Some columns are easier to write than others.

This is one of them.

Providing all of my research were the "family values" Republicans.

This week, second term Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina disappeared for six days, leaving the state without a chief executive who could make decisions in an emergency. His Republican lieutenant governor didn't know where he was, and had not been given any authority to make decisions in his absence. The state police said they had not been informed. His wife told the Associated Press she didn't know where he was, wasn't worried about him, and thought he was "writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids" over the Father's Day weekend. His senior aides said he was walking along the Appalachian Trail to "clear his head."

But it wasn't his head that he was clearing. When he returned, after first lying to a reporter for the Columbia State who caught up with him on his return to the Atlanta airport, he finally admitted he went to Argentina to meet with a long-time lover. His wife, who was not by his side when he held an early afternoon press conference, later said she and the governor had separated two weeks earlier. The State later produced e-mail love letters it had been keeping since December.

The rising young star of the Republican party who was seen as a presidential contender in 2012, the man who was head of the Republican Governors Association until the day after he acknowledged his extramarital affair, the man who had wanted to deprive his state of $700 million in federal stimulus funds as a political message to President Obama, the man who had established himself as a beacon for the sanctity of marriage and the values of the oh-so-pure Religious right, who a decade earlier as a congressman had strongly condemned Bill Clinton's extramarital affair, was not only an adulterer, but for at least the second time had left his state at risk since there were no contingency plans of how to reach him in an emergency.

Alas, Gov. Sanford isn't the only "family values" philanderer. Slightly more than a week earlier, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) admitted he had a nine month extramarital affair with one of his campaign staff. Ensign, who was contemplating a run for president in 2012, had been chair of the Republican Policy Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Like Gov. Sanford, Sen. Ensign only admitted to the affair after information had been leaked to the media.

This is the same John Ensign who, as a congressman, had curled his lips in revulsion at Bill Clinton's affair, and demanded he either resign or be impeached. "He has no credibility," Ensign told the Las Vegas Review–Journal in 1998. Six years later, now a senator, Ensign supported a federal ban on same sex marriages by declaring, "Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded . . . . [M]arriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation." Ironically, Ensign is active in Promise Keepers, an evangelical group.

Also vigorously calling for President Clinton's impeachment, while having had their own extramarital affairs and covering them up or lying about them, were:

• Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), chair of the House judiciary committee and the "house manager" for the impeachment, who lied about his own four-year affair with a married woman and then when a newspaper published details in 1998 called the affair in the 40s nothing more than a "youthful indiscretion." He retired in 2007 after 17 terms in the House.
• Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), who was the first legislator in Congress to call for Clinton's resignation and then became one of the leaders of the impeachment movement. Barr's background, however, wasn't family values pure. He never denied committing adultery with his second wife, and later, while married to his third wife, was photographed at what passed as a charity event licking whipped cream off the breasts of two women. Barr left office in 2003, after four terms.
• Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), who was one of the first to call for Clinton's resignation, told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that God had pardoned her sins for her six-year extra-marital affair. Chenoweth left office in January 2001 after keeping her promise not to serve more than three terms.
• Fourteen term Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind), chair of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, who not only had a long-time affair with a state employee but had fathered a son from that affair. His website once screamed, "Above all, Dan Burton believes the people have a right to principled leadership and that character does matter."
• Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who told Tim Russert on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" in 1999 that "The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy—a naughty boy. I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.” However, Craig himself was a "bad boy." In September 2007 he pleaded guilty, and then tried to withdraw his conviction on charges that he solicited a man in the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport. Several gay men later told the Idaho Statesman that Craig, who was married since 1983, had previously tried to solicit them or had sexual relations with them. Craig resigned in September 2007, and then reversed himself, staying in office through 2008. He did not run for re-election.
• Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), House speaker from 1995 to 1999, who may have had an affair while his first wife was in the hospital recovering from cancer. Gingrich later cheated on his second wife with the woman who became his third wife during the time he was pushing for Clinton's resignation.
• Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), who was Gingrich's designated successor until he admitted his own infidelities and eventually resigned from the House.
• Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who was elected to Livingston's House seat and served three terms before being identified in a prostitution scandal in Louisiana. In 2004, he was elected to the Senate, three years before Hustler magazine linked him as a client of a prostitution service in Washington, D.C.
• Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa), who had a five year affair with a woman 35 years his junior. She later charged that Sherwood had assaulted her several times. He eventually settled for what AP reported was about $500,000. Among those who supported Sherwood during his primary re-election were Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), one of the leaders of the conservative coalition who in November 2005 said that "Compassionate Conservatism relies on healthy families," and President George W. Bush who went to northeastern Pennsylvania to help raise funds for Sherwood. However, in the general election of November 2006, Sherwood was defeated for a fifth term.
• Rep. Vito Fossella Jr. (R-N.Y.), who, as a first term congressman with a 100 percent voting approval record from the Christian Coalition, was morally outraged at Bill Clinton's personal conduct. A decade later, he was arrested for drunken driving in May 2008. Upon intense media scrutiny, he also admitted that while still married he had fathered a girl, now four years old, with an Air Force congressional liaison officer who was the woman who came to his assistance the night of his DUI arrest. After six terms, Fossella chose not to run for a seventh term.
• Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had delivered a passionate plea to the Senate on why he planned to vote to convict President Clinton, citing legal issues. However, McCain had previously acknowledged his own several extramarital affairs in the 1970s, and had accepted the blame for the deterioration of his first marriage and estrangement from his children.

