Signal Boost: There Must Be Accountability

This is mainly me doing my paltry best to boost signal for Teh Portly Dyke’s post on the necessity of investigations and prosecutions for the war crimes committed by the US government over the past eight years (a subject I’ve mentioned before).

Launching a war of aggression is a war crime. Torturing prisoners is a war crime. Refusing to investigate and prosecute war crime is itself a war crime. And if the rule of law means anything, it means the mighty are bound by the same laws as the small, and president, ministers and CEOs may not be excused for their misconduct on grounds of expediency anymore than pickpockets or junkies.

PD has issued a pledge and a challenge to write letters weekly until investigations commence. I don’t know whether I will manage to do that — it often takes me months to write a single blog post — but I will try, and I encourage you to as well.

On Being America

Jeff wrote about this today, at his place and at Alas!, and a bunch of other folks have picked it up too:

…Did She Really Just Say That?

Yes.  Yes, she did.

Michele Bachmann (last seen declaring herself “a foreign correspondent on enemy lines” because she works in Washington, DC, which as we all know is not actually part of the United States) has stated she “[wants] people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” in order to “fight back hard” against the Obama administration’s proposed cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse emissions.  Thus continues the trend of Republicans and media right-wingers attempting to incite civil war.

I’d ask if they could get any more irresponsible, but I already know the answer.

Quick Hit: Cambridge Phelps-a-Thon

Apparently Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church  (sic) will be protesting in Cambridge, MA in a couple of weeks, over the continuing existence of a Gay-Straight Alliance at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.  This is close to home: I live only a few miles from there, and a good friend of mine went to Rindge.  The gall of these terrible people bringing their hatred here is astonishing, and it makes me very angry.

If you’re angry too, and you can spare some  money, please consider the Phelps-a-thon, which I think is one of the more effective counters to the WBC.  Phelps wants attention; he wants shouting matches with counterprotesters and even altercations, because that raises his profile.  Better to calmly display to him a sign showing how much money he’s raised so far for the causes he hates.

Why Does Glenn Beck Hate America?

On his Fox show last week, it seems Glenn Beck, noted professional terrible person, had a panel including ex-CIA and ex-Army officers discussing a supposed coming civil war in the US.  Greenwald:

[H]e convened a panel that includes former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and Ret. U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong.  They discuss a coming “civil war” led by American “Bubba” militias — Beck says he “believes we’re on this road” — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with “the people” in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government (they agree that the U.S. military would be with “the people”) [Emphasis mine.]

Even for a vile, eliminationist blowhard like Beck, this is shockingly blatant (and I’m a bit surprised Dave Neiwert hasn’t written about it yet; he probably has a piece in the pipeline, though).  I probably don’t even need to bring up the kind of enormous storm of fauxtrage we’d be seeing from the right wing, if a Rachel Maddow or a Keith Olbermann or a Michael Moore had said something even a fraction as inflammatory as this.

This bears empasis, so pardon my repetition: Glenn Beck, a professional political commentator employed (presumably to the tune of a rather large number of dollars) formerly by CNN and now by Fox News (sic), just ran a program promoting the idea that there will soon be a civil war in this country, in which in violation of their oaths the military will side with survivalist-type civilian militias against the (Democratic-Party-controlled) government.

This is insane.  And it’s unconscionably, dangerously irresponsible, especially in light of recent, tragic proof that this kind of violence-promoting rhetoric is not just a gimmick to boost ratings (and the question of whether Beck himself thinks that it’s just a gimmick is essentially irrelevant to the horrific results) has real, and terrible consequences.

The only remotely conscientious, responsible course of action for Fox is to cancel Beck’s show immediately and require him to deliver an on-air apology.  They won’t do that, of course, because they aren’t conscientious or responsible.

Update: See also Cosmic Variance.

…Did He Really Just Say That?

Yes.  Yes, he did.

Pete Sessions (R-TX32), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, did in fact say that the Republicans need to mount an “insurgency” against the Democratic majority in Congress, and that the Taliban can serve as a model for how to go about it.

The Taliban.

As the gnome pointed out over IM, even if Sessions hadn’t picked such a fraught analogy as the (of all things) Taliban, he’s still saying that the Republican minority in Congress should work like an “insurgency,” i.e. operate outside Congressional rules and procedures, in order to disrupt and obstruct the Democratic agenda.

Look, I know no major Democratic strategists read my tiny little blog.  But come on.  There is, very clearly, no good faith negotiating partner available for the Obama administration.  The Republicans don’t care what the actual outcomes of policies are, they only care about their “team” “winning” and the Democratic “team” “losing”.

