Why We Need Health Care Reform

Just a reminder.

(Image from Schuhle Lewis. Some other cool ones there as well, on various topics.)

Israel and Gaza

Supporters of Israel's actions in Gaza have attempted to frame the argument on the questions of whether Israel has the right to defend itself (of course) and whether Israel is in general morally superior to Hamas (who cares?) I assume they frame the argument that way because it makes them feel like their side is obviously correct and anyone who disagrees is just an antisemite or a liberal, and probably both.

Here are the questions which should be asked about any military operation:

1) Is the strategic objective a good one?
2) Will the operation likely bring about the objective?
3) Does the objective justify the means used in the operation?

Israel has a good strategic objective -- to stop the arbitrary bombing of Israeli civilians by Hamas. More broadly, it aims to reduce the number of Israeli casualties as well as to reduce the terror caused by the rocket attacks. These are understandable and perfectly commendable goals.

But will the attacks on Gaza bring about that objective? I'm quite skeptical, and the recent failure in Lebanon only brings more skepticism. The truth is, it's just not that hard to fire missiles into Israel from right next door. Killing a bunch of Hamas policemen isn't going to stop it. Qassam rockets don't need uranium or centrifuges or radar or aircraft or special fuel or even a big launcher. Anybody can make one in his basement with a few common tools and components.

Not only will the attacks probably fail to bring about the objective, but there is a good chance that they will bring about the anti-objective. By killing so many Palestinians and terrorizing and inconveniencing and making the lives miserable of so many more, they mobilize anti-Israel and anti-semitic sentiments among the Palestinians. The inevitable reprisals will no doubt kill more Israelis than all the Qassam rockets in the history of the conflict. And that's not even counting Israeli soldiers who die during the operation.

The biggest problem with the operation, though, is the answer to the third question. Does the objective of stopping the rockets justify the means Israel is using, even if it did acheive that objective? I guess that depends on the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties you deem acceptable. Is it acceptable to kill a hundred Palestinian civilians and destroy the homes and livelihoods of thousands of them and the infrastructure that supports millions of them to save a dozen Israeli lives?

I'll leave you with two paragraphs from Matthew Yglesias:

One way to reply to [the idea that intentions are what matter] is à la Ezra Klein who observes that at some point you need to judge based on what’s actually happening. And what’s been happening is that whatever Hamas’ ambitions may or may not have been, they were scattering short-range inaccurate rocket fire on Israel that was causing little damage. Israel struck back with actions that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and pushed over a million more closer to the brink of starvation. And in general this is an important aspect of the conflict — irrespective of intentions, over the years you have many more dead Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians.

But another piece of the puzzle is that though American Jewish liberals tend to take a lot of comfort in the idea of Israel’s good intentions and good faith throughout this whole process, there’s a reason approximately no Arabs anywhere in the world see it that way. All throughout the “peace process” years — through the good ones and through the bad ones — Israel continued expanding both the geographical footprint of its settlements and the population living upon them. For most of this time, Israel has often appeared unwilling to enforce domestic Israeli law on the settler population, to say nothing of abiding by international law or agreements made. And while Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the “disengagement” from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation. Israel’s policy objectives in the West Bank appear to be first seizing the choice bits of it, and then withdrawing behind a wall with the residual West Bank treating like post-”disengagement” Gaza.

You can argue until the cows come home about who has the moral high ground, but at the end of the day Israel has killed far more Palestinian civilians than vice versa, not only in this military action, but throughout the history of the conflict. Israel has continued to build "settlements," often aimed specifically at expanding Israel's territory and strategic holdings and to make a self-contained Palestinian state impossible. In doing so, it's not only been morally wrong, but breaking its own laws.

There is no excuse for Hamas to fire rockets at Israeli civilians. But just because Hamas is a terrorist organization doesn't mean that anything Israel does in response is justified. Israel must make sure its military operations are both effective and moral. The framing of the argument away from those relevant questions to a place where Israel gets to play the wholly innocent victim ("We aren't allowed to defend ourselves??" "We're worse than Hamas??") and much of the western world gets painted as antisemitic is just disingenuous.

Please don't respond by asking for alternatives, or by saying Israel has to do something, as if the lack of alternatives makes any counterproductive and immoral operation a good choice. And don't whine about media bias or antisemitism or any other change of topic. You have to demonstrate that this specific military action is moral and likely to succeed in order to win this argument.