Add to the list of morally bankrupt Republicans:

• Five term Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) who resigned in September 1995, three years before the Clinton impeachment, after the bipartisan Ethics Committee unanimously recommended his expulsion following charges of sexual abuse and assault by 10 women, most of them either former staffers or lobbyists.
• Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), a six-term congressman, and co-chair of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, who had sent sexually explicit e-mails and text messages to a 16 year-old male Congressional page. Foley resigned in September 2006, two months before the general election, long after the Republican leadership had failed to discipline him, and only after a blog (stopsexpredators.blogspot.com) and ABC-TV news exposed his hoped-for affairs may have included other staff dating back at least a decade.
• Rep. Robert E. Bauman (R-Md.), publicly homophobic founder of Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union, who admitted he had solicited sex with a 16 year old male. Bauman lost the general election in 1980 and later declared himself to be gay.
• Rep. Donald Lukens (R-Ohio), who was convicted in 1989 of a misdemeanor for having sex with a 16-year-old girl. The "affair" may have begun three years earlier. Lukens finally resigned in October 1990, after having lost the Republican primary several months earlier.

Republican leaders aren’t the only ones who commit adultery, nor are conservatives or members of the Religious Right, including preachers, solely the ones to have violated the seventh and tenth Commandments. Democrats also have a litany of their own scandals. But, it is the "family values" Republican leaders, who have led the party of right wing moral indignation; it is the Religious Right that has overtaken the party and wears the now-tarnished shield of righteousness to protect itself against anyone who doesn't share their own views of the world, including moderate and liberal Republicans, and anyone belonging to another political party.

The hypocrisy and moral turpitude of the leaders is just one reason why only 21 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans.

[Walter M. Brasch is a university professor of journalism, social issues columnist, and the author of 17 books. His current book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush, available from amazon.com, bn.com, and other stores. You may contact him at brasch@bloomu.edu or through his website, www.walterbrasch.com]]]> Guest Writings PV Guest 2009-06-29T23:03:33-08:00 http://www.pacificviews.org/weblog/archives/003749.html Corporate Knights recently hosted Dr. James Lovelock speaking on his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Here's the first segment of that talk.

He says the IPPC document is by far the scariest document ever written because it isn't just what we are doing to the earth that is the problem, it is that the earth responds to our actions. And change is coming faster than even our models predicted.

What will destroy our ability to get the healthcare we need are the Democrats that are standing in the way. What the incrementalists need is a dose of reality and smidgen of courage, because voting for real change (and not just a faux change) based in the best evidence we have today has a great potential of delivering something that really helps Americans. Senators who care about policy must be made aware that the reaction of their constituents to their vote will be based on the effectiveness of the reform. It behooves our Senators to be more aggressive in putting in the right changes rather than being so timid that nothing really changes, because the current system in place is devouring our government and will devour every thing in its path if not fixed. Here's how Dr. Gawande described it on Fresh Air last week:

I think our core understanding here that we just have to keep reminding ourselves is that the road we are on is unsustainable. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, we have a system that is destroying our competitiveness as businesses, it is devouring our government, and its leaving 45 million plus people without coverage. We're bankrupting a million people a year and many of them already have health insurance. The sense that we have a great deal to fear from any change can parallelize us, but if we let it, we will be dooming ourselves as individual people who need to rely on the healthcare system, and we will be dooming ourselves as a country.

