America?

So I was goofing off and taking silly quizzes on the web when suddenly I came across a question that wasn’t so silly. It went a little something like this:

If you had to make an important decision about something that would affect others, which of these factors would you consider most strongly?

• Justice
• Compassion
• Practicality
• Self-interest

I sat here for about 5 whole minutes mentally kicking this one around. I immediately eliminated Self-interest - it’s a perfectly worthwhile answer, but given that my judgment is going to carry repercussions for many others it automatically feels least important to me. In the broader scheme of things I’m not sure that this tendency is such a plus; it’s often been suggested to me that I am by nature too unselfish for my own good… but I digress.

After another minute or two I eliminated Practicality. A course of action, I reasoned, shouldn’t be considered more right because it’s the easiest or most practical way to go. Here again, I like my decision but readily admit it as evidence that I’m a lousy capitalist.

I finally settled on Compassion, mainly because I’m a big fan of it. If you’re surprised, hear me out.

Justice seems like the obvious answer. Everyone loves Justice, me included, but the problem is that no two people’s notions of Justice are quite the same. For only one example, If you’re deciding what to do with a confessed murderer, the victim’s family is most likely going to have a different idea of justice than the murderer’s mother would have. This, of course, is a single specific example, not necessarily correlative to the hypothetical decision I’d be making.
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Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamahana has shared a moment of sickening clarity:

I had lunch today with a prominent German Constitutional scholar who was flabbergasted about something that I could not adequately explain.

He asked me how the candidate to become the top legal official of the U.S. government could say that he does not know whether water-boarding constitutes “torture” (as Judge Mukasey stated yesterday in his confirmation hearings). My colleague insisted that in Germany any person who uttered such a statement would be finished. He found it shocking that a person could say this in America and still become our Attorney General.

At first I was surprised at his genuine disbelief; and then I felt a bit ashamed that I did not also react with disbelief.

And yesterday at Slate, a piece co-written Dahlia Lithwick (whose reporting over the last year or two on the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation practices has been consistently stellar) and Philip Carter brings another aspect of Mukasey’s craven dissembling into focus. The rub:

…Mukasey’s worst sleight-of-hand regarding waterboarding [is] his assertion Thursday that to comment about specific techniques would be irresponsible “when there are people who are using coercive techniques and who are being authorized to use coercive techniques. … And for me to say something that is going to put their careers or freedom at risk simply because I want to be congenial—I don’t think it would be responsible of me to do that.” Please. This administration has put careers at risk by muddying legal rules. If Mukasey really wanted to save careers, he would reinstate the bright-line rules that define and prohibit torture, as opposed to confusing and confounding them. By muddying these rules, we have now put generations of our own soldiers at risk should they ever be captured. It is they, and not Mukasey, who may face enemies using these very practices, shored up with our own tortured logic.

It is the oldest trick in the Bush administration’s psychological playbook to claim that we must be one serious badass nation if we are willing to do sick, unspeakable things to our enemies—even in the face of international condemnation and in violation of our own laws and ethical rules. But when those sick, unspeakable practices endanger our own soldiers, horrify our allies, and embolden our enemies, we don’t look like badasses anymore. We just look like sadists. And when those practices don’t even work, we look like stupid sadists to boot. There’s an easy fix here. Renounce torture. It was once an unremarkable proposition that the Unites States doesn’t stand for senseless sadism. What a tragedy that defending it has suddenly become a point of principle.

I think there’s still hope of cleansing our country’s reputation once we can get rid of the Bush cabal. If I didn’t think so, I’d be acting on a thought that I confess occurred to me a few times recently - something I never dreamed I’d even consider for a brief moment: emigrating.

Even in this era of with-us-or-against-us partisanship, I never cease to be amazed at the neocons’ mendacious, irresponsible, utterly illogical denial of the escalating environmental crisis. You can arm yourself with Coby Beck’s excellent syllabus, but what can you ultimately do about people who are shallow enough to play politics with the habitability of the planet?

I have beaten my head against this particular wall in far too many conversations, so today, I’m sending in the cavalry.

Who’s a puppet now?

Put down that cup of coffee, unless you like a mess. Courtesy of TPM Muckraker:

Gitmo to Stay Open as Human Rights Sanctuary

Turns out it’s more than just a catchy headline. The story is that the good ol’ Bush administration wants to slim down the prisoner headcount at Gitmo from the current 360 to 150. So good news for 210 wrongfully-imprisoned and even-more-wrongfully tortured detainees? Actually, no. We’ve still got one more level of wrongful to go: there’s nowhere to drop them off. Their home countries and all of the possible foster-home states that have been asked either won’t take them, or won’t take them without promising not to torture or kill them. So they get to stay in Guantánamo, where their human rights will be, uh, protected.

I wonder if they’d take any consolation in not being among the other 150 prisoners - the ones the Bush DoD doesn’t want to get rid of. Of those 150, Bush & Co. have selected 80 finalists whom they want to [beverages down again...] charge with war crimes. I shit you not. The Bush administration, having exempted itself from international accords and the U.S. Constitution in order to avoid being charged with war crimes, is gearing up to charge some of the victims of its war crimes with war crimes. Yes, some of them are surely guilty of war crimes, but we’ll never really know with the kangaroo-court military tribunals that will try them.

What about the 50 semi-finalists? The Bush junta says that they’re too dangerous to release from Gitmo, but not bad enough to put on trial. Um… I have nothing to add to this point. I guess my digust has reached critical mass, at least for the moment.

The thing that’s saddening me the most right now is that after 6+ years of Bush, this level of absurdity doesn’t even seem unusual anymore. It’s like a ghastly, global-scale version of one of the “Cowboys and Indians” games I participated in during my single-digit years: the ones where the biggest kids make up the rules as they go along, and their manipulations become more and more illogical until chaos and disillusionment set in and the game collapses.

Would that I could just say “I’m not playing anymore,” quit the war on terror and walk home.