America’s Depraved Leadership Has Created a Depraved Population

As I noted elsewhere, “…sever peoples’ connection to reality and they will accept whatever you tell them is real. The motto of Faux Noose.”

Keep people uneducated, frightened and disconnected from a real community and you can control how their mental processes work. (I won’t dignify the mental activity of 95% of Americans as ‘thinking’).

Democrats must justify looking the other when Obama refuse to prosecute torturers.

This is just stunning. I have not asked anyone if they thought torture was justified under any circumstance, mostly because I assume that, even if he (or she) did, he would lie about it as he would any other shame in his life. Certainly, if he answered in the positive, that would be the end of our last conversation.

And this is how I’m supposed to feel about the majority of my culture?

This hurts a lot. Makes me feel afraid. It looks like the decline is going to be an ugly one, after all.

This is where prosecutions, or at least a Truth and Reconciliation commission might really have helped – a galvanizing set of public testimony on the horrors of this. Victims speaking about the horrors inflicted on them, allowed to humanize it.

I’d add the long blathering about whether to release any of this gave the monsters a lot of time to prepare their PR campaign, it shows, Cheney emerging from his coffin, all the rest of band back together on all the respectable shows. Against that, fucking Diane Feinstein as the champion of not being a society of collective sadists.

Buick vs butterfly.

I was waiting for some polling to come out to see what public reaction would be. This is significantly worse than I expected. America is lost. I was hoping the millennials would see through the lies.

Apparently Kipling was right, having an empire breeds a decadent imperial people with a decadent imperial culture.

Now my hope is for the millennials children. They’re going to grow up in a country where they’ve never experienced the old economic stability and privileges that keep our current generations invested in the status quo. If anything the status quo will behave even more actively predatory with them and they’ll be negatively invested in it. I’m also hoping that having so many people from so many ethnic groups all in the same economic gutter will foster a spirit of commonality of the oppressed against the oppressors, and the tactics of the oppressors. We’ll see.

Or it could just be turtles all the way down.

Everythings Jake
December 16, 2014

Yes, correct. We’ve been propagandized since birth.
Once one awakens to that fact, there is only one course of action; disengage by any and all means necessary.
Get out and/or get away in all haste. Save yourself, because the masses will not listen or understand…
Reason/rationality is laid waste, so flee in all haste…

Ian’s point stands, but please make sure to read JustPlainDave’s comment above. Survey results can vary quite a bit based on exactly what question is being asked. A modest chunk of the supportive responses here could reasonably be attributed to the questions not saying “torture” and the general ignorance of many Americans about what “the CIA’s interrogation methods” are/were. Interrogation sounds very different from (e.g.) waterboarding.

Of course, then the argument comes that we live in a democracy and it’s everyone’s responsibility to stay informed, at least on such major issues as this. Yes, that is true. The results of this survey are still horrifying, even if some of the horror may arguably be converted from “supports torture” to “doesn’t know that the CIA tortured people and is supportive of the organization out of ignorance.”

Obama didn’t “fail to prosecute torturers.” He forced Spain to stop its investigation of Bush cabinet officials for torture, engineered the destruction of the Spanish judge spearheading that investigation, and prosecuted and jailed the only CIA official to publically blow the whistle on torture.

The “weak Obama” narrative is crap. He’s plenty strong when he’s doing something he means to succeed at.

30+ years ago, Reagan was eagerly backing juntas and death squads all over Latin America, even providing American advisors to instruct in proper torture methods.

(One of those advisors got recycled in the Bush-era occupation of Iraq, where he earned some additional press for the time he was observed cheerfully munching on a ham sandwich while supervising the torture of a ten-year-old boy.)

Ian,

I originally read your blog b/c I thought you were a sharp, astute intellectual type who was bipartisan though left leaning. (As a right leaning fellow I like to observe both sides of the aisle). I assumed you were American and I assumed your followers were too.

I appears that you are Canadian and it appears your followers are too. Is this a fair statement?

Please fill me in.

Thanks!

Jeff,

Don’t know if you have noticed but the Canadians are just as willing as the Americans to pollute the planet beyond repair. As a matter of fact, Canadians want to push a pipeline through this country to the Gulf of Mexico and send the thick nasty ooze to other continents. And they don’t care what the native people want or the general population. And eminent domain is being used by the PTB to take the homes and farms of the people who are in the way. This might be considered torture by some.