Obama, Bush, Pakistan, and Partisanship

Last year, Obama said that if he had actionable intelligence on high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan, he would take them out, without Musharraf's permission if necessary. At the time, I thought that was just common sense, although I also thought it might piss off some on the left. What I didn't expect was for the right to jump on that statement as a "gaffe" and as "evidence" of Obama's "lack of experience."

Today, as Oliver Willis points out, George Bush admitted to embracing that position:

President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.

Will the same people on the right criticize Bush for this as they did Obama? Or will they admit Obama was right? Most likely, they'll try to ignore the whole thing, or else try to find a detail -- any detail -- that separates the two men's statements and seize on that to explain why they are completely different.

As it happens, I was able to track down specifically what my conservative blog-friend Ezzie wrote about Obama's statement:

Barack Obama suggested (from what I understand) nuking Pakistan [followed by suggesting nuking just terrorists in Pakistan, followed by suggesting contemplating attacking Pakistan on our own, all within a minute or so].

Obviously, Obama never said anything about nuking anybody, and I challenged Ezzie on this in a comment (I wrote, "Source?") Ezzie appeared to admit he didn't have a good one ("a friend on Shabbos said...") but then went on to say, "Regardless, even the last statement is completely idiotic."

So I'm calling you out, Ezzie. :-) Are Bush and Obama right or are they "idiotic?"

Yesterday's Terrorist Attack in Israel

I've got nothing intelligent to say. An attack on a yeshiva like the one I went to hits close to home. These are people like me that were murdered. These are younger versions of my old classmates.

Ezzie has a moving post.

9/11

I wasn't able to write about 9/11 this morning for reasons I wasn't quite able to decipher. Then I read this piece by Ezra Klein:

I felt a bit conflicted about writing this post. What you want to do is remember an awful crime. What you end up doing is invoking a Republican talking point. That is all that remains of the term "9/11." As Gary Kamiya correctly points out, 9/11 need hardly be remembered: The President won't stop bringing it up. "President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq," writes Kamiya. "And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his 'war on terror.' He has incessantly linked the words 'al-Qaida' and 'Iraq,' a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' 'anxiously awaited' evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September."

9/11 has been robbed of its significance. It no longer lights up the neurons recalling an American tragedy, but instead activates that understand political strategy. I hate them for that. So this isn't a 9/11 remembrance. We've never been allowed to forget 9/11. Not for an instant. What we have been allowed to forget is 2,974 individuals who perished in that attack, who didn't die because they wanted to invade Iraq or because they thought Republicans were insufficiently competitive in elections, but because they were murdered. Remember them.

I remember talking to my father on 9/11, shell-shocked by what I had seen, but also worried by what I feared was coming. "I hope Saddam isn't behind this." That's what I said, because I knew that if he was, that if the atrocity were the doing of a country rather than a stateless terrorist organization, there was going to be a real war.

I guess I wasn't cynical enough, because it didn't occur to me that our government would use 9/11 to go to war with Saddam even if he had nothing to do with 9/11. I didn't realize that they would use 9/11 to stifle dissent. I didn't realize that six years later, Rudy Giuliani, who did nothing on 9/11 but run around aimlessly, would shamelessly attempt to cash in on it by mentioning it every ten seconds during a run for president. (President!)

Have they no decency?

I also didn't know that six years after 9/11, six years after discovering that it was Osama bin Laden and not Saddam Hussein who orchestrated the attacks, that the hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi and not Iraqi, that one third of all Americans and 40% of all Republicans would believe that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks. (NY Times/CBS poll.)

Let us remember this tragedy for what it was, but also for what it was not. Let us stop allowing politicians to manipulate its memory for personal and political gain.

If God Exists, Everything is Permitted Part II

In If God Exists, Everything is Permitted, I quoted Slavoj Zizek about how Dostoevsky had it backwards. Here's a real-life example:

Terrorists are turning more and more to crime to fund violence, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service... Oddly enough, religious groups may be more likely than political groups to turn to crime, since their sense of divine mission helps them convince themselves that any means is morally acceptable. (Islamic terrorists also find wiggle room by calling their depredations “economic jihad.”) Authorities suspect that profits from the sale of South American cocaine, Moroccan hashish, and Afghan opium support terror, but terrorist groups have also stooped to counterfeiting, bootlegging Viagra, sticking up jewelry stores, and heisting infant formula.