Our Democratic Senators must understand that not doing enough is more dangerous than doing too much. And if those fiscal scolds want to hyperventilate about the cost, then they need to be sat down and talked to until they truly understand that the cost for all of us will be much, much worse if we do nothing.

Now is the time for change.

The Schuylkill County, Pa., justice system managed to do something that insurance actuaries do with mixed results—it has determined not only the penalty for threats to a human life, but also the value of a human life.

• Norman E. Nickle, 54, who lived in Pottsville, the county seat, was convicted of killing two teenagers, and sentenced in April to two life terms, without possibility of parole. Nickle's only defense was that he was high on drugs and alcohol at the time of the murders.


• Jarrid Finneran, of Shenandoah, was sentenced to 2-1/2 to five years in prison after a jury convicted him in December 2007 of pushing his girlfriend in front of a car. Finneran said that the incident was the result of an accident, was not deliberate, and that he and the victim continued their relationship after the incident. The jury, however, convicted him of aggravated assault, simple assault, recklessly endangering another person, and disorderly conduct.


• Kyle J. Bluge, 23, of Frackville, admitted he shook a baby in April 2008 to try to stop the boy from crying. A pediatrician testified that the physical abuse resulted in significant brain injuries. Bluge, who will be sentenced Aug. 5, could face 10 to 20 years in prison for aggravated assault.


• Mark P. Wilner, 40, of Mahanoy City, in June was found guilty of simple assault after a bar fight that led to injuries to the victim who, according to court testimony, had begun the fight by punching a woman. Wilner could be sentenced, June 29, to one to two years in state prison.


• However, the life of Luis Eduardo Ramirez-Zavalo, 25, a Mexican who lived and worked in Shenandoah before dying, in June 2008 after a beating by a gang of about a half-dozen drunken Shenandoah High School football players, is worth no more than 23 months in a county jail.

Judge William E. Baldwin sentenced Brandon J. Piekarsky, 17, to six to 23 months, and Derrick M. Donchak, 19, to six to 20 months, June 17, after an all-White jury convicted them only of simple assault, a second degree misdemeanor. Baldwin also sentenced Donchak to one year probation for three counts of corruption of minors, a first degree misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of two to five years in state prison; Donchak was also sentenced to three months in prison on each of three counts of furnishing alcohol to minors; the sentences would be served concurrently. His total sentence is seven to 23 months in county jail.

The jury about six weeks earlier refused to convict Piekarsky of criminal homicide, although witnesses said that it was Piekarsky who kicked Ramirez in the head after he had already been on the ground; Ramirez died two days later from the beatings, with medical evidence suggesting the kick was the fatal blow. The jury also found both Piekarsky and Donchak not guilty of aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person, criminal solicitation/hindering apprehension or prosecution, and ethnic intimidation, although witnesses said they distinctly heard racial slurs and obscene language during the beating.

In sentencing the two teenagers, Judge Baldwin, confined by the jury's verdict, said neither defendant showed remorse—Donchak had even worn a "Border Patrol" T-shirt to a party four months after the beating. Contrary to defense claims, the judge ruled that the beating was not "a street fight gone bad [but] a group of young athletes ganging up on one person." Because of the jury's verdicts, the death of Ramirez could not be considered in sentencing. Baldwin said that if the attack "wasn't motivated by ethnic intimidation, it was plain meanness. You don't kick a man when he's down." Even with the relatively light sentences, both defense attorneys said they were contemplating appeals.

Two of the gang were not charged, and two are likely to spend more time in confinement than Piekarsky and Donchak, who are believed to be the more aggressive of the gang. Brian Scully, 18, CITYYwas previously ordered to spend 90 days in a treatment facility before sentencing, expected at the end of Summer. He could spend as much as three years in juvenile detention. Colin J. Walsh, 18, Shenandoah Heights, whose state charges were withdrawn after he pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation in federal court, cooperated with state and federal authorities and testified against Piekarsky and Donchak, was sentenced in federal court to up to nine years, but could be released in four years because of his cooperation.

