Hometown newspaper sinks to new low

You know, I stopped reading the Inquirer after they hired Rick "Man-On_Dog" Santorum as a columnist. I kind of wish right now that I had a subscription that I could cancel in disgust, though, because the Inky just hired John Yoo, Philadelphia native and torture memo author, as an Op-Ed columnist.

Philadelphia is a pretty heavily Democratic city, so I can only wonder who the Inky is targeting with this new hire. Are they counting on Web hits going up when liberal bloggers link to Yoo's columns in outrage, or do they think there's a secret market for Republican pro-torture propaganda in a city so liberal that they only have Republicans in the city council because it's mandated in the city charter that the minority party have representation?

Thankfully, I'm moving at the end of the month (NYC, baby) so I won't even nominally be represented in Newspaperland by a paper willing to pay for the opinions of a man whose opinions may soon get him disbarred.

Will Bunch, Daily News columnist, said it:

But while promoting public discourse is a goal of newspaper commentary, it should not be the main objective. The higher calling for an American newspaper should be promoting and maintaining our sometimes fragile democracy, the very thing that Yoo and his band of torture advocates very nearly shredded in a few short years. Quite simply, by handing Yoo a regularly scheduled platform for his viewpoint, the Inquirer is telling its readers that Yoo's ideas -- especially that torture is not a crime against the very essence of America -- are acceptable.

This is exactly the kind of "on one hand, on the other hand" cowardly practice that has become a cancer destroying the moral DNA of America's newsrooms. "On one hand, torture is not only immoral but a violation of international and even U.S. law, but on the other hand, check out our 'provocative' new columnist, John Yoo, who can't travel to Europe because he might be arrested for war crimes!" This is wrong -- horribly so. For more than five years, American newsrooms have helped to normalize the inhumane practice of torture, giving into the government's Orwellian terms like "enhanced interrogation" and failing to call for accountability of those responsible for these crimes, including -- but not stopping at -- John Yoo. For a much-honored newspaper like the Inquirer to pay someone like Yoo to write a regular column is surely the exclamation point on a dark period in which most of my profession flunked its greatest moral test.

Yep. "He said, she said" at its absolute worst. I might suggest, if the Inquirer is looking for opposing viewpoints, hiring Mumia Abu-Jamal to write a column to run alongside Michael Smerconish, or perhaps hiring some of the "let newspapers die" crowd to write a column about how the Inquirer has outlived its usefulness.

It Was Torture When Practiced on Americans 60 Years Ago; It's Not Torture Now

I recently read Shawn C. Smallman's excellent Fear & Memory in the Brazilian Army & Society, 1889-1954. Smallman does a great job of tracing shifts in military politics and memory, and the implications for the 1964-1985 dictatorship (though it is outside of his focus). One of the recurring themes is military leadership's use of torture against opposing factions or uprisings. One of these uprisings, the 1935 uprising of communists in the Brazilian Northeast, resulted in extreme repression and the establishment of the Estado Novo dictatorship, and many participants and leaders were tortured when the uprising failed. One of the participants was an American, Victor Allan Barron. Smallman writes of Barron's fate on page 53:

Victor Allan Barron, an American who had formerly been a member of the Communist Youth, underwent horrible tortures after his arrest. [...] A naval captain (and doctor) supervised Barron's torture, as he was beaten, shocked, and had his testicles squeezed until he fainted. [...] According to Brazilian authorities, Barron committed suicide by jumping from the second floor of the central police station. It is unclear if he was dead before he went through the window or if he died in the hospital after the fall. In the U.S., Congressman Vito Marcantonio denounced Barron's torture and murder before the house of representatives. He read a statement from Joseph R. Brodsky, Barron's lawyer, who claimed personal knowledge of his client's torture: 'They beat him with belts and rubber hose; they burned and shocked him with live electric wires; they punched and kicked him around constantly and did not let him sleep for days." (emphasis mine)

It's worth pointing out here that, when an American was forced to sleep deprivation (among other horrors) in another country, a U.S. Congressman took to the floor to denounce the actions. Yet 67 years later, Bush administration legal counsels suggested that "sleep deprivation does not constitute" torture when we were using it on foreigners.

