless wiretaps, confiscate library records, and spy on mosques and peace protests? It doesn’t make the picture easier to see, it just adds a lot more dots. We don’t need to be making the whole thing more complicated, we need to make it easier to draw lines. That’s why the NSA wiretaps and the PATRIOT ACT are bad ideas. Yes, some portions of the PATRIOT ACT make it easier to draw the lines, but they don’t do much good when they’re lumped together with stuff that just makes the dot-connecting more confusing.
Did you like the movie Die Hard? I thought it totally kicked ass, but at the end of the day, it was just a movie. In real life, the bad guys don’t go wandering around giving monologues about their plans and motives. But that’s what I’m afraid is motivating your current obsession with collecting intelligence. Stop me if I’m wrong here, but it seems like you’re endlessly looking for a “smoking gun” like a wiretapped phone call saying “Tomorrow morning, me and my eighteen friends are gonna hijack planes and crash them into buildings. Don’t tell anybody”. But all this waiting around for something that isn’t likely to happen is fraught with two problems. Number one, you’re collecting so many phone calls and emails that there aren’t enough people around to translate them quickly enough. Number two, your search for obvious intelligence may lead to ignoring mountains of vague intelligence that could lead to the same conclusion.
Which all leads me back to the 9/11 reports that I had you read earlier. Remember the conclusions they reached? It wasn’t that they didn’t have enough information to foil the hijackers, but that they didn’t, say it with me, Connect. The. Dots. So what is the lesson here? That the problems leading up to 9/11 weren’t with intelligence collection but with analysis of that evidence. Got it?
It’s been quite a week in the abuse-of-authority department. The NSA story has gotten most of the attention, of course, but let’s not overlook the other contenders.
Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.
In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.
The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, “I am a shameless agitator.” She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.
Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.
Until Sept. 11, the secret monitoring of events where people expressed their opinions was among the most tightly limited of police powers.
Berube has a good post on the supposed “libertarians” who support ever-increasing government intrusiveness at the expense of, you know, liberty. But there’s more to the problem than bloggers who continually harrumph that those of us angered by the mendacity of the Bush administration are “on the other side.” There’s more to the problem than bloggers who genuinely believe that those of us who fear for the very principles of liberty and freedom upon which this nation was founded actually want al Qaeda to win.
The real problem is that there are — and always have been — people in government and law enforcement, people with actual power, who believe this crap. Who can’t tell the difference between a Quaker’s friends meeting and an al Qaeda cell. Who believe — or conveniently pretend to believe — that gay student groups are a threat to national security. Who see a group of protesters and think to themselves, “you’re either with us or against us,” and consider it their duty to undermine the First Amendment by any means necessary.
The right wing bloggers are just on the sidelines, cheering these people on — because they figure their status as Right Thinking Citizens protects them from similar harassment and intimidation. In their fantasies, the big strong police officer will see the flag pin on their lapel and give them a knowing wink and move on down the line to bash some longhaired terrorist loving hippie freak.
History, of course, would tend to suggest that increasing authoritarianism often doesn’t work out that well, even for Right Thinking Citizens. But no one ever seems to remember that particular lesson until it’s far too late.
…meanwhile, the Pajamatarians are busy discussing traffic cameras in the U.K. I guess that one’s safely abstract enough to denounce. Just wait until it starts happening here, they’ll be stumbling over themselves to explain why it’s not a big deal at all.
I’m going just a little crazy trying to wrap up deadlines and get everything done before that holiday we liberals hate rolls around. So I expect blogging to be sort of sporadic and then fizzle out altogether over the next few days.
But this is too damn good not to post. And I know it’s a trite catchphrase used too often in lieu of actual thought, but in this case it’s almost imperative: read the whole thing.
9/11 changed everything. Suddenly the he-men of WalMart and the NRA leaped into Big Brother’s arms and shrieked “save me, save me! Do what ever you have to do, they’re trying to kill us all!” They now look to Daddy Government not to discipline the children, but to check under the bed for them every night, reassure them that the boogeyman won’t hurt them and then read them a nice bedtime story about spreading freedom and democracy. It turns out that underneath all this swaggering bravado, the Republicans aren’t the Daddy party — they’re the baby party.
