Am I the only one frightened by this image? From the New York Times Book Review of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream. The key thought:
“There are consequences to living in a dream.” We’ve sleepwalked into hallucination, regression and psychosis.
Somehow, this image is supposed to display hyper-masculinity. I am not sure the appropriate comment to make.
A note on why this was written: I was challenged by a redditor about Senator Obama’s vote for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The text of Obama’s speech on the floor of the Senate is here. Thanks to my challenger for the link. The actual back and forth is here. I’ve edited it a bit for posting.
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Obama’s vote in favor of the Military Commissions Act does disturb me greatly. More so than anything else about Obama as a candidate and future president.
However, I believe (and at this point it can only be a belief) that Barack Obama as president would restore habeas corpus and put an end to torture as a means of interrogation. He 
says so in his stump speech, but I do not blindly trust the words of those campaigning for public office.
After a cursory search of the web, I have not found a defense of Senator Obama’s vote. And given the two foundational principles – habeas corpus and the the responsibility of a government to treat those within it’s power humanely – that this bill in one way or another attacks (by suspending habeas rights for non-citizens with controversy over whether it applies to citizens, and by allowing testimony gained by means of torture)–it is difficult to see what a good man of principle may have been thinking. Even more, the MCA put into law the staggeringly flawed policy that is the Bush administration’s response to detaining possible terrorists.
But I do not merely admire Senator Obama because he is principled; just as important: he is both ambitious and pragmatic. Many principled men and women have broken their selves upon the system. I firmly believe it is possible to be both highly principled, and willing to compromise those principles at the right time, in order to preserve them.
As Lincoln did – suspending habeas corpus without calling on Congress; declaring slavery an evil, if anything is evil, yet not calling for its extermination.
I do not know what Obama was thinking when he cast that vote.
But my point is this: as disturbing as it may be, it is conceivable that a good and principled man or woman could vote for such a flawed law as this.
Centrism is not a dirty word. It is not our salvation either. I do not believe however Obama is trying to be a centrist. Rather, it seems to me he is trying to find the best solutions, words, and actions in a flawed world. Unlike Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, he is willing to be pragmatic in order to achieve what he wants. As the Clintons are; as Lincoln, JFK, and MLK were.
For me, the difference is that I trust that Obama has principles. Every position seems to contain both pragmatic and principled stands.
When I see Clinton, I only see pragmatism. She seems to believe that elections are games to get power; and with her power, she will do certain good things. Her focus is on the ends almost exclusively.
Obama seems to believe that elections are about convincing the country that his principles are right where possible, and compromising otherwise. Power is about making the changes he has brought the country around to with his election and using his position in office.
Kucinich seems to believe that elections are only won by the corrupt, and power is guaranteed to corrupt. It does not seem to me that Kucinich wants to win.
Oscar Wilde once said: “It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory and still to love it.” We are in a fallen world. I believe the institutions of our democracy are in grave danger. And I cannot countenance a leader who is unwilling to compromise in order to win.
Lincoln won his election on a platform of keeping slavery. And he meant it, it seems. Yet given the perspective of history, I would not have chosen another man to lead our country in that time – no matter how pure or how principled. Slavery was evil. Yet Lincoln’s decision, flawed as it may be, compromising his basic principles and the principles of our nation, still stands the test of time. It stands because he was able to bring the country to where he felt it should be.
And that is my hope for Obama.
Sorry for the extra-light blogging these past few days. I’m a bit under the weather and have no stomach for deep thoughts to intermingle my metaphors. In lieu of actual thoughts on a page, here are some thoughts by others:
As we remember the beginnings of Western civilization on this continent, we almost must look to our legacy:
“Tell the world why you’re proud of America. Tell them when the Star-Spangled Banner starts, Americans get to their feet, Hispanics, Irish, Italians, Central Europeans, East Europeans, Jews, Muslims, white, Asian, black, those who go back to the early settlers and those whose English is the same as some New York cab driver’s I’ve dealt with … but whose sons and daughters could run for this Congress.
