What Bible translation are you using? Because it doesn't read like mine does

TPM brings us Pastor [sic] Steven Anderson (no relation), of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona:

Chris Broughton, the man who brought an assault rifle and a handgun to the Obama event in Arizona last week, attended a fiery anti-Obama sermon the day before the event, in which Pastor Steven Anderson said he was going to "pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell", Anderson confirmed to TPMmuckraker today. * * *

"I don't obey Barack Obama. And I'd like Barack Obama to melt like a snail tonight," Anderson said in the sermon.

The sermon, which was titled "Why I Hate Barack Obama" and also contained virulent anti-gay themes, continued:

... you're going to tell me that I'm supposed to pray for the socialist devil, murderer, infanticide, who wants to see young children and he wants to see babies killed through abortion and partial-birth abortion and all these different things -- you're gonna tell me I'm supposed to pray for God to give him a good lunch tomorrow while he's in Phoenix, Arizona?

Nope. I'm not gonna pray for his good. I'm going to pray that he dies and goes to hell. * * *

"No where in the sermon did I advocate vigilantism," Anderson said today, reached at the church. "It's a spiritual battle."

He continued: "I'd rather have him die of natural causes anyway, that way he's not some martyr. I'm praying for him to die just so he gets what he deserves."

Obama Derangement Syndrome, anyone?

The Secret Service has been by to chat with Mr. Anderson, who doubtless will be discussing that particular bit of socialist oppression on some Fox News show in a day or two.

Then the bear got onto his Harley and drove away

WWTDD brings us this photo of a bear climbing out of a skateboard park ... on a ladder.Nothing about the whereabouts of the two skateboarders who went missing at that park the previous night.

Because standing 24/7, chained, in a diaper, isn't "degrading"

Daphne Eviatar notices that, apparently, Steven Bradbury's July 2007 memo on "enhanced interrogation techniques" is still good law at OLC:

“It’s surprising how little the analysis in this memo changed from the past memos, notwithstanding the passage of the [Detainee Treatment Act] and the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan,” said American Civil Liberties Union national security project lawyer Alex Abdo.

The July 2007 opinion, for example, analyzed whether prolonged sleep deprivation for up to 96 straight hours (or 180 hours in a 30-day period) while a prisoner is forced to stand, shackled, in diapers, and eventually in his own urine and feces violates the Detainee Treatment Act and Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions on “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.

The Justice Department lawyers concluded that it does not violate either law, even if the sleep deprivation is combined with restriction to a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet (half the recommended daily human intake) of liquid formula, and with “corrective techniques” such as the “facial hold,” “facial slap,” and “abdominal slap”.

The rules are not violated because the CIA has determined that such techniques are “safe”, concludes the memo, meaning they cause no “serious,” permanent or long-lasting injury.

So "degrading" treatment isn't degrading if it's "safe"?

The lawyers are confident of that conclusion because “the CIA adapted each of the techniques from those used in the United States military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (“SERE”) training,” which is “designed to familiarize U.S. troops with interrogation techniques they might experience in enemy custody and to train these troops to resist such techniques.”

Although the lawyers recognize “that a detainee in CIA custody will be in a very different situation from U.S. military personnel who experienced SERE training, the CIA nonetheless found it important that no significant or lasting medical or psychological harm had resulted from the use of these techniques on U.S. military personnel over many years in SERE training.”

That’s the same reasoning the OLC used to justify waterboarding and other techniques in its Aug. 1, 2002 memo.

The Aug. 31, 2006 Office of Legal Counsel memo goes on to say that the techniques don’t “shock the conscience” – the same standard the lawyers used in 2005 to say the CIA’s interrogation techniques didn’t violate the international Convention Against Torture.

In effect, in the Justice Department’s view, despite the new law and Supreme Court interpretation, nothing had changed.

Is all this continuing under Obama? Who knows?

Voice mail victims of the world, unite!

A White Bear wonders why we tolerate insanely long voicemail messages:

An infuriatingly calm female voice slowly intones things I can fucking take for granted, given that I am a sentient being who apparently has placed a phone call, probably more than once in my life.

The answer, I guess, is that we need the party we're calling more than they need us. The electric utility, for instance. We're calling either to report an outage, or to pay the bill at the last minute to prevent an outage. Either way, we need our freakin' electricity ON, and we are not going to hang up because Prozac Jane takes four minutes to explain the menu options to us.

