Lean Left

McCain Apparently Allows Bush to Execute Innocent Maher Arar
Posted by Kevin

It looks as if the three GOP “rebels” have caved and given Bush his blanket check to torture, use torture, and ensure that people can be executed without ever seeing the evidence against them:

Mr. McCain said the agreement means “that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.” The senator said the agreement “gives the president the tools that he needs to continue to fight the war on terror and bring these evil people to justice.”

… Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said the agreement had two key points. “Classified information will not be shared with the terrorists” tried before the tribunals, he said. And “the very important program of interrogation continues.”

Bush’s program is evil. It is un-American, contrary to all of our values, beliefs and practices of the last two hundred years. The GOP has sold its soul for temporary political gain, and it has destroyed the very best of America in the process. Tyrants torture people. Tyrants refuse to show the prisoners the evidence against them. Tyrants refuse to allow prisoners to demand that they be tried or released. Under the program that it appears McCain has agreed to, Maher Arar — an innocent Canadian — could have been executed.

First, he was tortured:

Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan — where he never has been — and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.

The CIA program that Frist mentions allowed torture, so torturing Arar would have been an acceptable way to get a confession:

The “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries. The tactics have been used to elicit intelligence from al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Further more, the information that lead to Arar being tortured came from people who themselves had been tortured into false confessions. Since the evidence came form torture (oh, I am sorry, alternative interrogation methods. What cowards these Republicans are; they don’t have the courage to admit that they want to torture people and hide behind weak-kneed, poll-tested mush. What brave, strong men they are.), it could very be classified and Arar would never know that his accusers had been tortured into confessions:

Von notes below that Syrian intelligence forces beat Maher Arar into falsely confessing that he had received terrorist training in Afghanistan. It’s actually worse than that. Arar wasn’t just tortured into a false confession in a Syrian prison. He also seems to have been sent to be tortured in Palestine Branch partly because of false confessions that two other Canadian citizens made under torture in the same prison.

… El-Maati’s first interrogation:

During his first interrogation session, when the Syrian intelligence officers found El-Maati’s initial answers to their questions unsatisfactory, they threatened to imprison and rape his wife. El-Maati said he had told the truth and that he ‘could not invent a story.’ But, according to El-Maati,

[T]hey told him yes, he could invent a story.

They told him to strip naked except for his shorts and made him lie down, and hancuffed his hands behind his back to his legs. He was still blindfoled. They poured ice water all over him and brought in thick electrical cables and started beating him with them on his feet, legs, knees and back. They would occasionally stop and take him back to his cell. This continued for two days.

Ahmad broke down and agreed to say what they wanted him to say.

If McCain agreed to allow the CIA to Bush’s program, then he allowed torture to continue and allowed prisoners to be tried and executed based on information tortured from them and/or information that they never even see, much less contest. Such a brazen disregard for justice should be left to monsters like Pinochet and Saddam. McCain and Bush and the rest of the cowardly GOP appear to have agreed to make it the law of the United States of America. Ahh, but what does it matter if innocents are tortured, imprisoned, and executed as long as one terrorist is punished?

George Washington, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and John Adams would be so fscking proud.

September 21st, 2006 | Legal Issues, Iraq, Terrorism, Torture | 14 comments

I Wish He’d Quit Sugar Coating Things
Posted by tgirsch

And tell us how he really feels!  Here, included in its entirety, with permission, is a eSkeptic review of Ann Coulter’s Godless:

a review of
Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Matthew Provonsha

Ann Coulter’s new book is vulgar propaganda that goes against both science and reason. She has made a living as the cruel darling of the Religious Right, and in this book she aims her harsh rhetoric against, among other things, evolutionary biology, atheism, and what she calls “liberalism.” The entire book in fact is a sustained attack on a group that doesn’t even exist, namely “liberals,” in the sense of the word that Coulter has made up.

In her own words, Coulter’s thesis is that “Liberalism IS a religion.” She even refers to liberalism as “the state-sanctioned religion.” This is borderline conspiracy theory, from the woman who called the Branch Davidians “harmless American citizens.” In a kind of transubstantiation, we are supposed to believe that despite all outward appearances, our government is actually controlled by atheists. She says, “Democrats revile religion,” and “liberals love to boast that they are not ‘religious.’”

