We saw Pan's Labyrinth this weekend. It was brutal and a bit gory, but sublime in its contrast of children's fairy tales and adult fairy tales. For me, it was the third in a series of movies that seek to change our Disney-polished 20th century retelling of these macabre stories. The first was Sleep Hollow; the second The Brothers Grimm. All of these movies focus on the horror of "Evil" in one way or anther. What makes Pan's Labyrinth different is that it highlights cruelty - not of the fairy world, but of our's. In mythology, from which fairy tales are drawn, nature is neither benevolent or malicious. The wolf in Little Red Ridding Hood is frightening because he is a wolf, and he is hungry, and he is a trickster; he must eat and his skills are suited to that necessity.
Pan's Labyrinth, as well as Sleep Hollow and The Brothers Grimm, maintains a common thread to a magical realm, at once dark and terrifying while alluring and seductive. The "Evil" encountered is magical Evil; opportunities for redemption often exist as do traps for becoming enslaved. These are the paths of Fairy Tales - through dark forests with endless choices and, often, only one safe way home. What makes Pan's Labyrinth different is that it also contains this entirely other story - of adult fairy tales and the cruelty that "purity" engender. The most shocking thing I've seen on film, outside of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, are the scenes in Pan's Labyrinth involving Captain Vidal. And they are horrific on a level that brings me back to Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and Extraordinary Rendition. Jose Padilla is unique - of all those taken by the government since 9/11, he is the only actual U.S. citizen. It is through his case that we will learn what "the good guys" have been up to in our name. This they do to "make us safe". The cruelty that has been used in our names shames us all as we have forgotten the faces of our fathers and the world they fought and died to protect and nourish. This is not what was ever intended.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
More on Torture: Clive James on Terry Gilliam's Brazil
I'm starting a roundup on insightful articles on torture... here's a really good one that focuses on Uber director Terry Gilliam:
Clive's lives
Terry Gilliam
What Brazil tells us about torture today.
By Clive James
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 2:52 PM ET
"No no no no no no no no … "
—Terry Gilliam, Brazil
Born in Minnesota in 1940, Terry Gilliam, after pioneering his personal graphic style as a resident artist for Harvey Kurtzman's Help magazine, reached international fame by way of Britain, where his visual inventiveness, based mainly on the silent wit of animated collage, was an important part of the "Monty Python" television series. In his subsequent career as a film director, he earned an unjustified reputation for extravagance when his Adventures of Baron Munchausen left its budget behind and sailed off into the unknown, but on the level of cold fact, he has proved, with several Hollywood projects, including the extraordinary Twelve Monkeys, that he knows exactly how to bring in a movie on time and on budget. (These undeniable achievements availed him little, however, when his film version of Don Quixote had to be abandoned. A measure of his idiosyncratic creative energy is that even a documentary about that film's abandonment—Lost in La Mancha—is required viewing.) Really, he doesn't fit the Hollywood frame at all and needs his own country of which to be a representative writer; if he had been born in Montenegro instead of Minneapolis, today there would be an annual Gilliam Festival on the shore of Lake Scutari—although his tendency to giggle at a solemn moment might still queer his pitch. His best work depends on an audience that can see past his laughing facade to the troubled man within.
Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late 20th century. Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone. A meek, distinctly nonglamorous secretary is taking dictation through earphones. She types up everything she hears in the next room. In the course of time, the viewer of the film deduces that she is compiling an endless transcript of what a victim is saying in a torture chamber. Even if he screams it, she types it up as if he has merely said it. She herself says nothing, and her face betrays no emotion as the words quietly take form. Her boss, the torturer, is played by Michael Palin in the full, sweet spate of his bland niceness. This is the ne plus ultra of torture as an everyday activity. The torture surgery contributes one of the most brain-curdling of the film's many disturbing themes (still revealing their subtleties on a third and fourth viewing). The suggestion seems to be that a torturer need be no more sinister than your doctor. That's the picture we take away. But how true is the picture?
In modern history, there is plenty of evidence that torturers are people who actually enjoy hurting people. What was true in medieval Munich was true again in the cellars of the Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, and what was true under Ivan the Terrible was true again in the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. The frightening thing is that any regime dedicated to ruling by terror so easily finds a sufficient supply of lethal myrmidons. Even Americans, on those occasions when they bizarrely conclude that the third degree might expedite their policies instead of hindering them, never suffer from a shortage of volunteers: At Abu Ghraib, the dingbats were lining up to display their previously neglected talents. On the whole, the man in charge is not a sadist himself, presumably because it would be a diversion from his organizational effectiveness if he were.
In his huge and definitive political biography of Juan Peron, the esteemed Argentine historian Felix Luna gives us a once-and-for-all illustration of how the author of a state that rules by terror can detach himself from the brute facts. Luna takes the view that the torturers were just doing their job. He calls them tecnicos and describes the subtleties of the technique, which on the torturers' part did indeed require a certain lack of passion if the victim was to survive for long. If Luna gets you wondering how he knew so much about it, your questions are answered a few pages later, where he records a conversation he had with Peron in 1969. "But in your time," said Luna, "people were tortured." Peron said, "Who was tortured?" Luna said, "Plenty of people. Me, for example." Peron said, "When?" With due allowance for Luna's emphasis on their clinical indifference, the maniacs who do the work seem mainly to come from the unfortunately plentiful supply of those who do enjoy inflicting pain for its own sake. "In what pubs are they welcome?" Auden asked rhetorically. "What girls marry them?" It is a nice question how large the supply would be if circumstances did not create it. Alas, the circumstances seem often to be there. Many of the Nazi torturers enjoyed their omnipotence on the strict understanding that without their place in the regime they would have been nothing: hence the tendency to go on tormenting their prisoners even after Himmler called a halt. They faced going back to where they started, which was nowhere.
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the security "organs," under whatever set of initials they flaunted at the time, were always, at the brute force level, staffed by otherwise unemployable dimwits. The opportunity to inflict torment gives absolute power to the otherwise powerless, and must be a heady compensation for those with a history of being the family dolt. In the Italian transit camp of Fossoli during the Republic of Salo (the last stage of Mussolini's Fascist regime, with the fanatics well in charge), there was a female officer who indulged herself in the Dantesque experiment of packing a cell with victims and keeping them without nourishment of any kind until they ate each other. Many of her victims were women. She seems to have had a social problem: She was cutting prettier, wealthier women down to size. In Latin America, the torturers were all men, but even the qualified medical practitioners among them seem to have been motivated by a similar urge to assure their victims that the boot was now on the other foot.
On the disheartening subject of how sadism and sexuality might be connected, Argentina has the dubious privilege of having produced a key document. In a short story called "Simetrias"—a creative work that unfortunately has ample documentation in fact—Luisa Valenzuela tells us how some of the male torturers would take out their victims for an evening in a cafe or a nightclub. The wounds caused by the electrodes would be covered with makeup. (The story appears in Cuentos de Historia Argentina, a collection published in Buenos Aires in 1998.) In Brazil, after that country's nightmare was over—it took place roughly at the same time as Argentina's—a book came out called Shut Your Mouth, Journalist! (1987). The book enshrines the testimony of journalists who had the sad privilege of seeing the big story from close range: too close. Survivors recall being woken up in the middle of the night by the cold barrel of a .45 automatic applied to the nose, as a preliminary to a long encounter with the electrodes. There were journalists who never came back to say anything. Unsurprisingly, silence soon reigned.
In the years since the silence broke, documentation has piled up. Too many of the most terrifying pages reveal that the torments were an end in themselves. Torture, especially when the victim was a woman, went on far beyond any use it might have had as a means of extracting information, and even beyond what was needed to create a universal atmosphere of abject terror. Films like Kiss of the Spider Woman and Death and the Maiden have done their best to face what happened in Latin America, but finally, if we can bear to look at what is happening on-screen, we have been spared the worst. The general picture in Latin America squared up badly with the picture of torture evoked in an impeccably realistic film like Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, in which the decent young paratroopers did not really want to be doing that kind of thing. (Alain Resnais' Muriel, without showing the horrors, made the same point by implication.) In Latin America the torturers did want to be doing that kind of thing. Which brings us back to Brazil, and hence to Brazil. Were they ever the same place?
