The NYT's Scott Shane's At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks is a tantalizing slice of bait titling. The question presents us with another, more troubling philosophical question before we even get to the first word of the text: is the title's question - assuming it can possibly be answered - a legitimate one to even ask? Any direction we lean in presents us with a problem.

Of the several possible answers, none of which will satisfy anyone, the two most desired ones are yes or no (though a firm maybe is the most likely outcome). The chances of receiving any sort of clarifying shake of the head are infinitesimally small. In fact, the chances are so ludicrously small as to make the question not even worth asking. It's akin to the query, "What color is God's hair?" The question implies that there is a god and that that god has some sort of hair. All answers, from "I don't know," to "God's bald," to any particular wavelength across the visible spectrum, accepts the existence of a god with hair. If you don't believe in a god, then the question is irrelevant and, actually, one that is quite mad. But if you do believe in a god and want to take a crack at it, the fact is that your guess is as good as anyone else's. (I'd go with azure blue if I believed in a god, but only because I like azure blue.)

The use of the term methods in the Shane's question implies that there are, obviously, more than one way to skin this cat. For the sake of argument let's reduce it to a generalized two: those methods that complied with the Geneva Convention (GC) and those that didn't. Or what about this pair: those that complied with the U. S. Constitution and those that didn't. For the sake of simplification, lets just lump it into legal or illegal, which is, I know, clear as mud. But back to Mr. Shane's question. If an attack was, in fact, foiled by the acquisition of information from any sort of interrogation, one can correctly assume that either a legal or an illegal method of information withdrawal was employed. (If data was gathered in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Djibouti, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Diego Garcia (a US naval base, not a cigar nor a relative of Zorro) or any of more than a dozen other cooperative countries that hosted black sites, then we can generally say that it was collected outside the confining bounds of any U.S. constitutional constraint. Why else would you sub your questions out to Egypt? Guantanamo Bay, the U. S. extra-judicial penal colony at the southeast end of communist Cuba, squarely falls into the "beyond GC" class. This doesn't leave many information extraction points that would unquestionably fall into the legal category. Lake Wobegon is still a candidate, but no one yet has been able to find it. I understand that Dick Cheney is a person of interest in its disappearance.)

But back to the NYT and the serious business concerning the hair of God. If we were able to somehow miraculously discover that actual attacks were thwarted through the employment of illegal interrogation methods, what should the next question be? If there is proof enough that torture effectively ensured national security would that be justification to spin it into a new law - with caveats, of course. We are, after all, a civilized bunch, are we not? And would one of those caveats be that torture could only be legally used on illegal enemy combatants? But there we go again, treading out onto that mushy ground of who, pray tell, is an illegal enemy combatant? According to Douglas Feith, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Bush Administration, impassioned Zionist and neoconservative, people of a failed state are not afforded the protection of the Geneva Convention. That the failed state he referred to was Afghanistan and that the people whom he targeted were Muslims, were not, we can most certainly be assured, a reflection of his personal political agenda.

Another question that immediately pops to mind is "Who are we, members of a nation found on laws, to step away from those laws, if we are, in fact, who we say we are?" If there were laws and they were seriously misshapen to fit into a twisted agenda, then those who bent the laws are necessarily accountable, to some degree or other. In the Roman Catholic list of do's and don'ts there is a greased pig of a natural law clause called 'rightful appropriation,' a godly wiggle that allows a person's soul to remain unblemished while taking or taking back something that rightfully, in spirit, belongs to him or her: say the Holy Lands, late Middle Ages. (Or in my case, comic books from a local bookstore when I was eleven. I'm not sure how I got around to fuzzily claiming ownership, but jigging around a blemish can wind you through a lot of weird meanders that you never knew existed until you wanted something so badly you could taste it. Superman!) A lot of slaughter went down in those medieval messes, but that's what happens when you fiddle with the language of the law. Imagine what the newly-converted Roman Catholic Newt Gingrich would do with this one if he were ever to giddily spin in the Oval Office's big chair?But let's not try to think too much about that.

And on that note, let's try not to think too much about Pakistan either, a Non-NPT (Nuclear Proliferation Treaty) member of the nuclear club that each day spirals further into chaos as the Taliban advances on Islamabad with the generous backing of Saudi oil money that America has been so eager to provide. (It sounds like somebody's getting ready to steal more comic books.)

