It’s the hit new game sensation sweeping the nation!
I mean, kudos to Miss South Carolina for cashing in positively on being the most humiliated person in America for two straight days, but that’s just bad cropping right there.
In Wednesday’s cartoon, Kranti completes her new look. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:
The more you click on my cartoons at comics.com during 2007, the better the chances they’ll appear in daily city papers in 2008. If you like Minimum Security, please see a new cartoon each weekday!
Is there even a remote reason in any rational world why this man is allowed to have a job after saying this?
Political Science 312: Military Operations and Winning the Peace
Instructor of Record: Donald RumsfeldIn this advanced seminar, students will learn that the best way to take the fight to the enemy is to attack a country that didn’t attack you, send in forces you didn’t properly equip, and seek to occupy a country of 27 million people with 130,000 troops and no plans whatsoever. Goodness gracious, me oh my! Other topics will include running a prison with panache; using no-bid contracts to increase quality; and “listening to America,” with a special guest speaker from the National Security Agency.
Campus Progress’ latest contest is asking for rewrites to the conservative college course catalog. It’s worth checking out just for the most disturbing poster ever they have up there.
This Week’s Column: GONZALES V. UNITED STATES
Here’s this week’s column. Comments may be posted here.
A Torturer Takes a Victory Lap
NEW YORK–Al Capone served six years at Alcatraz–for tax evasion. The true Original Gangsta was never held to account for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that left seven men cut in half by machine gun fire. Or the two disloyal wiseguys he ordered beaten to death with baseball bats. Or the corruption and mayhem his gangsters inflicted during the years he terrorized Chicago. Eliot Ness was cute, but the justice system failed. Capone won in the end.
Like Capone, Alberto Gonzales has gone down for a mere misdemeanor: firing U.S. attorneys for investigating Republican politicians. What led to his resignation as attorney general was his smearing them as incompetent. Hell hath no fury as a man fired without a positive recommendation. (Gonzales, a buffoon on his best day, perjured himself in spectacularly inept style in testimony about domestic wiretapping before Congress–an outfit that has forgotten more about lying than lesser lights will ever know.)
Gonzales’ crime was a doozy: He created the legal framework for American fascism. No punishment could suffice for America’s Eichmann, author of infamous pseudolegal rationales for torture and the end of habeas corpus. And none will he face.
“Fredo” (Bush’s nickname for him) quit over a procedural personnel matter. If he ultimately faces justice, it will be for mere perjury. Even his critics don’t care about his monstrous role as the legal architect of our post-9/11 gulags–proof positive that the master corrupter of democracy has triumphed, that we Americans are not a decent people.
“Are we being forward-leaning enough?” Gonzales used to ask his colleagues. “Forward-leaning” was Bush Administration jargon for toughness in the war on terror. It didn’t mean bending the rules. The Bushies were radicals. Trashing centuries-old constitutional protections–the right to an attorney, to face your accuser in a court of law, not to be tortured–wasn’t enough for our suburban Robespierres. They longed for an American Rome ruled by a harsh, omnipotent emperor over legions of troops standing ready to destroy all who challenged them, foreigners and Americans alike. They said 9/11 had changed everything. The new order required new laws.
One of the first steps down the road to perdition was a January 25, 2002 legal memorandum advising Bush to deny legal rights to Afghan POWs. “There are reasonable grounds for you to conclude that [the Geneva P.O.W. Convention] does not apply…to the conflict with the Taliban,” wrote Gonzales, then working as White House counsel. Deploying his characteristic blend of ignorance, arrogance and illogic, he called the Geneva Conventions–which have saved the lives of thousands of captured American soldiers–”quaint.” He then argued “that the Taliban and its forces were, in fact, not a government but a militant, terrorist-like group.” Actually, the Clinton and Bush Administrations had treated the Taliban regime as a government, negotiating with its leaders over oil-pipeline transit fees and subsidizing it with millions of U.S. taxdollars. U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, had embassies in Kabul. History was collateral damage in the war of terror.
Having denied captured Afghan soldiers POW status–”detainees,” newspapers began calling them–the Bush Administration looked for “forward-leaning” ways to abuse them. Children as young as 12 were beaten, shipped in shackles, their heads shaved and covered with gunny sacks, to Guantánamo Bay. Years have passed; they’ve grown up in Camp Delta. These kids–rural conscripts who couldn’t have attacked the U.S. even if they’d thought of it–still haven’t been allowed to see a lawyer or their parents.
