Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Civil Liberties Page 3 of 8

The Torture Culture

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On December 16, 2017

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Ok, here’s the deal: Torture does not work to get information. Period. You do not torture people to get information, you torture people to send information, or rather, to send a message. What is that message?

(Originally from Dec 16, 2010, but it seems worth re-upping for a new generation of readers – Ian.)

We Torture People

That’s all the message is.

The US is a torture culture. The majority of Americans accept torture; they think it’s okay. This extends right through the society. Sure, it is in its rawest form in places like SuperMax security prisons (23 hour a day isolation is torture), Bagram and Guantanmo, but it extends down.  Glenn Greenwald recently wrote a piece on how Bradley (at the time, now Chelsea) Manning is being kept in constant isolation, refused sheets or a pillow, not even allowed to exercise:

Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture. 

In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article — entitled “Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?” — the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, “all human beings experience isolation as torture.” By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that “solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture.”

Then there is this:

Ariz. Rep. Michele Reagan, R-District 8, is better known for fighting for new laws, but now, she is speaking about her fight against a lawsuit. Reagan is being sued by her mortgage company after she questioned who owned held the note on her home.

“It’s really scary,” she said, “I think that this really needs to be brought to light that this is happening to people in Arizona.” Reagan had wanted to find out she and her husband, David Gulino, could refinance their south Scottsdale home.

“In doing research, I began to wonder if the lender even owned the note to my home,” she said. “So I sent them a letter and asked them and asked them several things. I want to know who owns my property. Am I paying the right person?”

Soon after, Colonial Savings filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Reagan and her husband. The company says the couple is trying “to rescind their home loan,” or back out on the loan.

“We’re not interested in walking,” Reagan said. “We’re not interested in saying we’re not going to pay. We just need a little help with the interest rate. I’m current on my loan. Never missed a payment. We’ve never been late. We were sued for asking too many questions,” said Reagan.

Suing someone who has done nothing wrong, putting them through all that, isn’t about stopping them from defaulting, it’s about sending a message: “This is what we do to people who dare to challenge us in even the smallest way.” Win or lose, the banks have sent a message, and they can easily afford harassing lawsuits, while ordinary people can’t.

Torture is just an extension of bullying, and the message of the bully is always, “I can do this, and no one will stop me.”

The porno-scanners and the gropes (which definitely include touching your genitals, btw, I have been “padded down”) are also along these lines. They won’t stop a determined terrorist, but they do send a message: We can do this and no one will stop us. And if you fly on a private jet (i.e. you’re rich or important), hey you don’t get groped or scanned.

Likewise, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard shutting down Wikileaks donations was about sending a message. “It doesn’t matter if what you’ve done is against the law or not, we will shut you out of the modern economy, and no one will stop us.”

In the modern world, you’re either a someone or a no one. If you’re reading this, odds are that you’re a no one. And if you’re a no one, you’d better do what you’re told and you’d better not resist, or they will punish you whether it’s just or not, whether it’s legal or not, whether it’s “torture” or not.

This will only stop when the price for doing it is too high, personally, for the someones.

France Ends Freedom

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On October 9, 2017

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The terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, but if they did, well, they’d stop attacking France.

Fifty seven percent of the French approve, according to a poll.

It takes so very little to get people to give up their freedom. Find an enemy, have a few atrocities, and they’ll squeal for you to take it from them. Shades of Goerring’s comment on how easy it is to get citizens to line up behind wars.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Such laws as France has passed, will be used against others. The anti-terrorism laws in the US have been used vigorously against environmental protestors, including entirely peaceful ones.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Centuries ago Machiavelli observed that some peoples lacked sufficient virtue for freedom. They could only be ruled by despots. Increasingly, the West has shown that they have fallen into this class.

While the young are quite good on issues of economic fairness (out of self interest), they are not particularly good on most civil liberties, so we cannot be sure that the tide moving through the Anglo-West, towards more equal economic arrangements and less corporate control will necessarily push back on civil liberties abuses.