I am an American. I am not proud. Ian is a Canadian. I suspect that he is not proud about that either. But we love our fellow humans and want the best for all.

Merry Christmas if that is what you are into.

I agree that this is a shock, and regardless of how the language of the poll may have been skewed, this only confirms what I know but hate to think about. The US public has been led steadily to the right ever since the 60’s. and the results are fugly, fugly, fugly.

Overall, the sheeple will be sheeple no matter what. US exceptionalism runs deep, it’s a quasi-religious belief about US righteousness, that we are working everywhere to convert the heathens and are spending a ton of our money (no we’re not except for the billions spend on military) to be the saviors of humanity and liberate them from evil to pure white democracy.

But they don’t even thank us and obviously they don’t deserve our goodness. If they’re going to respond by attacking us, to hell with them. None of them matter anyway. If there is one enemy in a village of 100, kill them all if it will keep us safe. We deserve safety and those people don’t have a life worth living anyway. We trust our military, they are all moral people.

We never target good people, only bad people. Once in a great while, we miss and kill one innocent out of 50-100 bad guys. Sorry, but we gotta do what we gotta do to protect our country from evil. Basically we want our government to do whatever it can, at any cost of collateral damage to people outside the US who don’t deserve the protection of any laws. After all, any country harboring anyone who would harm us is by definition lawless to start with. Why should we be tied like bleeding-heart liberals to laws when our enemies aren’t?

There is no mainstream push back against any of this. Heck, Cheney can go on TV with a straight face continuing the same story and lies that led us into the biggest foreign disaster in US history and not get countered and denounced by any democrat. For my whole lifetime the democrats have been very effectively painted as ‘weak on national defense’ and they won’t/can’t ‘take the gloves off’ against this BS even when they have clear and very visible proof of republican disastrous failure.

Public discussion is dominated by the Cheney world view, by the militarized cops’ world view and the sheeple are scared and thinking what they are told to think. All they need to see is 1-2 US citizens getting executed and they jump right on the band wagon for more war. But hasn’t it always been like this?

The ‘foreign enemy’ card has been played by rulers since time immemorial. All it takes is the tiniest threat to get the sheeple ruled by fear and vengeance.

@jeff pendergast:

There’s a mix of people in the comments, though I can’t pretend to know where everyone is from or currently resides. We seem to have most representation from the US and Canada, with a few ex-pats living overseas as well.

Press doesn’t help when it uses word “justified” and the euphemism “interrogation” in same sentence.

Calling torture “interrogation” or “enhanced interrogation” or “harsh methods” is not objective language.

A more objective question (although the results will still show a depraved society) might be: “When the U.S. Government imprisons people, do you support the U.S. government illegally torturing them?”

So in answer to your absurd post, jeff, I am and have always been a citizen of the U.S. A. I watched the collapse of the twin towers from my office window and knew people who died there that day.

My wife was to undergo her first dose of radiation for cancer that day and instead spent the day helping the hospital prepare for the influx they expected.

I live in the immediate environs of NYC and spend a not inconsiderable amount of time there.

You are simply a coward, if you, wherever you are somewhere out there in the heartland feel threatened by what happened on 9-11. We are an Empire throwing our weight around all over the world and a little blowback should be expected. That is the price of Empire and all of the goodies that Empire brings.

Torture is wrong and indefensible. Full stop.

We have become stupid and scared as a population.

Actually Jeff, I’d have to say our reaction to Somalia is significantly ahead to America’s reaction to its current woes.

For the record, Pvt Brown was generally viewed as a CAR problem child – personality difficiencies, not the sharpest tool in the shed, etc. The instigator and driving force was MCpl Matchee – in custody, he attempted to hang himself and suffered massive brain damage, rendering him unfit to stand trial (my understanding is that he remains a vegetable to the current day, if he’s indeed still alive – it’s been a long while since I bothered to check). Brown’s weakness as a soldier (and Matchee’s convenient status) is widely thought to have helped him receive a lighter sentence than he might have otherwise. In addition to Brown and Matchee, a number of other CF personnel were charged, further up the chain of command (including a few who were charged for other incidents) – some were convicted and some were not, but something like eight (if memory serves) members in total faced charges.

You’ll also note that as part of the aftermath of what was termed “the Somalia Affair” there was a Commission of Inquiry struck that sat for something like two years, nationally televised testimony, tens of millions of dollars spent, etc. As a consequence, the Regiment _in toto_ (i.e., not just 2 Commando, the subunit involved) was disbanded, the colours struck.

