One-Sentence Movie Reviews: In the Loop

Here is my review of the must-see In the Loop:

(For our British readers) "Alastair Campbell...only much, much f******* b******* j****w**d**** scarier."
(For our American readers) "Donald Rumsfeld...only much, much f******* b******* j****w**d**** scarier."

Thank you very much.

The Torture Memos: A Quick Response to George W. Bush's Officials

Related Link: Text of the Torture Memos
Related Post: 4 Torture Memos Released, No Prosecutions of Interrogators

I am still concerned that the Obama Administration's release of four Bush-era memoranda documenting the authorisation of torture (or, as Politico insists, "interrogation techniques") is, in part, a deflection from ongoing issues over Executive power and surveillance/rendition/indefinite detention. And I suspect we'll be pursuing those matters in days to come.

But for today, as former members and acolytes of the Bush Administration absolve themselves in the press:

This was torture sanctioned by President Bush and his chief advisors. This was torture that was illegal, immoral, and ineffective. This was a torture that did not win the "War on Terror" but damaged US foreign policy and American standing with other countries and peoples.

This was a brute exercise of power, sanctioned by (but not actually responding directly to) the brutal attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001.

To Michael Hayden, former Director of the National Security Agency/Central Intelligence Agency, and Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General, who write in the Wall Street Journal that the release of the memoranda "makes the problem [of national security] worse":

Both of you, without question or qualm, carried out the orders that violated the Geneva Conventions, defied agencies such as the Red Cross, suspended any notion of US and international law, and --- in certain cases --- led to injury and death. Both of you strove for years to hide these orders. Both of you put out stories of the effectiveness of "interrogation techniques" which were later discredited.

To William Kristol, who sneers at the statement of current Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair that "[these] methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing":

From your editor's chair at the Weekly Standard and with yo social-political connections in Washington, you pressed for a war --- one that would both demonstrate and assure American superiority --- you had been advocating since 1998. Initially, you declared that war against the "jihadists". But, even as you supported the torture of detainees, your priority was not our safety from Al Qa'eda but the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And, after that, you wanted the overthrow of the Iranian Government.

Your primary concern was not "terrorists". Yet you were happy, in the name of perpetual war, to promote any method, no matter how effectively it shredded our own laws and standards rather than the threat from our enemies.

To Karl Rove, who Twitters about Kristol's column: "Another Must Read":

Your primary, maybe only, concern about the measures taken by the Bush Administration was the extent to which they supported the election and re-election campaigns of Republican candidates. If we raised our voices against torture, that only bolstered your message that we were soft, unreliable, appeasers of the enemy. And you too were only using Al Qa'eda as a foil to get to your #1 battle, the War against Iraq that would ensure a Republican mandate for years to come.

Forgive me, gentlemen, if you are receiving an undue share of my anger, given that the former President, George W. Bush, and the leaders of the campaign for torture, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, should also be held to account. But as they have not responded to yesterday's news....

Your fatuous, sometimes whining criticism of this current Administration for revealing your illegal, immoral, counter-productive seizure and manipulation of power is no better than the criminal blaming the judge who allowed the evidence into his courtroom.

You are deceivers and liars. In an ideal world, you would be held to criminal account for your actions; in this world (ironically thanks to yesterday's Administration decisions) you will face no formal prosecution. Therefore, we can only hope that your ex post facto excuses and pretenses reinforce a determination to ensure that this shall never happen again.

Israel-Palestine: What Has Happened to George Mitchell's Talks?

Funny thing about US envoy George Mitchell's latest visit to the Middle East: most of the US and British press didn't take much notice.

Mitchell was in talks yesterday with Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and opposition leader Tzipi Livni. The New York Times decided this was worth one paragraph with the lead sentence:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday skirted calls by George J. Mitchell, President Obama’s envoy to the Middle East, for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, demanding prior Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state instead.

The Washington Post relied on an Associated Press summary, "Stark differences between U.S. and Israeli policy toward peace talks with the Palestinians emerged clearly Thursday."

Even those brief mentions, however, raise the question: has Netanyahu effectively blocked Washington's pursuit of substantial Israeli-Palestinian negotiations?

Ha'aretz, the Israeli newspaper, offers a possible answer:

The Obama administration is preparing a Middle East peace process that will include simultaneous bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and Syria. The plan is based on the Arab peace initiative that offers establishing normal relations between Israel and Arab League states in exchange for withdrawing from the occupied territories and establishing a Palestinian state.

The United States will put together a "security package," including demilitarization of the territories from which Israel will withdraw and the option of stationing a multinational force in them for years.

Frustratingly, Ha'aretz gives no clue to its source, so it is unclear if the information has been leaked by Washington. Even more curiously, the spin on the plan is that "the Obama administration believes that a breakthrough in the peace process between Israel and the Arab states would restrain Tehran's influence and contribute to the diplomatic effort to block Iran's nuclearization". This could be an attempt by an Israeli official to sell the US approach to a domestic audience, or it could be an American attempt to overcome Tel Aviv's opposition by setting out the "Iran-first" framework.

All this speculation and spin, however, may be no more than academic, given the current Israeli position. Palestinian Authority leaders, meeting Mitchell in the West Bank today, made clear, "The U.S. must hold Israel to previous peace commitments and pressure it to accept the principle of Palestinian statehood."

