YANKING ON THE CHOKE-CHAIN

YANKING ON THE CHOKE-CHAIN : Among red diaper babies who came of age in the sixties, when paranoia struck deep into our lives it often crept in the form of a book which had not yet come of age- George Orwell’s 1984.

Written in 1948, at it’s then futuristic heart was a depiction of the now common practice of using less ominous euphemisms to replace hot button words with cooler though less accurate language.

Sure enough the practice was perfected during the Regan years and has become a de rigor cog of the modern political spin machine.

At first the press was skeptical but as real journalism devolved into a quick juxtaposition of unexamined opposing quotes of the “he said she said” ilk, truth became a casualty and “they say it- we print it” became the standard M..O. for every corporate reporter and editor.

What used to be episodes of acknowledged Orwellian doublethink- and the resultant popular term doublespeak, which is actually not part of the book- are now part of a widely accepted Orwellianism that doesn’t even elicit a second thought from the Joe News-consumer.

So it’s not really surprising that every- and we mean every- news report about the Bush administration’s torturing of prisoners refers to “enhanced interrogation techniques” sometimes adding “that some refer to as torture”

No! (and we don’t use exclamation marks lightly). What are we, freakin’ idiots? It’s torture- it never was and never will be anything else. The only ones who call it “enhanced interrogation” are the ones who tortured people.

The fact that some wigged-out wise-asses tried to write their way out of it at the behest of the administration overlords doesn’t make it anything but torture under an assumed name.

But the mainstream corporate press is so entombed in the cacophony of their own echo chamber that they can actually no longer press the BS button and report the “truth”, allowing special interests to dictate the very language that the last generation so profoundly feared would supplant the apparent.

Perhaps due to 21st Century corporate-style reporting, apparently the current “current occupant”- to use humorist Garrison Keilor’s catch-phrase for the last White House denizen- is perfectly happy being every bit as lawless as his predecessor, using George Bush’s creative constitutionalism to think himself enough of a “unitary executive” to say who is and isn’t above the law.

It is illegal to the US to torture prisoners, not just under international law but under the 1988 U.N. Convention Against Torture that Ronald Regan signed, making the law of the land.

What’s even worse than the misuse of language may be the notion that somehow “it worked” so it’s all an “ends justifies the means” wash.

Where to start with this little bit of disingenuous drivel, where to start?

We could start with the fact that the ends rarely justify the means.

Or we might ask who defines “works”... Dick Chaney? His citation of the fact that there hasn’t been another 9/11-style incident to show it “worked” is like the old joke about the guy wearing a tin-foil hat, dancing on one foot on the center stripe of the freeway, saying he’s keeping away the elephants and citing the lacking proximal presence of pachyderms as proof of his success.

Only a war-criminal could ignore decades of research showing that torture does not work.

The latest in a long line of interrogators who have almost unanimously reached this conclusion is U.S. Major Matthew Alexander -a named assumed for security reasons- who personally interrogated 300 Iraqi prisoners.

According to the UK newspaper The Independent, in his book with John R Bruning called “How to Break a Terrorist: The US interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq”, he details what everyone from the FBI to the CIA to every cop-on-the-beat knows- that developing a relationship with a subject is what elicits information.

Torture elicits, at best no information and at worst incorrect information and “confessions” from those who will say whatever the torturer wants to hear, many times “information” designed to mislead and sometimes to injure those in whose name the torture is performed.

The squishy moral center of American political leadership isn’t something new- for all the deification of the founding fathers their genocide of 30 million native Americans and enslavement of an equal number of Africans sometimes makes the Nazis look like incompetent amateurs.

According to Wikipedia the Nuremberg Principles were a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime, set down during the Nuremberg trials of Nazis after WWII and signed by the U.S.
Principle IV says:

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

That’s principle came as a result of the famous Nuremberg Defense used by those who, like the CIA personnel and others in Iraq and Guantanamo, were “ordered” to torutre or kill but said they were not responsible because they were “just following orders.”

As important for President Barack Obama, who has apparently “decided”- or at least “instructed” the Attorney General- not to prosecute the actual torturers, is Principle VII which says:

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

Complicity under U.S, law includes obstructing justice especially to hinder prosecution which would make Obama an accessory to war crimes if he bans prosecution of those covered under Principle IV.

It should also be noted that war crimes include not just actual torture but any “ill-treatment of prisoners of war”

Torture itself is banned under Article 4 of the 1949 Third Geneva Convention and defined in part as

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a male or female person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information...

Some, even among those who show the intelectual curioisty and consistancy to go beyond the usual left-right, Democratic-Republican and American-forigner axese, may accepet the “truths” herein described and yet still feel compelled to case-specifically shun the rule of law.

They may see the war crimes of Bush, Chaney, Rice, Gonzalez and others so heinous as to shake the county to it’s core and undermine the foundation should they be proescuted and many rather call for a “truth and recociliation commission” type resolution.

But the rule of law, if not to insure punishment or make re-offending impossible, is to insure, as people said after “the” holocaust, it happens “never again”.