In the film called Brazil, Michael Palin is the torturer as the civil servant who might conceivably have been doing something else, such as selling life insurance. In the country called Brazil, the same role was usually played by a psychopath. (The key document proving this is Brazil: Never Again published in 1985. By the time I bought my copy in 1988, it had gone through 20 printings.) We know from the fascinating long interview published as Gilliam on Gilliam that the Palin character in the movie was slow to take shape. The first three drafts of the script were written by Tom Stoppard. Finally Stoppard and Gilliam parted company because of disagreements over some of the characters. One of the characters in question was the torturer. The way Stoppard wrote the part, Michael Palin would have had the opportunity to play against type: He would have embodied evil. Palin is a very accomplished actor and could undoubtedly have done it. But Gilliam insisted on Palin's full, natural, nonacting measure of bland benevolence.
On the set, Gilliam gave Palin mechanical things to do while acting—eat, for example—so that Palin would be distracted from developing any nuances on top of his natural projection as Mr. Nice Guy. It is a moot point which of them was right, Stoppard or Gilliam. In the long run, the Banality of Evil interpretation of human frightfulness is not quite as useful as it looks. It helps us appreciate the desirability of not placing ourselves in a position where the rule of justice depends on natural human goodness, which might prove to be in short supply. But it tends to shield us from the intractable facts about human propensities.
White settlers of America were horrified to discover that the Apaches would torture their prisoners slowly to death on the assumption that the captor would gain spiritual stature as the captive lost it. The student would prefer not to think that a primitive people was thus showing us what was once universally true, and came from instinct. It would help if mankind were the only animal that tortured its prey: We could persuade ourselves that only a social history could produce such an aberration. Unfortunately, cats torment mice until the mouse turns cold, and killer whales play half an hour of water polo with a baby seal before they finally put it out of its misery by eating it. We can do better than the cats and the killer whales, but it might be a help to admit that the same propensity is widespread and could even be there within ourselves. In that respect, the film Three Kings was a rare feat for the American cinema. Educated in a hard school of bombed refugee camps, the Arab torturer was trying to show his clueless American victim what it felt like to be helpless. It is possible that all torturers are attempting to teach their own version of the same lesson. But in that case we are bound to consider the further possibility that anyone might be a torturer. The historical evidence suggests that on the rare occasions when a state begins again in what a fond humanitarian might think of as a condition of innocence, a supply of young torturers is the first thing it produces. Certainly this was true of Pol Pot's Cambodia. Of 17,000 people who were interrogated in the S-21 camp in Phnom Penh, 16,994 died in agony. The half dozen people who survived were questioned again, by journalists, but they had been too badly injured to say much. The writing on the wall probably says all that we need to hear. The Khmer Rouge torturers were not an example of a system of thought decayed into a perversion: They were prethought, and thus had a kind of childish purity.
Unfortunately for our hopes of innate human goodness, all the evidence suggests that the torturers were keen to get on with the job even if it was meaningless. All the evidence was still there afterward, including photographs taken at every stage of the torment. Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e., they were tortured just for the hell of it. Kafka guessed it would happen, as he guessed everything that would happen. In his Strafkolonie, the tormented prisoner has to work out for himself what crime he has committed and is finally told that it is being written on his body by the instrument of torture into which he has been inescapably locked. Kafka was there first, but he wasn't alone for long, and now we must all live in a modern world where the words "No no no no no no no no" can be recorded with perfect fidelity for their sound, yet go unheeded for what they mean.
Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2159927/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Clive's lives
Terry Gilliam
What Brazil tells us about torture today.
By Clive James
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 2:52 PM ET
"No no no no no no no no … "
—Terry Gilliam, Brazil
Born in Minnesota in 1940, Terry Gilliam, after pioneering his personal graphic style as a resident artist for Harvey Kurtzman's Help magazine, reached international fame by way of Britain, where his visual inventiveness, based mainly on the silent wit of animated collage, was an important part of the "Monty Python" television series. In his subsequent career as a film director, he earned an unjustified reputation for extravagance when his Adventures of Baron Munchausen left its budget behind and sailed off into the unknown, but on the level of cold fact, he has proved, with several Hollywood projects, including the extraordinary Twelve Monkeys, that he knows exactly how to bring in a movie on time and on budget. (These undeniable achievements availed him little, however, when his film version of Don Quixote had to be abandoned. A measure of his idiosyncratic creative energy is that even a documentary about that film's abandonment—Lost in La Mancha—is required viewing.) Really, he doesn't fit the Hollywood frame at all and needs his own country of which to be a representative writer; if he had been born in Montenegro instead of Minneapolis, today there would be an annual Gilliam Festival on the shore of Lake Scutari—although his tendency to giggle at a solemn moment might still queer his pitch. His best work depends on an audience that can see past his laughing facade to the troubled man within.
Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late 20th century. Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone. A meek, distinctly nonglamorous secretary is taking dictation through earphones. She types up everything she hears in the next room. In the course of time, the viewer of the film deduces that she is compiling an endless transcript of what a victim is saying in a torture chamber. Even if he screams it, she types it up as if he has merely said it. She herself says nothing, and her face betrays no emotion as the words quietly take form. Her boss, the torturer, is played by Michael Palin in the full, sweet spate of his bland niceness. This is the ne plus ultra of torture as an everyday activity. The torture surgery contributes one of the most brain-curdling of the film's many disturbing themes (still revealing their subtleties on a third and fourth viewing). The suggestion seems to be that a torturer need be no more sinister than your doctor. That's the picture we take away. But how true is the picture?
In modern history, there is plenty of evidence that torturers are people who actually enjoy hurting people. What was true in medieval Munich was true again in the cellars of the Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, and what was true under Ivan the Terrible was true again in the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. The frightening thing is that any regime dedicated to ruling by terror so easily finds a sufficient supply of lethal myrmidons. Even Americans, on those occasions when they bizarrely conclude that the third degree might expedite their policies instead of hindering them, never suffer from a shortage of volunteers: At Abu Ghraib, the dingbats were lining up to display their previously neglected talents. On the whole, the man in charge is not a sadist himself, presumably because it would be a diversion from his organizational effectiveness if he were.
In his huge and definitive political biography of Juan Peron, the esteemed Argentine historian Felix Luna gives us a once-and-for-all illustration of how the author of a state that rules by terror can detach himself from the brute facts. Luna takes the view that the torturers were just doing their job. He calls them tecnicos and describes the subtleties of the technique, which on the torturers' part did indeed require a certain lack of passion if the victim was to survive for long. If Luna gets you wondering how he knew so much about it, your questions are answered a few pages later, where he records a conversation he had with Peron in 1969. "But in your time," said Luna, "people were tortured." Peron said, "Who was tortured?" Luna said, "Plenty of people. Me, for example." Peron said, "When?" With due allowance for Luna's emphasis on their clinical indifference, the maniacs who do the work seem mainly to come from the unfortunately plentiful supply of those who do enjoy inflicting pain for its own sake. "In what pubs are they welcome?" Auden asked rhetorically. "What girls marry them?" It is a nice question how large the supply would be if circumstances did not create it. Alas, the circumstances seem often to be there. Many of the Nazi torturers enjoyed their omnipotence on the strict understanding that without their place in the regime they would have been nothing: hence the tendency to go on tormenting their prisoners even after Himmler called a halt. They faced going back to where they started, which was nowhere.
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the security "organs," under whatever set of initials they flaunted at the time, were always, at the brute force level, staffed by otherwise unemployable dimwits. The opportunity to inflict torment gives absolute power to the otherwise powerless, and must be a heady compensation for those with a history of being the family dolt. In the Italian transit camp of Fossoli during the Republic of Salo (the last stage of Mussolini's Fascist regime, with the fanatics well in charge), there was a female officer who indulged herself in the Dantesque experiment of packing a cell with victims and keeping them without nourishment of any kind until they ate each other. Many of her victims were women. She seems to have had a social problem: She was cutting prettier, wealthier women down to size. In Latin America, the torturers were all men, but even the qualified medical practitioners among them seem to have been motivated by a similar urge to assure their victims that the boot was now on the other foot.