Crisis in Guatemala?

As the Summit of the Americas opens and after attention to drug-related violence and its political effects in Mexico, Mark Schneider of Global Post looks at another Latin American country where crime and drugs are unsettling the system.

Guatemala: the next to fall?

While U.S. attention has rightly been focused on Mexico's drug wars — with high-profile trips by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before this weekend's Summit of the Americas — Mexico's southern neighbor is in far more serious danger of becoming a failed state. Reeling from gangs, corruption and pervasive poverty, Guatemala now faces well-armed, well-financed drug cartels.

Narco traffickers and organized criminals dominate an estimated 40 percent of the country, from the Mexican border to the Caribbean coast, as well as in the little-populated Mayan jungle and forest preserves of the Peten. Opium poppy fields grow freely. The major threat, though, comes from more than $10 billion in cocaine passing through Guatemala each year, with a tenth of the money laundered in the country and used to bribe officials.

The drug lords and their friends have become the self-ordained local governments and police, either directly or by buying off others. The Sinaloa Cartel, which has run cocaine trafficking in Guatemala for the past several years, is pitted against the Gulf Cartel newcomers. Their "Zetas" (paid assassins) are ratcheting up violence that inevitably hits "civilians." Last year there were more than 6,200 homicides reported in Guatemala.

As I walked the streets of Guatemala City a few weeks ago, the fear of local citizens boarding the city's buses was palpable, and it's no wonder. Bus drivers are a prime target as gang members tied to organized crime extort protection money from bus company owners and the bus drivers union. In the past year, more than 135 bus drivers in Guatemala City were assassinated, and in one case a grenade was exploded on a bus.

Marauding gang members rule entire urban neighborhoods, routinely abusing women and children. Kidnapping doubled last year to 438 cases, and there have been dozens more victims this year. Most suspect "dirty" or former police are behind the snatchings.

Read rest of article....

Tea Parties, Violence, and Politics (And, Yes, This is a Serious Post)

Warner Todd Huston, RedState.com, 16 April 2009: "It may seem ominous, but violence is sometimes acceptable depending on the cause."

Well, it's been a lot of fun with the Tea Parties this week. The too-blatant manipulation, by certain political groups and media outlets, of a "revolution" was well-suited to parody, even beyond the unfortunate double entendre of the protest's chosen beverage.

Today, however, the fun gives way.

I had refrained from commenting on the supposed political agenda of the protests, largely because there was no coherence and no attention to the financial/economic crisis beyond "Cut Our Taxes". There was no recognition, for example, that the Obama Administration's stimulus package rests in part on tax cuts, let alone that any solution to the current economic mess has to go beyond simply slashing the tax bill further.

(As always, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show team rode the wave. First, Stewart declared,  "if there's one thing I know about American people, they love baseball, kicking ass, and paying taxes to the Government". Then, the Daily Show's next item was on the investment company Goldman Sachs and its $1.5 billion profit.)

At the same time, I did not want to comment on elements of the wider, visceral protest which went beyond hate-Government to hate-Obama and which were beyond-borderline racist and Red-baiting. It would be too easy to highlight the single poster who compared Obama's economic policy to Hitler's treatment of the Jews, ignoring the majority of demonstrators  who --- however much I may disagree with their politics, however much I believe they were expressing anger or fear rather than a constructive politics --- were there from genuine concern for the future.

In short, I was hoping that this whipped-up Tea Party would pass and that, in the aftermath, we could return to the serious, ongoing engagement with the state of the American and international economic systems.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I read this blog by "freelance writer" Warner Todd Huston on RedState.com:

A dispassionate review of where we are today would tend to say that tax day violence is not justified in any way. But are future tax protests as off limits to violence if government does not heed the warnings delivered now? Even more to the point does a flat refusal to ever employ violence encourage recalcitrant government to ignore protests safely assuming that no real consequences for their actions will ever be imposed on them?

RedState.com is stridently pro-Republican and stridently opposed to Obama's policies, but it is not an "extremist" website. So I was shaken by this far-from-implicit call to discuss the possibility of violent protest: "It may seem ominous, but violence is sometimes acceptable depending on the cause." Huston had crossed a line that had been tight-roped for weeks by demagogues such as Fox News's Glenn Beck and politicians such as Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann as they tried to whip up "resistance".

Of course, the majority of yesterday's demonstrators are unlikely to be contemplating the violence that Huston discusses. At the same time, violence can occur and escalate not from the decision of a majority, but from a minority's stoking of the fear and anger that was too-clearly evident yesterday.

I am conscious as I write, though, that identifying that seed of violence is not enough. Otherwise, it risks the appearance of countering fear-mongering with fear, of point-scoring by tsk-tsking how the protests are destructive rather than productive.

Zephyr Teachout wrote in The Nation yesterday, "[The] tea parties represent a genuine, authentic civic anger." I'm not as sure that this is an "anger that the public has been largely shut out of the most important public decisions of our time" --- it seems more anger both from not understanding the complex economic mal-functions behind the current crisis and from following the easy "answers"/images of bad/evil/"left" Obama and the current Administration.

Yet the lesson remains: as fun as it was, the tea-bagging parody doesn't shoo away that anger and it certainly doesn't banish the polarising and manipulative groups behind the protests. Emotions will continue to be fraught, so politics must be fought through engagement rather than dismissal.