The beating and subsequent trial divided the region, and brought national news media to the coal mine region of northeast Pennsylvania. Thousands rallied against what they believed were lax immigration enforcement, and argued that Ramirez would still be alive if he had not been an illegal immigrant. Others argued that the area's bigotry and racism was the cause for the tension before the beating and continues to divide the people. The Pottsville Republican-Herald, the county's only daily newspaper, reports that more than 4,400 comments were submitted to its website the first three days of the five-day trial, but that many were not posted because of vulgarity. The newspaper also reports that during the trial the website recorded 72,000 unique users just for the trial coverage.

The case left a lot of questions, in addition to what many saw as "jury nullification" of a murder. The Shenandoah police upon arriving at the scene checked Latino witnesses for weapons rather than pursue the White attackers, and then didn't file charges for two weeks. Based upon previous testimony, Judge Baldwin noted, "the boys were ushered around and given counsel about getting their stories straight because it didn't look good for Mr. Ramirez." Testimony had also revealed that one of the officers was not only in a personal relationship with Piekarsky's mother, but that he was living with both of them. "There is a federal investigation ongoing," the Schuylkill County district attorney told the Republican-Herald. Further, the prosecution, which said it was pleased with the sentence, refused to say why it didn't put on the stand a retired Philadelphia police officer who witnessed the beating and had called 911.
Most residents, those who believe that even a simple assault charge was too much for what they still maintain is a "street brawl," and those who believe that the random gang got away with murder, seem to just want the spotlight to shine on other towns, other issues. But, that isn't likely for at least a few more months.

Piekarsky and Donchak could still face significant prison time. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, the Anti-Defamation League, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and other organizations have asked the Department of Justice to pursue hate crime charges against Piekarsky and Donchak. Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the 1960s, the Department of Justice was vigorous in bringing to trial and conviction, especially in Southern jurisdictions, persons who either were not charged or had received light sentences for attacks upon civil rights workers, Blacks, and their businesses and churches.

Shenandoah is a community of about 5,600, located in the anthracite coal region, about100 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The 2000 census revealed that 97.4 percent of the population is White, with about 20 percent of the population living below the poverty line. During the early and mid-19th century, the population was primarily English, Welsh, Irish and German immigrants, all of whom faced discrimination from large numbers of second- and third-generation Americans who objected to the influx of immigrants. Conflicts between the lower-class miners and the supervisors and management of coal companies led to the rise of the Molly Maguires, whose original purpose was to promote unionized labor and serve as a protection for the immigrants. Cultural and ethnic conflict led to violence against the Mollies and the Mollies, in turn, becoming violent, especially as other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe moved into the area, sometimes taking jobs the northern Europeans thought belonged to them. By 1920, the population peaked about 25,000, falling after World War II when it no longer became profitable for the robber barons to continue to strip the land of anthracite coal.

It is many of the descendants of immigrants who now support stronger immigration enforcement, and whose children and grandchildren carry the prejudices that have formed the patina of the place once known as the "city of churches"; it is the descendants of immigrants who have shown the prejudice against a rising Hispanic population and whose attitudes may have fueled the violence that led to the death of a Mexican immigrant who just wanted to work and help raise his three children.

[Assisting on this story were Rosemary R. Brasch, Brandi Mankiewicz, the office of the clerk of courts of Schuylkill County, several Schuylkill County residents, and the Pottsville Republican-Herald. Dr. Brasch is author of 17 books, a syndicated columnist, and professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University and recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Humanitarian Service Award. You may contact him through his website, www.walterbrasch.com]

The crisis can be boiled down to too much debt, the liquidity trap and no foreseeable way out of the hole we are in.

PK: The thing about Japan, as with all of these cases, is how much people claim to know what happened, without having any evidence. What we do know is that recessions normally end everywhere because the monetary authority cuts interest rates a lot, and that gets things moving. And what we know in Japan was that eventually they cut their interest rates to zero and that wasn't enough. And, so far, although we made the cuts faster than they did and cut them all the way to zero, it isn't enough. We've hit that lower bound the same as they did. Now, everything after that is more or less speculation.

...In their case, the problems had a lot to do with demography. That made them a natural capital exporter, from older savers, and also made it harder for them to have enough demand. They also had one hell of a bubble in the 1980s and the wreckage left behind by that bubble - in their case a highly leveraged corporate sector - was and is a drag on the economy.

The size of the shock to our systems is going to be much bigger than what happened to Japan in the 1990s. They never had a freefall in their economy - a period when GDP declined by 3%, 4%. It is by no means clear that the underlying differences in the structure of the situation are significant. What we do know is that the zero bound is real. We know that there are situations in which ordinary monetary policy loses all traction. And we know that we're in one now.