Humans didn’t evolve to live in large societies. We are terrible at it, and our decision-making heuristics are not capable of handling it. We cannot evaluate threats properly, our enlarged senses of identity (like nationalism and ethnic identification) are easily hijacked and usually we are unable to change our minds about anything important once we become an adult unless there is a catastrophe which personally devastates us, and when there is, we simply pick up (as Friedman noted) whatever ideas are around, rather than think critically.

And so, so much for Liberte.

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In Which Mandos Is Unsympathetic Towards Australia’s PM

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On February 3, 2017

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AustralianFlag

(This is a quick hit from MANDOS. Just so you know.)

Australia’s PM just had a little pity party about Donald Trump allegedly yelling at him about the refugee deal. Well, Trump’s tweet on the matter is, taken literally, true, except the part about them being illegal immigrants.

The truth is that Australia bought a country in order to use it as a torture camp for people who have mostly been declared real refugees. These are people who are fully the responsibility of Australia, and Australia is only using extra-territoriality as a fig leaf to use them in its political drama. That Trump is very likely to be unsympathetic to the refugees doesn’t mean that the Australian PM didn’t deserve it.

For the sake of the victims of Australia’s policy, I hope the deal eventually survives, and they can get to the US, although some of them will be very damaged by their treatment and may not get the psychological support that Australia morally owes them, along with enormous compensation. They don’t deserve to be used as a prop in the invasion paranoia drama of developed polities. Let me put it like this: If “preserving your civilization” requires the erection of a torture camp, your civilization deserves to have died yesterday. And no, holding refugees prisoner on an island from which they can’t escape to a normal life in a destination country of their own choosing is neither safety nor honouring of the refugee obligation.

Rule of Men, Not Law

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On January 7, 2017

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Amidst all the screaming about Trump, there is a feeling that he is being unfair by singling out various companies for attack.

This is true.

It is also special pleading.

What Trump is doing, and what he will almost certainly do when he is in office, is pick out specific groups and individuals, and he will very likely use the weight of the state against them.

Oh dear. Oh dear.

This is rule by men, yes. It has also been going on for years. Anti-war protestors and environmentalists have been singled out for special attention on the positive side of the scale.

Meanwhile, on the negative end of the stick, let us compare two financial crises. In the eighties, there was a financial crisis too, filled with tons of fraud, called the Savings and Loan crisis. It happened under a Republican president.

Executives were charged, and they went to jail.

In 2007-2008, we had a financial crisis, and from 2009 on, Obama’s DOJ applied fines, not criminal charges. Those fines immunized the participants, and since they did not take money from those who had benefited (and were often less than the profits taken by the corporation, even) they did not dis-incentivize criminal acts. Instead, the DOJ said: “There is no real penalty, so make the money when you can, and we’ll immunize you for a token fee.”

There is no question in any reasonable person’s mind that many executives had engaged in fraud, negligence, and criminal conspiracy which could have been indicted under RICO.

But hey, they were let off. Meanwhile, people who applied for mortgage relief were deliberately given the run-around and fucked over, losing their houses (see David Dayen’s “Chain of Title” if you need the blow-by-blow.)  Robo-signing by financial institutions, post-financial crisis, was also mass fraud, attesting to facts the signers had no knowledge of.

America is already a nation of men, not laws. One can say, “It has always been thus,” and there is some truth to that, but it is more a lie than true: see the S&L crisis.

People have already been getting away with lawbreaking–depending on who they are–and not small numbers of people. And if you don’t think various firms haven’t been picked out for special, positive favors, you simply haven’t been paying attention.

2000’s Gore vs. Bush ruling was “men over laws.” It was such a bad ruling that the Supreme Court tried to say it couldn’t be used as a precedent. Meanwhile, the protections of law in general were gutted: the Patriot Act, the AUMF, the rise of the vast surveillance state with its clear industrial-scale violations of the Fourth Amendment. Most Americans live in a border zone, where they don’t have freedom from arbitrary search and seizure. As for the First Amendment, the existence of “First Amendment Zones” tells you all you need to know.

Trump’s behaviour is and will be the direct consequence of how many previous Presidents acted, including Obama (who notably killed an American citizen without any trial and claimed the right to do so).

