Thanks, Massachusetts

So something has happened to once again jar me out of my blogging slumber. Bear with me, because this isn't going to be pretty.

There was a special election held in the state of Massachusetts this evening, to decide who would take over for the now-deceased Senator Edward Kennedy. Due to the Democratic candidate's inability to tell a Red Sock from a Yankee, and her general lack of campaigning skills, this Senate seat now belongs to some Republican yahoo who looks a lot like a younger Mitt Romney and has posed nude on at least one occasion. But, to his credit, he's a real 'murikan, and has promised to be tough on terrorists and to vote against any and all attempts to reform the healthcare system, which is all you really need to be a Republican senator these days.

Anyway, this will leave the Dems with a 59 vote majority in the Senate, which in any other epoch of American politics would be more than enough to get quite a bit done. After all, Bush never had this type of legislative majority, but nevertheless got nearly everything he wanted during his administration. But given that the Republican party will filibuster any and all legislation coming from Democrats (including declarations that Hitler was a bad person, or that kicking puppies is mean), and also considering that the Dems have been, at best, ineffectual with a 60 vote majority, it's quite likely that they will be entirely useless from now until the likely ass-kicking that they will suffer at the end of this year. The crazies on the Right are smelling blood.

I think the events of the past year (and really, the past decade) amply demonstrate that the US political system is hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of our time. You have one party that is weak, torn by ideological divisions, and largely beholden to the concerns of corporations and special interests, while the other party is simply insane. Obama is a huge improvement over the last occupant of the White House, but he hasn't shown the decisive leadership necessary to overcome this sad state of affairs.

Health care is a great example. Without dramatic health care reform, the US will continue to be an embarrassing exception among First World nations that guarantee quality health care to all their citizens. Health care costs will continue to skyrocket, enriching insurance and drug companies while bankrupting ordinary citizens, and eventually, the US government itself. Rather than giving up altogether on health care, the House may still pass the Senate health care reform compromise, but that hardly qualifies as "dramatic", and will do little to solve the larger problems the US faces on this front.

And we can pretty much forget about anything meaningful being done about climate change or regulating the financial sector or restoring civil liberties or transitioning to a greener economy or...I could go on. The one area where Obama will still have some room to maneuver is foreign policy, but that will make little difference when it comes to the long-term fiscal and social stability of our neighbor to the south.

I wish I could come to a more positive conclusion, but unless the Democrats man up and surprise me, or the Republicans finally come to their senses, and stop being so damned crazy and nihilistic, I don't see one. In future histories of the decline of the American empire, 2009 will surely be viewed as a huge missed opportunity to right the wrongs of the "lost decade" of the 2000s. Maybe it will take President Palin, a military dicatorship, and total economic collapse for Americans to finally come to their senses, but by that point it will be too late.

Update:

Yes.

The Democrats in Massachusetts nominated a horrendous candidate who proceeded to run a somnolent campaign (or non-campaign) that presumed victory and excited exactly no one. The Republicans were highly motivated even though Scott Brown is far from great shakes himself. So we're back to the pre-2008 electoral dynamics: Republicans vote, Democrats don't. And why would they? What kind of rallying cry could Coakley have used? "Get out to vote! Protect that watered-down embarrassment of a health care 'reform' bill! You know, the one we let the insurance companies write!" Something tells me that would not have worked. It is plainly obvious that Democratic candidates can't expect success without the voters who showed up in 2008, and they're not going to show up unless they're highly motivated by distaste for the GOP (which they aren't at the moment, given the results from 2006-08) or enthusiasm for the Congressional agenda. What we're seeing is not a schizophrenic electorate giving the GOP eight years to screw things up and expecting the Democrats to fix it all in nine months. We're seeing that nine months is more than enough time for the modern Democratic Party to disgust most of its base.

And this isn't unfair either:

In the end, however, Obama will get exactly what he deserves. He took office with all the enthusiasm in the world behind him and he proceeded to govern like an Eisenhower Republican. Like Clinton, Obama will probably survive re-election in 2012 because of his personal appeal and the pitiful field of challengers. But his brief window of opportunity to seize the initiative and take control of the Congressional agenda has passed.