If it were remotely plausible that the Republicans wanted what’s best for all of America but disagreed on how to achieve that, I would be all for trying to work with them, compromising on some things, and embracing bipartisanship as a useful method for moving forward.  But they are, in fact, utterly, brazenly, blatantly, opposed to bipartisanship.  They say the word “bipartisan” a lot, but everything they actually do makes it clear that that word simply doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it does to everyone else.  When a Republican talks about “bipartisanship,” he or she just means “doing what Republicans want, and not what Democrats want.”

Ugh.  It’s tiring, belaboring this point; I don’t really know what the point is of my trying to emphasize it further.  What could I, or anyone, conceivably say to persuade anyone not already convinced by the past month and a half that the Republicans have no interest in bipartisanship, compromise, progress, or indeed trying to fix the collapsing economy?  It’s simply not on their radar screen — the only thing that matters is making the Democrats “lose”.

I don’t know if there’s any audio or video of Sessions’s remarks.  I sincerely hope there is, and that the Democrats get hold of it.  After eight years of hearing the right wing scream at the top of their lungs that the Democrats were traitors and on the side of the terrorists, the chairman of the NRCC holding up the Taliban as a model for the Republicans to emulate is something that ought to be hung around the neck of the whole party.

After all, if in 2005 Rahm Emanuel had made a similar statement, we’d still be hearing about it twenty years from now.

Democrats: nail them to the wall on this.  They richly deserve it.

Something Other Than Beer

Darcy Burner is running for Dave Reichert’s congressional seat.  That seat is in Washington State, so it’s a bit out of my normal purview, but Burner has been one of the leading figures in promoting the Responsible Plan — I learned about her via Orcinus a while back.  She put up a very good post at OpenLeft last week, on the genuine threat to American democracy posed by mercenary armies like Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, etc., which are paid (and paid very well) by our government, ostensibly, to perform supporting duties for American troops.  In actual fact, these “contractors” are carrying out combat operations, and are frequently committing crimes — up to and including rape, murder, and torture — both against Iraqis and against other Americans, including their own coworkers.  On our dime, and in our names.  And because they’re not military personnel, and the US demanded, and the Iraqis had little choice but to accept, that “contractors” not be considered under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, they operate in a legal vacuum.  They can’t be held to account for crimes they commit.

I’ve called the offices of my Representative and Senators, and asked them to cosponsor (respectively) H.R. 4102 and S. 2398, the House and Senate versions of the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which would prevent further funding of mercenary armies.  I respectfully ask that the readers I optimistically imagine I might have read the OpenLeft post and the bills, and call or write your Congresspeople, and ask that they consider signing on as cosponsors.

Oliver Wendell Holmes is, presumably, turning over in his grave.

This morning on the BBC World Service’s NewsHour program, broadcast on WBUR, they played an interview with Justice Antonin Scalia, who among some other very dubious arguments, said by way of justifying the idea that treatment which is Constitutionally prohibited when applied to convicted criminals, is nonetheless not necessarily even bad when applied to people who have not yet been convicted of anything, but who are reluctant to give information, that you should be able to “smack a terrorist in the face” to get him to tell you “where he planted the bomb that’s about to blow up Los Angeles.”

Leaving quite aside the shocking bad faith of pretending that what the torture arguments in the US are about is a “smack in the face” rather than violent, painful, terrifying, techniques which (even when, as the arguments for waterboarding tend to claim, they don’t leave obvious physical damage, like bruising or broken bones) can have major long-term physical and especially psychological impact on their victims, and (to stick with waterboarding for a moment) which have been universally recognized as methods of torture for centuries, I’d like to point out something else, perhaps equally horrible, about Scalia’s argument.

The “bomb about to blow up LA, so you smack a guy in the face” scenario is lifted directly from the TV show 24 (the tendency of which to legitimate, if not glorify, torture is something I think Fox has to answer for, morally speaking). Scalia is attempting to make a convincing legal argument about what the US Constitution does or does not permit based on fiction. (Nor indeed is this the first time he’s fallen back on the 24 argument.) He might as well try to support rulings about police procedure based on what works on CSI, or claim that since it worked out so well in that book by Mr. Heinlein, and since “Islamofascists” are so similar, really, to hordes of giant space insects, we should consider whether military service ought not be a prerequisite to citizenship.

It’s really incredible — in the literal sense of “impossible to believe” — that anyone, let alone a Supreme Court Justice would have the gall, or the ignorance, to claim that fictional scenarios ginned up to bring in Nielsen ratings should be considered a reasonable basis for public policy and jurisprudence.  It’s even more incredible that so few people seem to be up in arms about this.  What the hell is wrong with us?