To cry now, and especially to weep for large corporations who are bad actors, is hilariously hypocritical and intensely revealing. “Trump blackmailed them into keeping a few jobs in America, that tyrant!”

Oh, My, God, the funny. Now yes, Trump has also called out people for terrible reasons. Oh well. Yes, that’s a new bad thing (though not worse than killing a US citizen without trial, the right to face his accusers, or see the evidence presented against him), but I just find it hard to get very worked up over.

You already lost your rule of law. There are a few places one can date the loss to, but I put it in Obama’s mass-immunization of financial executives. You could argue for Bush vs. Gore or a number of other places.

But wherever you put it, it already happened.

You have the rule of men. For certain people, the law is interpreted and enforced differently.

This, folks, was at the heart of Trump’s attacks on Clinton for e-mail, which liberals laughed off.  But we all know that if some peon had done the exact same thing, they would have been ruined and probably gone to jail.

You already lost rule of laws, and had rule of men.

You have already paid a frightful price for this. The reason your economy is so bad is because bankers were immunized and bailed out, staying in charge of your economy when they are incompetent crooks and ordinary people were not bailed out.

Not coincidentally, minus not bailing out ordinary people, Trump does not win election in 2016.  (He also wouldn’t have won if Obamacare was not so flawed, but that’s another post.)

Trump is just the continued price for breaking your own laws and constitution, and your own unwritten norms.

As such he falls under “as you sow, so shall you reap”.

Until large numbers of Americans see it this way, including at least some faction of elites or would-be-elites, there can be no true fix for this situation, whatever happens with Trump.

Trump is the symptom, not the disease, and until you treat the disease, things like Trump (or the financial crisis and the lack of real recovery from that crisis) will continue to happen, and fools will continue to be bewildered by them, as if the very public actions of the people they elected had not led to them.

Machiavelli wrote, and America’s founders agreed, that good men could make bad laws work, and that good laws could not save bad men.

The founders’ equivalent was that eventually Americans would become so degraded that they could only be ruled by despots.

Americans have given many signs of being this degraded, and now it’s up to Americans to prove that they aren’t.

Don’t dare to say this is all on “deplorables” or Republicans, because Democrats have not just been complicit in all of this, they have spurred it on in deliberate ways–as with Obama on surveillance, drone murder, and whistleblowers.

It is on Americans.

Americans are reaping as they have sown. That all Americans are not bad or degraded is not the point. Enough of you are, and your elites are corrupt as a class, so much so that I would easily expect, in nine or ten years, to be fundamentally unethical and unsuited to public life. That includes, by the way, Bill Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Trump is what Americans have earned.

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If People Want To Use “Ze” As A Gender Neutral Pronoun, Whatever

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On December 14, 2016

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Oxford’s student union has suggested using “ze” as a gender neutral pronoun.

(Edit: Apparently, they haven’t even done that!)

It is an offense to use the wrong pronoun deliberately, but not required to use “ze” for everyone. This follows the University of Tennessee suggesting tutors ask students which pronoun they prefer.

I remember in the 70s when “Ms.” came into use. It felt really awkward, but in a couple years I didn’t even notice. It was an issue of basic politeness, if a woman didn’t want to announce her marriage status, it was polite to accommodate her and did me no harm. Gender neutral pronouns exist in various languages, and frankly, if “ze” comes into wide use, I might prefer it to the awkward “he or she” in places where “they” likewise feels awkward.

However, this is a minor issue, especially in America, where the right to an abortion has been receding for years and is now at real risk of being lost. I’m for trans-rights, etc…but the right to an abortion effects far more people and is far more basic.

(Theresa May, the UK’s Prime Minister, also supports a reduction in the allowed time for abortions to 20 weeks from 24, though how much she cares about this issue is unclear, and it’s not nearly the same thing as an overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US. Meanwhile, in Canada, we have no abortion law, and the world has not ended.)

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On Wikileaks’ Actions in this Election

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On October 26, 2016

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The last post, a guest post by Mandos, about Wikileaks’ releases concerning Clinton, has spawned a lot of controversy in the comments.