Tell them why Americans, one and all, stand upright and respectful. Not because some state official told them to, but because whatever race, color, class or creed they are, being American means being free. That’s why they’re proud.As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, but, in fact, it is transient.
The question is: What do you leave behind?”
Tony Blair to the United States Congress in 2003.
For those of you paying attention, President Pervez Musharraf, who has been ruling
Pakistan for the past eight years, won the presidential election in a landslide yesterday despite being weakened by all sides by domestic insurgencies, international opprobrium, and several constitutional and other crises. He won because of a last-minute deal he struck with the exiled leader.
The alliance is one that seems destined to fall apart, as Bhutto and Musharaff detest one another and represent two very different Pakistans. Bhutto will be entering the country in the next few days, with all charges against her dropped. She has already publicly declared that her life will be in danger by returning–whether from the Islamic militants who despise her or the current president, she did not say.
But let me spin this back to how this affects the race for president of the free world. As most people know, a few months ago, Senator Barack Obama made some comments about Pakistan in a foreign policy speech:
Let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will. [my highlighting]
Bhutto, speaking at a public session before the Council on Foreign Relations responded:
Well, I wouldn’t like the United States to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty with unauthorized military operations. But the issue that I would like to stress is that Barack Obama also said, if Pakistan won’t act. And that’s the critical issue, that the government has to act. And the government has to act to protect Pakistan’s own serenity and integrity, its own respect, and to understand that if it creates a vacuum, then others aren’t going to just twiddle their thumbs while militants freely move across the border. [my highlighting]
Now let me highlight the significance of that: the former Prime Minister of Pakistan and current power broker in that country seems to believe that Senator Obama’s position is defensible–for America to violate her own country’s sovereignty. Senator Clinton on the other hand, does not engage in hypotheticals because that would reveal her thinking, her calculations and blasted Obama for his “irresponsible” remarks.
My question is: why didn’t Obama engage with Clinton–or anyone–more heavily on this issue, which ended up being talked up as a gaffe rather than a considered position?
The Interrogation of Abu Jandel
In October 2000, Abu Jandal was arrested by the Yemeni authorities in connection with the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. He was a member of Al Qaeda and had served as Osama Bin Laden’s chief bodyguard. After the attacks on September 11, the Yemeni authorities allowed Ali Soufan, one of eight FBI agents who spoke Arabic, to interrogate Abu Jandal.
The attack was fresh in Soufan’s memory. His friend and mentor, John O’Neil, who had dedicated much of his life to fighting Al Qaeda, had been killed in the attacks. Soufan was justifiably, righteously angry. The Yemeni authorities, not known for their squeamishness, gave Soufan wide latitude in the interrogation. The FBI gave Soufan the directive to identify the hijackers “by any means necessary”.
Despite the fact that Abu Jandel refused to cooperate with Soufan at first, Soufan remained respectful. Abu Jandel would rant about the evils of America–the single country, he believed, that was most responsible for the evils of the world. As an additional complicating factor, like many Al Qaeda members, Abu Jandel had been trained in counter-interrogation techniques. He agreed to those facts which Soufan knew and denied everything else. He tried to portray himself as a good Muslim who had at one time flirted with Al Qaeda.
This stonewalling lasted for several days. Soufan was patient, picking up small details he might be able to use. For example, he found that Abu Jandel was diabetic and the next day brought sugarless wafers and a history of America in Arabic. Abu Jandel read the book quickly and was astonished at America’s history. The very fact of Soufan’s existence–as a knowledgeable Muslim who loved America and was in the FBI–was a challenge to Abu Jandel’s conception of America.
Soufan also found that Abu Jandel was troubled that Osama Bin Laden had sworn fealty to Mullah Omar, the messianic leader of the Taliban.
For five days, Soufan and Abu Jandel debated the theology behind suicide bombing, America’s place in the world, and discussed Abu Jandel’s life. He refused to reveal that he had any significant knowledge of Al Qaeda.