WH: So your point is that the crisis in Japan was about excess debt, excess leverage and lack of demand - reinforced by the fallout from the asset bubble collapsing. They didn't have credit contraction on anything like our scale, but even so, zero interest rates were just unable to turn the economy around.

PK: That's right, that's right.

...I hope I'm wrong but the question you always have to ask is: where do we think that this recovery's going to come from? It's not an easy story to tell.

Having read Dr. Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, I found myself wondering how he feels having spent decades researching and studying these financial anomolies only to find himself now being asked to help the world find what will be the magic bullet that will help pull us out of these economic doldrums. Paul Krugman on the State of the Recession

Within a month of 9/11, millions of Americans bought American flags. Small flags they flew from their cars, trucks, and bicycles. Medium-sized flags they planted in their front yards, put onto their home windows, and flew from recently-installed metal poles on doors and porches. Large flags they flew in front of their businesses.

In our tragedy and grief we stuck together, the flag a symbol of our unity and patriotism.

It wasn't long until commercialism in the guise of patriotism dominated the American unity. In newspaper and magazine ads, in television campaigns, whether for cars or political races, we saw the message and an image of the flag. In myriad direct mail flyers, we first saw the flag and a patriotic call—and then an advertising pitch that each of us had an inviolate right to buy whatever the advertiser was pushing. General Motors even claimed that we could "get America rolling" again by buying cars.

During the 1960s, war protesters who wore clothes with the American flag design were beaten by “patriots” who believed the "hippies" were abusing a sacred image. However, for several years after 9/11, the fabric of America was “patriots” who wore high-priced T-shirts, pants, ties, and bandannas, all with images of American flags and slogans, all in violation of federal regulations.

Americans use flags and flag-decorated clothes, most of them made by non-union labor in China and other overseas countries, to "prove" they are more patriotic than the next person. They have demanded that politicians wear flag lapels. They have bought bigger and bigger flags, in the mistaken believe that flying a flag and being patriotic are the same thing. But, these "patriots" have also flown their flags improperly, often hanging the blue field in the wrong corner, sometimes tacking the flag to wooden walls. They have allowed their flags to have flown in rain and snow storms, to have become tattered and faded. And when some flags become too faded or too torn, their owners just throw them out, rather than give them the proper retirement that the Flag Code requires.

President Woodrow Wilson established Flag Day [June 14] in 1916, but it has never been a federal holiday, although Pennsylvania is the only state to declare the day a state holiday.

Ironically, many flag-waving pretend-patriots know little about American history and almost nothing about the Constitution.

This June 14, perhaps Americans should not only fly their flags, but might also read some American history, a little more about the Constitution—and, the rules and regulations for properly flying the flag. Patriotism, indeed, is not by how large your flag is, or how many days you fly it, but by how well you understand the principles that established this nation.

[Walter M. Brasch is a university professor of journalism, social issues columnist, and the author of 17 books. His current book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush, available from amazon.com, bn.com, and other stores. You may contact him through his website, www.walterbrasch.com]

And these two incidents are not the only time Shane has been found carrying Cheney's water. Last December when there was a lot of push back on who Obama should name as CIA director, Charles Kaiser of CJR noted that Shane's story once more was slanted.

The story on the front page of Wednesday morning’s New York Times provides the most recent and the most dramatic example of this syndrome. The story, by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, noted that John O. Brennan had withdrawn his name from consideration for CIA director after liberal critics attacked his role in the agency’s interrogation program, even though Brennan characterized himself as a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation techniques. Brennan’s characterization was not disputed by anyone else in the story, even though most experts on this subject agree that Brennan acquiesced in everything that the CIA did in this area while he served there.

But here's how Scott Horton described what happened with this story (emphasis mine).

"I was aghast reading this," said Scott Horton, a professor of human rights law at Hofstra and a contributing editor at Harper’s, whose blog was instrumental in framing the opposition to Brennan’s appointment. "The Times doesn’t even do a reasonable job of presenting the conflicts—their principal source today was John O. Brennan. They have not reached out to the other side. It looks like Mark and Scott have decided that it’s payback time for a couple of their sources at the agency."