Of course, it doesn't help that some Democrats are already falling all over themselves in declaring defeat. So typical .

Why We Don't Torture

Okay, I'm back, but just temporarily. There are many subjects I'd like to comment on, from the economy, to the performance of the Obama administration thus far, to the BSG finale, but there's one thing above all that has awoken me from my blogging slumber and compelled me to say something.

The decision by the Obama administration to release memos showing the extent of the Bush torture regime (and I won't shy away from the word "torture") has ignited a debate in the United States over whether the perpetrators should be prosecuted. To me, it seems self-evident that actions in clear violation of domestic US law, international law, and various treaties including the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture (signed by the US in 1984), should be prosecuted, and those responsible brought to justice. When someone commits crimes in a liberal democracy, they are supposed to be held accountable by the justice system. At least in theory. Currently on display in the American media and government is a bizarre aversion to any form of accountability for crimes committed by the political elites of that country. John McCain even compared prosecutions for torture to something that only happens in "banana republics", as opposed to, you know, torture only happening in banana republics. But that is a whole other post, and I'll leave it to Glenn Greenwald and other bloggers to document the shameful goings-ons. In any case, there were some positive signs from yesterday's Presidential press conference, wherein Obama used unambiguous language describing waterboarding as "torture". This may indicate a shift in his position on prosecutions, but we shall see.

Part of what makes the “debate” over torture so exasperating is the way that some very simple facts get lost or ignored by one side (the torture apologists). The facts are that the United States waterboarded various “high value” prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Abu Zubaydah, dozens of times. Was it to stop a ticking bomb? To gain crucial intelligence on impending Al Qaeda plots?

It’s important to recognize that torture has seldom ever been used as a means of extracting usable intelligence from terrorists or prisoners of war, and the current arguments in favor of such a practice are as new as they are morally bankrupt. From the Spanish Inquisition to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, torture has been used throughout history as a means of extracting false confessions from political prisoners or as a blunt tool of repression, not for gathering usable intelligence against terrorists. For this reason alone, the argument that the apologists use (that using torture is somehow necessary for the national security of the United States) is both ignorant and unprecedented in a modern liberal democracy, none of which, until now, have had any reason to sanction such a barbaric practice.

Let us return now to the documented cases of waterboarding. Upon their capture, both suspects were claimed to be very high level members of Al Qaeda’s organization, deeply involved in both the planning and execution of terrorist attacks. Looking back, it has become clear that these claims were highly inflated.

Of the two, it is likely that Mohammed was the more important figure, implicated in a number of terrorist activities even before 9/11. When he was captured, the Bush Administration authorized the CIA to use waterboarding on Mohammed, ostensibly to gain intelligence on any terrorist plots he had knowledge of. After being waterboarded on at least five separate occasions in March 2003, Mohammed “admitted” to his involvement in literally dozens of different plots, including everything from plans to attack NATO headquarters in Europe to the assassination of Jimmy Carter. Though it is far from clear how many of these plots ever amounted to anything more than wistful daydreams of Mohammed and his fellow jihadists, the United States government nevertheless sent agents and security personnel all around the country and the world in response to these imagined threats, and the Bush administration trumpeted their role in disrupting “dozens of terrorist attacks” thanks to their interrogations of Mohammed. More importantly, Mohammed admitted to being the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, though given the obviously unreliable nature of intelligence gained through torture, even this fact is suspect.

Abu Zubaydah was captured almost a year before Mohammed, and similarly, the Bush Administration claimed that he was a high ranking member of Al Qaeda with knowledge of terrorist plots and operations. And like Mohammed, he was waterboarded multiple times. Looking back, it seems quite likely that Zubaydah was nothing like the central figure that he was purported to be. His specialty in Al Qaeda was not planning attacks, but rather logistics, such as the transportation of the wives and children of terrorist leaders. Additionally, he suffered from various psychological disorders, and wrote a diary from the viewpoints of several split personalities. But like the interrogations of Mohammed, the admissions gained from the torture of Zubaydah were taken seriously by the American intelligence community, and resulted in significant waste of resources through the investigations of and responses to these non-existent plots.