All of which we both expected.

So here’s my quick take on Wikileaks:

First, (Removed, as may be inaccurate) (Edit 3:06pm Oct 28th: it appears Wikileaks only linked to the Turkish database of women, and did not release that information itself.)

Second, the information Wikileaks has released on the US election is germane to the election. It is information which it is in the interests of the public to know. I believe that it should have been released. I do not know if it came from Russia, the evidence is circumstantial at best, but I don’t care if it did or not. The information is real, not fake, and that is what matters.

In 2004, the New York Times knew about widespread spying on ordinary people by the Bush administration. They chose not to release that information because they didn’t want to sway the election. That information might have been the difference between Kerry or Bush winning, the election was that close.

That was vast journalistic malpractice. Journalism is about the public’s right to know, and that information was clearly information the public should have known when making its decision who to vote for. It was germane.

That Clinton is a corporate hack who is essentially on the side of bankers (which is one thing the leaks clearly show) is germane to the election. It matters.

Most information held from public view should not be. We keep far too much stuff that the public should know, private. The public needed to know just how sympathetic to bankers Clinton was right after the financial collapse.

That is, actually, journalism.

So, I don’t agree with everything Wikileaks has done, but I support what it has done in relation to the US election. I also believe Assange when he says that if he had information on Trump he would release that as well. I don’t think the source of the information is particularly important, IF the information is real, which it appears to be.

That many people view this through partisan lenses is understandable and expected. Since the leaks have been Clinton leaks, suddenly the Right supports Wikileaks and “the Left” is against them.

I supported Wikileaks when they were goring Bush and Republicans with “Collateral Murder” and I support them now when they are goring Clinton, because I support Wikileaks on the basis of the public’s right to know; if any information can help the public judge whether they support the governments they have elected or those they may elect in the future.

This is not a partisan issue for me. It is an issue of principles. Information is either in the public interest, or it is not. If it is, and I believe, in this instance, it is, then I support its release.

As for the politics, if Trump loses, that will be on political and personal merits which have little to do with Wikileaks. In this I agree with Mandos; in a normal election, the information in the leaks might have sunk Clinton, but it is insufficient in the face of Trump’s problems.

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The Gun Control Sit-In

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On June 23, 2016

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I’m in favor of some form of gun control in the US, but this sit-in is so that people who are on the no-fly list can’t buy guns.

This is a terrible idea. There is no due process to such lists. You get on them for reasons you can’t determine, and you can’t get off them.

You do not have the right to see the evidence against you, to face your accuser, or to have any sort of trial. You’re just on it, sucker, too bad.

No punishment without a fair trial is one of the cornerstones of Western liberty and civilization. The no-fly list and all similar lists are abominations which should not exist.

If you want gun control, start by banning all assault rifles and restricting clip sizes. I’d be totally fine with banning all automatic and semi-automatic weapons, with the exception of old style pistols. Hunters should be using bolt or lever action rifles and pump shotguns (at most). Maybe then they’d learn how to shoot.

I’d extend these restrictions to the police, by the way, with a few years for phase out time.

Drop the penalties for non-violent crime, jack up the penalties for any crime committed with banned weapons; criminals actually do tend to respond to such incentives.

I think there’s a strong case to be made that the US should have properly regulated militias and that the US government has failed in its duty to make sure such exist, but I am not sold on the broader 2nd amendment argument.

I do have much more sympathy than most left-wingers for the “guns against tyranny” argument, but the US is vastly armed and it hasn’t done any good. See “no-fly list” and “most incarcerated nation on Earth.” What matters in violence is organized violence.

In any case, whatever one thinks about gun control, using the no-fly list or any similar list is a terrible idea. Western civilization spent a thousand years fighting for the right to fair trials and due process. It would be wise not to confirm the adage that all you have to do to get people to beg you to take away their rights is make them a little scared.

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Charlie Hebdo Will No Longer Publish Cartoons Showing the Prophet

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On July 26, 2015

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Yes, violence often gets people what they want.

Also, France is passing increasingly draconian surveillance laws.

Freedom. It was a nice dream.

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