So, what's the rule on a failing state with nukes that shares a border with India and China, the immediate downwinders, which includes one-third of the world's population? Ask George W. that question if you can find him. Chances are he's not talking. But maybe it's a lot easier to ask Fox News to cross the Potomac and underhand that question at Dick Cheney. He seems to have given a lot more thought to these sorts of things than his former boss was ever able to give to any issue that required the consideration of a future. (Perhaps George is more Boulder Buddhist than any of us ever knew: "I live in the moment; tomorrow is too much to ask. Ooo-wahhh, Ooo-wahhh") Dick will have given that one some serious thought, you betcha. And his answer will be all about Obama coming to town. Nothing to do with him and his good buddy, DoD Don, not wanting to see the CIA succeed in dealing a crippling blow to al Qaeda at Tora Bora back in December 2001, seeing as how it would have ruined their plan to go to war with Iraq. It almost feels like Dick Cheney fed nukes to the terrorists in some sort of self-fulfilling messianic scheme. I know, this all gets pretty complicated. Too much for me to figure out. Kind of makes me want to ask easier questions.

So, what color do you think God's hair is?
 ________

PS: I just received an email I sent to myself from my iTouch 19 days ago. The contents of the email were personal notes I'd taken as I was reading Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine. I wondered where it had gotten to, then figured it was a lost lamb that had gone astray and been eaten by some digital predator. And so, I forgot all about it. Then today, miraculously, the lamb wandered back into the herd, nearly three weeks after its disappearance. It came through my Google mail with an ad for www.america.gov/persian, all the words in the ad in Arabic with the exception of the URL.

Here is the inexplicably found email (they are notes, so disregard the grammatical mistakes):

Chapter 2

p. 64: the exiled 1990s Neocons - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith & Perle - were now at the wheel, not looking for international diplomatic consensus building, but rather using strength and might to force their will as the last and mightiest ones left on the block. The Superpower. Power is useless if left untapped, if not, at the very least, used to enforce a "national" will, one defined by the neocons. What good is it if it is not used as overarching threat.

p. 65: and then along came the non-state transnationalists, the border-ignoring terrorists. The 'transnats.'

p. 77: "Every CIA success is a DoD failure." - Rumsfeld, early 2002

p. 81: "We have come to know truths that we will never question: evil is real, and it must be opposed." - GeoW, 2002. Charles Krauthammer referred to this speech as a declaration of war against Iraq.
________

An interesting grouping of 'threat' keywords. I wonder where this one wandered while it was away, and who may have read it before it finally found its way into my inbox? Baaaaaaa. I thought those guys had gone home a few months ago.

Notes to myself:
"Take Inertia more seriously! OK. I will, I will!"
"Re-watch Werner Herzog's Every Man For Himself and God Against All.

This morning I woke up laughing, which is not normally how I greet the day. I am usually quite happy about being wherever it is I am, but laughing is certainly a bonus. And there's a reason. In that gray mushy interlude between sleep and waking the thought of a 2012 Republican presidential ticket drifted out of the fog like a giant piñata begging to be whacked with a bat: Gingrich - Palin: For A Renegotiated Contract With America. Or maybe it was Palin - Gingrich: Huskies For A Wholly New America. Then I checked to make sure I had a pulse, that I hadn't died and gone to heaven. Still here.

In the oddest of imaginary pairings, Newt wouldn't be caught dead with Sarah, but Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle managed to sell a few records. And who could have ever imagined that John McCain would have been sharing the stage with Sarah and the Far North Secessionists back a few months ago. I think the privileged Republicans have to revisit their private drug-use policy, and think about cutting mushrooms from the platform committee meeting lunches. That's a plank that hasn't served them well.

It has been great to see a resurrected Newt (isn't their a special limnological term for newts that rise again from the ash heap?). And especially one who acts so much like the last one. "Obama weak like Carter." What a peach! What a joke cracker he is!

Here's a guy with more baggage than Imelda Marcos has shoes (and who knows, some of her shoes may still be in his baggage) and he's swinging for the fences with his best, frightened white boy whiff. It's amazing how much a black president with a Jewish chief of staff - both of whom successfully survived and rose up and out of the Irish/Polish Catholic Chicago political sausage machine - can get the perpetually scared and racially-challenged mean pale men to say things that sound so adolescently schoolyard.