On the disheartening subject of how sadism and sexuality might be connected, Argentina has the dubious privilege of having produced a key document. In a short story called "Simetrias"—a creative work that unfortunately has ample documentation in fact—Luisa Valenzuela tells us how some of the male torturers would take out their victims for an evening in a cafe or a nightclub. The wounds caused by the electrodes would be covered with makeup. (The story appears in Cuentos de Historia Argentina, a collection published in Buenos Aires in 1998.) In Brazil, after that country's nightmare was over—it took place roughly at the same time as Argentina's—a book came out called Shut Your Mouth, Journalist! (1987). The book enshrines the testimony of journalists who had the sad privilege of seeing the big story from close range: too close. Survivors recall being woken up in the middle of the night by the cold barrel of a .45 automatic applied to the nose, as a preliminary to a long encounter with the electrodes. There were journalists who never came back to say anything. Unsurprisingly, silence soon reigned.
In the years since the silence broke, documentation has piled up. Too many of the most terrifying pages reveal that the torments were an end in themselves. Torture, especially when the victim was a woman, went on far beyond any use it might have had as a means of extracting information, and even beyond what was needed to create a universal atmosphere of abject terror. Films like Kiss of the Spider Woman and Death and the Maiden have done their best to face what happened in Latin America, but finally, if we can bear to look at what is happening on-screen, we have been spared the worst. The general picture in Latin America squared up badly with the picture of torture evoked in an impeccably realistic film like Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, in which the decent young paratroopers did not really want to be doing that kind of thing. (Alain Resnais' Muriel, without showing the horrors, made the same point by implication.) In Latin America the torturers did want to be doing that kind of thing. Which brings us back to Brazil, and hence to Brazil. Were they ever the same place?
In the film called Brazil, Michael Palin is the torturer as the civil servant who might conceivably have been doing something else, such as selling life insurance. In the country called Brazil, the same role was usually played by a psychopath. (The key document proving this is Brazil: Never Again published in 1985. By the time I bought my copy in 1988, it had gone through 20 printings.) We know from the fascinating long interview published as Gilliam on Gilliam that the Palin character in the movie was slow to take shape. The first three drafts of the script were written by Tom Stoppard. Finally Stoppard and Gilliam parted company because of disagreements over some of the characters. One of the characters in question was the torturer. The way Stoppard wrote the part, Michael Palin would have had the opportunity to play against type: He would have embodied evil. Palin is a very accomplished actor and could undoubtedly have done it. But Gilliam insisted on Palin's full, natural, nonacting measure of bland benevolence.
On the set, Gilliam gave Palin mechanical things to do while acting—eat, for example—so that Palin would be distracted from developing any nuances on top of his natural projection as Mr. Nice Guy. It is a moot point which of them was right, Stoppard or Gilliam. In the long run, the Banality of Evil interpretation of human frightfulness is not quite as useful as it looks. It helps us appreciate the desirability of not placing ourselves in a position where the rule of justice depends on natural human goodness, which might prove to be in short supply. But it tends to shield us from the intractable facts about human propensities.
White settlers of America were horrified to discover that the Apaches would torture their prisoners slowly to death on the assumption that the captor would gain spiritual stature as the captive lost it. The student would prefer not to think that a primitive people was thus showing us what was once universally true, and came from instinct. It would help if mankind were the only animal that tortured its prey: We could persuade ourselves that only a social history could produce such an aberration. Unfortunately, cats torment mice until the mouse turns cold, and killer whales play half an hour of water polo with a baby seal before they finally put it out of its misery by eating it. We can do better than the cats and the killer whales, but it might be a help to admit that the same propensity is widespread and could even be there within ourselves. In that respect, the film Three Kings was a rare feat for the American cinema. Educated in a hard school of bombed refugee camps, the Arab torturer was trying to show his clueless American victim what it felt like to be helpless. It is possible that all torturers are attempting to teach their own version of the same lesson. But in that case we are bound to consider the further possibility that anyone might be a torturer. The historical evidence suggests that on the rare occasions when a state begins again in what a fond humanitarian might think of as a condition of innocence, a supply of young torturers is the first thing it produces. Certainly this was true of Pol Pot's Cambodia. Of 17,000 people who were interrogated in the S-21 camp in Phnom Penh, 16,994 died in agony. The half dozen people who survived were questioned again, by journalists, but they had been too badly injured to say much. The writing on the wall probably says all that we need to hear. The Khmer Rouge torturers were not an example of a system of thought decayed into a perversion: They were prethought, and thus had a kind of childish purity.
Unfortunately for our hopes of innate human goodness, all the evidence suggests that the torturers were keen to get on with the job even if it was meaningless. All the evidence was still there afterward, including photographs taken at every stage of the torment. Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e., they were tortured just for the hell of it. Kafka guessed it would happen, as he guessed everything that would happen. In his Strafkolonie, the tormented prisoner has to work out for himself what crime he has committed and is finally told that it is being written on his body by the instrument of torture into which he has been inescapably locked. Kafka was there first, but he wasn't alone for long, and now we must all live in a modern world where the words "No no no no no no no no" can be recorded with perfect fidelity for their sound, yet go unheeded for what they mean.
Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2159927/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Friday, February 16, 2007
Iran attack pretenses heating up.... those So, So bastards
Cenk Uygur has a nice reminder piece on what the Iraq study group said about the funding source for Sunni insurgents. As the administration starts rolling out physical "evidence" of Iran's involvement in Iraq violence, they continue to turn a blind eye on the Saudi's, the Bush families most important friends. We are headed down the road to attacking Iran at the same time Bush is claiming a Taliban revival in Afghanistan this spring. With all due respect, this surpasses idiotic. It's like they want to provoke the end of the world...
Enemy of the State, summary executions and Teddy's thoughts on political criticism
It strikes me that, at some point, there will have to be a reckoning. The methods and means of the "Ultra-Patriots" in the US, which provide international terrorists with their most potent recruiting tools, are the greatest threat has faced since the Red Scare. Comments like those of the ever wacky Frank Gaffney, who recently called for the execution of members of Congress that debate the future course of foreign policy in Iraq, reminds me of the comments of social conservatives that led to the murder and attempted murder of several abortion clinic employees in the mid-nineties. I particularly enjoyed the T. Roosevelt quote on what patriotism means, and the fact that the UP's always like to cut to the chase on punishment (and never mention pesky trials, evidence, judges or juries...)
Glenn Greenwald - http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/02/14/neoconservatism/index.html
Neoconservatives hate liberty as much as they love war
While neoconservatism is most frequently criticized for its militaristic foreign policies, it embraces with equal fervor serious abridgments of political liberty.
Feb. 14, 2007 | (Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)
Frank Gaffney, one of the country's most influential and well-connected neoconservatives, has a column in today's Washington Times in which he argues that the debate taking place in Congress over the war in Iraq constitutes treason. Gaffney specifically argues that the condemnations of Douglas Feith from Sen. Rockefeller Levin "really should be a hanging offense."
Gaffney begins his column by purporting to quote Abraham Lincoln. Gaffney claims that Lincoln said:
Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.
This quote has become a favorite weapon for those who want to criminalize criticism of the Leader and the War. Jack Murtha's opponent in the last election, Diana Irey, cited this quote while discussing Murtha's opposition to the war.
But this quote is completely invented. Lincoln never said it. This "quote" was first attributed to Lincoln by J. Michael Waller in Insight Magazine, in a 2003 article revealingly entitled: Democrats Usher in an Age of Treason. But as Waller himself now admits, the quote attributed to Lincoln is completely fraudulent. Waller wrote in an e-mail to FactCheck.org (h/t William Wolfrum):
The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.
It was Waller, in The Washington Times' Insight Magazine, urging that anti-war Congressmen be hanged -- not Abraham Lincoln. But to justify their plainly un-American assault on our most basic constitutional liberties, neoconservatives like Gaffney simply invent quotes, attribute them to Abraham Lincoln, and continue to use them long after they have been debunked. Gaffney continues:
It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated -- let alone applied -- today.
Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to "damage morale and undermine the military" while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war. . . .
The Journal has properly warned that Senator Ahab's [the Wall St. Journal's name for Sen. Rockefeller Levin] misbehavior is likely to have implications far beyond the immediate disservice it does to Mr. Feith and those who labored so ably under him. It will likely also have a severely chilling effect on the willingness of policymakers rigorously to challenge, and thereby to improve, the quality of the intelligence they are getting about tomorrow's threats.