(Incidentally, the author of that post, Digby, is doing a little fundraising…)
* * *
And as if to prove the point, Bill O’Reilly’s viewers weigh in …
With the end of the year approaching, it seems like a good time to thank my editor and publicist at my new publisher, Tarcher. After more than a decade with St. Martin’s, my expectations for publishers were ground into the dirt. My editor at SMP was a loyal friend, but the machinery there conspired against us at every turn. When the Great Big Book came out a few years ago, a lot of you helped out by pre-ordering it, driving up to #12 on Amazon’s bestseller list for awhile — and SMP still pretty much just let the book die. I am not privy to the exact details, but I believe when this was brought to the attention of the muckety-mucks, their response was something like, “Prithee, good sir, pray explain the meaning of this odd term ‘webbe-syte’.” After which they picked up their crow quill pens and resumed scratching away at the parchament ledger books. They didn’t get it, and they didn’t get me. To SMP, I was always going to be the weird alternative cartoonist kid from California, even after six books and two RFK awards. And a brief turn on the top of the Amazon list.
So it’s quite remarkable to be in the early stages of planning a real book tour, with genuine support from the publisher. It’ll be a limited tour, but that’s my decision, not theirs (these things play havoc with my deadline schedule, and there’s only so much time I can afford to take off). It’s also quite remarkable to be dealing with a publicist who understands there’s more to the job than leaving a stack of books out on Fifth Ave and hoping someone who works at a magazine might happen to stumble across them.
The book won’t be in stores until March 23. The pre-sell info should be up at Amazon within the next few weeks, and believe me, I’ll start pimping it then. (I’m holding off on releasing the cover art until then as well.) The book is full color throughout, on heavy paper stock — I haven’t seen it yet, but my editor called yesterday to tell me the advance copy looks stunning.
So that’s all good.
While I’m at it, I also owe thanks to my new webmaster. The transition to a new server has not been without a few hiccups, but things seem to be running smoothly now, and thanks to his help, I’ve cut my expenses dramatically.
And speaking of people I have worked with this year, my one regret is that these guys won’t be showing up under any Christmas trees this season. I have one set, and they are truly works of art, which must be seen to be appreciated. Unfortunately, the company producing them apparently collapsed under the weight of the demand. I was supposed to get a few more sets in lieu of the royalties they owe me, but they’ve vanished and no longer answer email, so it’s anybody’s guess at this point if that’ll happen. (Dawson, if you’re reading this–it’s okay, bubba, there are no hard feelings here. But I really would like to get those sets.) In the meantime, I’m still open to trying again if there are any interested manufacturers out there. (Anybody from Dark Horse reading this?)
…hey, one more: big, big thanks to the co-bloggers. They’ve added a lot to this site.
Conservatives should fall down on their knees every morning and thank their white patriarchal Christian god for the existence of the New York Times. The paper that helped sell the Iraq war via Judy Miller’s sterling reportage may also be the paper that helped ensure the re-election of George W. Bush — by sitting on the fact that he was busy committing impeachable offenses until a year after the election.
The New York Times first debated publishing a story about secret eavesdropping on Americans as early as last fall, before the 2004 presidential election.
But the newspaper held the story for more than a year and only revealed the secret wiretaps last Friday, when it became apparent a book by one of its reporters was about to break the news, according to journalists familiar with the paper’s internal discussions.
Dec. 19, 2005 - Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.
Keller and Sulzberger had a meeting with Bush in the Oval Office — and the Times did not bother to mention the fact.
Unsurprisingly, the live audience attending a broadcast of the Fox News “Dayside” program is quite eager to “sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety,” as Benjamin Franklin famously put it (noting that such citizens frankly deserve neither). But surprisingly, Fox’s in-house legal expert, Judge Andrew Napolitano, has strayed off the reservation:
Napolitano: When Congress enacted the FISA act in ‘77, it also made it criminal for anyone in this country to use the power of the government to wiretap without a search warrant. It made it easy to get the search warrant with the FISA law, but it said you have to get the search warrant.
Host: So what the president’s done is a criminal act?
Napolitano: The president has violated the law in the name of national security, not wanting to violate the law, believing he’s doing the right thing, but he violated it nonetheless. He can’t pick and choose which laws to obey and not to obey any more than the rest of us can.
Not too far off the reservation, but definitely at least one foot outside the gate. The audience is unimpressed: But judge, they’s terrorists! They wants to blow us up! Etc., etc., ad nauseum.
….unfuckingbelievable:
Audience member: We’ve got to give the President the flexibility to protect me. I use my cell phone all the time and I don’t have any problem with the folks listening to the conversations I have because they’re appropriate conversations.
And the audience bursts into applause.
If our democracy survives the next three years in any recognizable form, it will be in spite of morons like that.
NEW BEDFORD — A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”