I am not even going to bring up the issue of Newt and women, (or Palin and women, for that matter), but I do hope that the GOP can somehow do better than this pair, whether they share a ticket or fight each other for a share of it. No, really I don't hope that at all. I hope this is the best they can muster. It would be almost as much fun as watching the Indians beat the Yankees 22-4.

And speaking of New York, let's dredge up Rudi (and women), though it may be hard to pry him away from lower Manhattan where he is heroically wandering and looking for something or other to oversee. Wow! Hard to know which way Rush will go on this one, though we know it will not be with a black Republican candidate. (Take a seat, Michael Steele, you're going nowhere.) The blustering Republican extreme's not ready for that yet, and, in reality, it will never be ready for anything close to that, which is something Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were never quite able to grasp.

So, let's all get behind Newt (please, no shoving). He'll bring that solid 20% together. In fact, he already has. In fact, it's the same 20% that the good Ms Palin could count on. The biggest problem Newt's got now will be getting it to 21. Look for more fear and weaklings. And also, look for real Republicans who understand their acute and growing predicament to finally mutiny or just jump ship. There is only so long that moderates can suffer the flapping fringe. Third party anyone? And if so, who will end up with the GOP trademark? And they thought Ross Perot was their enemy!

"The lawyering that produced the memos flows from a theory, subscribed to by very intelligent people called the unitary theory of the president. These are presidentialists, not only in the sense that they believe that the presidency ought to be very powerful, but they have a unitary theory.... These are intelligent men and women of goodwill who say that anything that inhibits the president's power to defend the country is not binding." --George Will, on ABC News' "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" - April 19, 2009
________

I have started the long and painful reading of the newly released Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos that justified what can only be described as torture.

From the Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (aka the Bybee Memo)

As part of this increased pressure phase, Zubaydah will have contact only with a new interrogation specialist, whom he has not met previously, and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape ("SERE") training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began. This phase will likely last no more than several days but could last up to thirty days. In this phase, you would like to employ ten techniques that you believe will dislocate his expectations regarding the treatment he believes he will receive and encourage him to disclose the crucial information mentioned above.

These ten techniques are: (1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress position, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in confinement box, and (10) the waterboard. The interrogation team would use these techniques in some combination to convince Zubaydah that the only way he can influence his surrounding environment is through cooperation. You have, however, informed us you expect these techniques to be used in some sort of escalating fashion culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique. Moreover, you have also orally informed us that although some of these techniques may be used more than once, that repetition will not be substantial because the techniques generally lose their effectiveness after several repetitions. You have also informed us that Zubaydah sustained a wound during his capture, which is being treated." [Bybee memo:1-2]

________

Abu Zubaydah was captured in Faisalabad during the night of March 27/28, 2002. According to Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine, Zubaydah was an expendable, not the operations chief that ex-President George W. Bush and ex-Vice President Dick Cheney hyped and sold to the press and, by extension, the entire country. They oversized him and they knew it, but lied about it anyway, PR-ing him into someone he clearly was not. Ex-CIA Director George Tenet, the president's water boy, was expected to grow him into a larger fish than he actually was. Now we learn that he did it by waterboarding Zubaydah 83 times. According to FBI agent Dan Coleman, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality." [Suskind:100] And that was before they started in with a regiment of torture. What he is now is anyone's guess. Justifying torture by labeling those who do violence to U.S. as "illegal enemy combatants" has done a grave injustice to soldiers everywhere. Of this there is no doubt. Nearly all - if not all - of those responsible for the flawed, and likely criminal, memos never served a day in the military. They were suits.

Jay Bybee, a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, approved, through his August 01, 2002 memo, coercive techniques, including "insects placed in confinement box." Who could possibly defend this as not being torture? Bybee was approved as a federal judge before his involvement in the justification of torture became public. His impeachment is a very real possibility.
________

Dick Cheney, one of George Will's men of goodwill, wants the CIA to release more classified documents to show what the intelligence gained through torture yielded, so as to make it a "honest debate," once again showing his zealot streak, where the ends always justify any means.