Horton also disputed the idea that an investigation of agency abuses would "would demoralize the line officers of intelligence and the military." The people saying that are "very very skillfully pointing to the interrogators as being the targets—because they know they would not be the targets. The people who would be the targets are policy makers like [Cheney chief of staff David] Addington, who have the same ability to attract sympathy from the public as cockroaches. I’m not sure that the early part of the story is going to be so embarrassing to the company. There was push back at the beginning; you had pretty high level opposition and Cheney decided to cram it down, which is why they went to get that Department of Justice memo" authorizing the torture of prisoners.

As Charles notes in his post, Scott Shane's reporting on the subject of torture has been egregiously bad.

It appears that Scott Shane has his reasons for writing story after story that helps carry Cheney's water, but it doesn't help the Times credibility on this subject.

Update: Read Glenn Greenwald's analysis on today's Times story and what the Comey memos actually show.

Glenn is right that the torture story is like the bullying of the CIA by Cheney and his ghouls because it really is the same story. Cheney insisted on torture because he wanted to have an excuse to bomb Iraq and after the war started was looking for evidence that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden. Today, Cheney acknowledges there was no link. But everything we know about the torture and the lies that led to the war was that Cheney was the main driver.

Always the best medicine.

Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih would be the fifth prisoner to take his life at the detention center since the Pentagon began holding terrorism suspects there more than seven years ago.

When the Guantanamo prisoners first started their hunger strike, the US officials complained about how the prisoners were just trying to get attention. In 2006, when three other prisoners committed suicide, this is how the news was reported.

[Rear Adm. Harry] Harris said Saturday that every prisoner at Guantanamo is considered "dangerous."

"They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own," Harris said. "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

Asymmetrical warfare is when one side uses unorthodox or surprise tactics to attack the weak points of its stronger opponent.

...Also last month, 75 prisoners staged a hunger strike to protest conditions at the jail, Reuters reported.

Harris said the men who killed themselves Saturday were "committed hunger strikers" and had participated in the May hunger strike.

Even while Harris was blaming the dead for trying to embarrass the Americans and lying by saying that only terrorists were held at the camp, David Rose wrote the following in the Guardian.

[Former British prisoner Shafiq] Rasul said: 'I was shocked by what happened, though not surprised, because I saw it almost happen so often. It was always scary: I would see people deteriorating mentally in front of my eyes until they tried to take their own lives, and you always thought: "That could be me". There were even times when I thought about it myself, but I wanted to be strong for my family. When I did, believe me, it wasn't because I was trying to hurt the United States, but on days when I'd just been told I'd never see England again, and that I was a terrorist, and when I denied it they wouldn't listen.'

The first hunger strikes started in Guantanamo just after it opened in 2002 and there have been regular and ongoing strikes since that time. As TIME reported in 2006, the prisoners that go too far are force fed and even told "Dying is not permitted."

At Gitmo, however, dead prisoners are something the U.S. military wishes devoutly to avoid. So force-feeding has been standard policy at the camp ever since hunger strikes began in early 2002. The facility's top physicians have also told TIME that prisoners who resist are subjected to especially harsh methods. In one case, according to medical records obtained by TIME, a 20-year old named Yusuf al-Shehri, jailed since he was 16, was regularly strapped into a specially designed feeding chair that immobilizes the body at the legs, arms, shoulders and head. Then a plastic tube that is 50% larger, and more painful to insert, than the commonly used variety was inserted up through his nose and down his throat, carrying a nutritional formula into his stomach.

Thousands of people, of course, endure some form of voluntary intra-nasal feeding every day in hospital settings. But when force-feeding is involuntary and the recipient is in a state of high anxiety, the muscles tense up and the procedure can trigger nausea, bleeding, diarrhea and vomiting. "We are humane and compassionate,"; Guantanamo commander Harris told TIME, "but if we tell a detainee to do something, we expect the detainee to do it." As a note scrawled in al-Shehri's medical records put it: "[The prisoner] was informed that dying is not permitted."

One thing to note is how similar the forced feeding was to that experienced by Vladimir Bukovsky who was tortured in Stalin's prison camps.

It is time to stop this insanity, shut Guantanamo down and provide some real justice to the prisoners who are still there.

