The Detainee Bill

Count me in among those who condemn the Democrats for cowardice on this one. How amazing is it that the Senate leadership couldn't muster the votes to filibuster, or rather that they chose not to? Do they no longer have faith in the strength of human rights as a campaign issue? Or are they convinced that fear will rule in this election again? Perhaps they're hoping, with an eye on the situation in Iraq, that fear WILL rule, and it will work for them. Democrats are pragmatic, after all.

The New York Times yesterday compared this bill with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and I think they're right on the single dimension of constitutional embarrassment. When the history of the past five years is taught half a century from now, the people who voted for this bill will have disappeared their support, just as there are no longer any proud opponents of the Civil Rights Act or proud supporters of Japanese internment. By then, US global hegemony will have gone the way of cheap oil, and international standards of human rights will have been instituted using the US as an exemplar of the barbaric past. Our children will have a much harder time pretending that they live in the freest place on Earth.

Perhaps the Supreme Court will gut this bill. We can hope so. It does seem patently unconstitutional. But the Court is a pragmatic body.

One could also hope that the next Congress guts it. But this doesn't seem likely, with even a reliable progressive like Sherrod Brown voting in favor. Yes, Sherrod Brown. What's the world coming to?

Not connecting the dots

Somini Sengupta, whose journalism I generally admire, does a good report on suicides among farmers in India. This is a story that the Indian journalist P. Sainath has been covering for a few years now. Sainath bats from the left side of the plate, and connects the dots. Sengupta throws all the dots at you, which is pretty good, but won't call it what it is--neoliberal economic policies killing people. Instead, in her largest framing paragraph, she retails the neoliberal line:

Subsidies, once a linchpin of Indian economic policy, have dried up for virtually everyone but the producers of staple food grains. Indian farmers now must compete or go under. To compete, many have turned to high-cost seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, which now line the shelves of even the tiniest village shops.

But read the whole thing in today's NYTimes. The story is all there--good journalists don't blink the facts. And if you go through the NYTimes archive you'll find a similar story on farmer suicides in China, and one on the US as well, and you'll find a number of reports on broken down trade negotiations and agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe and you'll also find reports on intellectual property disputes and biological information and Monsanto--the corporation that sold the seeds that banrupted the farmer in India who Sengupta profiles in today's story. Just no connecting the dots.

Is Waterboarding Torture?

Yes.

By way of the Daily Show, which remains indispensable, I saw pieces of the Pres-o-dent's appearance on the Today Show. I had to pause the dvr to explain to my wife what "waterboarding" means. It's only when you say these things out loud that you realize just how awful they are. Now the Pres-o-dent wants to tell us that waterboarding is not torture. And his attorney general has memoed that it isn't torture because it doesn't cause "grievous bodily harm," if I recall the phrase correctly. Whoa. Neither does attaching electrodes to your testicles, I guess.

But when confronted with the brutality of this, the apologists always say something like "we need this tool to protect you and your families." This is not an argument that waterboarding ISN'T torture; it's an argument that IT IS, but that we gotta do it anyway. And even on that score it's a bizarre argument. First, it's obvious that in the long run lowering the standards on torture makes the world more dangerous for everyone, including me and my family. I haven't heard a serious argument on the other side of this question. But second, I've yet to hear any evidence that IN THE SHORT RUN torture has saved any lives. In fact, the torturers at Abu Graib managed to produce a kind of hallucinogenic intelligence environment, one in which decisions were made that sent the occupation seriously off the skids. No doubt the waterboarding of Al Qaida detainees has produced equally distorted intelligence, and may be one reason why the war on terror more generally has gone of the skids.

Isn't it remarkable that the nation depends on four Republican senators to keep us from embracing the mutilation of the world's consensus on torture?