—“Terrorist Precursor Crimes: Issues and Options for Congress,” Siobhan O’Neil, Congressional Research Service (PDF)

Emphasis added. Via The Atlantic Monthly.

How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business

How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business, via Andrew Sullivan.

I'm more concerned with the fact that we're torturing than with the idea that doctors are involved, but the article provides some disturbing details about what the government is doing in our names. If you have no sympathy for al-Qhatani, as I don't, remember what Mencken wrote:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Excerpt:

Some of the medical involvement in torture defies belief. In one of the few actual logs we have of a high-level interrogation, that of Mohammed al-Qhatani (first reported in TIME), doctors were present during the long process of constant sleep deprivation over 55 days, and they induced hypothermia and the use of threatening dogs, among other techniques. According to Miles, Medics had to administer three bags of medical saline to Qhatani — while he was strapped to a chair — and aggressively treat him for hypothermia in the hospital. They then returned him to his interrogators...

Of the 136 documented deaths of prisoners in detention, Miles found, medical death certificates were often not issued until months or even years after the actual deaths. One prisoner's corpse at Camp Cropper was kept for two weeks before his family or criminal investigators were notified. The body was then left at a local hospital with a certificate attributing death to "sudden brainstem compression." The hospital's own autopsy found that the man had died of a massive blow to the head. Another certificate claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had died of "cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his heart." According to Miles, no mention was made that the old man had been stripped naked, doused in cold water and kept outside in 40-degree cold for three days before cardiac arrest...

Other doctors just looked the other way, their military duty overruling the Hippocratic Oath. One at Abu Ghraib intervened to ask guards to stop beating one prisoner's wounded leg and quit hanging him from an injured shoulder. He saw it happen three times. He never reported it. In Mosul, according to Miles, one medic witnessed guards beating a prisoner and burning him by dragging him over hot stones. The prisoner was taken to the hospital, treated and then returned by doctors to his torturers. An investigation into the incident was closed because the medic didn't sign the medical record and so he couldn't be identified.

After a while, you get numb reading these stories. They read like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer spreads. In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns them into accomplices to harm.

American Torture - What Bush's Military is Doing in Your Name

Confessions of a Torturer


Excerpts:

I wrote the abuse report and gave it to my superior. And that abuse report, as far as I know, has disappeared. It doesn’t exist anymore.

“For instance, one technique that was approved was called environmental manipulation. It’s really unclear what that means exactly. He took it to mean that we could leave them outside in the cold rain, or we could blast rock music and bombard them with strobe lights for days at a time, or use those things in combination. The document didn’t really give us guidance, although that is what it was meant for...

“We were in this murky area. . . . They always tell you, if you’re given an illegal order it’s your duty to refuse to follow it, but we were in a place that we didn’t know what the legal limit was, so we didn’t know what to do.”

We were getting prisoners who had gotten seriously fucked up. We were getting prisoners from the navy SEALs who were using a lot of the same techniques we were using, except they were a little more harsh. They would actually have the detainee stripped nude, laying on the floor, pouring ice water over his body. They were taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer. We had one guy who had been burned by the navy SEALs. He looked like he had a lighter held up to his legs. One guy’s feet were like huge and black and blue, his toes were obviously all broken, he couldn’t walk.

Lagouranis says the MPs were “willing and enthusiastic participants in all this stuff. A lot of the guys that we worked with were former prison guards or they were reservists who were prison guards in their civilian life. They loved it. They totally wanted to be involved in interrogations. It actually was a problem sometimes. I remember I would be standing guard at three in the morning outside of the shipping container with a prisoner inside and people would come by and they would know what was going on because they could hear the music and maybe see the lights. And they’d want to join in. So I’d have four sergeants standing around me, and I’m a specialist, and they want to go and fuck the guy up, and I would have to control these guys who outrank me and outnumber me and they have weapons and I don’t—because I’m guarding a prisoner I don’t have a weapon. It got really hairy sometimes and I couldn’t call for help because there was nobody around. I remember at one point the MPs came over from the facility and they were banging on the shipping container, one guy got on top and he was jumping up and down, they were throwing rocks at it, they were going inside and yelling at the guy. And I was like, ‘How do I control this situation?’”