When _anyone_ at CIA is charged and the Directorate of Operations disbanded, then *and only* then will you have the standing to indulge in the above type of “only in Canada” Intertubes rhetoric.

@jeff

i’ll put this as plainly as possible, even though it’s been pointed out on this blog by better men than me, the blog publisher included. torture is abhorrent, and moreover doesn’t work. when you write “I would suggest that as despicable as torture is, it is a tool in the tool box used to defend against terrorism” you are, plainly, advocating in favor of using it. your words, buddy. torture is exactly and precisely as immoral and dehumanizing as rape or genocide, and i’ll continue to place it next to them until you and your ilk understand how your arguments sound outside of your echo chambers.

speaking only for myself, i’d rather live in a nation where sometimes innocent people die than in a nation of torturers.

@justplaindave,

The CIA report, inept and corrupt as it was, began the debate. After but reading through the comments, as an American I was offended by the broad brush painted over this country by many on this chain who were not Americans, but Canadian. The piling on had to stop. Even @ibaien, writing from the basement of a loony bin somewhere was taking the low road “I would rather live in a nation where sometimes innocent people die (what is an acceptable number exactly, and what if they were your family members?) than in a nation of torturers.” Freedom has it’s disadvantages I guess.

With respect to the Somalia Affair, I needed to point out that Canada has skeletons in it’s closet. The details of that horrific slaying were far more grotesque and immoral that water boarding. The notion that Americans are “a depraved population” of complicit tortures is utter nonsense. And for the record, 100 million of our 310 million Americans were made aware of this report, $40 million spent on producing it just this time around.

So Ian I’m sorry for stirring the pot. If I am out of line I will go away as quickly as I came, just say the word.

@jeff

i can’t believe i’m explaining something so simple, but i suppose i have a relatively high opinion of the commentariat here and rarely feel the need to add my two cents. you write ‘what is an acceptable number exactly, and what if they were your family members?’ and think you must have caught me out in a rhetorical masterstroke. so perhaps i should ask in reply, how many people is it acceptable for a nation – that somehow still thinks itself a shining city upon a hill – to torture as it has been? and what if they were your family members, jeff pendergast, having these things done to them until they were utterly broken or outright dead?

The meme on torture must change.

Torturers are perverts who get off on sadism.

There is no benefit to anyone else.

Torture supporters are wanna be sadists.

The most successful interrogators have always been friendly to their subjects.

Any justification for torture is a lie.

Jeff, the most important differences between Somalia and the CIA’s use of coercive techniques principally centre around the fact that for the USG this was deliberate, ongoing policy, at scale. The same emphatically cannot be said of the transgressions by some members of the former CAR. This is part of the reason why I am not a fan of exclusively moral arguments against torture. An exclusively moral framework makes it easier for folks to make arguments like you have, essentially boiling down to “yeah, well you did it too”. They may suffice in the artificial, no consequences for the writer, environment of Internet-mediated rhetoric, but in the real world it’s utterly irrelevant and even harmful. To mangle a phrase, systemic use of torture was more than a crime, it was a blunder.

As to whether the American populace is uniquely depraved, well I think that’s an overly strong way of putting it. In fact, I think it’s probably ultimately unhelpful to people who would like to shift public opinion to be less tolerant of coercive means. That said, the data clearly indicates that American opinions on the issue are significantly different from those in other western nations. As an example, recently released work from GlobeScan indicates that Americans were strikingly more likely to agree with the notion that “Torture is sometimes necessary and acceptable to gain information that may protect the public” than were other western nations – 45% of Americans somewhat or strongly agreed with this sentiment, compared to 29% of UK residents, 25% of Canadians, 21% of Australians, 19% of Germans, and 17% of Spaniards. Me, I think that’s a consequence more of the “politico-tainment” complex that sees everything through an incredibly partisan lens than anything innate.

As to the issue of whether other nationalities have the right to criticize American actions, my advice would be to focus more on learning what you can from the critique than expending energy seeking to counter them. You folks haven’t had a grand strategy more sophisticated than “we’re big, rich and very hard to get to” for about a hundred years. Every leg that strategy rests on is becoming less true every day. Learning from middle powers will ultimately make your transition to new realities a lot less painful.