Utilitarianism in action

I got in trouble over at EOTAW for bringing up Mary Jo Kopechne in response to Ted Kennedy's (unfortunate, premature) death. Apparently it was gauche to interrupt the canonization of Teddy as the Greatest American Senator Ever.

No one, however, quite came out and said, "what's one dead chick versus the good that Kennedy later accomplished?"

Joyce Carol Oates has now filled that indecency gap:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

What, indeed?

I've found the next Tarantino movie

Haven't made it to Inglourious Basterds yet, but I already have the subject matter of the next flick doped out (h/t The Plank):

LIBYAN leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's glamorous bodyguards stole the show when he arrived in Rome this week.

The dictator, who calls himself a pioneer of 'Islamic socialism', doesn't let his female security detail hide their charms under a burqa.

The all female bodyguards, along with their khaki uniforms and red berets, wear lipstick, jewellery, and even high heels - but are trained in armed combat.

All 40 guards are virgins, and he insists they remain so.

What's not to like?

... Damn. Second commenter at The Plank: "This seems like something Tarantino would dream up. Virgin chop socky smash in defense of a a mysterious belief system (Islamic Socialism)!"

... Based on the photo above, I'm thinking the head of state protected by the Deadly Virgin Squad is an easy role for Bruce Willis.

You can't make this party up

U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins told a recent gathering in northeast Kansas that the Republican Party is looking for a "great white hope" to help stop the political agenda of the Democratic party and President Barack Obama.

Videotape shows Jenkins, a Republican, making the comment at an Aug. 19 forum.

-- Associated Press, Aug. 26, 2009.

The bookshelf

What have I been reading? Forgetting to update this at least monthly means I've forgotten some stuff.

Jenkins, Asquith. Typically good Jenkins for political coverage, while failing, as with his Gladstone book, to give a strong sense of the personality. It's never terribly clear for instance what Margot meant to him, or what was going on inside him to make him so passionate for Venetia Stanley. This was not a fault of Jenkins's excellent Churchill bio, possibly because Churchill's personality was so powerful, or just that I already had a sense of what Churchill was like.

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. My favorite novel, in high school; now, I admire his descriptions more than I used to, but the characterization is poor. Catherine seems too much of a fantasy girl (perhaps what commended it to me in high school), and her death's foreshadowing is heavy as a pile of bricks. Picked it up in a British paperback whose advert pages notified me that, in Britain, The Sun Also Rises was published as Fiesta. Good heavenly lord.

Langguth, Patriots. I liked his Vietnam book, and thus far the focus on individuals is working well in this book on the American Revolution -- there's a lot more on the leadup to the rebellion than I'd seen before. Though Langguth is surely the first person to be inspired to write about our revolution by the example of the Vietnamese war against France and America.

Kershaw, Fateful Choices. Not sure why I've been rereading this actually. A good study, distinguishing absolutely gratuitous blunders (Mussolini's invasion of Greece) from hard but arguably compelled choices (Hitler's war on Russia).

Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Finally got around to finishing this. Quite readable, and anyone who can make me want to pick up more Hegel is doing something well. His thesis, once one actually reads the book, is not terribly radical. How much, though, can any era see the next era coming?

(... Have picked back up Hegel's Philosophy of Right which I shamefully abandoned months ago in the midst of Hegel's introduction. I think I'm going to spot him his dialectic and just take him for whatever the hell he says about stuff, without worrying how he got there.)

MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend. The "one to read" is deplorably out of print in this country, but with Amazon all things are possible. Hadn't realized quite how gay Byron was, but then, not many had prior to MacCarthy's book -- she does force the interpretation here and there, but the evidence overall seems indisputable.

Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions. A minor classic of the fantasy genre; I'd never read any Anderson, oddly enough, but found this in a bookshop in Laurel, Miss. Emphasis on "minor" -- the world-building is dubious, the prose is mediocre. But it's fun seeing how much Gary Gygax grabbed from this book for D&D, and the part where the elfin duke recites a legend about Brigadier Gerard just about made the book worthwhile by itself.

Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. Tyler Cowen talked this up, and while Cowen is too idiosyncratic to be always reliable (bought a dreadful Shostakovich violin concerto at his behest once), I'm dark enough on the Dark Ages that this seemed worth a buy -- even if he really does omit the Battle of Tours. I note that the Penguin History of Europe volumes have gotten longer since the appallingly short Europe in the High Middle Ages, which is a good thing.