If there's one thing that really should be a hanging offense, it is behavior that results in our being even less equipped to deal with such threats than we were before this phase of the War for the Free World began on September 11, 2001.
None of that is meant figuratively. Gaffney is really arguing that Senators who speak out against the President and the war are committing treason and that -- just as Lincoln "argued" -- those who are particularly obstructionist of the Leader's efforts to protect us, such as Sen. Rockefeller Levin, by virtue of his criticism of Gaffney's "old friend," Doug Feith, all should be hanged.
Shouldn't it be considered more notable when such a well-connected figure as Gaffney -- with close relations to some of the administration's most powerful figures -- expressly accuses Senators of treason and calls their criticism a "hanging offense"? Why does advocacy of ideas this extreme provoke so little reaction, and why are advocates of such measures treated as serious and respectable political figures?
And none of this is new. This is what the neoconservative New York Sun editorialized about pre-war opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and specifically the dispute over whether war protesters should be allowed to march through Manhattan to protest the war:
So long as the protesters are invoking the Constitution, they might have a look at Article III. That says, "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies,giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."
There can be no question at this point that Saddam Hussein is an enemy of America. . . . And there is no reason to doubt that the "anti-war" protesters -- we prefer to call them protesters against freeing Iraq -- are giving, at the very least, comfort to Saddam Hussein. . .
So the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution. Thus fully respecting not just some, but all of the constitutional principles at stake.
The idea that war opponents were committing treason by virtue of marching against the invasion of Iraq -- or that Senators who currently criticize the war should be treated as traitors -- is as repugnant to our political values and as radical and dangerous as anything which, say, the widely discredited Joe McCarthy ever urged. Yet the individuals who have argued, and continue to argue, for such un-American abridgements of basic liberties are not castigated or scorned at all, but instead continue to occupy perfectly respectable positions in what is deemed to be the mainstream.
Not only is none of this new for neoconservatives and the hardest-core Bush supporters, it is not isolated either. Countless other examples of similarly radical and freedom-hating incidents have passed more or less unnoticed.
After Howard Dean, in November, 2005, pointed out the obvious -- that the U.S. would not be able to "win" in Iraq (a fact which William Buckley, among others, repeated a few months later) -- Ronald Reagan's son and frequent Fox News guest host Michael Reagan said this: "Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!"
Ben Shapiro, writing on Townhall, urged that Dean, Al Gore and John Kerry -- just as a start -- be criminally prosecuted for sedition. And none of this should be the slightest bit surprising since the "Father of Neoconservatism," Irving Kristol, has long expressed disdain for America's most basic freedoms, as illustrated by this belief: "I don't think the advocacy of homosexuality really falls under the First Amendment any more than the advocacy or publication of pornography does."
It is true that neoconservatism poses a grave danger to the U.S. as a result of its insatiable quest for more and more war in the Middle East. But inextricably linked to that foreign militarism is a boundless hostility to the liberties and political values that have defined this country since its founding. All of the liberty-infringing radicalism of this administration -- its radical lawbreaking theories, its lawless and indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and "alien unlawful combatants," its use of torture both directly and via rendition, its secret and illegal surveillance programs -- all stem from the same neoconservative mindset which fuels its endless pursuit of wars. The latter is used as the pretext to justify the former.
This is yet further evidence of the corruption which lies at the heart of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Its wars cannot possibly lead to the spreading of freedom and democracy because the people who advocate these wars, and who are implementing them, are about as hostile to those values as one can be.
UPDATE : Attaturk makes the excellent point that the inconsequential use of vulgar words or "offensive" comments about religion from bloggers will provoke all sorts of hand-wringing and media attention. But truly indecent and dangerous ideas flowing from some of the country's most influential political figures in mainstream media outlets -- justified by fabricated quotes -- are treated with respect, and trigger almost no controversy and never any consequences for their advocates.
As Attaturk correctly notes, while low-level bloggers for the Edwards campaign were recently forced from their jobs, "Frank Gaffney will suffer no ill affects of this incredible wank-a-riffic behavior as he goes on FoxNews and fill-in-the-blank right-wing radio bloviators and as he continues to get his paycheck from some ironically named 'think-tank'."
Nonetheless, you can demand that the Washington Times retract its falsified Lincoln here.
UPDATE II: While Gaffney and his liberty-hating comrades are forced to rely upon fabricated quotes from former Presidents, there is a real quote from a former President highly relevant to our current political landscape. The following observation is from Theodore Roosevelt, written in the middle of World War I, as part of a 1918 Op-Ed for The Kansas City Star. It couldn't be more applicable to the Bush movement and to the accompanying neonconservative belief that anti-war sentiments constitute treason:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.
Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
Base. Servile. Unpatriotic. Morally treasonable. That about covers Gaffney and his fellow anti-liberty crusaders who seek to stifle criticism of the Leader by equating the most fundamental and defining American freedoms with "treason."
UPDATE III: It is notable that the Gaffney Op-Ed still remains unchanged, with no retraction or acknowledgment of error. It seems highly likely (though admittedly not definite) that The Washington Times is now aware of the fictitious nature of the Lincoln quote. Multiple readers here have indicated that they sent e-mails to the Times. I also called the Times and left a voice mail message (a couple of hours ago) for Commentary Page Editor Mary Lou Forbes, detailing the error and directing her to this post as well other sources for finding the proof that the quote is fake. And yet, the quote remains.
UPDATE IV: I spoke with Mary Lou Forbes, the Commentary Page Editor of the Times, who said that she contacted Gaffney about the e-mails she received and that he has now confirmed that the quote is fictitious. Forbes said Gaffney intends to "run a correction at the bottom of his next column."
When I pointed out that this did not really seem to be a sufficient correction, and suggested that they ought at least to append a correction to the top of the online version, she said that she had not thought of that -- pointing out that she was "an old print journalist" -- but said that perhaps it was a good idea and that they might do that.
I had intended to ask her whether they had any position on Gaffney's call for Jay Rockefeller Carl Levin to be hanged and whether that was the type of column their newspaper thought it appropriate to publish, but, to be perfectly honest, after chatting for a couple of minutes with the very amiable if slightly confused Forbes, it seemed clear that that line of inquiry was going to be futile.
-- Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald - http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/02/14/neoconservatism/index.html
Neoconservatives hate liberty as much as they love war
While neoconservatism is most frequently criticized for its militaristic foreign policies, it embraces with equal fervor serious abridgments of political liberty.
Feb. 14, 2007 | (Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)
Frank Gaffney, one of the country's most influential and well-connected neoconservatives, has a column in today's Washington Times in which he argues that the debate taking place in Congress over the war in Iraq constitutes treason. Gaffney specifically argues that the condemnations of Douglas Feith from Sen. Rockefeller Levin "really should be a hanging offense."
Gaffney begins his column by purporting to quote Abraham Lincoln. Gaffney claims that Lincoln said:
Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.
This quote has become a favorite weapon for those who want to criminalize criticism of the Leader and the War. Jack Murtha's opponent in the last election, Diana Irey, cited this quote while discussing Murtha's opposition to the war.
But this quote is completely invented. Lincoln never said it. This "quote" was first attributed to Lincoln by J. Michael Waller in Insight Magazine, in a 2003 article revealingly entitled: Democrats Usher in an Age of Treason. But as Waller himself now admits, the quote attributed to Lincoln is completely fraudulent. Waller wrote in an e-mail to FactCheck.org (h/t William Wolfrum):
The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.
It was Waller, in The Washington Times' Insight Magazine, urging that anti-war Congressmen be hanged -- not Abraham Lincoln. But to justify their plainly un-American assault on our most basic constitutional liberties, neoconservatives like Gaffney simply invent quotes, attribute them to Abraham Lincoln, and continue to use them long after they have been debunked. Gaffney continues:
It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated -- let alone applied -- today.
Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to "damage morale and undermine the military" while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war. . . .
The Journal has properly warned that Senator Ahab's [the Wall St. Journal's name for Sen. Rockefeller Levin] misbehavior is likely to have implications far beyond the immediate disservice it does to Mr. Feith and those who labored so ably under him. It will likely also have a severely chilling effect on the willingness of policymakers rigorously to challenge, and thereby to improve, the quality of the intelligence they are getting about tomorrow's threats.
