Three things strike me about the release of the Senate Committee’s report on torture by the CIA. First there is the limited extent of outrage by the general public at what the CIA was doing in our name. Partly this is about limited media coverage of the outrage and partly the timing of the release.  People are certainly caught up in the materialist consumer frenzy that is Christmas and with the unrelenting revelations of white police killing unarmed black people at will.  There is only so much outrage to go around. We are experiencing outrage fatigue. On a deeper level there are those who don’t care what the country does as long as the citizens feel safe. It doesn’t matter whether they are actually safer which is arguable, but torture made them feel safe. For example there is the Fox News correspondent who cried “awesome” when these acts were revealed because she was impressed at the lengths the government would go to to keep her safe. As I often told my students when people are scared they will give away anybody else’s rights and some of their own. The public acquiescence in these horrific acts is more terrifying to me than the awful acts themselves. To his credit John McCain bucked this trend by standing up on the floor of the Senate and expressing his opposition to these methods.  As a former POW who was tortured himself he could provide a unique perspective.  Some of those in power like Obama and Dianne Feinstein did express their outrage but it only leads me to my second point. Those in power should have made it their business to know and the current outrage faux or not is too little too late. We can and should blame Bush and Cheney and the intelligence apparatus, but some of this also happened on Obama’s watch.  If the most powerful man in the world couldn’t get straight answers from those who work for him, then we have a problem. Sure the CIA lied and misled but if there is no or at best belated presidential or congressional oversight of these people, they are allowed to run wild. There is also the wink and nod reality that as long as there is plausible deniability that those in power knew, the CIA could do what it wanted.  That what it wanted produced little in terms of actual actionable intelligence is proof of what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum.

The other thing that strikes me is the reaction to the report. Some have criticized the report for revealing covert actions or announced that the report itself will put more Americans in danger.  This seems to me a part of the pattern of magical thinking that pervades these folks.  A thing does not exist until someone acknowledges it.  Conservatives have long applied it to things like sex education believing that it is education that has put these naughty ideas in adolescent heads, not that they were already there. Mentioning racism or class warfare brings it into existence and it wouldn’t have existed otherwise. This is of course nonsense. The rest of the world especially the Arab world knew about these acts and has acted upon that knowledge for years. It is part of the reason that the United States is the big Satan to them and there have been so many acts of terrorism against us. Even Hollywood has guessed that such actions have happened and has featured them prominently as a trope in its mythology e.g. Zero Dark Thirty or Homeland just to name a couple. