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There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.
The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman - indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.
The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters - warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.
The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.
In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.
It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.
Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.
Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence - the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her yesterday. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf - as if he were the problem - can camouflage that fact.
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Read more at the link.
¶ Friday, December 28, 2007 10 comments
candidates don't run around murdering the opposition.
Benazir Bhutto1953-2007
Where there is hatred let me bring your love
Where there is injury, your pardon, Lord
And where there's doubt, true faith in you
Oh, Master, grant that I may never seek
So much to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand
To be loved, as to love with all my soul.
Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there's despair in life let me bring hope;
Where the is darkness, only light;
And where there's sadness, ever joy.
Make me a channel of your peace.
It is pardoning that we are pardoned
In giving to all men that we receive;
And in dying that we're born to eternal life.
- Prayer of Saint Francis
"It was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! God bless us, every one!"
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens ¶ Tuesday, December 25, 2007 2 comments
I wish I could post the entire WaPo column, but here are some highlights:
¶ Monday, December 24, 2007 0 comments
"5 Myths About Torture and Truth"#1. Torture worked for the Gestapo.
Actually, no. Even Hitler's notorious secret police got most of their information from public tips, informers and interagency cooperation. That was still more than enough to let the Gestapo decimate anti-Nazi resistance in [occupied countries] and the concentration camps.
It's surprising how unsuccessful the Gestapo's brutal efforts were. They failed to break senior leaders of the French, Danish, Polish and German resistance. ...the number [of successes] is small and the results pathetic, especially compared with the devastating effects of public cooperation and informers.
2 Everyone talks sooner or later under torture.
Truth is, it's surprisingly hard to get anything under torture, true or false. [In France] between 1500 and 1750, [despite brutal, barbaric, inhumane methods] the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent (an exceptional high). Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever.
The Japanese fascists, no strangers to torture, said it best in their field manual, which was found in Burma during World War II: They described torture as the clumsiest possible method of gathering intelligence. Like most sensible torturers, they preferred to use torture for intimidation, not information.
3 People will say anything under torture.
Well, no, although this is a favorite chestnut of torture's foes.
In fact, the problem of torture does not stem from the prisoner who has information; it stems from the prisoner who doesn't. Such a person is also likely to lie, to say anything, often convincingly. ...and the CIA's own 1963 interrogation manual explains that "a time-consuming delay results" -- hardly useful when every moment matters.
4 Most people can tell when someone is lying under torture.
Not so -- and we know quite a bit about this. ... Ordinary folk have an accuracy rate of about 57 percent, which is pretty poor considering that 50 percent is the flip of a coin. [Police] accuracy rates fall between 45 percent and 65 percent -- that is, sometimes less accurate than a coin toss.
In fact, most torturers are nowhere near as well trained for interrogation as police are. ... And, not surprisingly, they make a lot of mistakes.
5 You can train people to resist torture.
Supposedly, this is why we can't know what the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" are: If Washington admits that it waterboards suspected terrorists, al-Qaeda will set up "waterboarding-resistance camps" across the world. Be that as it may, the truth is that no training will help the bad guys.
Simply put, nothing predicts the outcome of one's resistance to pain better than one's own personality. Against some personalities, nothing works; against others, practically anything does.
The thing that's most clear from torture-victim studies is that you can't train for the ordeal. There is no secret knowledge out there about how to resist torture.
And yet these myths persist. "The larger problem here, I think," one active CIA officer observed in 2005, "is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn't work."
There are several questions one may chose to consider when pursuing this debate. I will consider these over several coming posts.
1. Is waterboarding torture?
The federal criminal code defines torture as "the intentional infliction of severe mental pain or suffering." Waterboarding is an interrogation tactic in which a person is exposed to the beginning stages of drowning. It causes severe physical suffering in the form of reflexive choking, gagging, and the feeling of suffocation. It can cause damage to the lungs, brain damage, injuries from struggling against restraints, and death. The experience and sensations are so intense and terrifying that the person will do or say anything to put a stop to it. This is the testimony of many experts, including US servicemen and intelligence agents who have undergone the technique as part of their training.
More than 100 law professors declared waterboarding to be torture and a felony punishable under US law. John McCain says it is torture. The US Department of State recognizes it as torture. In 1901 a US Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding a Filipino insurgent during the Spanish-American War. In 1947 the United States sentenced a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, to 15 years hard labor for waterboarding a US civilian. In 1968 the US Army launched an investigation, which resulted in court-martial and discharge, into the "fairly common" practice of waterboarding NVA soldiers in Vietnam. In 2006 the DoD even prohibited the use of waterboarding by U.S. military personnel in an Army Field Manual. The US is signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture which states, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever ... may be invoked as a justification of torture."
It is ovious that waterboarding meets the definition of torture and that torture violates not only the character, but the laws of the United States. It takes a great deal of hypocrisy and disingenuousness to pretend that waterboarding is anything other than inhuman, barbaric torture. ¶ Sunday, December 16, 2007 2 comments
Over a month ago I posted a short blurb giving my views on waterboarding. The post generated no response at all until a few days ago when "Phil" and "Greg" both showed up to declare that waterboarding is not torture - which is false - and that, even if it is, torture is an effective means of gathering intelligence - which is also not true.
The discussion sidetracked into a debate on whether it was necessary to use atomic bombs on Japan to force their surrender. (It probably wasn't.) Both Phil & Greg continue to insist that in order to defeat the monsters we are fighting we must become inhuman monsters ourselves. To prove their points they called upon examples from General Sherman's burning of the South to Michael Savage to the Talmud. Greg even quoted Abraham Lincoln.
Well, sort of. Greg wrote, "Abraham Lincoln said it best when he said 'We fight on their level. With trickery, brutality, finality. We match their evil. There is no honorable way to kill. No gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war except its ending.' "
That might be a great quote, except President Abraham Lincoln never said any such thing. The quote is rather a line from Star Trek episode #77, "The Savage Curtain" by an actor portraying Lincoln.Next he'll be quoting Harrison Ford or some other famous "President" to back up his arguments. I can't wait. I've got some President Jed Bartlet quotes all ready to fire back with.
¶ Sunday, December 16, 2007 19 comments
Al Fateh (or Grand) Mosque
Guest Palace
They're everywhere!
Pearl Roundabout
You can see the rest of the pictures from my trip at my Flickr page.
"Some believe that certain controversial interrogation techniques are acceptable. But after nine years in the Soviet Gulag, and 400 days in punishment cells, I know that sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, and enforced hunger are forms of torture.
"Maintaining our principles in the face of terror is sometimes dangerous. Abandoning those principles would be even more dangerous.
"Still, I am deeply concerned that some of those who insist that America not cede the moral high ground do not recognize that America stands on the moral high ground.
"Those who would use abuses at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay to accuse America of being no different than the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Sadaam's regime have lost all sense of moral clarity.
"America is different because your citizens can protest without going to prison. America is different because your courts can defend rights and your press can expose injustice. America is different because your Congress can hold hearings and because your people can hold your leaders accountable. America is different because America is free.
"In standing up against torture, I hope that all Americans will remember the profound moral divide that separates the free world from the world of fear and work to advance abroad the very principles you so rightly cherish at home."
- Natan Sharansky, Soviet Jewish dissident and anti-Communist, human rights activist and author of "Fear No Evil" ¶ Friday, December 14, 2007 6 comments
That old feeling comes on,
We're waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
- Pete Seeger, 1967
¶ Monday, December 10, 2007 4 comments
