Mission Irretrievable

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Welcome to Your New Century

I Still Hate Politics

Here are some things that happened lately:

Week before last, we got to see John Yoo's March '03 memo outlining legal justifications the Administration could use in defending its torture program. The memo was rescinded nine months later, but we learned this past week that it was only a small part of the administration's deliberations on the torture question. Beginning in 2002, the White House Principals Committee - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Tenet, Powell - met repeatedly to set guidelines for CIA interrogators including how many times a detainee can be hit or pushed, how long deprived of sleep, etc. (Oh yes, and waterboarding. Waterboarding was part of these deliberations.) This isn't the first time (I think it's in fact the second) that an unlikely hero emerged in John Ashcroft, who said during one of the meetings, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

Meanwhile, our current Attorney General has been behaving less heroically. A couple weeks back, speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Michael Mukasey choked back tears describing the need for telecom-company amnesty for their complicity in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping scheme. Yes: he actually came to the edge of breaking down in tears. Mukasey said that unfettered and warrantless wiretapping is essential because just before 9-11, the government failed to listen in on an inbound call from a "safe house in Afghanistan", a call that presumably detailed the attacks. Now: (1) Under then-current law, the government actually had every right to listen in on such a call. And (2) interestingly, this call was never revealed to the 9-11 Commission.

This past week, asked by Patrick Leahy to clarify the mess, Mukasey curiously both backpedaled and remained defiant, by saying he had gotten everything right in his remarks... except that he'd mixed up the country. The call was not from Afghanistan. So, this call's relevance to 9-11 is questionable (as well as its existence), and it proves nothing about a need for expanded wiretapping powers anyway, since the call (if it occurred) could freely have been monitored in the first place. Got all that? Woogh.

And as we all know, Petraeus and Crocker returned to DC this week to explain how much progress has been made in Iraq. Meanwhile, just this past week, 18 soldiers were killed there.

Okay. So you've got these things going on in the news. And so I tune in to watch This Week With George Stephanopoulos this morning, and what does his roundtable spend fully half their time talking about? Barack Obama's big, big problem of being an elitist.

Why is Barack Obama supposed to be an elitist? Hang onto your hats, folks, this is really bad. In a private donor meeting in San Francisco (aka, elitism central) he said this:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I, for one, am scandalized. How dare Obama summarize the thesis of What's the Matter With Kansas? (which was correct, and a great book)? How dare he suggest that gun rights and religious pandering serve as smokescreen issues, allowing folks to get bamboozled into accepting a raft of policies contrary to their interests - like, say, the shifting of the tax burden onto the middle class?

This is atrocious. This requires a national discussion around the issue of snobbery. This requires Hillary Clinton to become a bird-hunting enthusiast? Okay, never mind that one. But this requires outrage, people! Did you hear that Barack Obama turned down a coffee he was offered the other day, and asked for orange juice instead? Where does that no-good bastard get the nerve! And how can he expect to stay up for 3am phonecalls without caffeine?

Well. This is of course why I hate politics. You might hone that claim a bit to say that what I hate is the media coverage of politics... but really, you know, our politicians are all so media-conscious (and in their defense, they have to be) that it is a complicitous, evil-symbiotic relationship. You can't much tease the one loose from the other.

What bugs me about this particular flap - which, if the bobbleheads on This Week are to be believed*, is a serious one for Obama - is that our unofficial (but inexorable) system makes it impossible to become a creditable candidate for president unless you're a millionaire, and beholden to the power structure of your party, and beholden to a slate of shadowy donors who all have their hooks in you. It is impossible that you not be an "elitist", however you want to define the term. But then you've got to run back and forth across the country playing this kabuki-theater act in which you dress like a lumberjack and shoot at animals and try not to appear effete in the way you hold a glass of beer. You have to be one of the common folk: otherwise you have committed a damnable sin - perhaps the ultimate sin, politically. You weren't a regular Joe or Jane.

And did I mention that you must be a championship bowler (whatever you do, don't roll a 37!). You must play sports - but not windsurfing, because that makes you look like a girl, or something. Honestly, I could never figure out what was wrong about the windsurfing.