It is important to note that neither Zubaydah nor Mohammed were tortured immediately after their capture. Though the two subjects were evasive and hostile, traditional interrogation methods (which included building a rapport between subject and interrogator, and “good cop, bad cop”) were initially used, and seemed to be producing results. The decision to torture the two suspects came not from any direct knowledge of a “ticking bomb” scenario (a common excuse made by torture apologists), but rather from the suspicions of US officials that these men knew much more than they were letting on, and from the Bush administration’s desire to trumpet successes in their war on terror. This is worth restating: these men were tortured to confirm the pre-existing suspicions of their torturers, which is qualitatively no different from torturing to extract a false confession. In both scenarios, torture is used to arrive at a pre-determined outcome. It is very dangerous to confuse this scenario with valid intelligence gathering, as torture will eventually compel the subject to provide whatever answers the interrogator wants to hear, and not the truth.

Additionally, there are strong indications that the Bush administration (notably Cheney and Rumsfeld) applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use these harsher techniques as part of their larger goal of tying the government of Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. Where no evidence of a link was being found, these officials demanded that interrogators produce it. Yet again, torture was being used to produce a pre-determined outcome, not to reveal some crucial piece of information that would stop an impending attack. And predictably, this produced faulty information that was used to help justify a war against Iraq, most notably in the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who, after being tortured and deducing what his torturers wanted to hear, made wild claims about Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborating on biological and chemical weapons training.

These cases are merely the most extreme examples of state-sanctioned torture and prisoner abuse, but a pervasive system of abuse was implemented for the rest of the captured “enemy combatants”, including those held in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and numerous CIA secret prisons spread throughout Europe. Detainees in these prisons have been routinely subjected to forced nakedness, induced hypothermia, dousing with cold water, sleep deprivation (both with harsh lighting and the playing of loud music), stress positions, isolation, and complete audio-visual deprivation, all of which are taken almost directly from the Soviet playbook. There were more creative techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison, including sexual humiliation and the use of dogs in a threatening manner, and although seemingly unauthorized by the highest levels of government, it is not hard to see the logical progression from what was authorized to what was not.

Almost invariably, professional intelligence personnel and experienced interrogators have denounced the use of torture by the US government, with its defenders reduced to bloviating talk radio/Fox news hosts, and right-wing politicians with no professional expertise in the subject. Here's a description of a visit to Iraq by Stephen Kleinman, formerly part of the Air Force's SERE program, designed to train US military personnel to resist torture:

Kleinman, a senior officer at the Air Force Academy where SERE training was conducted, was part of a team invited to Iraq in 2003 to observe interrogations and offer advice. He said he witnessed several episodes in which young troops sought to overcome a lack of training in interrogations by blindly using harsh SERE tactics on Iraqi detainees. Many of the interrogations took place in a former ammunition bunker, which he described as "underground, cold and dark."

In one instance, he said, a detainee was forced to kneel under a spotlight, flanked by guards toting iron bars, while interrogators shouted questions at him. Each answer automatically elicited a hard slap across the face -- a pattern that was repeated without pause for 30 minutes.

When Kleinman intervened to stop the questioning, the interrogators appeared baffled. "They didn't seem to think it was a problem," he said.

A second detainee interrogated in Kleinman's presence was subjected to sleep deprivation and painful stress positions. A third had all his clothes physically torn from his body and was ordered to stand continuously for 12 hours, "or until he passed out," Kleinman said.

When Kleinman complained about the practices, various Defense Department officials agreed that the techniques probably violated Geneva Conventions standards but the interrogations continued unabated, he said. By then, six months into the Iraq war, White House and Defense Department lawyers had issued legal opinions that declared the Iraqi detainees to be "unlawful enemy combatants" not covered by Geneva Conventions protections for prisoners of war.

