Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

Yesterday morning’s NY Times editorial on the embarrassing revelations that the National Security Council deliberated on the specific “harsh interrogation methods” (that were to be applied in specific cases) reminded me of Michael Kieschnick’s blog a week ago. Provocatively entitled, “Which Torture Method did Cheney Prefer?” it got me thinking.

My response? Simple: dogs. Big, barking, threatening dogs straining at their leashes wanting to sink their teeth into kneeling, naked, blind-folded prisoners. Yes, I’m quite sure of it. Cheney is a hunter guy. He even shoots guns, as his friend Harry Whittington can attest (they say all the birdshot was successfully removed). So, it’s my guess that Cheney made sure they used dogs to “harshly” interrogate those poor souls.

Just how is it that this guy, multiply deferred from the Vietnam draft as a student and then as an expecting parent, ends up as America’s chief of revenge? For isn’t that really what this torture stuff is all about? Getting “them” back for the 9/11 attack?

If we as a people have come down so far on the ladder of civilization that revenge motivates policy, we have fallen far indeed. The corruption of our principals is exceeded only by the corruption of our politics. It is truly time for change.

I read this morning that the Honorable Tom Tancredo, Representative to Congress from Colorado’s 6th District, has found His Holiness the Pope wanting with regard to his sympathetic, supportive stance regarding immigrants. From today’s NY Times:

Accusing the pope of “faith-based marketing,” Mr. Tancredo said Benedict’s comments welcoming immigrants “may have less to do with spreading the Gospel than they do about recruiting new members of the Church.” Mr. Tancredo, a former Catholic who now attends an evangelical Christian church, said it was not in the pope’s “job description to engage in American politics.”

Representative Tancredo is but the most recent example of the remarkable American trait of generational amnesia. All four of his grandparents immigrated to the US from Italy, part of some 4 million Italians who arrived here between 1880 and 1920. As a third generation American, Mr. Tancredo has adopted another uniquely American trait – “we got here first, so you stay away.” A quick review of the history of American Immigration Law reveals repeated exclusions of immigrants based largely on race: Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, and Filipinos all can claim their own special Congressionally approved bans, each in place for years before repeal. The racial underpinnings of our evolving immigration laws will confound any remaining skeptics of the concept of structural racism. Race has clearly been the basis of immigration policy over and over again, and especially so during the period that Mr. Tancredo’s grandparents were making their way to the US.

What’s intriguing about the son of a son of an immigrant becoming the Chief Immigrant Baiter among right wing politicians who collectively seem intent on blaming Spanish-speaking immigrants for every ill, is that it so clearly reflects an element of self-hatred. When Italians came in droves to the big cities of America a century ago, they were termed “Birds of Paradise” arriving to earn some money and return home, just as many, if not most, of our current undocumented workers wish to do (and have done for decades). The irony, of course, is that the conservative response to date, dampened only by the change in Congressional majorities two years ago, has been to erect barriers that prevent transit across the borders, thus effectively trapping these “remittance workers” here indefinitely when they used to return home seasonally.

As a Californian, the issue of immigration imbues both current and historical politics. This state, originally a part of Mexico, has inarguably been built on the labor of its immigrants. What few recall in the current debate, is that California is the only state in the nation that attempted to prevent immigration from other states. In 1937, California enacted the so-called “Anti-Okie Law” which was not overturned until 1941. It’s purpose? – stem the tide of Okies, Arkies, ‘Texicans’, and other predominantly white refugees from the famed Dust Bowl of the thirties in the mid-west. Just as Mexican and Central American migrant laborers do today, they largely came west to pick crops and scrape out a meager living, having suffered through one of the worst environmental calamities to afflict modern America. Okies were demonized more than Arabs are today throughout the media, that is until John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was made into one of Hollywood’s greatest films.

There is no suitable response to Tancredo’s critique of the Pope other than to quietly say that freedom in America means that even really stupid, rude, wrong things get said at times. That the sayer is a Member of Congress ought to be deeply embarrassing to those Coloradans living in the 6th District, just south of Denver. It surely is to me.

It’s an incredible spring day in NYC today, and I’m reflecting on our latest marker: more Americans have died in Iraq than died on 9/11. One wonders if our misguided taste for revenge has run its course, since how else does one explain what we’ve done?

Arrived today to spring in NYC. Blossoms on the trees, people soaking up the sun. Why do I keep thinking about Guantanamo? Probably because I watched an old Democracy Now podcast about this kid held there since he was 15. I wonder what his spring is like.

