Aftermath: The Torture Apologist tour and other Un-pleasantries

I talked to Bostonboomer last night about the time John King–sober this time–was on the air. Piers Morgan is a cup of tea that I don’t want to know exists, but I did go back to look for a pattern during the Anderson Cooper show.  I even checked out Fox News a bit.  There it was.  The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture policy apologist tour.  It was inevitable that a few Bushies would show up to offer the ‘balance’ to the Osama story. I’m not sure if Dubya wants to be able to visit the South of France without fear of being arrested for crimes against humanity or it’s just a bunch of guilty consciences trying to find equilibrium, I just see the meme and it’s appalling.

The Bushies have jumped on the Bin Laden courier narrative as a way to justify their treatment of Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees from the War on Terror. I must’ve not been the only one that saw this unfolding because today’s RealClearPolitics has a pretty good set of videos up with both the meme mongers–like NY’s Congressional Ninny Peter King— and the ones that say this isn’t so.  I’d say John Brennan’s word on the matter is a pretty authoritative one.  SOS Clinton speaks on this too. Brennan was on Morning Joe this morning try to  kill the meme among other things.

Here’s a taste from TPM on what I sensed during last night’s news cycle.

Like so many memes that persist in politics, this one started on the Internet. The morning after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, conservatives started crowing that credit should be given to President George W. Bush — specifically, for having the foresight and courage to torture the people who provided the initial scraps of intel that ultimately led the CIA to a giant compound just north of Islamabad.

The most prominent of these conservatives was Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who took to Twitter to ask sardonically, “Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?

About two hours later, the Associated Press published a brief story claiming that the CIA obtained the initial intelligence it needed to find bin Laden from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the so-called mastermind of 9/11 — and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi at CIA black sites in Poland and Romania.

Those secret prisons, which the Obama administration contends to have abandoned, were the facilities where Mohammed and al-Libi were waterboarded. There, the detainees supposedly identified by nom de guerre a courier who would years later be located by American intelligence officials, and lead them to bin Laden’s compound.

“The news is sure to reignite debate over whether the now-closed interrogation and detention program was successful,” the AP wrote. “Former president George W. Bush authorized the CIA to use the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S. history. President Barack Obama closed the prison system.”

There’s just one problem. The key bit of intel wasn’t acquired via torture, according to a more fleshed out version of the same report.

The morning after the day after the ghoulish Booyah Death celebrations just reminds me that there are parts of being an American that really dismay me because there are things about American Society that are just over the top.  It’s our inability to separate our modern reality from spaghetti westerns and other Hollywood genres.  This entire thing is unfolding like a series of badly written, thinly plotted Hollywood movies.  Don’t even get me started on the actors.

I’d like to think that we could take this time to reflect on the last ten years of blowback rather than join a mosh pit of grave dancers.  We now have trillions of dollars sunk in two seemingly endless wars.  Many Americans and others have died as a result.  This adds to the already too high death toll of the Cole and the World Trade Centers.  We got a second Bush term because of all this.   We have made flying commercial airlines a complete exercise in fascist humiliation right down to bullies in uniform doing unspeakable things to the elderly and young.  Bin Laden’s death gives us reason to recheck our reactions and values, not create a set of worse ones.

First, before we go any further down Conspiracy Lane, the President will release the graphic photos of the dead Osama Bin Laden.   I suppose that my hope is that we don’t see this abused to the point that it puts people serving in countries with religionists that are offended by this sort of thing in danger.  This will probably set off a series of extremist sites debunking the photo but if this puts some people’s minds at rest, so be it. Maybe Donald Trump will get another poll boost by calling for more evidence than is rationally necessary.  Part of the problem with the photos release seems to be that Bin Laden’s skull was blown apart which makes this a particularly gruesome set of photos. They’re not sure what reaction folks will have to it.

I suppose it’s got to be released eventually, but count me lucky that I’m going to be sitting in my house for awhile and not traveling about or serving anywhere dangerous.  This is not me being an Obama apologist either, this is me being a realist.  Pope Dark Ages just canonized a barely dead pope who supposedly did miracles.  We’ve seen martyr’s funerals turn into all kinds of unpleasant things recently. We can’t even get a bunch of nuts from Kansas to stop harassing people at funerals and one nut in particular to quit grandstanding by burning Qurans.  Rational behavior is not exactly a hallmark of religion. We’ve seen the nuttiness from humanity BC forward.  It’s not going to stop, unfortunately.

A second question will come from the Wag-the-Dog plot.  Will the poll bounce that Obama has gotten from this be enough to get people’s minds away from the myriad of problems that are not solved?   Again, I think that depends on the size of those lesser,  shallow spaghetti western angels that comprise our society.   Torture, wars, Gitmo, and the TSA can only bring on so much false sense of security.  I think we’ve learned some of that over the past decade.  Hopefully, I’m not just being optimistic.  Most of us know that  Osama Bin Laden’s death will not get us out of Afghanistan and Iraq any quicker.  It will not solve our unemployment problem and it’s not going to stop the finance sector from draining every penny it can out of businesses and households.  It certainly is not going to solve our problem with Pakistan or hopefully, define our policy on the nations undergoing the Arab Spring.

You can gleefully dance on a watery grave for only so long before you have to go back to chopping wood, carrying water, and cooking dinner.  Eventually, you have to come back from the adrenaline rush and face the problems that are not dead.   Osama Bin Laden has been one very small problem recently. It’s nice he’s out of the way, still …

The Corps of Engineers is blowing up a levee on the Mississippi River as we speak. It will flood parts of Missouri.   You remember those guys, they are the ones that brought us the Katrina aftermath.  Canada just had an election with some astounding results.  The UK is considering completely changing the way they vote and achieve majorities.  They’re not getting a consensus on governance any more than we’ve been able to find bi-partisanship.  What does this mean for democracy?   Their parliamentary system is at the root of as many governments as our republic. Governments are being overthrown in a part of the world where we get most of our oil.  When will that impact Saudi Arabia?  Is Japan’s nuclear reactor any closer to safe?   Are you eating Gulf seafood yet?  Does it bother you that two ecosystems have been utterly destroyed by the energy industry with a year?  What have we learned about these things over the last two days?

Unfortunately, the public forum to work out all these issues is going to be our very corporate, very broken media and the nether reaches of the internet where hopefully some less-captured voices prevail.  I think we all have the duty to get beyond the hooplah and search out the facts because these things have a tendency to shape policy as well as conversations.  I’m concerned that our two second attention span–which fixates on personalities and symbolic events–will take our eyes away from the real deal.  Does it matter if Bin Laden is dead or alive?  What problem does that really solve?