The Iceman Cometh

Army Spc. Sabrina Hartman, 372nd MP Co.,
poses with the body of Iraqi detainee Manadel al-Jamadi

There isn't a more profitable undertaking
for any country than to declare war
on the United States and to be defeated.
--The Mouse That Roared (1959)

To hell with the truth!
As the history of the world proves,
the truth has no bearing on anything
--The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill
________________

Ranger Observation of the Day:
Terrorism Counteraction is Social Security
provided to the world, sans enrollment cost.
The entitlement is funded by the American taxpayer,
borne upon the backs of American servicemen.
It is socialism on a grand scale,
but nobody calls it what it is
_________________

Several recent media events coalesce in Ranger's mind. Justice is not an easy commodity to find these days.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9-11-01 attacks, is on trial but not in a federal court, and evidence of his torture has been ruled inadmissible. It was a destined to be a failed exercise out of the chute.

Why the subterfuge? The defendant knows he was tortured and we know it, so why pretend otherwise? KSM is a criminal and by no stretch a soldier, and he should have been tried as one.

More procedural exemptions when reptilian attorney John Yoo, George W. Bush's best boy, was exonerated by the 4th Federal Circuit court from being held responsible for Jose Padilla's torture complaints because "torture was not defined at the time." When President Obama said this is "a time for reflection, not retribution," he swept away with a statement any hope for justice against the purveyors of torture.

The photo at the top shows a gleeful U.S. service member posing with Manadel al-Jamadi ("The Iceman"), an Abu Ghraib suspect surely killed as a result of this indefinable thing once known as torture. Torture must be like pornography as defined by Justice Potter Stewart: You can't define it, but you know it when you see it. So even if torture remains undefined, homicide does not, and the Iceman was a homicide. Yet Yoo is off the hook for homicide, too.

But Obama also biased the trial of George Zimmerman when he inappropriately said that Trayvon Martin "could have been my son." Why didn't Obama say that Zimmerman could have been his son, for surely we can imagine an upstanding Obama scion being a neighborhood watchman and finding himself in that terrible situation from the other side, too.

And why isn't Yoo charged exactly the same as is George Zimmerman? Did not Yoo's ruling contribute directly to an unknown number of deaths like that of the iceman? Ah, but Yoo is in the privileged strata of humans, doing the dirty work of politicians everywhere. John Yoo screwed the pooch and he will never account for his crime. He is merely consigned to a life in hippy Berkeley, doing penance teaching legal ethics before the privileged offspring of liberals, his own kind of hell.

Odd days when an alleged child pornographer makes it onto the 10 Most Wanted List and will serve more time in jail than the torturers and murderers who walk amongst us. Zimmerman is losing his witnesses due to darkness and poor eyesight; it is a metaphor for the times. The reality is probably closer to the suggestion of an early NPR report -- intimidation. The witnesses live in Zimmerman's complex; angry people will find them, so they are taking the Schultz way out: I saw NOTHING, this after originally claiming the opposite.

So this is what passes for justice today: Lies, hypocrisy, intimidation, power and privilege, with a healthy dose of bigotry and paranoia. If Zimmerman is not convicted, will we be as quiescent as when Yoo was exonerated? As when O.J. was acquitted of killing his white wife, Nicole Brown?

Paying the Piper

The Aragon was a cock-up, the Yank said.
No artillery, no plans, no timing, no leaders,
everybody running around like rabbits
--from Moment of War, Laurie Lee (1991)

To compare terrorism with an all-encompassing
ideology like communism and fascism is evidence
of profound confusion
--Sen Joseph Biden [D-DE]
(from "Republicans and our Enemies")

Where's your shame
You've left us up to our necks in it
--Changes, David Bowie
_____________

The true-blue cheerleaders of the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) are right about one thing: they do want to destroy our way of life. Except the "they" are members of the National Command Authority to include partisan lawyers justifying the Dr. Jekyll nature of U.S. policy.

Two of the worst of the worst, David Addington and "puling scrivner Yoo" (as beautifully embodied by fellow blogger FDChief here) recently testified before Congress to little fanfare. Two men who should raise the righteous ire of any self-respecting Democratic member of Congress, raised nary a whimper.

