Sherry Chandler

Busy Day

Fun day!

No time for computers, which is probably a good thing.

If you’re looking for something sort of fun to read, The Guardian’s Book Blog has Ten Rules for Writing Fiction from the likes of Elmore Leonard, Roddy Doyle, Neil Gaiman, et al.

My favorite was Margaret Atwood (predictable, yes), who begins like this:

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

But while Atwood recommends that you consult a thesaurus, I tend more to agree with Roddy Doyle:

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.

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Another writer’s take on these lists at Phoenicia Publishing.

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On a more serious note, this is wrong.

Read here too.

Who’s terrified?

Here’s a modest proposal from a columnist in our local weekly newspaper, The Bourbon County Citizen. The column is called Uncommon Sense; it is written by one Kevin Garrison. Last week’s number was entitled “I Am Getting Tired of Being Treated Like A Criminal.” He’s talking about airport security.

Here’s the proposal:

Justice should be sure and swift for terrorists. United States citizens should not put up with having to be scanned to the point of nudity in order to travel their own skies. I am sorry but a guy who just burned his wee-wee off with a bomb in his underwear isn’t a “suspected terrorist” or an “alleged bomber”. He is the guy. He is the one who had the explosives in his pants. He should be shot with a pork laden bullet within twelve hours of his conviction and his body should be sent back to Nigeria and put on display.

Well, that would certainly show those barbarians how us civilized folk live here in the land of the free. And, of course, it kind of does away with the Bill of Rights and the presumption of innocence. Not to mention a whole bunch of the New Testament.

And of course it sort of turns us into the terrorists.

As it turns out, I am opposed to full-body scanning too, but not because I trust I government to know who needs shooting and who don’t. After 8 or 9 years of this war on an emotion, the only people I see who are all that terrified are the U.S. citizenry.

I am against these scans because they’re an invasion of privacy, because they are unproven, and because they’ll still depend on human operators (airport security personnel who aren’t being allowed to use collective bargaining to get decent pay). I’m against them because, as Glenn Greenwald argues, what we need is not more security but more-intelligent security, and with David Brooks that it’s impossible for our government to protect us from every threat:

All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.

Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.

I do not want to live in a surveillance state. I’ll take my chances.

Of course, that’s pretty safe for me to say, living as I do in a backwater with nothing more than a few tons of aging chemical weaponry to cause me nightmares.

I do tend to be against a “bring me the head” mentality. I thought that stuff went out with the ancient Romans — remember all those crucified bodies displayed to terrify the local peasantry? I think we were against that.

I was going to thread this post around to this report on “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides’” and this description of how we treated prisoners at Guantanamo:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

My point being that a nation sort of gets the kind of security it deserves.

But my son sent me a link to the video below and I think, in some twisted intuitive way, it’s a pretty good answer to Mr. Garrison’s argument:

When lawyers authorize torture

You need to read David Coles’ The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers:

History has shown that even officials acting with the best intentions may come to feel, especially in times of crisis, that the end justifies the means, and that the greater good of national security makes it permissible to inflict pain on a resisting suspect to make him talk. History has also shown that inflicting such pain—no matter how “well-intentioned”—dehumanizes both the suspect and his interrogator, corrodes the system of justice, renders a fair trial virtually impossible, and often exacerbates the very threat to the nation’s security that was said to warrant the interrogation tactics in the first place.

Knowing that history, the world’s nations adopted the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture (in 1949 and 1984), both of which prohibit torture in absolute terms. The Convention Against Torture provides that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

If laws such as the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture are to work, however, lawyers must stand up for them. That means being willing to say no when asked whether it is permissible to subject a human being to the brutality that the CIA proposed. Yet the OLC lawyers always said yes. Where precedents were deemed helpful, they cited them even if they were inapposite; where precedents were unhelpful, they did not cite them, no matter how applicable. They treated the law against torture not as a universal moral prohibition, but as an inconvenient obstacle to be evaded by any means necessary.

Such an approach to the law is especially alarming in view of the particular role of the Office of Legal Counsel. That office is designed to serve as the “constitutional conscience” of the Justice Department.

Bush administration lawyers acted more as though they were mouth-pieces for some mafia don. Or as Cole puts it, as hired guns.