If they count on the people of the country to “never again” elect someone with a predilection for such criminal intent they’d best remember how unlikely many American voters thought such a scenario in November of 2000.

1984 came, just as predicted- both the year and the world ascribed to it in the book. But while we calmly munch our pita-bread and watch reporters on the wall mounted screen discuss the circus of a recent NY Times editorial discussion regarding whether the “enhanced interrogations” were merely “harsh” or should now be described as “brutal”, we’d best remember that 2540 is yet to come and even now it’s beginning to look like a “Brave New World”.

HEEL

HEEL: Sports fans all know the routine.

You just don’t do it- ever....you don’t say it out loud. You don’t sit down, turn on the TV for the big game and say to your buddy “well this one is in the bag- we’re gonna win easy”. When your team takes a big lead late in the game you may think it but you never say “well, this one is over.”

The “jinx” factor is just too strong.... and you don’t have to be a sports fan to whistle in the graveyard or knock on wood either.

That irrationality may be the only plausible explanation for why no one wants to ask “what the heck is going on with this $1.99 a gallon gas just months after $150 a barrel ”peak oil” was redefining our future in every imaginable aspect.

Six months ago you couldn’t turn on a panel of TV talking heads without hearing detailed explanations of the hows and whys of soaring prices and the resulting imperative for a change in the very essence of our energy production and consumption.

Now it’s shhhh- don’t say anything... you’ll hex it.

Has anyone heard anything? Nope, not a peep in the press asking how the heck this price drop happened. And along with that is a severe dearth of discussion of any plans to address what was and will be a crisis again... very shortly.

We’re not much for evidence-free conspiracy theories. But that said there is little we wouldn’t put past most of corporate America.

And we’re hardly alone in thinking there’s absolutely nothing we wouldn’t put past the oil companies.

While the price for oil soared there was no end to the detailed price-fixing charges against “big oil”... not that it really took much of a jump to connect the record profits from Exxon-Mobile, Shell and the rest to the jacked up prices that seem to have no basis in reality or rational economics.

But no one- and we mean not the mainstream corporate media, not the alternative media, not even the bloggers- is questioning this brief era of cheap gas..

Now why would the oil companies conspire to lower prices beyond all reason- even more beyond reason than last Springs’s spike?

If you have to ask what Veep Chaney and his Bushy cohorts are up to, as Jon Stewart is fond of saying, you don’t know Dick.

Let’s remember the response to those high prices especially coming in the middle of a presidential election season.

While a diminishing handful of reactionary rabble were chanting “drill baby drill” the smart savvy and sane crowd could talk of nothing but a “green” energy future brought about through aggressive public and private investment in development of non-fossil, non-carbon producing alternative energy technologies

Democratic candidate Barack Obama made a huge commitment to this investment making a non-carbon renewable energy future a centerpiece of his energy policy. Even oil man T-Bone Pickens of all people became a harbinger of this new day dawning.

But T-bone’s defection notwithstanding the oil companies were predictably silent on developing unconventional energy options preferring to counter the cries with insanely-euphemistic, oxymoronic advertisements for things like “clean coal” and “green drilling” that didn’t fool anyone.

So what’s an oil company that’s been raking in obscene record profits to do, especially with the likelihood that a windfall profits tax was a top agenda item for the inevitable Obama administration and new congress?

Well if you have a few trillion in profits lying around- cash you gouged out of consumers through years of unregulated price-fixing abetted by two oil company executives in the top two executive federal chairs- the one thing you don’t want to do is see all the self-absorbed SUV-driving Americans change their gas-guzzling ways.

Well the dicks at Exxon might be malevolent but they ain’t dumb.

They knew they’d be in deep kim chee if January 20 were to roll along with high-priced gas- and alternative energy was going to be the number one issue.

High prices were bound to be perceived as, if not the sole cause, certainly the most immediate aspect exacerbating the impact of the coming economic Armageddon.

Not just their obscene profits, not just their business model, but their business itself might be swept out the door of “change”... unless....

Unless the price of oil falls off consumers’ radar screens at the very time when the plans for legislation and action are drawn up for the first year or so of an extremely busy new presidential and congressional regime.

And with the pile of cash they have been stockpiling- and the ease of raising prices back to $5 a gallon at the drop of a hat once the agenda is set to exclude a massive push for alternative fuel plans- it’s a no brainer to invest a few hundred million to lower the cost for their products.

There was only one way to assure that we sheep would go back to sleep- give us cheap gas until that window for planning closes until the devil in the details of other “change” overwhelms the D.C. policy makers..

And very soon all the money- and perhaps more importantly the legislative time and effort- that was set to be invested in research, development and infrastructure for wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen production and distribution networks and the like will be gone.

And then welcome back to $5, $6 maybe $10 a gallon gas.

And by all means if this scenario makes sense don’t say anything. As Phil Ochs said “Monopoly is so much fun we’d hate to spoil the game”

Or as Chaney and Bush would quote Ochs as they steal the silverware on their way out, “I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends”.