Kleinman said the Air Force's training program was distorted into an offensive program. He noted that the harsh techniques were adapted from torture methods used by Chinese communists, and were never regarded as useful in eliciting intelligence. Instead, they break a prisoner psychologically and make him eager to say anything to stop the pain.

"That model's primary objective was to compel a prisoner to generate propaganda, not intelligence," he said.

Torture is not only immoral and illegal under US and international law, but as I hope I have demonstrated, it is also near-useless as a valid counter-terrorism tool. The debate is too often framed in false terms, with television personalities gravely pontificating about the “necessity” of real-life Jack Bauers doing the dirty work to keep their country safe, or the false dilemma of torturing a terrorist to prevent a bomb from detonating in an American city.

In fact, torture is not a necessity under any realistic circumstances, and evidence to the contrary is non-existent. There are those who claim otherwise, of course, those who claim that “enhanced interrogation” was instrumental in saving American lives. But they refuse to produce any corroborating evidence, using the typical defence that any such evidence is classified, and that releasing it would be harmful to national security. Such a defence is blatantly disingenuous, being obviously vacant yet impossible to disprove.

Taking a breather

As you may have guessed, I'm taking something of an extended timeout from blogging. Several factors have contributed to this, not least among them a new job and the stresses and lack of free time associated with it. But I've also become somewhat mentally exhausted with politics and current events (not to mention the dreary economic situation), and have lacked motivation to blog lately.

I'll probably have some more things to say at some point (likely when elections are on the way), but for now, I'm leaving the commentary to others.

So I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to read my unique take on things during these past seven months, and say goodbye for the time being. Stay safe, and don't let the world get you down.

Same old sad story

I don't really have much to say about Israel and Gaza, only that I think we've all seen this movie before. Israel will pound the shit out of some Hamas fuckheads, but in the process, kill a lot of innocent people, embittering Palestinians even more strongly against Israel, and giving Hamas and the other extremists their next wave of suicide bomber recruits. The UN and most countries not called the United States will condemn Israel with harsh words, and organizations like Amnesty International will criticize Israel for not doing enough to avoid civilian casualties, but no one is actually going to do anything about it. But Hamas will not make Gaza a "graveyard" for the Israeli army. Despite their tough talk, they are no Hezbollah, and are much better at strapping bombs to scared teenagers than they are at fighting the professional Israeli army. They understand military tactics no better than they understand human rights or religious freedom.

To be frank, I find it difficult to fully sympathize with the residents of Gaza. First, some background. This is the Gaza strip:



That scale is correct; Gaza is only 360 square km, with a population of roughly 1.5 million. It has no economy to speak of, with a per capita GDP of around $600. It is entirely dependent on Israel for electricity, and Israel and other nations for food aid. More than 60% of the population lives below the poverty line (I shudder to think what is considered "poverty" in Gaza).

Despite all this humiliating deprivation, Hamas was elected with a majority of the seats in the Palestinian parliament in 2006, and they later seized full control within Gaza, with a coalition government teetering on the brink in the West Bank.

Does Hamas promise an improvement in living conditions? An economic plan for the future? Since neither is possible without Israeli help, and Hamas refuses to even acknowledge Israel's existence as a sovereign nation, the answer is clearly no.

The problem here, as I see it, is the inability of a significant portion of the Palestinian population to accept their defeat in 1948. Until they get over that simple fact, and realize that they will never get their land back through violence, there will never be peace, and there will never be a viable Palestinian state. And if the people let them, assholes like Hamas will continue to steer Palestinian society in an entirely counter-productive direction. Instead of launching stupid little rockets at Israeli towns, the residents of Gaza should be investing in their future and trying to build a better life for themselves and their families. That's the only way out of this never-ending quagmire.