More directly, we lost 158 CF personnel and five civilians (with thousands of non-fatal physical and mental casualties) in service of a mission that you guys boned (and I mean absolutely *boned*) at the strategic level. When I see the chronic stupidity that passes for the policy development process down there whip itself into another know-nothing-but-opine-on-everything frenzy, you’re goddamn right I’ll criticize. American politics is too important and has too many effects on me and mine to be left just to Americans. A little truism of the international system is that if you want others not to be perpetually “in your shit”, you can be small or you can be smart. I’d know which one I’d pick, and that means listening more than transmitting.

@justplaindave,

I understand your position, thank you for taking the time to explain. Admittedly my reply about the Somalia Affair was “first page google search”, simply a response to the pervasive anti-American rhetoric I read through on this chain. I don’t object to criticism as an American, I am used to it and appreciative of the contribution Canada made during the Iraq war. Hindsight is 20/20 but don’t believe we should have invaded Iraq either, although at the time I was in favor of it given the information compiled by 2 administrations and confirmed by the UN. It was a mistake and I will leave it at that.

I wonder (and hopefully we will never know) how the international communities would poll if they had jetliners flown into their skyscrapers, killing 3000 of their citizens?

There will always be an America, a big, rich bully on the block who is in charge, but when the shit hits the fan, all the allies come running to for defense, money, etc. I suppose Canada could hitch their wagon to another star, maybe China, Russia, but I don’t see that happening, do you? Again, thanks for you time and Happy Holidays to you.

A nation that can find moral relativism when it comes to torture will also, one day, find moral relativisim when it comes to rape and pedophilia. You can justify everything once you have justified something as heinous and morally indefensible as the torture of another human being. This is a consequence of 40 plus years of neoliberal ideology; the self is all, do what thou will, and all that other satanic bullshit. People can laugh at me for saying this, but the US and its allies have succumbed to a demonic possession of sorts, which is the flipside of the religious ecstacy found in those we have chosen as our new enemies. The image of a plane flying into a building is a perfect metaphor for what we as a culture are doing right now. I find it appropriate that the only new religion that has been founded in the US since WW2 is Scientology, which is in fact not a religion, but a ponzi scheme with a giant fucking black hole at the center of it. Once you get to the top they open the box and the great seceret is: NOTHING. Nihilism at its purest. The US and its citizens have given in to the blackest, fiercest nihilism imaginable, and it shows. The rest is just bad theatre.

Jeff, two strategies predominate in realism – balancing and free-riding. While I do actually sympathize, the guy in me who’s seen this movie before is of the opinion that getting mad at allies for free-riding pretty much whenever they can is akin to getting mad at a cat for shedding. No amount of simply reasoning with them or moral suasion is going to change the behaviour. The relatively recent trend in American foreign policy to insisting that allies take the lead if they wish to see use of force (e.g., Libya) and refusing if they do not (e.g., Syria) is the most positive development I have seen in American foreign policy in some while.

One thing that I do want to point out is how important it is to understand that the international community has no small amount of experience with terrorism. The four attacks on 9/11 stand out for their one day lethality, but a number of other nations have suffered significantly more lethal campaigns since 9/11. The 2014 edition of the Global Terrorism Index reports that nearly 18,000 people were killed in terror attacks last year, with numbers trending up sharply since the Arab Uprising. This is a fairly widespread and enduring phenomenon – I do not think the relationship between public opinion and severity of losses suffered is going to be a simple one.

Torture works just fine–for getting trumped-up excuses to invade Iraq:

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/12/18/why-did-they-torture/

First time commenter here, long-time reader and admirer.

What’s driving me crazy about this debate is how nobody is bothering to distinguish between torturing those who MAY OR MAY NOT have useful info, and torturing those who we are SURE have useful info, i.e., they are known to be complicit in a specific plot and/or powerful in active terrorism circles.

IMO, there is no good case to be made for torturing the former, for all the reasons already pointed out.

OTOH, I have seen nobody make a good case for not torturing members of the latter group. I would respectfully submit that any such case must rely on the kind of politically correct moral purity that can only exist on blog threads (analogous to “I would never shoot anybody, even in self-defense, I’d rather submit to being killed”), and never in the real world.

Am I crazy to think that that difference matters? Take a moment and assume we are actually faced with a genuine “ticking bomb” scenario, and we know we have the planner in our custody. Should we really be politically correct about forcing info from him?

@realitychecker

Please refer to the Convention Against Torture article 2 for your answer

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html

Your disasturbation sounds too much like an episode of 24 for me to give it much thought.

