Why Add My One-liner to the Humoral Pyre?

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I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
— Winston Churchill

If, just to piss off Christopher Hitchens, there really IS a God, then He’s laughing His ass off right now.

After all, if he couldn’t laugh at the folly of the Human Race, then he’d cry such a river that it would drown the World. And, if there were a God, just to piss off Bill Maher and Janeine Garofolo, then She would a Sense of Humor, even for Satan’s little riffs.

Because, my children, this one is oh, sooooo special.

You see, once upon a time, a sad, sick batch of twisted men and women people (sic) decided they didn’t like somebody and that they’d kill him. Now, if this were a TV show, there wouldn’t be anything “novel” about it. If this were a play, it wouldn’t necessarily set the theatrical world on fire. Both would depend on the handling. It could be a “caper,” as in every MacGuyver show ever shot. Or every “Mission Impossible” episode on TV (excepting the dreadful movies).

Or, it could be a tragedy in theater. A MacBeth. A Richard III — a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse.

If it were a political potboiler, say, by a Harold Robbins, it would be about a plot to kill a potential future president of America (and there would be one intensely sado-masochistic sex scene about two-thirds of the way through the book). If it were a John Le Carré novel, it would be about a plot to kill the potential leader of ANOTHER country. Were it a Robert Ludlum novel, it would be successful, but one person would realize what was really going on — preferably an ex-intel agent or FBI man — and there would be a 700-page chase scene through Europe filling out the middle of a slightly extended novella.

(If it were a Stephen King novel, of course, there would a haunted whatchamacallit that was forcing these people to plot this horrible thing, and, after almost all of them were killed in gruesome ways by the haunted whatchamacallit, one would realize how to destroy the haunted whatchamacallit, and everything would be fine again on Maple Street in Anytown, U.S.A.)

Were it a plot by Tom Clancy, our Super Duper Great Ultra-Competent intel agents would use high technology (and perhaps Ding and Clark) to take out the Foreign leader himself. It would be done for the good of the world, and we would all be proud as Americans, that these tireless sentinels of freedom had their satellite platforms and assassination teams. (But the world would never know the magnitude of threat that had been averted by our super-good, super-competent civil servants.)

If it were a novel by Tom Robbins, it would be sad and funny, and there would be a strong woman character who bathed in rose petals by the light of the Harvest Moon.

If it were a movie, it would turn out to be a machine-induced hallucination and everybody would wear patent leather fetish clothes and really tiny black sunglasses.

But it wasn’t any of those.

It was Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Colin Powell and the rest of the gang deciding to “take out” Saddam Hussein.

But, while a cliché of fiction, it was an assembly almost wholly unimaginable in the Real World* that has been the bedrock of American political verity for more than 230 years.

[* Not to be confused with the eponymous MTV Television Series.]

They were meeting on how to convince Americans to go to war to kill Saddam Hussein.

Then, they were meeting on what to do with prisoners picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan (our toe-in-the-water first deployment of U.S. troops).

Then they were meeting to finalize plans for invasion.

Now, at some point, mission creep set in, and conflating the primal urge to kill Saddam with the need to gather “intel” on another group, “Al Qaeda” who was successfully morphed into “Oceana” for their Big Brotherish purposes, came the need to decide if torture should be allowed.

Sent to the Pentagon’s general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president’s inherent wartime powers.

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote. “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

And, in this horrific greek tragedy meets a Tom Clancy novel gone bad somewhere slightly South of Shakespeare the team literally met to figure out how to get around the Geneva Convention’s ban on torture. And around U.S. laws prohibiting it.

(not to mention the The Decider Guy, our very own Compassionder in Chief had specifically addressed the issue in 2002 –

The United States Congress ratified both the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions thereby compelling the U. S. Armed Forces to comply with their strictures. The Third Geneva Convention, which covers prisoners of war, contains the following proscription within Article 17:

“No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”

The Fourth Geneva Convention, which covers “the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” from the occupying power has less precise rules on interrogation but Article 31 still bans all “physical or moral coercion” to obtain information. Soon after 9/11, there was some confusion as to who was a Prisoner of War and/or protected by these Conventions. That was quickly put to rest with the 7 February 2002 memorandum “Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees” from President Bush that directs, in part:

“Our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment. As a matter of policy, the U.S. armed forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.” (Emphasis added.)

But, they were meeting in the White House, to conspire on how to bypass the Geneva Accords of 1907, 1929, 1949 and 1996, the agreed-upon “Law” of the Civilized World for nearly a century. ‘Barbarians’ we should correctly call them. They were meeting to conspire barbarity.

And, of course, the sense of moral outrage this weekend was palpable. Throughout the blogosphere, and the punditosphere, the red-faced bloviators sputtered their righteous indignation and profound sense of outrage.

At Barack Obama. (Over nothing, nothing at all. See prior post.)

Whoops.

Somebody is very, very sick here. Sadly, both the maladministration AND the press have become so utterly dysfunctional that in the face of this monstrous barbarity, the reaction of the former was almost undoubtedly to distract the increasingly savage, twisted and imbecilic latter.

Seriously, do you REALLY think that the Obama sound bite was more important than the admission of torture meetings and authorizations?

[ibid:

Regardless of where you place the threshold between torture and coercion, they are both banned by the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions and anathema to President Bush's order to "treat detainees humanely."]

Diagnosis? Our body politic is seriously ill. Having been called to social health (we need to be in this together) in time of increasing instability, perhaps we might consider the root causes of the illness, in order to ascertain a method of treatment. Doctor?

The Seven Social Ills, as quoted by Mahatma Gandhi in “Young India,” 1925

• Politics without principles
• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Knowledge without character
• Commerce without morality
• Science without humanity
• Worship without sacrifice

Somewhere, perhaps, the sound of godlike laughter echoes. Pissing Christopher Hitchens off, no doubt.

Courage.

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