Better than standing still, but the rot runs deep

As we head into the new year, there's a lot of anxiety over where the economy is headed. According to most economists, Canada is probably facing only a mild recession, with a recovery possibly beginning within six months. Historically, bull markets after recessions lead the actual economic recovery by roughly that length of time. Investors speculate on future economic performance, not what has already happened. And the markets have indeed been optimistic over the past week or so.

This article is most likely right that while 2009 will be a positive year, we shouldn't expect a boom right away. This, I think, is the key point:

But even a modest improvement in the economy, which has been in recession since last December, could help stocks extend their recent run.

"If you're standing still, walking is a pickup of speed," said Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price Associates Inc.

Also, this:

In addition, some analysts believe the market will improve because so many investors have pulled out, leaving little room for more selling.

"Given the nasty carnage how much further risk is there?" said David Darst, chief investment strategist for Morgan Stanley's global wealth management group.

It's going to take a little longer for the credit markets to recover, with the banks still in an extremely cautious state after being burned so badly in the crisis of 2008.

And it's important to remember that the US is not out of the woods yet. They still face some very serious problems, new administration or not. That $11 trillion in national debt isn't going away just because the new President has a (D) next to his name. Nor are GM and Ford going to suddenly become competitive simply because the government threw them a few billion dollars to keep them from drowning. Nor is an economy based on people borrowing money to buy shit from China while they struggle to pay for their health insurance and ever more expensive gasoline ever going to be viable in the long run. A lot of things need to change for America's economy to be healthy again, but one of the most immediate problems is a simple lack of revenues.

Bush's tax cuts and resultant deficits have left America's government starved of cash, forced to borrow record amounts of money in order to keep their economy afloat and avoid a longer term depression. The conservative mantra of tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts was sold on the idea that they were necessary for the health of the economy. Yet the government kept spending money and the economy crashed anyway. Now that it is necessary for the government to spend money, all they can do is borrow imaginary money that will be paid back through some combination of fairy dust, heavenly manna, and magic jelly beans.

The challenge for the new US administration is going to be stimulating the economy without bankrupting the country or resorting to devaluation of the currency. Obama will need to cut some expenditures (military pork spending, Iraq) while increasing others (public works, health care, alternative energy). It's a fine line to walk, and it isn't going to be easy.

This looks like a job for...Master Legend?

This story makes me smile:

Like other real life super-heroes, Master Legend is not an orphan from a distant dying sun or the mutated product of a gamma-ray experiment gone awry. He is not an eccentric billionaire moonlighting as a crime fighter. He is, as he puts it, "just a man hellbent on battling evil." Although Master Legend was one of the first to call himself a Real Life Superhero, in recent years a growing network of similarly homespun caped crusaders has emerged across the country. Some were inspired by 9/11. If malevolent individuals can threaten the world, the argument goes, why can't other individuals step up to save it? "What is Osama bin Laden if not a supervillain, off in his cave, scheming to destroy us?" asks Green Scorpion, a masked avenger in Arizona. True to comic-book tradition, each superhero has his own aesthetic. Green Scorpion's name is derived from his desert home, from which he recently issued a proclamation to "the criminals of Arizona and beyond," warning that to continue illegal activities is to risk the "Sting of the Green Scorpion!" The Eye takes his cue from the primordial era of Detective Comics, prowling Mountain View, California, in a trench coat, goggles and a black fedora featuring a self-designed logo: the "all-seeing" Eye of Horus. Superhero — his full name — is a former wrestler from Clearwater, Florida, who wears red and blue spandex and a burgundy helicopter helmet, and drives a 1975 Corvette Stingray customized with license plates that read SUPRHRO.

Most Real Life Superheroes are listed on the World Superhero Registry, a recently assembled online roster. ("I can't say if I will ever fight an army of giant robots or a criminal mastermind," an Indianapolis superhero called Mr. Silent notes in his entry. "I just don't know.") Some superheroes have joined forces in local crime-fighting syndicates: the Black Monday Society in Salt Lake City, the Artemis National Consortium in San Diego and the tautologically titled Justice Society of Justice in Indianapolis. Attempting to unite all the superheroes under one banner are groups like the World Heroes Organization and Heroes Network, which hosts an online forum where more than 200 crime fighters trade tactics (should I wear a mask?), patrolling tips (how do I identify a street gang?) and advice/feedback (can you get bulletproof vests on eBay?).