@ibaien,

What me worry? I don’t live in fear. But I don’t believe in reactionary foreign policy. Part of protecting the country involves making chvoices, particularly during war, even if it involves coerced interrogation. You don’t seem to have a plan, you are just another angry critic.

@malcontent,

You are aptly named, although I can think some add on’s. Given your attitude, this scumbag is very happy to piss you off. Stop wasting my time with your intellectual wannabe jibberish.

@Dave

I don’t think Obama establishing a “red line” in Syria then not enforcing it was good foreign policy, but I do think setting certain expectations of our allies is a very good move. I haven’t read the poll, but I don’t remember 19,000 terrorist related deaths occurring in the UK, Canada, Spain, Germany and Australia.

Glenn Greenwald from 2010: “Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal”

http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/

Maybe this explains the persistence of JP.

Maybe he’s telling the truth when he says “I don’t live in fear.”

Maybe he’s simply getting paid to pollute this site.

@JP: You’re the one choosing to waste your time where you’re not wanted, Jeffy.

@Malcontent: Hey, Mal, this Jeff dude wets his lacy panties so much from fear of a hypothetical terrorist attack that he wants to torture people, even though that never works to prevent terrorist attacks–and even though he has far less chance of dying from that than from a car accident or even a lightning strike–and he calls us cowards. 😆

(This assumes, of course, that he isn’t simply being paid.)

“Good. Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.”

I was actually frightened one of us scared him away but he does have manly passion! If only the light wasn’t so bright outside the echo chamber he could read better.

If he wasn’t so immature then I would be insulted by his calling me a coward, or for that matter a liberal and worst of all an idealist.

Make no mistake Jeffy, I’m a pessimist and far more conservative than you are willing to recognize. I am also brave enough to have offered you insight on your future despite your manners.

Good luck kid. You’re going to need it.

Torturers are perverts.

Torture supporters are wanna be perverts.

They built it? I thought they hired foreigners to build and maintain it for them.

(@Ian: I apologize for all these posts, but I keep having afterthoughts, and I can’t edit my responses to put them all in one entry.)

JPDave makes a good point, though. I shouldn’t rule out sheer howling incompetence by the Chimperial Cheney @$$ministration as an explanation for the success of the 9/11 attacks. “Hanlon’s Razor” reminds us never to assume malice where stupidity can provide an adequate explanation.

In that case, the 9/11 attacks would not be another Pearl Harbor, but rather another Little Big Horn–a freakish victory by a materially disadvantaged culture over a materially advantaged culture, due to incompetent leadership on the materially advantaged side.

Maybe we should call the Chimp “President Custer”.

Just coming back to say, responses to my prior comment were disappointing. I’m new here, so it’s understandable that some might fail to realize the high quality of debate I seek to engage in.

But, one response was pure ad hominem, calling me a paid troll. One pointed out the present content of various international accords, as though that could ever be the final word in a complex moral inquiry; as a lawyer, I’m all too aware of how deficient and fluid laws and their enforcement can be to ever have that conclude a conversation about morality. And Ian himself responded, but failed to engage my point, choosing instead to say it might be ineffective because the subject could lie and you don’t have time to verify, but in the pure ticking bomb hypothetical I set up to test the logic, he could also tell the truth and allow the bomb to be harmlessly defused, so trying to get that info would still make sense. Ian, I would also say to you that I don’t want or enjoy more torture just because I point out an extreme situation where torturing would be the only responsible thing to do. I abhor the fact that any living thing should ever in pain.

I’m trying to point out the fallacy of the ABSOLUTE position to never torture. When many lives are at risk, and the captive subject is known to have the info that could prevent the pain and/or death of the many (my hypothetical), it would be immoral to simply let the many die. Nobody would ever make that choice in real life, especially if their own loved ones were at risk. To aver you would make that choice in the abstract, only serves the purpose of allowing a sense of moral smugness that is not justified, and can lead to bad reasoning in other areas as well. It’s immoral to have such bad arithmetic skills when balancing the costs and benefits of other people’s lives.

Someone please tell me a logical reason why that is not correct.

To Monster:

Well, fine then, make your argument. I’ve presented a difficult and complex moral hypothetical, let’s hear your analysis and refutation of my position.

So far, you’ve got nothing.

I must commend Ian on his patience. In his place, I would have banned RC and Jeff from this site already.

I don’t believe trolls spouting wingnut talking points deserve to be taken seriously, and I see little reason to waste any time and energy refuting their amoral sophistries.

Heaping scorn takes far less time and energy. 😛