At its best, law is about seeking justice, regulating state power, respecting human dignity, and protecting the vulnerable. Law at its worst treats legal doctrine as infinitely manipulable, capable of being twisted cynically in whatever direction serves the client’s desires. Had the OLC lawyers adhered to the former standard, they could have stopped the CIA abuses in their tracks. Instead, they used law not as a check on power but to facilitate brutality, deployed against captive human beings who had absolutely no other legal recourse.

In light of these actions, it is not enough to order a cessation of such tactics, and a limited investigation of CIA agents who may have gone beyond the OLC guidelines. Official recognition that the OLC guidelines were themselves illegal is essential if we are to uphold a decent standard of law. Official repudiation is also critical if we are to regain respect around the world for the United States as a law-abiding nation, and if we hope to build meaningful safeguards against this kind of descent into cruelty happening again.

Moreover, this is not just a matter of what’s right from the standpoint of morality, history, or foreign relations. The United States is legally bound by the Convention Against Torture to submit any case alleging torture by a person within its jurisdiction “to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.” President Obama and Attorney General Holder have both stated that waterboarding is torture. Accordingly, the United States is legally obligated to investigate not merely those CIA interrogators who went beyond waterboarding, but the lawyers and Cabinet officers who authorized waterboarding and other torture tactics in the first place.

Listen also to the podcast.

The Gitmo poets

Read Yemeni poets behind Gitmo’s bars.

Then read I Am an Enemy Combatant.

Wise statement of the day from Dave Bonta:

We truly are a nation of chickenshits.

Which has been my theme for some time now, since, say, about September 11, 2003. Cowards and bullies.

See also Federal complaint: Gitmo was “Animal House.” Oh, and there are photos

And then there’s this:

Items

 Good news on the revolution/coup front

Honduras:

The scoreboard in the battle for Honduras shows the coup losing badly. It has not gained a single point in the international diplomatic arena, it has no serious legal points, and the Honduran people are mobilizing against it. As the military and coup leaders resort to brute force, they rack up even more points against them in human rights and common decency.

Only one factor brought the coup to power and only one factor has enabled it to hold on for these few days–control of the armed forces. Now even that seems to be eroding.

Iran:

What is new today is not that cracks have opened inside a monolithic system, or even that particularly powerful figures, like Rafsanjani, have broken onto the side of the reformers. What is new is the fierce mass movement from below, which is not confined to students and intellectuals but seems to span demographics and age groups. Even while exercising legal rights, nonviolent methods, and issuing constant appeals to Islam and to the ideals of the revolution, this movement has openly defied Khamenei, the Basij, and the Revolutionary Guards, by ignoring the threats of bloodshed and mayhem. Nothing like that has happened in thirty years.

Thanks to Dave.

Also Borges on Iran, thanks to the Poetry Hut Blog.

And this via The Sideshow:

Not such good news on our own human rights accountability:

In anticipation of the release of that report [the full version of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report}, there is an important effort underway — as part of the ACLU Accountability Project — to correct a critically important deficiency in the public debate over torture and accountability.  So often, the premise of media discussions of torture is that “torture” is something that was confined to a single tactic (waterboarding) and used only on three “high-value” detainees accused of being high-level Al Qaeda operatives.  The reality is completely different. 

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least.  While some of those deaths were the result of ”rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia

Sad news for bird lovers:

The nightingale has effectively vanished from woodlands across the UK.

A 30-year survey of British woodland birds has found that its population has fallen by more than 95%.

Seventeen other bird species have also declined significantly, many of which overwinter in tropical west Africa where their habitat is being destroyed.

Nightingales have a special significance for lovers of English poetry. I’ve never heard one but I grieve to think they may be gone from the English countryside.

Via

Torture

Here’s a shameful headline: Report Outlines Medical Workers� Role in Torture. Here is the Red Cross report.

Big Tent Democrat links to a report that Senate Republicans

are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to �go nuclear� over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration�s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration�s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

I very much hope that President Obama calls the Republicans on this behavior. It’s bullying in a shameful cause.

Chickens, meet roost?

Via Corrente, The Noose Tightens:

The United States, like many countries, has a bad habit of committing wartime excesses and an even worse record of accounting for them afterward. But a remarkable string of recent events suggests that may finally be changing�and that top Bush administration officials could soon face legal jeopardy for prisoner abuse committed under their watch in the war on terror.

To count the ways the chickens might come home to roost, read the whole thing.