Worried that the American people might someday return to its senses and prosecute them for their monstrous crimes against humanity, the Bushies again turned to their affirmative-action poster child–this time for a C.Y.A. memo validating torture. The CIA wanted permission to use six “pressure techniques” against prisoners. Mock burial, Gonzales and his legal staff thought, was a mite “too harsh.” The medieval practice of waterboarding, on the other hand, was OK. Another practice, “open-handed slapping of suspects, drew much discussion,” reported Newsweek. The idea was “just to shock someone with the physical impact,” one of Gonzales’ staffers said, with “little chance of bone damage or tissue damage.” Gonzales approved it.
The discussion resulted in an August 1, 2002 memo to Gonzales, which he passed on to Bush. The CIA and U.S. soldiers were free to subject prisoners to “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment. All they needed was permission from the Emperor. “Those committing torture with express presidential authority,” The Washington Post reported about the memo, “were probably immune from prosecution.” Abu Ghraib followed.
Slippery slopes are usually cited as cautionary tales. Gonzales saw post-9/11 fear as an opportunity to be exploited. He pushed for the USA Patriot Act. Foreign detainees, he decided, would get military kangaroo courts. Using Gonzales’ advice as back-up, Bush signed an executive order authorizing himself to declare any U.S. citizen an “enemy combatant” and have him assassinated. Next came the terrifying Military Commissions Act, which allows a president to declare martial law, seize control of the National Guard from the states, and throw U.S. citizens into concentration camps for the rest of their lives.
But no one objected to any of these attacks on our freedom. Not the news media. Not the Democrats–they voted for them.
After Torturer-in-Chief Gonzales announced his departure, Ted Kennedy slammed him–for perjury. “He has exhibited a lack of candor with Congress and the American people and a disdain for the rule of law and our constitutional system,” said the liberal stalwart. “The rampant politicization of federal law enforcement that occurred under his tenure seriously eroded public confidence in our justice system,” added House speaker Nancy Pelosi, focusing, like everybody else, on the fired U.S. attorneys. The word “torture” didn’t come up.
Gonzales will be remembered as corrupt and intellectually deficient. Nevertheless, his legal legacy will likely remain in place for the foreseeable future. Torture isn’t in the news because it isn’t news. It’s normal.
The monster dragged the rest of us down to his level. We are all Alberto Gonzales.
COPYRIGHT 2007 TED RALL
So there’s this girl who is an artist. And she makes computers out of fiberglass beavers. And makes pants out of meat.
I’m thinking a June wedding would have the best weather.
Newsweek reported last week that China has banned reincarnation without a permit. At first glance it may appear that they are trying to create the ultimate example for Libertarians as to how governments want to control our lives (and our afterlives!) but it has a specific political purpose: controlling who becomes the next Dali Lama.
The Dali Lama has always been adored by many on the left and those wanting to see the Beastie Boys and Rage Against The Machine in concert, but I never really got it. Here’s a man who declares himself to be the reincarnation of the Dali Lama with some inherent right to govern Tibet and issue bizarre dietary edicts based on nothing. I suppose many people in Tibet accept him as their leader, but it took this Lama 40 years of exile before even proposing something resembling Democracy. By two thirds vote of the people he can be removed from power. It wasn’t put up to a referendum or anything–he just declared it to be the rules.
And to be fair to his silly views, he is a lot better in the human rights arena than many countries leaders. But past Lama’s weren’t all peaceful bald men. For centuries Tibet was a peasant country where most of the population lived in abject poverty while their Monk Overlords sat in lavish temples governing their lives. Maybe thinking your current lot in life is a deserved result of actions in a past life has something to do with this.
Granted, China has been that nice to Tibetans and I think they should govern themselves, but at least they introduced plumbing and split up the land a bit.
For two good takes on the Dali Lama, check out Michael Parenti’s essay Friendly Feudalism and Penn & Teller’s Bullshit segment on His Holiness.
Thor’s Day: Baghdad Survival Tips
Articles for this week’s ‘toon:
Yikes…
It takes a lot to get me really worked up these days about something bad the Bush administration is doing. Don’t get me wrong — I’m constantly appalled — but one gets sort of used to the steady stream of abominations burbling out of the White House after a while. The new strip-mine rule gave me pause, however.
According to this NY Times article, as of Friday the Bushies gave the green light to mountaintop removal mining, allowing mining companies to dump waste in streams, effectively obliterating them. This practice is destroying vast parts of Appalachia, all for a filthy source of energy we need less of if we hope to combat global warming. It is diabolically short-sighted.
I didn’t even have room in the cartoon to talk about the sludge.
My “Puppy Principle” cartoon has been making its way around the internet a bit. Most people seem to get it, but — as I initially anticipated — I’ve heard from a couple angry readers who think I’m defending Michael Vick or downplaying the heinousness of his cruelty to animals. Let me state categorically that this is not the case. The purpose of the cartoon is to point out the cognitive dissonance between Americans’ reactions to Vick’s cruelty and other forms of cruelty perpetrated on humans on a much wider scale.