And I can't figure out what's wrong with Obama, at least vis a vis this elitism problem (Reverend Wright, on the other hand - that guy was a whackjob**). You see, the way I see it, Obama may be the candidate least beholden to "the system" that we've seen this side of World War I.*** The financial backing of Obama's candidacy comes mainly from small donors. His relative inexperience, whatever drawback it may be otherwise, at least comports well with the idea that he isn't ossified into the political status quo. True, Obama doesn't come to the public with the most radical policy agenda imaginable - but you can at least feel comfortable with the idea that he's his own man, not fully bought-and-sold like your typical candidate. But now we want to say that he's the elitist? And we want to say it because he essentially said kitchen-table issues are more important to America's future than legislation over religion, guns, and immigration?

The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. Or maybe that's just the Crown Royal.


* - And I guess you should believe them, because as members of the media they will decide for us how long a stupid story like this one continues to get play.

** - . Not for saying "God damn America" - in context I think that made perfect sense. But when Wright said the government created AIDS to attack Black people? Yow.

And by the way, Obama isn't responsible for what Wright has said. I'm just saying that Wright himself is a whackjob. Because another curiosity about American politics is that we require our politicians to go rub noses with religious whackjobs - witness John McCain - after which, of course, we require said politicians to provide tortured non-apology-apologies for having consorted with whackjobs.

*** - I just mean candidates with a credible shot of winning. I'm not considering Eugene Debs, or Ralph Nader, maybe even Howard Dean.

Oh, and rather than WWI, I was about to say "Reconstruction", but TR comes to mind; he was certainly a wild card.

Biden nails it

I didn't hear all the Petraeus testimony yesterday, but of what I was able to listen to, the standout item for me was Joe Biden's opening statement in the afternoon session with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Looking for the clip today on YouTube, I first accidentally came across Biden's opening statement from the last time we did this - Petraeus' Senate surge testimony last September. Listening to that clip, I thought, "Huh, I'd thought Biden came on a little stronger than this." But I didn't realize until two-thirds of the way through that I was listening to something seven months old. Because what Biden has been advocating has been very consistent. To wit: this isn't working. To any extent it is working, it'll be undone whenever we leave, whether that's tomorrow or several years from now. And so we really need to leave right now. This withdrawal should be orderly and staged, and some force may likely remain for the discernible future to continue fighting the (very small) Al Qaeda powers in Iraq, and to train the Iraqi army. But in the main, we need to pull back our military, lick our wounds, and realign against the actual enemy in Afghanistan.

Biden's statement yesterday is the most cogent articulation I have lately heard of where we stand over there. It's calm, clear, reasoned, and unrelenting.

The clip doesn't seem to exist on YouTube; the best I can offer is CSPAN's page on yesterday's testimony, from which there's a link to Biden's statement in a Real file.

The Yoo-Nighted States

I posted this comic once before, but I thought it bore a repeat with the release last week of John Yoo's torture memo.

Funny thing, I wasn't even thinking of Yoo when I wrote out "The Yoo-Nighted States of America"; it just seemed like the way Bush talks. You know, like how he charmingly chooses to call his countrymen "Merkins".


By the way, while I'm on the subject - just incidentally, you know - it will redound to this nation's perpetual shame that not only has this man not been impeached, but that no one involved in the extralegal capture, imprisonment, and torture of foreign combatants and American citizens alike - unambiguous war criminals all - has been so much as issued a reprimand.

Aside from that, my feelings are pretty neutral in the matter.

"The Surge is Working"

I've always been pretty sure that the apparent peace in Iraq (peace without progress, to coin a phrase) was going to fall apart this April. However, I had thought this because we've been told troop drawdowns would have to begin then. More recently, however, Bush and Petraeus have found ways to keep troop strength at around 150,000 for the indefinite near-term (pre-surge, in early 2007, the level was around 130,000: at its peak in November, it had reached almost 170,000).

So the current re-eruption of violence in Baghdad and Basra doesn't have much to do with the "surge", yea or nay. Which is much scarier, right?, because that means it's systemic.

First bear in mind some of the very basic demographics of prewar Iraq. It was a majority (two-thirds) Shia nation, ruled by a Sunni minority (Saddam). And it's Arabs throughout: unlike neighbor Iran, whose population is also majority Shiite but ethnically Persian.