I can only hope that the CIA accommodates Mr. Cheney, and actually releases more documents, though only with the permission of the President Obama. Mr. Cheney, the presidentialist, should clearly understand the necessity of that caveat, though I have the impression that he misses that point altogether. There is a clear divide between being presidential and being dictatorial, though it is one that Mr. Cheney obviously is unable to grasp. He is a fraud and constant reminder of the shameful level that our country fell to during the eight years of imperious presidency that we suffered through, and which we will be long in recovery from.
 ________

In the 1960s Dick Cheney sought and was awarded five (5) draft deferments so that he would not have to serve in the military and, possibly, be sent to Vietnam. His vigorous support of torture techniques and his willingness to not defend the Constitution, as twice he publicly swore to do, shows how much he might have learned by being in the military, by realizing the value of duty and honor, by understanding the fundamental reason for and necessity of the Geneva Convention. My hope is that those who have served and continue to serve will see this man as the disgraceful human being he is. He continues to soil our present by distorting the past, by twisting our history for self-profit.

And if, by chance, you actually speak to him, ask him how many funerals of your fallen comrades he has attended. Then ask the same of ex-President George W. Bush. These two men, so anxious for you (us) to go to war, chose to run and hide when it was their time to serve. And don't be surprised when you learn that not once have they attended a military funeral. This is how much they value your service. To them we are all good enough to kill but not to honor. This is what you need to remember.

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In the continuing saga of How Religion Twists the World, the next domestic battleground looks to be Indiana. South Bend, to be exact. This time it's the Catholics! I feel that I can happily say that since I put in more than my fair share of time and lessons with some very psychotic Roman-collared clergy. The current upset has to do with the invitation extended to President Obama to deliver the commencement speech on May 17 to the 2009 graduating class of University of Notre Dame. Already people are planting their feet and saying, "Hell no, we won't go. How can you give an honor to an abortionist." Well, you opened your arms to George W. Bush in 2001, a man, who, as the six-year governor of Texas, executed 152 inmates, a figure unmatched by any modern governor. And he did it all with the help of Alberto Gonzalez, a card carrying Catholic, who ineffectually presented clemency briefs on the first 57 before essentially giving up and just letting them be killed, good thieve, bad thieves and probably a few in-betweeners.

Francis Cardinal George, the Catholic headman of Chicago, blasted the mother ship school when he said, "It is clear that Notre Dame didn't understand what it means to be Catholic when they issued this invitation." The words were spoken on a video, so it is hard to tell if the 'c' in catholic was meant as lower or upper case, despite how it appears in print. The good cardinal needs to clarify that, and if it was a small 'c' then he needs to dig out his dictionary and learn what obviously would be a new meaning for him. If it's a BIG 'C' he needs to act like one.  My guess is he meant capital 'C' and that he secretly pines for the days when George W. ran the world. Now, there was an anti-abortionist worth following, even if he is known to have told some mighty lies that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Before I walked away from the Roman Catholic Church, traditional Catholics generally voted the Democratic ticket, the party of the working class who filled the Sunday collection plates with hard earned money. But over the years things have changed, and so, too, have many Catholics, who have generally moved politically right to quietly partner with fundamentalist Christian groups, joining hands over the abortion issue. The genuine oddness in all of this is the fundies don't really believe that Catholics are 'real' Christians, since they believe in transubstantiation, parthenogenesis - the loopy idea that the Son of God sprang from the pristine womb of a virgin, which is too much for those people who get lit by tongues of holy fire which take over their spirits and allow them to speak in lost languages of scattered Biblical tribes - and follow the word of a man who lives in a Mediterranean palace and has more money than their version of God can imagine. But, then there is that single issue that allows them to meet out there along the fringe.

Poor Catholics. It's hard to know which way to go, which path to follow, since all paths seem to leave more and more behind. Too bad you didn't move a little quicker to protect your children from the epidemic of pederasts who prowled the pews and aisles looking for fresh meat in the form of all those good Catholic children whose parents told them that the Fathers were all good, when, in fact, you knew that many of them were not. So, you secretly passed the bad ones around like plague-laden rats.  Wow, that was very "full of grace." And you're the ones who hammer Obama? Good luck with that one, guys.

