Andrew Sullivan on torture

Read what Andrew Sullivan has to say on the torture of Abu Zubaydah and on torture in general:

Notice what the Zubaydah case tells us about the key argument of torture advocates like Charles Krauthammer: that torture should only be used when we already know that someone has actionable information on an imminent catastrophic threat. We're five years into the Bush torture regime and despite hundreds - and possibly thousands - of torture sessions, this was never, ever the case. Charles' abstract argument has been rendered completely moot by the evidence of the past five years. The United States made the decision to torture Zubaydah after he had already given helpful information - solely because they suspected he had more - and not in response to any knowledge of any imminent, catastrophic threat. In the beginning - not even in the end - torture became its own rationale, creating a need for torturers to justify their war crimes by finding more information through more torture, and unleashing the sadism and evil that exists in every human heart - even the most trained and professional. And then the war crimes created a need to destroy the evidence of war crimes and so the criminality of the government deepened, cloaked in the secrecy of national security. and now we are caught between an acceptance that the president is a war criminal and the necessity to keep fighting a vital war.

A positive development in the Senate

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid abruptly pulled the FISA bill last night, the one that would have granted telecom companies immunity for violating the privacy rights of their customers when they assisted the government in conducting warrantless wiretaps. More here.

I liked this quote from Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, "Those like myself, who are against immunity, really don't want to punish the phone companies as much as we want to hold the government accountable. But it's very difficult to do that."

The reasonable path is to continue to require a court order before the telcos cooperate with the government and allow it to spy on people in the United States.

NPR also had this report yesterday on "All Things Considered" and this one on "Marketplace." In the latter report, Senator Ted Kennedy dismisses the Administration's argument that without immunity, the telcos could be bankrupted by lawsuits:

In other words, the administration is telling us that these companies may have engaged in lawbreaking on a scale so massive that they could not afford the penalty if they are brought to justice. But massive lawbreaking is an argument against immunity, not for it.

Update on the Senate's FISA bill

From the New York Times.

So this is how liberty dies...

Andrew Sullivan's blog mentioned this excellent Salon.com article, "The Lawless Surveillance State." It comments on the ongoing revelations about the telecom industry's role in the government's domestic spying operations and pending legislation that would grant the the telcos immunity for past and future lawbreaking (background here and here). From slate.com:

More than anything else, what these revelations highlight -- yet again -- is that the U.S. has become precisely the kind of surveillance state that we were always told was the hallmark of tyrannical societies, with literally no limits on the government's ability or willingness to spy on its own citizens and to maintain vast dossiers on those activities. The vast bulk of those on whom the Government spies have never been accused, let alone convicted, of having done anything wrong. One can dismiss those observations as hyperbole if one likes -- people want to believe that their own government is basically benevolent and "tyranny" is something that happens somewhere else -- but publicly available facts simply compel the conclusion that, by definition, we live in a lawless surveillance state, and most of our political officials are indifferent to, if not supportive of, that development....

Ultimately, what is most significant about all of this is how the most consequential steps our government takes -- such as endless expansion of its domestic spying programs with literally no oversight and constraints of law -- occur with virtually no public debate or awareness. By contrast, the pettiest of matters -- every sneeze of a campaign aide and every trite, catty gossip item from our moronic travelling press corps -- receives endless, mindless herd-like attention.

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values.

To take action, call your Senators and urge them to vote against any FISA bill that includes immunity for telecom companies.

Andrew Sullivan's Republican pick

One of my favorite writers, Andrew Sullivan, has often written favorably about Barack Obama in his blog. Today he answers the question of who he likes best in the Republican race for the White House: Ron Paul. Read his post here; I particularly like how he summed up the Iraq war:

Let's be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror - at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East - we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency?

New article from Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan writes about sustainability and agriculture and the potential for disaster should the system break down (which he believes may already be happening). Read "Our Decrepit Food Factories" from yesterday's New York Times Magazine.

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

And this Washington Post article on global warming would only seem to amplify the impacts of which Pollan warns.

"We are not dealing with a single toxic agent or a single microbe where we can put our finger with certainty on an exposure and the response," said Jonathan A. Patz, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Climate change affects everything."

Heavy sigh.

(See my previous post on Michael Pollan's excellent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

Another kind of risk from farmed fish...

Ugh. Tainted farmed fish from China. Read on.

Downside of farmed salmon

A new report highlights the risks of aquaculture. Apparently salmon farming harms wild salmon by bringing parasitic sea lice closer to shore where they can infect young wild salmon as they head to sea. At least one population of wild salmon is at risk of extinction.

More information to think about when you are at the supermarket or ordering seafood at a restaurant can be found at the Pure Salmon Campaign website.

Climate Crisis website and petition

An online petition supporting Al Gore's goal of a comprehensive global warming treaty that goes into effect by 2010 (and a lot of other information on climate change) can be found here.

McCain on torture

Senator John McCain commenting on the controversy over the CIA's destruction of tapes documenting waterboarding and a former agent's assertion that the practice has prevented terrorist attacks:

Waterboarding will give you a confession, but it won't always get you the truth.

I'm not going to condone a practice that we used as the rationale for prosecuting the Japanese for war crimes in World War II.

I maintain my belief that it is harmful to America's national security because it damages our image so badly and we lose the ideological struggle, which is based on the moral high ground.

I wholeheartedly agree.

If you do as well, sign the ACLU's petition.

The Former U.S. of A.

Michael Ventura takes a look back at how the USA might be remembered 100 years in the future... in three parts: one, two, and three.

And since I'm sitting here in Holton, Kansas, I'll include this quote:

Let us take, as just one example, agriculture. By 2007, technological innovations in agriculture were so efficient that a Kansas farmer with 7,000 acres required only two full-time year-round employees. For the farmer, this was profitable, as it was for the speculator in agricultural commodities; for the farmer's community, it was ruination. No permanent agricultural workforce meant no permanent support-structure – stores, services, etc. Gradually, farming towns across the country looked like ghost towns, or ghostly towns, with streets of boarded-up stores and crumbling infrastructures. "Profit" was defined simply as money, not as quality of life, and, in that definition, communities were no longer necessary to agricultural profit. In fact, cohesive community was no longer deemed necessary to any means of profit.

That is what I have seen... the town I grew up in in the 60s and 70s is no more. People still live there, but the once vibrant downtown--with every kind of shop that the average person needed--is boarded up. Maybe small towns like Burrton are the proverbial canaries, dying off first. People like me who moved to the coast thought that they'd escaped, only realizing years later that community might be measured by something more than how many people lived in a place or how quickly it was growing.

Earlier tonight when my cousins Michelle and Kim were in my motel room, I read the story of Cain and Abel as recounted in the Gideons Bible in the drawer beside my bed. Such a very short story... what are we to make of it? Why was Abel's gift worthy and Cain's not?

And what choices are we to make to have our own lives count for something more than the "individual gain" described in Ventura's column?