"By the last year of the Bush presidency, growing numbers of former administration insiders had abandoned the government with the conviction that in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way. Many had fought valiantly to right what they saw as a dangerously wrong turn. With Bush, Cheney and Addington still firmly in power, it was hard to declare their efforts a success. Still, with change in the air, there was a sense that history might be on their side." She mentions by name Jack Goldsmith, Matthew Waxman, Alberto Mora and Phillip Zelikow. Zelikow had warned that the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen in the same light as Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He put it this way, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."
Jane Mayer The Dark Side
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Deception, incompetence and social indifference have led the Bush administration to breach ethical and legal boundaries in its anti-terrorism interrogation policy, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer said in a discussion of her new book, “The Dark Side,” on Wednesday afternoon.
“They redefined torture so that they were not torturing unless they caused organ failure or death,” Mayer said. She explained that by employing attorneys to find loopholes in the law, the White House was able to employ techniques such as waterboarding, which involves inducing the sensation of drowning.
Likewise, the CIA has erected black-site prisons around the world to escape the jurisdiction of American courts and the restrictions of American law, Mayer said, noting that such prisons are suspected to exist in countries such as Poland, Romania, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Afghanistan.
The current administration has also reinterpreted the definition of extraordinary rendition, Mayer added.
“The extraordinary rendition program was Deception, incompetence and social indifference have led the Bush administration to breach ethical and legal boundaries in its anti-terrorism interrogation policy, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer said in a discussion of her new book, “The Dark Side,” on Wednesday afternoon.
“They redefined torture so that they were not torturing unless they caused organ failure or death,” Mayer said. She explained that by employing attorneys to find loopholes in the law, the White House was able to employ techniques such as waterboarding, which involves inducing the sensation of drowning.
Likewise, the CIA has erected black-site prisons around the world to escape the jurisdiction of American courts and the restrictions of American law, Mayer said, noting that such prisons are suspected to exist in countries such as Poland, Romania, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Afghanistan.
The current administration has also reinterpreted the definition of extraordinary rendition, Mayer added.
“The extraordinary rendition program was supposed to allow us to pick up terror suspects around the world and return them to face justice in their home countries,” Mayer said, explaining that instead, the program has been used to send arrested suspects to other countries to subject them to torture.
Incompetence, Mayer said, was also a factor in the decision to subject suspects to harsh treatment. There is evidence that torture is ineffective, she said, adding that she faults the administration for ignoring this evidence.
“[Torture] is something that amateurs turn to,” Mayer said, citing the case of al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. Mayer criticized Bush’s claim that the results obtained by using waterboarding were in fact relevant intelligence.
Mayer also stressed the long-term consequences of harsh interrogation, noting that treating prisoners unethically only allows them to be seen as victims and is counterproductive as a result.
“Anything that would win [Abu Zubaydah] sympathy in the world with the new generation of Muslims is a tremendous political problem,” Mayer explained.
The role of the next president, Mayer noted, will be difficult, given the Bush administration’s legacy and the legal impact of changing its policies.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/09/25/21471/
Binging in a Parallel Universe. That's how he felt. As if far off, in a different place, but nevertheless the same place, in a sidestep world hidden, enveloped inside this one, he was drinking like he had never drunk before, drunk in every cell of his body, steeped in alcohol, away on those massive binging spirals he used to go on, lasting days, weeks, months. They were driven by profound injustices. By a sense of betrayal, unfairness. Bill Leak, the well known cartoonist, is in hospital after having undergone brain surgery. He fell off a balcony. While feeding parrots. At the ad man John Singleton's, place. It was very Bill.
I was sober for seven years once, John, he told me. They were the worst seven years of my life. That was in the seeking, the desire for comfort. He wanted to be wounded, an animal by the side of the road. He wanted to be driven over, ignored, a piece of bleeding carcass. Gone were the days of gin and tonics, the elegant drinking. Now it was all about road kill. It was all about making the biggest mess of himself possible. Zoned in, zoned out, there was nothing left of his stomach, he was repeatedly terrified. Oh please, please, he said, tears flowing down his face in the middle of the night. He had no idea who he was talking to.
The worst seven years of my life. Going against nature. There was no hope. You will never succeed. All the negative head talk the psychiatrists talked about, profoundly dysfunctional, you will never stop, never triumph, haunted him through to the early hours. He drank and he drank until he felt the click, that moment when he felt at one with the universe, at one with the bar, the music, the people; and he knew that he would never remember anything beyond this point. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they would never end. He met old friends he hadn't seen in years, old friends who had gone off to London to succeed.
They couldn't believe he was still sitting on the same bar stools, in the same bars, talking about the same crap, gossiping about the same people. They couldn't believe his life had remained so static, while theirs had soared. Blair looked at him with something between pity and contempt. He probably barely had the money for a drink. And the old queens weren't queuing up any more to buy. He had become one himself. He was in the process of dissolving into the floor, into the surrounds. Everything about him spoke failure. He couldn't believe all that hope and promise had come to so little. All those stories had accounted for nought.
These bars truly were the heart of darkness. You know what this is? the bitch asked, rubbing his thumb and finger together. The biggest joint in the world, rolled just for you. He died under a pillow, suffocated by his lovers, his friends. They took these terrible ways out. They sat on the stools and they drank and drank. These people who had washed up here, the courage of difference, perverts. In their own, enclosed universe, they were just a group of people the city had washed up into the same place. Every time he thought, an ocean of distress opened up beneath him. The cell walls closed in.