If there's one thing that really should be a hanging offense, it is behavior that results in our being even less equipped to deal with such threats than we were before this phase of the War for the Free World began on September 11, 2001.
None of that is meant figuratively. Gaffney is really arguing that Senators who speak out against the President and the war are committing treason and that -- just as Lincoln "argued" -- those who are particularly obstructionist of the Leader's efforts to protect us, such as Sen. Rockefeller Levin, by virtue of his criticism of Gaffney's "old friend," Doug Feith, all should be hanged.
Shouldn't it be considered more notable when such a well-connected figure as Gaffney -- with close relations to some of the administration's most powerful figures -- expressly accuses Senators of treason and calls their criticism a "hanging offense"? Why does advocacy of ideas this extreme provoke so little reaction, and why are advocates of such measures treated as serious and respectable political figures?
And none of this is new. This is what the neoconservative New York Sun editorialized about pre-war opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and specifically the dispute over whether war protesters should be allowed to march through Manhattan to protest the war:
So long as the protesters are invoking the Constitution, they might have a look at Article III. That says, "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies,giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."
There can be no question at this point that Saddam Hussein is an enemy of America. . . . And there is no reason to doubt that the "anti-war" protesters -- we prefer to call them protesters against freeing Iraq -- are giving, at the very least, comfort to Saddam Hussein. . .
So the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution. Thus fully respecting not just some, but all of the constitutional principles at stake.
The idea that war opponents were committing treason by virtue of marching against the invasion of Iraq -- or that Senators who currently criticize the war should be treated as traitors -- is as repugnant to our political values and as radical and dangerous as anything which, say, the widely discredited Joe McCarthy ever urged. Yet the individuals who have argued, and continue to argue, for such un-American abridgements of basic liberties are not castigated or scorned at all, but instead continue to occupy perfectly respectable positions in what is deemed to be the mainstream.
Not only is none of this new for neoconservatives and the hardest-core Bush supporters, it is not isolated either. Countless other examples of similarly radical and freedom-hating incidents have passed more or less unnoticed.
After Howard Dean, in November, 2005, pointed out the obvious -- that the U.S. would not be able to "win" in Iraq (a fact which William Buckley, among others, repeated a few months later) -- Ronald Reagan's son and frequent Fox News guest host Michael Reagan said this: "Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!"
Ben Shapiro, writing on Townhall, urged that Dean, Al Gore and John Kerry -- just as a start -- be criminally prosecuted for sedition. And none of this should be the slightest bit surprising since the "Father of Neoconservatism," Irving Kristol, has long expressed disdain for America's most basic freedoms, as illustrated by this belief: "I don't think the advocacy of homosexuality really falls under the First Amendment any more than the advocacy or publication of pornography does."
It is true that neoconservatism poses a grave danger to the U.S. as a result of its insatiable quest for more and more war in the Middle East. But inextricably linked to that foreign militarism is a boundless hostility to the liberties and political values that have defined this country since its founding. All of the liberty-infringing radicalism of this administration -- its radical lawbreaking theories, its lawless and indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and "alien unlawful combatants," its use of torture both directly and via rendition, its secret and illegal surveillance programs -- all stem from the same neoconservative mindset which fuels its endless pursuit of wars. The latter is used as the pretext to justify the former.
This is yet further evidence of the corruption which lies at the heart of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Its wars cannot possibly lead to the spreading of freedom and democracy because the people who advocate these wars, and who are implementing them, are about as hostile to those values as one can be.
UPDATE : Attaturk makes the excellent point that the inconsequential use of vulgar words or "offensive" comments about religion from bloggers will provoke all sorts of hand-wringing and media attention. But truly indecent and dangerous ideas flowing from some of the country's most influential political figures in mainstream media outlets -- justified by fabricated quotes -- are treated with respect, and trigger almost no controversy and never any consequences for their advocates.
As Attaturk correctly notes, while low-level bloggers for the Edwards campaign were recently forced from their jobs, "Frank Gaffney will suffer no ill affects of this incredible wank-a-riffic behavior as he goes on FoxNews and fill-in-the-blank right-wing radio bloviators and as he continues to get his paycheck from some ironically named 'think-tank'."
Nonetheless, you can demand that the Washington Times retract its falsified Lincoln here.
UPDATE II: While Gaffney and his liberty-hating comrades are forced to rely upon fabricated quotes from former Presidents, there is a real quote from a former President highly relevant to our current political landscape. The following observation is from Theodore Roosevelt, written in the middle of World War I, as part of a 1918 Op-Ed for The Kansas City Star. It couldn't be more applicable to the Bush movement and to the accompanying neonconservative belief that anti-war sentiments constitute treason:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.
Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
Base. Servile. Unpatriotic. Morally treasonable. That about covers Gaffney and his fellow anti-liberty crusaders who seek to stifle criticism of the Leader by equating the most fundamental and defining American freedoms with "treason."
UPDATE III: It is notable that the Gaffney Op-Ed still remains unchanged, with no retraction or acknowledgment of error. It seems highly likely (though admittedly not definite) that The Washington Times is now aware of the fictitious nature of the Lincoln quote. Multiple readers here have indicated that they sent e-mails to the Times. I also called the Times and left a voice mail message (a couple of hours ago) for Commentary Page Editor Mary Lou Forbes, detailing the error and directing her to this post as well other sources for finding the proof that the quote is fake. And yet, the quote remains.
UPDATE IV: I spoke with Mary Lou Forbes, the Commentary Page Editor of the Times, who said that she contacted Gaffney about the e-mails she received and that he has now confirmed that the quote is fictitious. Forbes said Gaffney intends to "run a correction at the bottom of his next column."
When I pointed out that this did not really seem to be a sufficient correction, and suggested that they ought at least to append a correction to the top of the online version, she said that she had not thought of that -- pointing out that she was "an old print journalist" -- but said that perhaps it was a good idea and that they might do that.
I had intended to ask her whether they had any position on Gaffney's call for Jay Rockefeller Carl Levin to be hanged and whether that was the type of column their newspaper thought it appropriate to publish, but, to be perfectly honest, after chatting for a couple of minutes with the very amiable if slightly confused Forbes, it seemed clear that that line of inquiry was going to be futile.
-- Glenn Greenwald
Thursday, February 15, 2007
I fear that we will be judged cowards...
and worse, I think that we will deserve it. Gitmo is a national disgrace that Stalin would have greatly approved of. "Extraordinary rendition" is the most freakish euphemism I've heard this side of Goebbels - so we snatch up folks to have them interrogated in countries that sanction and specialize in torture. The military reaches out to the producers of "24" to ask them to tone down the torture.
I would concede that I too am part of the cowardly party that allows this Orwellian nightmare to continue. I have many excuses to offer; all rational and completely understandable and all equally shameful in the face of the power of brutality and outright dishonesty of my government. I think, and am curious, about the power of this shame. Is it an accident or is it a layer of a larger impetus, created long ago by men like Machiavelli and his spiritual descendants Pareto and Bumham, to pay me off for my silence and acquiescence? I was educated as a historian and I think it is past time for me to re-employ those skills.
I would concede that I too am part of the cowardly party that allows this Orwellian nightmare to continue. I have many excuses to offer; all rational and completely understandable and all equally shameful in the face of the power of brutality and outright dishonesty of my government. I think, and am curious, about the power of this shame. Is it an accident or is it a layer of a larger impetus, created long ago by men like Machiavelli and his spiritual descendants Pareto and Bumham, to pay me off for my silence and acquiescence? I was educated as a historian and I think it is past time for me to re-employ those skills.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Recipe for corruption: The Heritage Foundations "Take Charge of Federal Personal"
Paul Krugman's article pointed to this document, created in January 2001. It is amazing to me how screwed up the administration can be yet manage to follow, almost to the letter, manifesto's like this and the infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses", which foretold all the policy decisions we have seen come to pass from this administration since 9/11. You have to give them the nod for following directions.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
The Bushies were looking for a blank check quite a while ago...