So, many of us left for less deranged digs, and although there are some still unhappily wandering, looking to fill the void left behind by your lies, many of us are more than happy to be gone and onto something else. And by the way, we voted for Obama. Yeah, I know, we've fallen far, but we've landed on our feet. That's what can happen to some who were tested by the fires and violence so early in life. We developed scars. And smiles too, since it's nice not to be so pin-headed anymore. Of course, most of us didn't go to Notre Dame, even if we were forced to root on Saturdays for the Fightin' Irish. (Sidenote: my grandfather from County Sligo, never could understand why all those black guys were running around with big-lettered "Fightin' Irish" all over their chests. Of course, he didn't call them "blacks" back in the 60s; he always called them something else. But most people I knew called them something else, too, even if they didn't play for Notre Dame. That's the way things were back then, and how, in many places, they still are. Oh well, some things take a little longer to get used to. The London Times used to make the Irish in cartoons all look like monkeys. Irish men and women looking just like monkeys! Imagine! And that was long before Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post got around to it, apology notwithstanding.)

So as the issue heats up and graduation day gets closer, do your best to keep from going the simian route. I know how some of you Irish boys can get all laced up with the weekend 'spirit' and end up doing things you can only spill in the confessional. (Does anyone actually do that anymore?) But try to remember that there but for the grace of time and history go all of us, evolutionarily speaking. (There's another point of departure with your fundie buds.) And try to treat our president better than Dick Cheney treated him: Dick's Svengali angel kept him screwed to his seat, his bad back nothing but a flimsily poor excuse. Try to act more human than our ex-VP was able to do: despite knowing better, he couldn't allow his inner racist to take a day off and allow for history and transitions to proceed smoothly.

This time the world's watching you, even those of us who walked away and no longer root for your football team. But basketball ... well, that's another story. We never rooted for you guys back home. It was always St. Joe's or Villanova, Temple in a pinch. I know, more bad news, just when you don't need to hear another word. Oh, well.

There is so much to say about Dick Cheney that I think I'll take a pass on him this week and move on to the person who didn't quite scoot into his seat in the Office of the Vice President (OVP), the woman who stares down Russia from her front porch. (What is it with Republicans and their porches? George W.'s Crawford ranch's back porch was known as a place where Dick and George cut several major deals, legal or otherwise. Then post-Katrina, when George was afraid to set foot in Louisiana, he went to Mississippi and imagined a future where he'd be sitting on Trent Lott's porch. And staying with the porch theme, the darling from Wasilla, AK kept watch over the awakening bear of Russia from her front one in suburban Anchorage. There's a porch thesis just waiting to be written.)

But when half's said and nothing's done, it's been a bad week for Sarah Palin. Her nearly son-in-law, the father of her grandchild, is heading for the talk show circuit with his mother, an alleged OxyContin dealer who's been in such acute pain for the last seven years from a botched hysterectomy that she had to give up her career as a hairdresser and turn to selling painkillers. Kiss, tell, take a few OCs then get paid for it on a talk show is a family recipe that seems to work for some. Ask Rush. He's made a few runs at families, eaten a few painkillers, and he's still getting paid for it. By the bucketsful.

Now we learn that Sarah's "First Dude" Todd's half-sister, Diana, also a Palin, a stay-at-home mom with a husband, Scott, and two kids, is in the Mat-Su Pretrial Facility in Palmer, AK for breaking into the same house twice-in-a-week to steal money. Bail: $10,000.  Scott, who didn't recognize the street name where his wife was spending some of her days, had no idea why she'd do such a thing. Me neither, Scott. And I don't even know her.

So, what do you think John McCain's thinking these days. Someone ought to go ask him just to watch him go la-la on camera. "So, Senator, have you been following the drama surrounding your former running mate, the one who refused 31% of the federal stimulus funds for her state just so she could snag the 2012 slogan, I sold Alaska on eBay. Now Levi, her approximate in-law, along with his mother, who's facing six felony counts relating to selling drugs, are hot-wired into the talk show circuit.  Oh yeah, and that tall, good looking guy who used to hang out with other AK guys who wanted to secede from the Union, you remember, the one with the snow machine who was always milling around you last fall? Well his sister's in the slammer for breaking and entering. So, hypothetically, if you had another crack at it, would you choose the governor of Alaska to head up your OVP?"

How long do you think it would take before John's head exploded? I'd go six, maybe eight seconds. Nah, six. Successful bull riders go eight, and I just can't imagine Mr McCain making it to the buzzer. Send in the clowns.