He met the handsomest bank robber, who was out in the remand section because he was being driven to and from court for yet further proceedings. I can tell by the way you're sitting, he said, and made a grab for him. He didn't resist. For an A-grade criminal he was gentle, rather fun. He told him stories about what went on in the main jail, how everyone had their boy. How you had to find a protector or end up being raped. How he wouldn't survive for five seconds, not in there amongst the real men. And he listened and they talked and after the sex they just kept on talking, men trapped in cages, a world they didn't own. Back on the street, on the black tide of the asphalt, he drank to the handsome robber, to Jean Genet and Our Lady Of The Flowers, to a short life and a merciful death, to love exchanged in brief moments. He would never see him again. It was a laugh he had at the authority's expense, that memory, that man laid out on the narrow bed, that urgent desire.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24526497-952,00.html
PRESSURE is mounting on the Government to slash the immigration intake next year as the global meltdown is tipped to push up unemployment.
Opposition immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone yesterday urged the Federal Government to ditch past practice and consider cutting new arrivals before the financial year's end.
"It is important they remain flexible because the most important thing to do is look after Australia's own unemployed," she told The Courier-Mail.
This year Australia was due to accept a record 190,000 immigrants for the 12 months to the end of June.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised the Government will re-examine the migrant intake in the May Budget, but the Opposition is now pushing for earlier action.
"This Government needs to be watching very carefully the way the economy probably seems to be unravelling in the new year with higher unemployment occurring," Ms Stone said.
Her call came as Australia's biggest home lender, the Commonwealth Bank, became the third big bank to cut its home loan rates. The Commonwealth will shave 0.21 per cent off its standard variable rate for home loans, cutting it to 8.32 per cent.
The move will lower repayments on a standard $300,000 loan by about $42 a month.
Westpac is the only one of the four big banks to refuse to cut its home loan rates after cuts by its competitors.
Meanwhile, Mr Rudd has announced he will host a small business summit in Brisbane this Friday to discuss the impact of the global economic crisis.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-09-23/columns/when-is-obama-going-to-start-talking-about-bush-s-dark-side/
On C-Span, Dana Priest—the first reporter to break the story of CIA torture as an American Policy in "the war on terror" (Washington Post, December 26, 2002)—recently interviewed Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side (Doubleday). If there is an American Nuremberg trial of "the high crimes and misdemeanors" committed during the Bush-Cheney rule, Mayer's book and testimony will be a vital part of the evidence.
During the interview, Mayer strengthened my resolve to keep refusing to vote for Chuck Schumer as my senator. The discussion was about what it will take to sufficiently arouse the American people—and thereby Congress—to hold the Bush chain of command criminally accountable for its serial violations of American laws and international treaties. Jane Mayer said she had asked Schumer—"with a safe seat in a liberal district in New York state"—about the possibility of bringing Bush et. al to justice. This was Senator Schumer's answer: "People don't care about that" (emphasis added).
And Schumer, an ardent seeker of television cameras, didn't himself care enough to arouse his constituents or the nation about Bush's war on the Constitution. Instead, the powerful New York senator was the key force in enabling Bush to appoint Michael Mukasey as his current Attorney General, our chief law-enforcement officer. This former New York federal judge—who continues to avoid calling CIA waterboarding a criminal act—is a major component of the Bush regime's campaign to lock into legal precedent a far-ranging expansion of presidential powers before another administration comes in.
For one example, Mukasey is moving to further loosen FBI surveillance guidelines that will bring us back to J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Operation). The FBI, with no evidence of wrongdoing, will then be free to put "suspicious" persons and organizations into government databases. (There has been no objection from McCain or Obama).
http://www.dailyitem.com/0100_news/local_story_268233049.html
It's not as though we hadn't been adequately warned. Some of the greatest minds in the judicial and political history of the U.S. warned of the lasting harm that could be done to a democracy if it abandoned its ideals of justice and the rule of law during times of fear and panic. Accordingly, Jane Mayer begins most of the chapters of her excellent but horrifying book with short quotations from those who had the foresight to warn us away from choosing the dark side in dark times:
"America should go �not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. "¦ She might become the dictatress of the world: She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit'" (John Quincy Adams.)
"The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends" (The 1976 Church Committee Report.)
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding" (Justice Louis Brandeis.)
Jane Mayer refers to herself as a writer of narrative non-fiction, and, indeed, she brilliantly displays her narrative talent in the way she begins her book with a meticulous recreation of the panic that held the most powerful people in this country in its grip just after 9/11. Key decisions about how to deal with continuing terrorist threats, how to strengthen national security, how to apply the rule of law to these matters, and whether (or how) to expand the powers of the Presidency -- decisions that continue to affect us to this day -- were reached in a condition of chaos and panic. Nevertheless, Mayer demonstrates, key figures in the White House -- Vice President Dick Cheney and his adviser David Addington -- seized on this opportunity to act on their long-held agenda "to enhance presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history and obliterate constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment."
The terrible consequences of those acts, just as Adams, Church and Brandeis warned, will further darken the reputation of the most despised and denigrated presidency in American history. The title of Mayer's book ("The Dark Side") is actually a Faustian quotation from Cheney. On the Sunday after 9/11 during a "Meet the Press" interview, he described how the administration planned to respond to the continuing terrorist threat: "We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will." He went on to say, "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies -- if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives."
Parramatta River, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
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