Well, those Iraqi Sunnis have largely been evicted, certainly from Baghdad. For years now they've been getting funny little notes slipped under their doors - "Get packed and be gone in a week, or you will soon star in our next beheading DVD." So Sunnis make up a lot of the 2-million-plus refugee crisis crammed up against Jordan and Syria (a crisis we don't hear so much about in the press).

This "Shia Power" movement, if you will, has been abetted especially in the past year by us. One of the ways we've been trying to clamp down on violence over there, in addition to the surge, has been to co-opt Shiite militias by paying them to keep their neighborhoods peaceful. Of course, since our money is flowing through the corrupt and ontologically-questionable Iraqi government, none of these folks has actually been getting paid. So the last best glimmer of cooperative spirit we'd seen from these Shia groups is falling back to its default "death to America" state.

This video from the Guardian UK is illuminating and disturbing (particularly the bit about people murdered by being buried up to their necks and then abandoned).

And now we see these Shiite militias increasingly fighting each other for power, as well as fighting the Iraqi army (basically another very large Shiite militia). Note clearly that none of this has the slightest thing to with with Al Queda in Iraq - an extremely minor player - which (a) comprises a couple thousand fighters at best, and (b) is Sunni. Sunnis aren't faring well in Iraq right now.

Intra-Shiite strife in Iraq is going to get a lot worse before it ever gets better. So if indeed it's true that John McCain (who appears not to know the difference between Shia and Sunni) is staking his presidential run on the success of the surge, then I think we can look forward to President Obama* next January.



*Because Hillary can't win anymore. Or if she does, it will be through such extreme methods that the Democratic party will be cleft in twain and we'll be looking at the rise of the Greens.

P.S. to my "*" -- Yes, this means I was wrong in January when I predicted Hillary would win the nomination. It's fun passing out armchair precognitions, and I enjoyed doing it. But Megan was correct back then to comment that there was plenty of time left in the primaries. The only thing I would say in my defense - which really isn't even in my defense, since I'm claiming I was wrong - is that I was inspired to my prediction by a sense of Hillary's... uhm, what word to use?, let's go with... unrelentingness. And she has surely borne herself out on that count.

Here's a topic for you: prison rape

1 of 32 of us lives in prison, which beats any society in human history (Europe imprisons seven times fewer of its people as a percentage of its population). One of every ten African American males lives behind bars. I've always had a strange, fascinated dread of prison - never mind that I'm not doing anything that could end me up there (though hell, innocence certainly isn't sufficient to keep a fellow out). If I believed in hokum like past lives, I think I'd be convinced I served time in a former one.

So I just read Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison, which is every bit as dreadful as it sounds. But I'd have to say it's one of the best books I've ever read - the cliche was true in this case that I couldn't put it down once I'd started reading.

T.J. Parsell did a number of incredibly stupid things as a teenager, culminating in the 1978 armed robbery of a photo mat with a toy gun (he did this "as a joke", and never quite explains what the joke was supposed to have been...). Out of jail awaiting trial for the robbery, he was picked up again, this time on a trespassing charge after letting himself into an empty room at the hotel where he was working, trying to avoid going home drunk to his parents. He would go on to spend four years in Michigan prisons, starting at age 17.

A new fish in the Riverside Correctional Facility, Parsell was tricked within a day or two of arrival into believing a little party was being thrown in his honor; he drank some homemade liquor which turned out to be spiked with Thorazine; in his incapacitated state, he was gang-raped. Afterward there was a coin-toss to see which of the men would "own" him. Parsell caught a break, if you want to call it that, by falling into the relatively benign hands of a former negro-league baseball player called Slide Step. Who was a nice guy, compared with the alternatives.

Complicating things, Parsell is coming to realize during all of this that he's gay. In case anyone happens to be stupid, it should be said that this doesn't relate to the rape. It's a realization that certainly had to emerge in his mind in spite of it.

So, he's gay. And while serving time in another facility - mind that he's now 18 or so - he falls in love with a young prisoner named Paul. You know how that feels, age 18 and in love: just imagine it happening in a prison, and you'll know that you'll never be able to imagine the intensity of this connection. Better yet, Paul's wiser about prison than Parsell, and so together they have a couple of golden months where they manage to put up a joint front and hold off the maniacs and serial rapists. Then they're separated for spending too much time together. Now, if one of them were a "man" and the other a "boy", it wouldn't have mattered if they'd spent all their free time alone. But as two "boys" together, no go. And, shortly after being separated from Paul, Parsell is raped again.