IRAN -- HAGEL REVEALS WHITE HOUSE ORIGINALLY WANTED 2002 IRAQ WAR RESOLUTION TO COVER ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST: The Bush administration has taken a series of steps in recent weeks that appear to be setting the stage for a military confrontation with Iran. Congressional leaders have been raising red flags. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: "I'd like to be clear: the president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization." Recent comments made by Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) explain why Congress' resistance is so vital. Hagel has revealed that the Bush administration tried to get Congress to approve military action anywhere in the Middle East -- not just in Iraq -- in the fall of 2002. At the time, Hagel says, the Bush administration presented Congress with a resolution that would have authorized the use of force anywhere in the region. "They expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere in the Middle East?" the interviewer asked. Hagel responded, "Yes. Yes. Wide open." (From: Center for American Progress Action Fund http://capweb.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=257099899&url_num=20&url=http://www.americanprogressaction.org/prarchives )
The Hagel interview…
THE ANGRY ONE
Republican senator Chuck Hagel sounds off on the sorry state of Congress, the president’s lies, and the vote for war that he now regrets
GQ, January 2007 http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5326&pageNum=1
Chuck Hagel came home from Vietnam in 1968 with shrapnel in his chest, scars on his face, and an unyielding certainty that the freedom of men is theirs alone to win. As an infantryman, he had not bombed from above or commanded from behind; he had stood knee-deep in the muck, face-to-face with the enemy, firing on men and watching them die. It’s a hard memory to leave behind. Even after four decades and a lifetime of change—a fortune earned in the investment-banking business; a decade as a senator from Nebraska; and a position as one of the GOP’s conservative torchbearers with a shot at the White House—Hagel has put everything on the line to oppose the war in Iraq, refusing to send a “surge” of new troops into battle, or to forget the lessons he brought home from the killing fields long ago.
*****
Why do you oppose the “surge”?
For almost four years, this administration has been saying, “Just give us another six months. Give us more time. The Iraqis need more help. We need more troops. We need more money.” I am not willing to sacrifice more young men and women for a policy that isn’t working.
What do you think the real effect of the “surge” would be?
More American lives lost. Billions of dollars going into this hole. It will erode our standing in the Middle East and the world. It will destroy our force structure. It will divide this country in a bitter way not seen since Vietnam. And what do we get in return? The administration likes to point to these benchmarks—the Iraqis wrote a constitution, they had an election, they elected a unity government. The administration takes great pride in saying, “It’s now a sovereign nation. They’re in charge of their own affairs.” It’s completely untrue, but they say it anyway.
What would it take to secure Baghdad?
It’s not ours to secure. We have never understood that! We have framed this in a way that never made sense: “Win or lose in Iraq.” Wait a minute! There is no win or loss for us. The Iraqis will determine how this turns out. We can help them with our blood and our treasure and our standing, but in the end they have to deal with the sectarian problems. That is what’s consuming that country. It’s not Al Qaeda. It’s not the terrorists. That’s not the main problem over there. It’s a civil war!
The administration doesn’t call it that.
They won’t call it civil war. Everybody calls it a civil war! Of course it’s a civil war. The generals call it a civil war. And it’s even worse than a civil war, because in addition to the sectarian violence, you’ve got Shia killing Shia. We have ethnic cleansing of major proportions going on in Baghdad. It’s reminiscent of Bosnia. A truck pulls up and Uncle Joe is put inside; his body is found in a dump two or three days later, arms bound, usually tortured—one of the favorite deals is to drill into their head a little bit while they’re still conscious and then shoot them. We can’t solve that!
If we can’t win and the public wants out, isn’t it the responsibility of Congress to check the power of the president?
Sure.
But it seems Congress has been ineffective at that.
Well, we have. We’ve abdicated our responsibilities. That has to do with the fact that the Republican Party controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate. When that happens, you get no probing, no questioning, no oversight. If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq and after two years he was having the same problems, do you think the Republican Congress would have put up with that? I don’t think so.
Do you wish you’d voted differently in October of 2002, when Congress had a chance to authorize or not authorize the invasion?
Have you read that resolution?
I have.
It’s not quite the way it’s been framed by a lot of people, as a resolution to go to war. That’s not quite what the resolution said.
It said, “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.”
In the event that all other options failed. So it’s not as simple as “I voted for the war.” That wasn’t the resolution.
But there was a decision whether to grant the president that authority or not.
Exactly right. And if you recall, the White House had announced that they didn’t need that authority from Congress.
Which they seem to say about a lot of things.
That’s right. Mr. [Alberto] Gonzales was the president’s counsel at that time, and he wrote a memo to the president saying, “You have all the powers that you need.” So I called Andy Card, who was then the chief of staff, and said, “Andy, I don’t think you have a shred of ground to stand on, but more to the point, why would a president seriously consider taking a nation to war without Congress being with him?” So a few of us—Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I—were invited into discussions with the White House.
It’s incredible that you had to ask for that.
It is incredible. That’s what I said to Andy Card. Said it to Powell, said it to Rice. Might have even said it to the president. And finally, begrudgingly, they sent over a resolution for Congress to approve. Well, it was astounding. It said they could go anywhere in the region.
It wasn’t specific to Iraq?
Oh no. It said the whole region! They could go into Greece or anywhere. I mean, is Central Asia in the region? I suppose! Sure as hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything they wanted. It was literally anything. No boundaries. No restrictions.
They expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere they wanted in the Middle East?
Yes. Yes. Wide open. We had to rewrite it. Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I stripped the language that the White House had set up, and put our language in it.
But that should also have triggered alarm bells about what they really wanted to do.
Well, it did. I’m not defending our votes; I’m just giving a little history of how this happened. You have to remember the context of when that resolution was passed. This was about a year after September 11. The country was still truly off balance. So the president comes out talking about “weapons of mass destruction” that this “madman dictator” Saddam Hussein has, and “our intelligence shows he’s got it,” and “he’s capable of weaponizing,” and so on.
And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.
Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t believe them.” But I was told by the president—we all were—that he would exhaust every diplomatic effort.
You were told that personally?
I remember specifically bringing it up with the president. I said, “This has to be like your father did it in 1991. We had every Middle East nation except one with us in 1991. The United Nations was with us.”
Did he give you that assurance, that he would do the same thing as his father?
Yep. He said, “That’s what we’re going to do.” But the more I look back on this, the more I think that the administration knew there was some real hard question whether he really had any WMD. In January of 2003, if you recall, the inspectors at the IAEA, who knew more about what Saddam had than anybody, said, “Give us two more months before you go to war, because we don’t think there’s anything in there.” They were the only ones in Iraq. We hadn’t been in there. We didn’t know what the hell was in there. And the president wouldn’t do it! So to answer your question—Do I regret that vote? Yes, I do regret that vote.
And you feel like you were misled?
I asked tough questions of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld before the war: How are you going to govern? Who’s going to govern? Where is the money coming from? What are you going to do with their army? How will you secure their borders? And I was assured every time I asked, “Senator, don’t worry, we’ve got task forces on that, they’ve been working, they’re coordinated,” and so on.
Do you think they knew that was false?
Oh, I eventually was sure they knew. Even before we actually invaded, I had a pretty clear sense of it—that this administration was hell-bent on going to war in Iraq.
Even if it meant deceiving Congress?
That’s right.
Congress has a lot less leverage to stop the war, now that it’s begun.
Well, we still have power, starting with appropriations, oversight, the power of the people, the polls. We represent the voters.
It’s indirect, though.
It is indirect, if you’re looking to stop the war. We’re already in it, we’re hugely invested, half a trillion dollars, over 3,000 dead…
And the decision to withhold funding is a tough one.
That’s right, because it can be seen as political. It is touchy. Nobody ever wants to be accused of cutting a canteen from the troops, so you get into that murky area: Are you hurting the troops by cutting off funding?
Where are you on that?
I think we need to exercise oversight of the funding. The president is going to come up with probably $100 billion in “emergency supplemental” funding for the war. That bill needs to get oversight. The last four years, we haven’t had any oversight over these “emergency” appropriations. Let’s examine it. Let’s pull it apart: “What’s this 40 million for?”
That seems so slow and bureaucratic.
It’s frustrating. Especially when you’re losing young Americans every day. We just keep throwing them into the fire.