Many other people (including myself) have commented already on the double-standard of the U.S. under Bush, as acts that other countries previously committed that we called "torture" suddenly became legal when we were employing the same methods. Smallman's study (published in 2001, well before we'd even begun torturing people) offers just one more documentary piece of evidence into the hypocrisy of making "legal" the torture methods for which we have previously condemned others.

A Rare Moment of Political Activism (Rather than Political Theorizing) from Mr. Trend

I almost never do this (and feel a bit embarrassed doing it now), but....

...in light of the release of the torture memos, Jay Bybee's central role in their awful, (il)legal logic, and his current status as a member of the Ninth Circuit of the Federal Court of Appeals, I'm asking any and all of you who are interested and have the time to write your Senators and Congresspeople and ask them for his impeachment. For those who are interested or don't have the time to include their own message, I included mine below (though I recommend changing the bit about being a Latin American historian, unless you actually are one). The more people that make their voice heard, especially on Bybee, the better the court system and the country will be for it.


Dear Senator Schumer,

I am writing to ask you to please join efforts to impeach Jay Bybee. I know that you were one of the 79 senators to approve his original nomination to the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, and you no doubt had your reasons and your own information. However, in light of the recent declassified torture memos that President Obama released, including the 18-page memo by Mr. Bybee himself, that offered a logic for why torture that the United States conducted was legal, make clear that Mr. Bybee should in no way be responsible for major legal decisions.

I am a historian who studies Latin America, and my focus is on military dictatorships, all of which used torture themselves in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Throughout those years, numerous politicians, including President Jimmy Carter and senators like Sen. Ted Kennedy, openly declared methods like those mentioned in Mr. Bybee's memo (including "walling" and confinement in small spaces for extended periods of time) to be torture. Yet, as I'm certain you are aware, upon the U.S.'s performance of similar deeds, Mr. Bybee was at the forefront of defending these same methods that had been "torture" for other countries when it came time for the Bush administration to defend its use of the same practices.

Mr. Bybee's appointment to the Federal Court system has put American citizens like myself at the risk of having our fates decided by his legal logic, a logic that has already defended the use of torture. This kind of behavior and these legal positions cannot and should not be allowed on any court bench, much less a Federal Court bench.It is for this reason that I am asking you, as one of the two Senators from the great state of New York, to please join the efforts to impeach Mr. Bybee, so that his legal reasoning can never affect the lives of American citizens in the way it has already affected the lives of those who were tortured in Guantanamo. Thank you.

Respectfully yours,

Mr. Trend

[OK, I actually didn't sign off w/my pseudonym. But there it is.]

The Torture Memos

I read them. All of them. I screamed at the screen and my notes are filled with quotations from the memos followed by insults in all caps. Trend noted on my Facebook page: "Welcome to how I feel."

Of course we all knew that horrible things were done with the express permission of the Bush legal team. But it doesn't make reading it in self-righteous bureaucratese any easier.

I wrote about it over at GlobalComment.

“Shocks the conscience.”

That’s the test that Steven G. Bradbury, acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel in Bush’s Justice department used to decide whether or not an “enhanced interrogation technique” was torture. I won’t be the only one to suggest, after reading three memos by Bradbury and one by now-Federal Judge Jay Bybee, that perhaps Bradbury doesn’t have much of a conscience to be shocked...

In all of the memos, the description of waterboarding is chilling in its deliberate, specific confidence. The assurances that you can’t use the techniques on United States citizens just reminds me that in war, it’s all about Othering the opponent.

As long as it’s not you, it’s OK. When you read the calm descriptions of the techniques, you realize that the people writing the memos are supremely confident that these techniques will never be applied to them. They won’t. They may well be applied to our troops captured in battle, with the justification that we did it first, but Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury will never be waterboarded, never be deprived of sleep for days...

The first Bradbury memo notes that, “Both KSM and Zubaydah had ‘expressed their belief that the general US population was ‘weak’, lacked resilience, and would be unable to ‘do what was necessary’ to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.’” With this one sentence, the entire memo takes on a whole new meaning—as if the “enhanced interrogation techniques” are suddenly less about gaining actionable intelligence and more about one giant pissing contest between the U.S. and the “terrorists.”...

You can read my whole piece here. You can also read the memos in their entirety, with very little redacted, here. This was, as Greenwald noted, a win for civil liberties.