This is absurd. Coulter sticks to generalizations because she can’t give any cogent examples. Martin Luther King Jr. was undeniably Christian and liberal, but I doubt she had him in mind when she wrote, “I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven.” Ann Coulter is going to heaven and Martin Luther King Jr. is not? For shame.

Coulter can’t name a godless president or member of Congress. The last two Democratic presidents have been born-again Christians, and the vast majority of liberals are Christian, yet Coulter defines “liberals” as people who reject notions of God and an immortal soul. Meanwhile, the overtly Christian Republican Party is in control of all three branches of government. In this aspect of the book, as in others, it is exceedingly difficult to take Coulter seriously, and it is hardly surprising that many commentators on the left and right have questioned her sincerity.

ID proponent William Dembski wrote on his blog that he takes full responsibility for any errors in the last few chapters of the book, which deal with evolution. Several websites have pointed out plenty of them, so if he was being honest, he has got his work cut out for him. But it doesn’t matter how much evidence there is against Coulter because she just lies when the truth gets in the way of her agenda. She lies brazenly in the book about the Dover trial, which ruled the teaching of ID in science classrooms unconstitutional. According to Coulter: “They won the way liberals always win: by finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter.” Here Ann Coulter shows herself to be either completely incompetent or deliberately deceptive. The judge that presided over Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is a life-long Republican and a church-goer, appointed to the federal bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush. Clifford A. Rieders, the former president of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association and a Democrat, said Judge Jones is “universally well regarded.” Coulter’s attempt to smear him is transparently motivated by her ideological concerns, not the facts.

Like other bigots, Ann Coulter attacks what she perceives to be easy targets. In the past she has attacked Arabs, Muslims, and homosexuals, and in this book she saves some of her harshest words for environmentalists and America’s most mistrusted minority, atheists. She writes, “The theory of vegetarianism is that Americans consume ‘too much’ energy.” To the contrary, vegetarianism is not a theory at all, it is the practice of not eating meat. There are a variety of reasons for practicing vegetarianism, and an individual vegetarian’s choice to avoid meat may have nothing at all to do with concerns about over-consumption or inefficient consumption. She adds, “Environmentalists’ energy plan is the repudiation of America and Christian destiny, which is Jet Skis, steak on the electric grill, hot showers, and night skiing.”

This consumerist position is untenable in light of much of Christian and American intellectual history. Coulter can’t point to a verse in the New Testament promoting self-indulgence that could justify the conspicuous consumption of the rich while tens of thousands die every day due to malnutrition and easily treatable diseases. Jesus exhorts his followers, “Sell that which you have, and give gifts to the needy,” and seek treasures in heaven instead of on earth. Nowhere in Coulter’s book does she express concern for the troubled people of the third world where there are food and drug shortages, or for the poor in this country who can’t even afford healthcare, much less jet skis or night skiing.

Coulter’s religion is not like that of the author of the Book of Proverbs, who prayed for neither poverty nor riches but, “only the necessaries of life.” Her religion is not like St. Thomas Aquinas’s, who went so far as to say that anything held in superabundance must be given to provide for the sustenance of the poor. If we are to infer “Christian destiny” by looking at Christian history, we see that Coulter’s ideal is nothing like the ideal put forth by most Christian leaders of the past. St. Francis of Assisi prayed, “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek,” but Coulter has said that the Biblical view is to “rape the planet.”

Coulter’s distortion of history in order to misrepresent atheism is particularly disturbing. She wants us to believe that the horrors of Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the People’s Republic of China are in some way due to atheism and acceptance of evolution. “Hitler’s world-view was based on Darwinism, not God,” she writes. This is clearly a lie designed to denounce Darwinism by association. It is contrary to Hitler’s own words, as even a cursory reading of Mein Kampf shows. In it Hitler writes, “Hence today I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Though she claims that Hitler cited Darwin, she can’t substantiate it, and thus this is yet another baseless assertion. Hitler was obviously either heavily influenced by Christian beliefs, or wanted to appear as though he was. Along with various other influences, Nazism undoubtedly drew from a long-standing Christian tradition of anti-Semitism. As far as I can discern, Hitler never even mentioned Darwin; rather, he repeatedly claimed to be doing the will of Providence.