Speaking of war crimes

We heard the news the other day of William Calley's belated public apology for his mass murder at My Lai, but Sullyblog links to a fellow who saw Calley at the Kiwanis Club:

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai, “ William Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus today. His voice started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.” * * *

I asked him for his reaction to the notion that a soldier does not have to obey an unlawful order. In fact, to obey an unlawful order is to be unlawful yourself. He said, “I believe that is true. If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd Lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them - foolishly, I guess.” He said that was no excuse, just what happened.

William Calley, Jr:Some of his victims:Note the baby near the center, and the one in the purple shirt in the foreground.

Did convicting John Yoo just get a little easier?

Possibly, judging by two tidbits from Monday's torture-doc dump.

Emptywheel notes that the docs point to "a CIA document on the 'Legal Principles' on torture that included legal justifications that had not been in any of the August 1, 2002 OLC memos authorizing torture." The IG report describes it:

OGC continued to consult with DoJ as the CTC Interrogation Program and the use of EITs expanded beyond the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. This resulted in the production of an undated and unsigned document entitled, "Legal Principles Applicable to CIA Detention and Interrogation of Captured Al-Qa'ida Personnel." According to OGC, this analysis was fully coordinated with and drafted in substantial part by OLC. In addition to reaffirming the previous conclusions regarding the torture statute, the analysis concludes that the federal War Crimes statute, 18 U.S.C. 2441, does not apply to Al-Qa'ida "Because members of that-group are not entitled to prisoner of war status. The analysis adds that "the [Torture] Convention permits the use of [cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment] in exigent circumstances, such as a national emergency or war."

One version of this document is here; another, here (via, again, Emptywheel).

Tidbit # 1: OLC's involvement in the document, contrary to OGC's representation, seems to have been confined to the kibbitzing of one John Yoo. Jack Goldsmith wrote the IG to dissent from that portion of the report, and said quite bluntly:

OLC also believes that the status of the bullet points was made clear at a meeting on June 17, 2003 soon after the Deputy Assistant Attorney General with whom OGC had consulted on the bullet points had departed from the Department of Justice.

So Yoo was not, here, acting formally on behalf of OLC. Rather, he was acting as part of the "torture team" -- the inner circle doing its best to make torture happen.

That becomes even more clear from Tidbit # 2 (Smintheus, via 1st Emptywheel link above). The bolded portion in that quote from the Legal Principles, above? Total moonshine:

The UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment says no such thing. The OLC/OGC lawyers evidently were insinuating that the Convention drew a very major distinction between the prohibitions against torture on the one hand, and against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment on the other. Article 2 of the Convention states explicitly that there are no circumstances that may be used to justify torture:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

It is true that the Convention does not repeat the Article 2 statement when it later discusses "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment". However that discussion (in Article 16) is extremely brief and to the point: that governments should prevent 'cruel etc. treatment' as they do torture and should give its victims the same legal recourse as victims of torture. There is no implication whatsoever in the Convention that "exigent circumstances" permit the use of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Indeed, the US wrote the following to the UN Committee against Torture ten years ago regarding its implementation of the Convention (Report of the United States to the UN Committee against Torture, October 15, 1999, UN Doc. CAT/C/28/Add.5, February 9, 2000, para. 6):

No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture. US law contains no provision permitting otherwise prohibited acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances (for example, during a "state of public emergency") or on orders from a superior officer or public authority, and the protective mechanisms of an independent judiciary are not subject to suspension.

So, when do the torture memos written by John Yoo and friends rise beyond the level of bad lawyering and into the much shadier territory of deliberate falsification for the purpose of facilitating, enabling, or encouraging torture? Because at that point I'd think even the timid Eric Holder's Justice Department would be forced to prosecute them.

From his mouth to God's ears, my friends.

... Andrew Sullivan, apparently paying a visit to his own blog, reminds us what Yoo's legal work resulted in:

Here's what the "CIA pros" did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president's directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance "the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody". Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. * * *

John McCain will remember these techniques and variants of them from his time in the Hanoi Hilton. If this is not torture, then torture does not exist. And if this is America, and there is no accountability for these war crimes, then core American values have ceased to exist as well.

But please, let's look forward.