Does it seem like the president is basically daring you to cut funding?
He is. He feels, as I think a number of Republicans do, that it would be a disastrous thing politically. These are bright people. They understand politics about as well as anyone. President Bush has been elected twice. Some might argue that he wasn’t elected the first time. With the popular vote, he actually wasn’t. But he’s very savvy politically. He’s never going to stand for election again, and he believes this is right for the country. The president is trying to do something very difficult: sustain a war without the support of the American people.
Are you especially sensitive about these wartime decisions because you’ve been to war?
Certainly going through combat in Vietnam and seeing war up close, seeing friends wounded and killed in front of you, you cannot help but be framed by that experience. When I got to Vietnam, I was a rifleman. I was a private, about as low as you can get. So my frame of reference is very much geared toward the guy at the bottom who’s doing the fighting and dying. Jim Webb and I are the only ones in the Senate who had that experience. John McCain served his country differently—he spent five years as a prisoner of war. John Kerry was on a boat for about three months, maybe less. I don’t think my experience makes me any better, but it does make me very sober about committing our nation to war. We should never again get into a fiasco like we did in Vietnam. And if we are going to use force, we better make damn sure it is in the national interest.
Which is essentially the “Powell Doctrine.” Do you and Colin Powell still talk?
We’re very good friends.
Do you think it’s hard for him to keep silent these days?
I think it is very hard for him. I think he is greatly tormented by all of this.
Does it surprise you that so many people in the administration who supported this war, didn’t have any military experience?
I have never doubted the motives of those who wanted to go to war so badly. I don’t question their moral standing.
But you might wonder if they really understand what war is.
Look, it has not gone unnoticed that President Bush served a little time in the National Guard. Secretary Rice never served. Wolfowitz never served. Feith never served. Cheney had five deferments. Rumsfeld might have done something at one time. But the only guy that had any real experience was Colin Powell. And they cut him off. That’s just a fact. That’s not subjective. That’s the way it was.
Does being a veteran also make you sensitive to the administration’s approach to interrogation and the use of secret military prisons?
It does, because that’s not who America is. We have always, certainly since World War II, had the moral high ground in the world. But these secret prisons and the treatment at Guantánamo destroy all of that. We ought to shut down Guantánamo. There shouldn’t be any secret prisons. Why do we need those? What are we afraid of? Here we are, the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Why can’t we let the Red Cross into our prisons? Why do we deny they exist? Why do we keep them locked up? What are we afraid of? Why aren’t we dealing with Iran and Syria?
What about civil liberties? Does it concern you that the administration has been searching bank records and personal mail, and listening to international phone calls, without warrants?
Very much. We have always been able to protect national security without sacrificing the liberties of the individual. Once you lose those rights, it’s very hard to get them back. There have been arguments made that if we just give up a few rights, it will be easier to preserve our national security. That should never, ever happen. When you take office, you take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. That is your first responsibility.
Is it strange for you to be allied on these issues with the anti-war left, which is not exactly your constituency?
I think these issues are starting to redefine the political landscape. You are going to see alliances and relationships develop that are based on this war. You are going to see a reorientation of political parties.
How conservative are you really? Tell me the truth: You don’t care whether or not gay people get married, do you?
No. Personally, I think marriage is between a man and a woman, but that’s because I see it as a religious union. As a legal contract, marriage should be up to the states. If a state wants to change the rules, that’s up to them.
What about the drug war? You don’t really think it’s going any better than the Iraq war, do you?
The drug war is different. Drugs are against the law.
But what do you think of the law?
That’s part of having a society. You have to have standards, social mores that are acceptable. You can’t go around exempting the law.
But Congress writes the laws.
Yes, and you can try to change the laws. If someone thinks marijuana ought to be legalized, go through the process. I would be opposed to it, by the way. Drugs are a devastating problem. Meth is creeping across the country. I know there are some who say you wouldn’t have near the problem if you just legalize drugs, but I disagree.
How about flag burning?
I voted for a constitutional amendment to ban it.
Isn’t it a form of expression, if some schmuck wants to make a statement?
I think you can defend your position both ways on that, but I am against it.
You don’t hear very many politicians say that both sides of an issue are reasonable these days.
We are living through one of the most transformative periods in history. If we are going to make it, we need a far greater appreciation and respect for others, or we’re going to blow up mankind. Look at what zealotry can do. Religious zealotry has been responsible for killing more people than any other thing. Look at the Middle East today. It’s all about religion. We need to move past those divisions and learn to be tolerant and respectful. If we go out there full of intolerance and hatred, we’ll never make it.
The Hagel interview…
THE ANGRY ONE
Republican senator Chuck Hagel sounds off on the sorry state of Congress, the president’s lies, and the vote for war that he now regrets
GQ, January 2007 http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5326&pageNum=1
Chuck Hagel came home from Vietnam in 1968 with shrapnel in his chest, scars on his face, and an unyielding certainty that the freedom of men is theirs alone to win. As an infantryman, he had not bombed from above or commanded from behind; he had stood knee-deep in the muck, face-to-face with the enemy, firing on men and watching them die. It’s a hard memory to leave behind. Even after four decades and a lifetime of change—a fortune earned in the investment-banking business; a decade as a senator from Nebraska; and a position as one of the GOP’s conservative torchbearers with a shot at the White House—Hagel has put everything on the line to oppose the war in Iraq, refusing to send a “surge” of new troops into battle, or to forget the lessons he brought home from the killing fields long ago.
*****
Why do you oppose the “surge”?
For almost four years, this administration has been saying, “Just give us another six months. Give us more time. The Iraqis need more help. We need more troops. We need more money.” I am not willing to sacrifice more young men and women for a policy that isn’t working.
What do you think the real effect of the “surge” would be?
More American lives lost. Billions of dollars going into this hole. It will erode our standing in the Middle East and the world. It will destroy our force structure. It will divide this country in a bitter way not seen since Vietnam. And what do we get in return? The administration likes to point to these benchmarks—the Iraqis wrote a constitution, they had an election, they elected a unity government. The administration takes great pride in saying, “It’s now a sovereign nation. They’re in charge of their own affairs.” It’s completely untrue, but they say it anyway.
What would it take to secure Baghdad?
It’s not ours to secure. We have never understood that! We have framed this in a way that never made sense: “Win or lose in Iraq.” Wait a minute! There is no win or loss for us. The Iraqis will determine how this turns out. We can help them with our blood and our treasure and our standing, but in the end they have to deal with the sectarian problems. That is what’s consuming that country. It’s not Al Qaeda. It’s not the terrorists. That’s not the main problem over there. It’s a civil war!
The administration doesn’t call it that.
They won’t call it civil war. Everybody calls it a civil war! Of course it’s a civil war. The generals call it a civil war. And it’s even worse than a civil war, because in addition to the sectarian violence, you’ve got Shia killing Shia. We have ethnic cleansing of major proportions going on in Baghdad. It’s reminiscent of Bosnia. A truck pulls up and Uncle Joe is put inside; his body is found in a dump two or three days later, arms bound, usually tortured—one of the favorite deals is to drill into their head a little bit while they’re still conscious and then shoot them. We can’t solve that!
If we can’t win and the public wants out, isn’t it the responsibility of Congress to check the power of the president?
Sure.
But it seems Congress has been ineffective at that.
Well, we have. We’ve abdicated our responsibilities. That has to do with the fact that the Republican Party controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate. When that happens, you get no probing, no questioning, no oversight. If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq and after two years he was having the same problems, do you think the Republican Congress would have put up with that? I don’t think so.
Do you wish you’d voted differently in October of 2002, when Congress had a chance to authorize or not authorize the invasion?
Have you read that resolution?
I have.
It’s not quite the way it’s been framed by a lot of people, as a resolution to go to war. That’s not quite what the resolution said.
It said, “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.”
In the event that all other options failed. So it’s not as simple as “I voted for the war.” That wasn’t the resolution.
But there was a decision whether to grant the president that authority or not.
Exactly right. And if you recall, the White House had announced that they didn’t need that authority from Congress.
Which they seem to say about a lot of things.