Coulter’s attempt to blame Darwin for the horrific famines in China is ironic given that they occurred partly because Communist scientists rejected Darwin. Denying what they called “capitalist science,” they paved the way for agricultural catastrophe. Coulter even suggests that Darwin is to blame for “Stalinist gulags.” In reality, Stalin sent scientists to gulags for espousing Darwinian evolution.

Throughout the book Coulter never argues her points, but makes ad hominem attacks and false analogies, attacks straw-men and blatantly misrepresents history. She can’t even distinguish between Darwinism and Social Darwinism. She is as bad on ethics as she is on science, and is completely inept regarding logical reasoning. When she says atheists are always the ones practicing genocide, she shows that she hasn’t even read her scriptures.

There is no “church of liberalism,” there isn’t even “liberalism,” in Coulter’s sense. Liberals are not “pro-abortion,” and no atheist hates God. Godless is a ridiculous book and Ann Coulter lies flagrantly and is as self-righteous as she is malicious. The most controversial line in the book is her condemnation of four 9/11 widows who chose to involve themselves in politics: “I have never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.” But it’s not the only nasty thing she wrote in the book and she has said even worse things in the past. She has used epithets like “raghead,” “paki,” and “gay boy.” She actually said, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

Coulter’s fans apparently consider death threats and violent rhetoric humorous, and she doesn’t disappoint them. She is a hate-mongering reactionary who has said she is for public flogging, and against women’s suffrage. I wish I were making this up. Godless is a boring collection of rants filled with utterly mind-boggling absurdities, like, “public schools are the Left’s madrassas,” “The most important value to liberals is destroying human life” (in reference to abortion), and “liberals made up Watergate.” We needn’t worry about misinterpreting her words because she has repeatedly told interviewers that she believes everything she wrote in the book. She has even said that she never regrets anything she has ever said and she wouldn’t have said anything differently. Even if the cynics are right to say that Coulter is laughing all the way to the bank and that she doesn’t really believe any of it, it still reflects horribly on our media that gives her a national platform, and on our culture in which she is thriving with a lucrative speaking career and best-selling books.

September 21st, 2006 | Reviews, Books | 6 comments

Is Bush Assasination Film Outrageous?
Posted by Kevin

Hillary Clinton seems to think so:

Sen. Hillary Clinton this morning blasted the producers of a new film depicting the assassination of Pres. George W. Bush.

“I think it’s despicable,” Clinton said of “Death of a President,” a fictional film that features a staged assassination of the president in 2007. “I think it’s absolutely outrageous. That anyone would even attempt to profit on such a horrible scenario makes me sick.”

Obviously, I don’t have the same perspective as Clinton does; her, her husband and even her daughter are all high profile figures, often figures of hate. I know that her and her husband, at least, have received death threats and one conservative columnist at NRO wrote and article stating that Chelsea should be killed to be prevented from continuing the Clinton genes. Living through that would almost certainly color her perception of such a film. But I don’t think she is right to be outraged in this case.

This is a movie, not an essay, not a political manifesto. From all accounts it does not glamorize either the assassination itself or its aftermath. It appears to do what good art is supposed to do: it uses the imagined assassination to say something about current American culture, current American politics, and the current state of world relations.

If the film was only prurient in nature, if it existed just to wallow in the imagined blood of Bush, then I could understand the outrage. But this film does not appear to do that, and I cannot subscribe to the notion that the life and death — even the imagined life and death — of public, historical figures must always be off limits. Imagining the world with a George W. Bush-sized hole in it can be used to tell us something about the world as it is now. And I just don’t see anything outrageous about that in and of itself.

September 21st, 2006 | Culture, Media | 5 comments