On the fifth night, Soufan brought him a news magazine with graphic photos of the twin towers on fire, photos that brought home the scale of the death and destruction. Abu Jandel had heard that something had happened in New York, but was shocked by the events, and insisted that Bin Laden could never do that–he said it must have been the Israelis, or someone else. Soufan showed Abu Jandel a local Yemeni newspaper with the headline: “200 Yemeni Souls Perish in New York Attack.” “The Sheikh is not that crazy,” he insisted, referring to Bin Laden. Soufan asked him to identify a series of mug shots. Still disturbed by the images of the attack, Abu Jandel was able to identify seven men as members of Al Qaeda, but he still insisted that Bin Laden could not have ordered the attack.[digg-reddit-me]
Soufan responded that he knew for sure that the people who did this were Al Qaeda. “How? Who told you?” Abu Jandel asked.
“You did. You just identified the hijackers,” Soufan said.
Abu Jandel asked for a few moments alone. When Soufan came back, he offered to help, to reveal what he knew about the structure of Al Qaeda, the locations of hideouts, and plans for escape. “I think the Sheikh went crazy,”Abu Jandel said.
Abu Jandel’s information proved significant in the Afghanistan campaign.
The Interrogation of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi
In late 2001 or early 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured by Pakistani forces while trying to escape Afghanistan . By the middle of January 2002, he was in US custody. He was one of several high value detainees whose interrogation and detention challenged the limits of what the CIA was willing to do. The Bush administration had just recently authorized “enhanced” interrogation techniques, includes, as revealed by the New York Times in a recent expose, “slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions” and waterboarding. According to the New York Times:
With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.
Relatively little is known about the specific techniques used on al-Libi or about his interrogation. It seems certain however that al-Libi was subject to these “enhanced techniques” such as simulated drowning and the rest. Additionally, al-Libi was also transferred for a time to a foreign intelligence service in the rendition program, that began under President Clinton, where he was also physically abused and threatened with torture.
Under pressure and feeling threatened, Al-Libi provided the CIA and other officials questioning him with a wealth of information about planned attacks in Yemen and around the world. Most significant however, al-Libi was the primary source for the faulty pre-war intelligence about Al Qaeda-Iraq links. Al-Libi specifically said that Iraq had been training members of Al Qaeda in the use of chemical and biological weapons, a claim cited by President Bush, Colin Powell, and many others as a justification for the war.
This bit of intelligence, gained by torture and used to justify a war, was found to be false after the invasion.
Torture as a Symbol
These are just two of the most prominent examples of the interrogations of detainees after 9/11. Two examples cannot prove a point. They do illustrate an opinion that is held by many if not most interrogators: torture and other extreme techniques are useful in getting people to talk, but not necessarily to tell the truth. The harder and less television-friendly approach is often the best.
Torture, as a symbol, represents the bankruptcy of the Bush’s administration’s approach to the War on Terror. The decision to begin to torture prisoners was made without public debate of any sort, by distorting current law and common sense, by abandoning America’s long-held positions and values, and without any attempt at resolving questions of tactics or strategy.
The CIA thus began to develop a program that mimicked Soviet techniques America had long condemned–techniques that were not designed to elicit information, but confessions for show trials. While Guiliani, Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, Addington, Scalia, and others have denied that they endorse torture, they have endorsed “enhanced interrogation techniques” inflicting physical and psychological pain short of death or major organ failure. To embrace torture (which is what these men have done) reveals a tactical and strategic deficiency. The focus is on looking tough and on taking postures of violent masculinity even if they are counter-productive.
E. B. White wrote an essay on New York City at the dawn of the nuclear age, saying:
“The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions…In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”
We cannot accept such blunders, such a short-sighted strategy with so much at stake.
[digg-reddit-me]Here’s the full transcript of Obama’s speech at DePaul University.
And a choice excerpt:
As Ted Sorensen’s old boss President Kennedy once said – “the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war – and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears.” In the fall of 2002, those deaf ears were in Washington. They belonged to a President who didn’t tell the whole truth to the American people; who disdained diplomacy and bullied allies; and who squandered our unity and the support of the world after 9/11.