That’s right. Mr. [Alberto] Gonzales was the president’s counsel at that time, and he wrote a memo to the president saying, “You have all the powers that you need.” So I called Andy Card, who was then the chief of staff, and said, “Andy, I don’t think you have a shred of ground to stand on, but more to the point, why would a president seriously consider taking a nation to war without Congress being with him?” So a few of us—Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I—were invited into discussions with the White House.
It’s incredible that you had to ask for that.
It is incredible. That’s what I said to Andy Card. Said it to Powell, said it to Rice. Might have even said it to the president. And finally, begrudgingly, they sent over a resolution for Congress to approve. Well, it was astounding. It said they could go anywhere in the region.
It wasn’t specific to Iraq?
Oh no. It said the whole region! They could go into Greece or anywhere. I mean, is Central Asia in the region? I suppose! Sure as hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything they wanted. It was literally anything. No boundaries. No restrictions.
They expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere they wanted in the Middle East?
Yes. Yes. Wide open. We had to rewrite it. Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I stripped the language that the White House had set up, and put our language in it.
But that should also have triggered alarm bells about what they really wanted to do.
Well, it did. I’m not defending our votes; I’m just giving a little history of how this happened. You have to remember the context of when that resolution was passed. This was about a year after September 11. The country was still truly off balance. So the president comes out talking about “weapons of mass destruction” that this “madman dictator” Saddam Hussein has, and “our intelligence shows he’s got it,” and “he’s capable of weaponizing,” and so on.
And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.
Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t believe them.” But I was told by the president—we all were—that he would exhaust every diplomatic effort.
You were told that personally?
I remember specifically bringing it up with the president. I said, “This has to be like your father did it in 1991. We had every Middle East nation except one with us in 1991. The United Nations was with us.”
Did he give you that assurance, that he would do the same thing as his father?
Yep. He said, “That’s what we’re going to do.” But the more I look back on this, the more I think that the administration knew there was some real hard question whether he really had any WMD. In January of 2003, if you recall, the inspectors at the IAEA, who knew more about what Saddam had than anybody, said, “Give us two more months before you go to war, because we don’t think there’s anything in there.” They were the only ones in Iraq. We hadn’t been in there. We didn’t know what the hell was in there. And the president wouldn’t do it! So to answer your question—Do I regret that vote? Yes, I do regret that vote.
And you feel like you were misled?
I asked tough questions of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld before the war: How are you going to govern? Who’s going to govern? Where is the money coming from? What are you going to do with their army? How will you secure their borders? And I was assured every time I asked, “Senator, don’t worry, we’ve got task forces on that, they’ve been working, they’re coordinated,” and so on.
Do you think they knew that was false?
Oh, I eventually was sure they knew. Even before we actually invaded, I had a pretty clear sense of it—that this administration was hell-bent on going to war in Iraq.
Even if it meant deceiving Congress?
That’s right.
Congress has a lot less leverage to stop the war, now that it’s begun.
Well, we still have power, starting with appropriations, oversight, the power of the people, the polls. We represent the voters.
It’s indirect, though.
It is indirect, if you’re looking to stop the war. We’re already in it, we’re hugely invested, half a trillion dollars, over 3,000 dead…
And the decision to withhold funding is a tough one.
That’s right, because it can be seen as political. It is touchy. Nobody ever wants to be accused of cutting a canteen from the troops, so you get into that murky area: Are you hurting the troops by cutting off funding?
Where are you on that?
I think we need to exercise oversight of the funding. The president is going to come up with probably $100 billion in “emergency supplemental” funding for the war. That bill needs to get oversight. The last four years, we haven’t had any oversight over these “emergency” appropriations. Let’s examine it. Let’s pull it apart: “What’s this 40 million for?”
That seems so slow and bureaucratic.
It’s frustrating. Especially when you’re losing young Americans every day. We just keep throwing them into the fire.
Does it seem like the president is basically daring you to cut funding?
He is. He feels, as I think a number of Republicans do, that it would be a disastrous thing politically. These are bright people. They understand politics about as well as anyone. President Bush has been elected twice. Some might argue that he wasn’t elected the first time. With the popular vote, he actually wasn’t. But he’s very savvy politically. He’s never going to stand for election again, and he believes this is right for the country. The president is trying to do something very difficult: sustain a war without the support of the American people.
Are you especially sensitive about these wartime decisions because you’ve been to war?
Certainly going through combat in Vietnam and seeing war up close, seeing friends wounded and killed in front of you, you cannot help but be framed by that experience. When I got to Vietnam, I was a rifleman. I was a private, about as low as you can get. So my frame of reference is very much geared toward the guy at the bottom who’s doing the fighting and dying. Jim Webb and I are the only ones in the Senate who had that experience. John McCain served his country differently—he spent five years as a prisoner of war. John Kerry was on a boat for about three months, maybe less. I don’t think my experience makes me any better, but it does make me very sober about committing our nation to war. We should never again get into a fiasco like we did in Vietnam. And if we are going to use force, we better make damn sure it is in the national interest.
Which is essentially the “Powell Doctrine.” Do you and Colin Powell still talk?
We’re very good friends.
Do you think it’s hard for him to keep silent these days?
I think it is very hard for him. I think he is greatly tormented by all of this.
Does it surprise you that so many people in the administration who supported this war, didn’t have any military experience?
I have never doubted the motives of those who wanted to go to war so badly. I don’t question their moral standing.
But you might wonder if they really understand what war is.
Look, it has not gone unnoticed that President Bush served a little time in the National Guard. Secretary Rice never served. Wolfowitz never served. Feith never served. Cheney had five deferments. Rumsfeld might have done something at one time. But the only guy that had any real experience was Colin Powell. And they cut him off. That’s just a fact. That’s not subjective. That’s the way it was.
Does being a veteran also make you sensitive to the administration’s approach to interrogation and the use of secret military prisons?
It does, because that’s not who America is. We have always, certainly since World War II, had the moral high ground in the world. But these secret prisons and the treatment at Guantánamo destroy all of that. We ought to shut down Guantánamo. There shouldn’t be any secret prisons. Why do we need those? What are we afraid of? Here we are, the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Why can’t we let the Red Cross into our prisons? Why do we deny they exist? Why do we keep them locked up? What are we afraid of? Why aren’t we dealing with Iran and Syria?
What about civil liberties? Does it concern you that the administration has been searching bank records and personal mail, and listening to international phone calls, without warrants?
Very much. We have always been able to protect national security without sacrificing the liberties of the individual. Once you lose those rights, it’s very hard to get them back. There have been arguments made that if we just give up a few rights, it will be easier to preserve our national security. That should never, ever happen. When you take office, you take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. That is your first responsibility.
Is it strange for you to be allied on these issues with the anti-war left, which is not exactly your constituency?
I think these issues are starting to redefine the political landscape. You are going to see alliances and relationships develop that are based on this war. You are going to see a reorientation of political parties.
How conservative are you really? Tell me the truth: You don’t care whether or not gay people get married, do you?
No. Personally, I think marriage is between a man and a woman, but that’s because I see it as a religious union. As a legal contract, marriage should be up to the states. If a state wants to change the rules, that’s up to them.
What about the drug war? You don’t really think it’s going any better than the Iraq war, do you?
The drug war is different. Drugs are against the law.
But what do you think of the law?
That’s part of having a society. You have to have standards, social mores that are acceptable. You can’t go around exempting the law.
But Congress writes the laws.
Yes, and you can try to change the laws. If someone thinks marijuana ought to be legalized, go through the process. I would be opposed to it, by the way. Drugs are a devastating problem. Meth is creeping across the country. I know there are some who say you wouldn’t have near the problem if you just legalize drugs, but I disagree.
How about flag burning?
I voted for a constitutional amendment to ban it.
Isn’t it a form of expression, if some schmuck wants to make a statement?
I think you can defend your position both ways on that, but I am against it.
You don’t hear very many politicians say that both sides of an issue are reasonable these days.
We are living through one of the most transformative periods in history. If we are going to make it, we need a far greater appreciation and respect for others, or we’re going to blow up mankind. Look at what zealotry can do. Religious zealotry has been responsible for killing more people than any other thing. Look at the Middle East today. It’s all about religion. We need to move past those divisions and learn to be tolerant and respectful. If we go out there full of intolerance and hatred, we’ll never make it.
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