Mark Danner and Elizabeth Farnsworth -- In 1998, Judge Juan Guzman was appointed to investigate criminal complaints against General Augusto Pinochet, the president of Chile from 1974-1990. Skeptics feared Guzman, a long-time Pinochet supporter, might turn a blind eye to the kidnappings and possible murders committed under the regime. In her documentary film, "The Judge and the General," director Elizabeth Farnsworth explores Judge Guzman's quest for the truth through two of his investigations. As the truth gradually emerges, Guzman's investigation becomes increasingly urgent, the elderly Pinochet's failing health means he might never face trial. Farnsworth and Mark Danner will discuss the desire for justice even decades after the crime, the manipulation of public perception under Pinochet's rule and the importance of telling the story of the Chilean victims and survivors now. Danner is an award-winning journalist and reporter who has extensively covered Latin America, as well as the Middle East, Haiti, the Balkans and American politics on the international stage. They appeared in conversation at the Herbst Theatre on March 4, 2009.

When I was listening to to this discussion the other day, I found myself encouraged to realize that the crimes of the past can be discovered and exposed even decades later.

You can see the trailer for the documentary here.

Most people know Nouriel Roubini as Dr. Doom because he had been predicting the coming economic collapse when most economics and market watchers were still quite bullish. In 2006 when he predicted the mortgage-backed crisis, he did so by looking at the market and the world economy as an integrated whole which let him see the inherent flaws in the system. So how did he come to his unorthodox, yet original way of viewing the world? Recently, The New Republic published a piece that covered the background of the eclectic Dr. Roubini which provides some clues on what shaped his view of the world.

What sets Roubini apart from his fellow economists (and what occasionally gets him in trouble) is his willingness to intuit broad patterns and connect the dots, something that became apparent early in his career. While others spent years refining one econometric model or drilling down on one microsubject, Roubini gorged on a range of diverse topics that, to him, were all related: Japanese public debt, tax evasion, liquidity and exchange rates, monetary policy in the newly formed European Union, the effect of political cycles on industrial economies. As a graduate student, he attracted the attention of older, more established academics both for his ambitiously sweeping econometric analyses and his ability to synthesize vast swaths of seemingly unrelated information.

Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute, has been long known for looking at the linkages between population, agriculture, oil, soil, and water. The problems in each of these areas profoundly affect the problems in the others and as Dr. Brown shows, we can't address one without understanding and doing something about the other. Recently he had a piece in Scientific American which asked whether the growing global food crisis could be the basis of growing global instability.

And finally, one of the best pieces I've ever read explaining why it is so important to get the healthcare problem solved and what really is the problem comes from Dr. Atul Gawande in the latest New Yorker. It is absolutely required reading for anyone who thinks they understand this issue.

Jack Cloonan was a special agent assigned to the FBI Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. He was the fellow called for advice by the first interrogators who talked to al-Libi when he was captured on December 18, 2001. And he was angry and disappointed when the Washington decided that the CIA would use torture to question the detainees they scooped up.

In January 2008, when he was asked to provide his perspective to a Washington Monthly discussion on Torture, he talked about what he and his team did to get real information from the members of al Qaeda they interrogated.

One man we captured was Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, an al-Qaeda operative behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ali Mohamed had fully expected to be tortured once we took him in. Instead, we assured him that we wouldn't harm him, and we offered to protect his family. Within weeks, we had opened a gold mine of information about al-Qaeda's operations.

Ali Mohamed wasn't unique. We gave our word to every detainee that no harm would come to him or his family. This invariably stunned them, and they would feel more obligated to cooperate. Also, because all information led to more information, detainees were astonished to find out how much we already knew about them—their networks, their families, their histories. Some seemed relieved to reveal their secrets. When they broke, the transformations were remarkable. Their bodies would go limp. Many would weep. Most would ask to pray. These were men undergoing profound emotional and spiritual turmoil—the result of going from a belief that their destiny was to fight and kill people like us to a decision that they should cooperate with the enemy.

He notes that when members of foreign intelligence agencies would sit in on the interrogations, they were surprised to see how effective this method was. And then he concludes:

I've mentioned that we assured our detainees that we wouldn't harm them or their families. One of our techniques for breaking them was repeating that powerful promise again and again and again. But who would believe us now?

Why did this method work when Cloonan was interrogating his subjects? Well, because it was built on interrogation methods that had been shown to be effective in World War 2. As Henry Porter wrote, Major Sherwood Moran found that he could get reliable information from his Japanese prisoners of war while in the midst of the battle for Guadalcanal using humane techniques.