Also of interest:

Gitmo: The New Rules of War Documentary Clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrcO_l9iELg

Have you ever met Ms. American Express? Or, Mr. Exxon? No, neither have I, but the odd thing is that under the law, they are, roughly speaking, the same as any normal sentient person. This is the result not of a Supreme Court decision, but rather a Supreme Court Reporter’s description of a decided case – a statement without precedential value – that has been disputed ever since. That the reporter was a retired railroad executive and the plaintiffs were rail companies in the late 1800’s, seems to have been left in the dust of history. The rail companies, you see, were trying to reinterpret the 14th Amendment that was passed shortly after the end of the Civil War; its purpose was to address the history of slavery in the south by precluding a state’s right to pass any law that “abridge[d] the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…” In short, if held to be a legal “person,” a corporation could argue that a state couldn’t individually regulate its affairs; only the federal government could. In any event, by chicanery or innocent error, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad became the means that turned corporations into legal “people.”

There is more than a modicum of irony in this, since many of the rail corporations that benefitted from the 1886 decision, and they did so handsomely, also readily embraced the Jim Crow laws of the post Civil War period that continued the subjugation of most ex-slaves and their progeny for a hundred years. I doubt they ever made the connection between their economic advantage and the use of the Amendment intended to ensure freedoms to those freed by the passage of the 13th Amendment banning slavery.

What inspired this line of thought? I read in today’s NY Times that over recent years, the US Justice department has been signing dozens of “deferred prosecution agreements.” These have them paying fines, opening themselves to ‘outside monitors,’ and otherwise not admitting responsibility. Many of these agreements are secret, to boot, so we don’t even know about them. Now, that’s what I call having your cake and eating it, too, because I don’t think real people get anywhere near that kind of a break. No, we seem perfectly content to lock real people up or – at the very least – have them plead guilty to a lesser charge. Criminal cases don’t have “settlement agreement” options…unless you are a corporate “legal person.”

Think of all the money we could save if we allowed people indicted for crimes to have “deferred prosecution agreements.” None of those Enron guys would have gone to jail – they’d just have bought themselves out of the jam just like Monsanto evidently did. In the Times article, they described Monsanto’s deed: knowingly bribing an Indonesian official in return for looser regulations for those using their modified crop strains. The company knew about and approved the bribe (not some maverick executive, to be clear), but they never faced criminal charges of the kind that drove Authur Anderson out of business. Ah, the new era of “free market capitalism” seems to have been given a new meaning for “free.”

Evidently the current administration’s perspective is that free market corporations ought to have a permanent “get out of jail free” card. Any idea where I can get one of those?

Oh, one more thing. Remember John Ashcroft, our former Attorney General who oversaw the Justice Department? Well his firm just got a $50 million deal to monitor a “deferred prosecution agreement” between Justice and a medical services company. Sweet, huh? Just kinda makes one want to go into public service….and then jump into the greenback-lined “post-prosecutorial era.”

How do you sign up to do torture? Where is that dotted line filled out saying that, “no, I don’t mind seeing another human being scream in agony, agony that I cause in the name of something or in the interest of ‘intelligence’?” The answer, according to Stanford’s Phillip Zimbardo, one of our nation’s experts on the subject, is that people don’t sign up. They absorb the permission from the system they are a part of.

At the recent TED Conference in Monterey, Zimbardo set forth his trim assessment that there are essentially no “bad apples”, which is how the military explained Abu Ghraib. In fact, he asserted, there aren’t even bad barrels. Instead, there are bad barrel makers – the designers of the system – that really hold responsibility. If you need any reinforcement for this argument, just read JoAnne Wypijewski’s extraordinary article in the March/April issue of Mother Jones. It will curl your hair. They have created a system that will not learn from its experience and will not accept responsibility for the wrong that was done. In so doing, they damage us all even more.

In her step by step excavation of the way the military has “held itself accountable”, she outlines in detail what we all know: the grunts on the ground paid a heavy price – many with years in prison. But NONE of their commanding officers has had anything more than a hand slap. It is truly remarkable, and, surprise, surprise, the press is oblivious. No coverage. No outrage. No accountability.

At one point, she recites what we may recall from early press reports – Secretary Rumsfeld received daily briefings on the intelligence gathered. He was focused on Abu Ghraib and had urged the use of the “strong” tactics used to achieve the intelligence as has often been reported. Everyone in the military knew that he and the Vice President believed in harsh tactics. That virtually all the intelligence was garbage seems beside the point. That no one holds any responsibility nor has been held accountable for one of the worst chapters in American history, and, arguably, one of the contributing factors to America’s precipitous decline in international circles.

Somehow, the defender of liberty and freedom and democracy has become the perpetrator of inhumanity, violence, and torture in the name of the emergency of terrorism. How was it that the Nazis explained why Jews needed to be rounded up? What emergency deprived them of their civil liberties?

Military necessity is used to justify the harshest measures of the state – the deprivation of a citizen’s rights. Has it ever been proven worthwhile? Outside of the mind-numbing, fiction of “24” on television, I don’t think so.