The CIA's Inspector General report

It's out, in very heavily redacted form. For instance, the entirety of the "recommendations" are redacted. Not sure how much we can glean from this, though Emptywheel et al. will doubtless sift for any gems.

Skimming, it's interesting to note another confirmation of Ron Suskind's reporting.

Suskind wrote in The One Percent Doctrine:

According to several former CIA officials, interrogators told KSM his children would be hurt if he didn't cooperate.

OIG report, p. 43:

An experienced Agency interrogator reported that the interrogators threatened Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. According to this interrogator, the interrogators said to Khalid Shaykh Muhammad that if anything else happens in the United States, "We're going to kill your children."

As Suskind went on to note:

The traditional models of debriefing, used by both FBI and CIA, involved the building of a relationship, no matter how long and arduous a process. It's the need for some human contact, some basic comfort, rather than simply the bottomless human fear, which ultimately triumphs. The captive's previous life starts to fade and is slowly replaced by one constructed, often ingeniously, by his captors. This method, which the FBI still recommends, was cancelled out by what they [CIA] did to KSM. That's the gamble. Once you do something as horrific as threaten someone's children, and it doesn't work -- there's nowhere else to go.

KSM's children were 7 and 9 at the time, wrote Suskind.

... Blowing cigar smoke in al-Nashiri's face was done, said the interrogators, "to mask the stench in the room" (p. 43). What stench? Was al-Nashiri left in his own wastes? Note also that smoke was used "to make them ill to the point where they would start to 'purge'" (p. 72).

The End of History and the Last Fan

For most of post-historical Europe, the World Cup has replaced military competition as the chief outlet for nationalist strivings to be number one. As Kojève once said, his goal was to re-establish the Roman Empire, but this time as a multinational soccer team.

-- Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, at 319.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Mt. Shasta News, via Kleiman:

Republican Congressman Wally Herger held a health care town hall meeting Aug. 18 at Simpson University in Redding, where a partisan crowd of over 2,000 people loudly cheered Herger’s position that a public option was “unacceptable.” * * *

One speaker said he could trace his ancestors back to the Mayflower and said “they did not arrive holding their hands out for help.”

“I am a proud right wing terrorist,” he declared to cheers.

Herger praised the man’s attitude.

“Amen, God bless you,” Herger said with a broad smile. “There is a great American.”

Leaving aside the obvious, did our Mayflower descendant ever read about Thanksgiving?

In which we judge a book by its cover

Over at Bookslut, Nina McLaughlin writes about an early Edna O'Brien novel, August Is a Wicked Month, which I am determined to find and read, because of (1) the excellent title, (2) McLaughlin's description of the book, which makes me wonder why I've not read any O'Brien, and (3) the cover, which appears to be a photograph of the author:That is just the most compelling portrait photo I've seen in a long time.

Question:

Why would the New Yorker waste my time telling me what David Denby thinks about the new Quentin Tarantino flick?

Next up: Rush Limbaugh reviews The Audacity of Hope.

... Okay, I could rail on Denby all day, but here's one example only:

In “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” Tarantino, in apparent homage to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns (Ennio Morricone, Leone’s composer, is on the soundtrack), photographs the Bride’s progress across the West in wide-open spaces. Yet, at the crucial moment, he doesn’t hold to the demanding aesthetics of open space; he stages the violence in Budd’s narrow trailer, where it’s impossible to see anything clearly and he has to fake the violence in order to do it at all. The Bride, having escaped her coffin, takes on Elle, and the two tall, skinny blond actresses go at each other with knee, toe, and claw. The female savagery is exciting, in a garishly meaningless way, but the actual violence resembles two flies buzzing around in a bottle. All you see in this boxed-in space is motion, not the acts themselves.

The trailer fight is a *hoot*. Tarantino has a lot of fun with the cramped trailer -- too narrow to draw a samurai sword, flimsy walls you can smash right through, etc. Denby is too much concerned with whether the scene looks like his own mental ideal of a fight scene to appreciate it on its own terms.

(And Elle Driver "for no good reason, humiliates Budd and kills him"? Is "getting a Hattori Hanzo sword for free, thus saving a million dollars" not a good reason, in Denby's book? Has Denby missed the clear personal antagonism between Elle and Budd, which -- given that Elle is a murderous, vicious sort to start with -- is plenty of justification for humiliating him? Does Denby actually *watch* the movie, or just have someone take notes for him?)