Obviously, this is a pretty serious book. I don't mind saying that as I finished reading it - at work, during lunch - I had a damn hard time keeping myself from openly crying. It closes with an exchange of letters with Paul, whom Parsell tracks down as part of his writing process. In the 25-some years since they'd last seen one another, Parsell put himself through college at night, entered the tech sector, and moved to the east coast to raise an adoptive daughter with his partner. He'd put prison a million miles behind him. Paul, on the other hand, had botched a prison escape, and with the exception of less than one year outside on probation, had remained incarcerated the entire time.

Their letters glow with a kindness and affection that are almost difficult to bear. I mean, for these feelings to have emerged in the midst of such manifest horror.

So that's the positive side - some transcendence is possible here. But the bigger picture is not particularly rosy. Rape and sexual abuse exist in our prisons as a deliberate tool of social ordering and control. I don't just mean that it's used deliberately by prisoners, to establish a pecking order; I mean that the prison authorities themselves tacitly condone and/or even encourage rape. You certainly can't expect much help from them if, as a prisoner, you report threats of rape or actual attacks - apparently the guards' typical line is that they try not to get involved in lovers' quarrels. According to Parsell, the attitude is that to allow rape and sexual servitude in prison helps the stronger and more aggressive prisoners to let off some steam.

Human Rights Watch has prepared a fascinating, if godawful, report on U.S. prisoner rape that's well worth taking a look at. Certainly, a tenth of our state and federal prisoners are subjected to forced or coerced sex, but the figure may be more like one-third.

Midnight Express notwithstanding, I might prefer serving a sentence in Turkey over doing it here in the United States.

...When the Abu Ghraib photos hit, most folks seemed a little baffled by the weird sex stuff. It was as if we could understand that soldiers in the field would be rough with detainees, but what's with all the nudity and pantomimed coitus and panties on guys' heads? Well, it should come as no surprise that the reservists organizing these activities, Charles Graner in particular, had received their training in prisoner control from the good old U.S. correctional system.

The racial aspect of prisoner rape is also uniquely American. Something like 45% of prisoners are black (as against 12% of the general population), 40% white, and 15% hispanic. Rape appears to occur principally within the racial groups - with the exception of white inmates, who tend to be fair game for everybody else.

I think a lot of folks take an attitude toward this phenomenon - since, after all, the existence of prison rape is hardly a secret - that it's more or less what criminals deserve. But I don't think the reality could possibly bear this out, no matter how cruelly you think we ought to treat our lawbreakers. For one thing, slightly over half of our nation's convicts are nonviolent, including fully three-quarters of the new fish (violent offenders tend to have longer sentences). In 2000, 22% of all prisoners were behind bars for no other reason than that they'd gotten high. And as a whole, it's the nonviolent offenders who are the likeliest victims of sexual assault. The worst, most violent criminals in our system - the ones whose punishments we might rightly want to see be the most severe - are most commonly the "beneficiaries" of systemic prisoner rape. Or whatever you'd call it, since "beneficiary" seems awful crazy to say.

This phenomenon could be relatively easy to bring under control. What would help most, of course, is to admit that many of the Mr.-Tough-Guy laws that have gone on the books in the wake of the Reagan Revolution have done this nation terrific harm. Obviously I'm thinking of the "war on drugs" more than anything here. But the fact is that we have no conscionable excuse to throw seven times the people into jail that they do in Europe. We may have a more violent culture here, but it ain't seven times more violent (and, of course, one of the many reasons America is more violent is our miserably robust prison industry, which, for all the reasons I've been describing, sends people back out into the world a lot more violent than they were coming in).

So reducing the prison population would greatly help, not to mention that it would - hey, Republicans! - save us money. Since that won't happen, the next step is simply for prison authorities to exert a modicum of will to stop the problem. Patrolling blind spots of the prison, following up on complaints, use of protective custody, etc. could all begin to change the perception that sexual abuse is tolerated. In 2003 - thanks partly to the group Stop Prisoner Rape, of which T.J. Parnell is a board member - the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 was passed. Which is great, but I think is only a beginning.