But there were two brothers in particular that we were going on pretty hard. . . . We had some significant evidence on these guys which was so rare—we almost never had evidence on anybody. . . . We went on them hard for almost a month, I think, and these guys were just completely broken down, physically, mentally, by the end of it. One guy walked like a 90-year-old man when he was done. He was an ex-army guy, he was a real healthy young man when he came in, and by the end he was a mess. Psychologically they couldn’t focus on things. Their emotions would change all the time. They were obviously showing signs of deterioration.”

If a man can’t focus, can he answer questions? “It made interrogation harder, but we weren’t getting information from these guys anyway. The person who was ordering all this stuff, the chief warrant officer, he never saw these prisoners, so there was no way for him to understand what was going on.” The warrant officer’s response to a lack of information, Lagouranis says, was simply to add another layer of abuse.

After the [Abu Ghraib] scandal broke, they stopped torturing people in prisons and they would torture them before they got to the prison. They would either torture them in their homes or they would take them to a remote location . . . The marines had a location—they called it the ‘meat factory’—they would bring them there and they would torture them for 24 or 48 hours before they brought them to us, and they were using techniques like water boarding, mock execution, they were beating them up, breaking their bones, whatever. It was bad, in particular the First Recon—they’re sort of like marine special forces, an elite unit [attached to the 24th Marine Exped­itionary Unit, known as 24th MEU]. Every time they went on a raid it didn’t matter who they were bringing back, they would just fuck these guys up. Old men, 15-year-old kids, they all came with bruises and broken bones. One guy came with a blister on the back of his leg. It was big, it was horrible, a burn blister. They’d made him sit on the exhaust pipe of a running truck.

Lagouranis says he once interrogated four brothers who’d been arrested during a general search because soldiers had found a pole in their house that they’d argued could be used for sighting targets for mortars. The brothers, interrogated separately by Lagouranis, contended they used it to measure the depth of water in a canal, and there was nothing incriminating in the house. Though he was convinced they were telling the truth, his superiors would not release the men. A man arrested because he had a cell phone and a shovel met a similar fate. The army contended the shovel could be used to plant an IED and the cell phone could be used to help set it off, and though Lagouranis bought his explanation, nothing he said shook that belief. The army wanted to be able to boast about the number of terrorists apprehended, and the four brothers with the striped stick, the two who ran the aid station at the potato factory, and the man with the shovel were close enough.

The vast majority of the men and women in Lagouranis’s MI brigade remained at Abu Ghraib and a nearby base for their entire tour, and at the end of that year they published an intelligence report he says was full of empty claims. “It was like, ‘The top ten detainees and what we got out of them,’ ” Lagouranis says. “It was all bullshit. And that’s for an entire year of interrogating thousands of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. They got nothing out of that place. That’s not just my assessment—you can talk to anybody I worked with over there. The main reason for that is because 90 or 95 percent of the people we got had nothing to do with the insurgency. And if they did we didn’t have any good evidence on them. And the detainees knew that and they knew they didn’t have to talk to us.” A February 2004 Red Cross report based on the estimates of coalition intelligence officers said that 70 to 90 percent of the prisoners were innocent.

“I got nothing in Iraq,” says Lagouranis. “Zero.”

Lewis says he was required to submit a detainee abuse report whenever a prisoner complained of mistreatment, no matter where it had taken place. He recalls patterns of torture emerging, with specific methods peculiar to specific locations—there was a Ramadi pattern, for instance, and another for Fallujah. He recalls that prisoners complained of having been sodomized by a broom or squeegee handle in one location, and although he’d report it he’d hear the same allegation several months later from another prisoner detained at the same location. “Not once did I hear of any arrests” as a result of an abuse report, he says, though it was clear to him that the detainees were not repeating a rehearsed story.

“It was obvious that certain abuse was happening all over the country,” he says. “Every day I saw things that to so many of us interrogators seemed so normal and part of a routine that nobody said anything. It takes a unique clarity to stand up and say what everyone thinks is so normal is actually abhorrent. I think I did well under the circumstances, but no one reported what they should have when they should have—including me.

“I saw barbaric traits begin to seep out of me and other good and respectable people—good Americans who never should have been put in that position to begin with. They have two choices—disobey direct orders or become monsters. It’s a lonely road when everyone else is taking the other one.”

Via Andrew Sullivan, via Stephen.