What is changing our lives and destroying our freedoms are the actions and inactions of our elected leaders. Our lives are being diminished by federal operating deficits in excess of $500 billion per year, the punishing costs of elective phony wars, the skyrocketing price of oil and gas and all that devolves from that and the price of everything rises due to the devaluation of the dollar, the inevitable result of a broken consumer economy. One figure guaranteed not to rise anytime soon is the average paycheck or subsidy allowance.

The threat to the U.S. is not posed by terrorists. The threat is posed by willful ignorance by all players of the ugly issues facing our boy-in-the-bubble societal mindset, or as Steve Pearlstein in WaPo called it, our "mirage economy." Forget Iraq and Afghanistan -- who will pay the piper when the jig is up?

Those regions will both survive without our beneficence. They function as costly distraction, much as the pathologized member of a triangulation functions in a family system. The war hawks can project and focus the ire of a population on The Other for a time, but eventually, when the floor drops out from beneath them the citizens will notice.

Most still accept the long war paradigm vis-a-vis current conflicts, but an even bigger problem is that our national planners are anticipating future wars of the same nature. Even usually lucid Senators Joseph Biden and Richard Lugar of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say we need "a new national security act," that gives the U.S. a diplomatic and civil administrative strike force capacity, ready to move into "Iraq-type conflicts as the military is to cope with hostile forces" (Foreign Policy's Best Hope.)

The U.S. must focus on the welfare and survivability of our nation before spending irreplaceable deficit dollars on pipe dreams.

Viewed another way, don't invasions and forced regime changes mean we hate them and want to take away their freedoms and change their way of life? U.S. policy does to them what Bush says they want to do to us. "I know you are, but what am I?" Does this make adult sense?

Such a sham; such a shame. Our combat might enable elections in theatre, but without any meaningful democratic features. Theirs is a government of flunkies, minus country or national consensus or identity. Maybe that is why our confederacy of dunces declare all is going well -- it is a case of narcissistic identification.

Our armies are fomenting hatred and embitterment that cannot be quelled with palletized greenbacks or ballot box props.

T Squared

John Yoo, Torture Memo author

Hear the loud alarum bells
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
--The Bells (1849), Edgar Allen Poe

The bells are ringin' for me and my gal.
The birds are singin' for me and my gal
--For Me and My Gal, Meyer/Leslie/Goetz
_________

The title refers to the subjects of this piece -- tinnitus and torture. Outrage, with a personal bent.

GWB the equivocator recently stated unequivocally that the U.S. does not engage in torture (isn't this a logical contrapositive: if a liar says something is not true [i.e., that the U.S. commits torture], isn't that the same as an honest person saying the truth is that the U.S. does commit torture?) Specifically, this addresses John Yoo's munificent definition in his original "torture memo" that torture is punishment that could result in organ failure.

Tinnitus is organ damage to the ear that can be caused by exposure to loud sounds. It can result in sensorineural hearing loss and a cascade of other problems emanating from the initial abuse. Some experts believe the damage is not only site-specific, but the brain is also involved.

Some effects of tinnitus are depression, inability to concentrate, irritability, impotence and even suicide. Tinnitus cannot be treated or reversed. Once you get it, you've got it for good.

Most combat soldiers have this condition and often don't realize it because the ringing and buzzing become the normal background.

One of the favored enhanced U.S. interrogation techniques is sleep deprivation combined with sensory overload/deprivation, combined with excessively loud music played over long periods of time. Tinnitus is being inflicted through this high decibel bombardment upon suspect's ears and brains.

As a bilateral tinnitus sufferer, Ranger knows the torture of lifetime damage to his ears. From that experience, I can assume lifetime disabling problems are being inflicted on these subjects. By John Yoo's definition, treatment equivalent to that which can result in organ failure is torture. Ears are organs.

The administration and intelligence agencies must stop this deplorable interrogation technique. It is neither cute nor effective. Inflicting this condition intentionally is torture in this Ranger's book.