He quickly found himself in the Pacific as part of the First Marine Division. He landed on Gaudalcanal in the first wave on August 8th, 1942. He and the other Marines were stuck on Guadalcanal with no leave, relief, rest, laundry or toilets. They were lucky to get two meals a day as they lived for months in the jungle fighting for control of Henderson Field. Half a world away, a baby girl made him a grandfather. He did not know that at the time. He was busy doing his job. His job was to interrogate the Japanese prisoners captured in combat.

Now remind me again... what are the advocates of torture saying about "ticking time bombs", "imminent threats", "ruthless enemies"? Forgive me if I say the imagery seems a bit shallow when you deliver those lines to men spending months sleeping, fighting and dying under continuous fire in the mud half a world away. It's enough to drive a person mad. So let's consider how Sherwood Moran reacted.

It wasn't until the Marines were evacuated to Australia that his superior officer, Lt. Col. Edmund Buckley, sent word of his interview style and impressive results back to headquarters. Moran was called back to Washington DC. awarded a Citation and a Bronze Star by Admiral Halsey. In DC he lectured, retrained interrogators, and revised the manual. Part of his rewrite effort was the newly transcribed memorandum, "Suggestions for Japanese Interpreters Based on Work in the Field."

I am going to publish it here in full because this document is hard to find, easy to overlook and needs to be made widely available. As his grandson notes, the document is important because of its "clear, emphatic, and persuasive explanations of why sympathetic, familiarly grounded prisoner interrogation was altogether preferable to its opposite." That is why this document is still being taught today within the US military for its intended purpose, and, as has been pointed out by many others, is perhaps more important than ever given our present circumstances.

Major Moran was humane and respectful of his captive subject. He brought his intelligence and his compassion with him to work.

I can simply tell you what my attitude is; I often tell a prisoner right at the start what my attitude is! I consider a prisoner (i.e. a man who has been captured and disarmed and in a perfectly safe place) as out of the war, out of the picture, and thus, in a way, not an enemy. (This is doubly so, psychologically and physically speaking, if he is wounded or starving.) Some self-appointed critics, self-styled "hard-boiled" people, will sneer that this is a sentimental attitude, and say, "Don't you know he will try to escape at first opportunity?" I reply, "Of course I do; wouldn't you?" But that is not the point. Notice that in the first part of this paragraph I used the word "safe". That is the point; get the prisoner to a safe place, where even he knows there is no hope of escape, that it is all over. Then forget, as it were, the "enemy" stuff, and the "prisoner" stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being, (ningen to shite). And they respond to this.

When it comes to the wounded, the sick, the tired, the sleepy, the starving, I consider that since they are out of the combat for good, they are simply needy human beings, needing our help, physical and spiritual. This is the standpoint of one human being thinking of another human being. But in addition, it is hard business common sense, and yields rich dividends from the Intelligence standpoint.

He inspired the manual with its golden rule ("the golden rule is that if we would not want a technique applied to our service members, we don't apply it to the detainees") that the Army used until the Bush administration, captured by the will to power and the dark side, infected it with their torture tools.

We must return to our earlier, more effective, and more humane methods of getting information.

How should we take these quotes concerning the timing of those briefings in which the CIA supposedly said that they told Nancy Pelosi and the "Gang of Four" about the use of EIT on detainees?

Two officials present during the briefings in 2002 said the talks were overshadowed by fears of more terrorist attacks. "It was wartime crisis mode, and all the chatter at the time was about a 'second wave,'" said one congressional official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the briefings were classified. "The next attack was supposed to be even bigger, and everyone was taking it very seriously."

Oh yeah, Washington was full of talk about imminent terrorist attacks in September 2002. What was driving the chatter about terrorist attacks on the horizon? Could it have been a tiny little war for which the Bush administration wanted authorization which required feeding the Congress all kinds of propaganda such as Saddam Hussein had unmanned drones that could take out Washington?

And then there's the comment about these briefings weren't considered "time sensitive."

Intelligence officials did not consider the briefing "time sensitive" but simply an effort to bring the lawmakers up to speed on what was labeled a "highly sensitive collection activity," according to former intelligence officials. Shelby and Graham would not be briefed for another 23 days.

The reason they needed to brief Congress in September was because they had to lend credibility to their forced march to War. Otherwise, the Bush administration didn't think they had any obligation to keep Congress informed about they were doing.

Via LivingOnEarth