But it doesn’t end there. Because the American people weren’t just failed by a President – they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress – a coequal branch of government – that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let’s be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.
Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren’t really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debating
in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That’s the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it?
With all that we know about what’s gone wrong in Iraq, even today’s debate is divorced from reality. We’ve got a surge that is somehow declared a success even though it has failed to enable the political reconciliation that was its stated purpose. The fact that violence today is only as horrific as in 2006 is held up as progress. Washington politicians and pundits trip over each other to debate a newspaper advertisement while our troops fight and die in Iraq.
And the conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002. This is the conventional thinking that measures experience only by the years you’ve been in Washington, not by your time spent serving in the wider world. This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place – the outdated assumptions and the refusal to talk openly to the American people.
Well I’m not running for President to conform to Washington’s conventional thinking – I’m running to challenge it. I’m not running to join the kind of Washington groupthink that led us to war in Iraq – I’m running to change our politics and our policy so we can leave the world a better place than our generation has found it.
I had read with a bit of skepticism that the Obama team was holding “the full Barack” back to avoid peaking too early as Howard Dean and countless other alternate candidates have. But this speech is something different. Clearly, succinctly making the case for an Obama presidency and one part of the tragedy that would be Clinton II. I bear no ill-feeling towards Hillary, other than a vague unease. And I admit that the more I have seen her, the more I have come to respect her. That said: she represents convention, political caution, and the establishment.
The Establishment
As someone who respects and studies the “establishment” – as represented by such elite opinion-makers as the Council on Foreign Relations, The New Republic magazine, the Brookings Institute, The Economist magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and a few other odds and ends – I believe Hillary is the candidate who best embodies what they have stood for and what they stand for today. She gives the answers they have scripted. She embodies the middle-of-the-road ideology embraced by most of these organizations, an ideology that focuses on economic liberalization and projecting strength and American power. This group is socially liberal, economically conservative, and hawkish on foreign affairs. They supported the Iraq war, immigration reform, Israel, combating climate change, and fiscally responsible policies. They are not some evil cabal as maintained by some conspiracy theorists, but rather are those who have taken it upon themselves to think deeply about these issues, those who are powerful enough to pursue their interests in politics, and those who once were in positions of significant power. Their contribution to the public debate is enormous. Their experience and conventions are well-worth hearing: if Bush had listened to them, he would have had a much more successful presidency. They did not push the Iraq war, but they acquiesced to it. They encouraged respect for military estimates and have been astonished by the Bush administration’s hubris and incompetence. It is largely because this group has been convinced that some form of universal health care is back on the table.
Hillary Clinton is campaigning as their candidate. But the funny thing is this: they have not embraced her yet. And while Senator Obama agrees with them in principle on many issues, he believes that these wise old men and women are part of the problem. And the funny thing is: many of them agree. The informal system that in so many ways has determined the policy and actions of America is broken. Not only did they get wrong the most important issue in the past decade, but they have been marginalized by the Bush administration which has not sought the held wisdom of non-ideologues.
The Choice
We need a president who will seek to challenge, reinvigorate, and reinvent this informal system. As a nation, we are headed into a half dozen enormous disasters on our current track – from the entitlement crisis to an invigorated islamist movement. We have been on this path for some time. This path has largely been set by the establishment, although the scope and consequences of our problems have been exacerbated intensely by the current administration. The wise old men and women do not know how to get us out; Hillary doesn’t know either. And neither does Obama.
But Obama sees and feels the problem – and Hillary does not. The choice we face is this: do we need a president who will be competent and strong, who will make few mistakes in the execution of her plans, who knows rather specifically what she wants to do, and who will oversee the downfall of American preeminence in the world? Or do we need a president who will make mistakes, who does not know precisely what he wants to do, who is intelligent and strong, but who sees the enormity of the challenge, and who stands an outside chance of reversing the decay and restoring America?
This presidential election should not, cannot be about which candidate will be the toughest on terrorism. What this election must be about is which candidate can rescue America from the precipice we are barely balancing on.