I dunno, if I were a real superhero, I'd want a cooler name. And Batarangs.

Holiday blues update

I haven't really been motivated to blog lately. Between work, family matters, and the general stress of the Christmas splurging season, I'm not left with much energy or time to rant on the internet.

During my time away from the keyboard, the Democratic governor of Illinois went down in flames, and turns out to have been a complete asshole and egomaniac. Or, as Dickipedia so aptly summarizes:

The subject of no fewer than a dozen separate federal investigations, Blagojevich is a disgrace to all Serbian-American governors everywhere—that means you, George Voinovich of Ohio. He is also just the kind of a-hole who threatens to screw the whole thing up for Barack Obama before he even takes office.

Rod Blagojevich was the first Democrat to be elected governor of Illinois in 30 years, a distinction he proceeded to totally crap all over by continually failing to pass legislation and budgets, making many political enemies (even in his own party), committing federal and state crimes, wearing a ridiculous side-part in some seriously bouffant hair, and, in October 2008, earning the title “America’s Least Popular Governor.” All that before he got arrested.

On December 9, 2008, adding dick insult to dick injury, Blagojevich was detained by the FBI and charged with conspiracy to commit fraud as well as solicitation of bribery for allegedly trying to sell president-elect Barack Obama’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate. This happened the day before Blagojevich’s 52nd birthday. One imagines they canceled the stripper.

Heh. Hee hee.

What else?

Oh, I should mention that the BSG spinoff Caprica has been picked up by Scifi as a series! Details here. The only downside is that we won't be seeing any of it until 2010.

Webisodes bridging seasons 4.0 and 4.5 are currently airing as well, but I refuse to link to them in protest of their unavailability for Canadian web surfers (can't see the logic in shutting out fans who happen to be outside of the US; if Space is too cheap to get the rights to them, that's their problem). Catch them on Youtube instead.

WTF, Dubai?

World's tallest skyscraper, under construction in Dubai:



Something about that building indicates low self-esteem on the part of the architects...

(click the picture for more detail)

Not Iggy!

Okay, so Dion wasn't the very best party leader. But Ignatieff? Seriously? He's the best guy they've got?

Look, I don't usually get worked up at the thought of elitist inteleckshuals sipping their lattes and scoffing at the common folk, but this guy pretty much embodies that stereotype. He's spent more of his life at Oxford and Harvard than in Canada.

More to the point, he has only three years of actual political experience. The former director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy was a prominent and early supporter of the war in Iraq (using dumbass reasoning), and equivocated on torture (using even more dumbass reasoning). This unappealing intellectual midgetry is fine for the Republican Party, but the Liberal Party of Canada? Seriously? What exactly gives this guy the credibility to become a potential Prime Minister of Canada, other than his admittedly unimpeachable Ivory Tower credentials?

Ah, whatever. For some levity, here's Jon Stewart attempting to make sense of our wacky political adventures.

I agree with the Governor General

She made the right move in proroguing Parliament. I know a lot of liberals and progressives out there will be disappointed that Harper has lived to fight another day (and really, that fight might come immediately after January 26), but in the long run, it's for the best.

Harper overreached. He knows that, and he and his party are chastened. They are still a minority government, and they need to act like one. They will now get to work on a budget that the opposition will support, meaning real concessions on the economy and no more poison pills like the removal of campaign financing dollars or crackdowns on public employees' rights to strike.

This unexpected vacation will give all the parties time to step back from the brink and think about what is best for Canada and their own political futures (there should be some overlap). We'll also have a better idea of what the US is planning to do on their end before we march ahead with a massive stimulus.

Meanwhile, despite all the fireworks, the rest of the world has barely noticed our Grave Political Crisis. How typical.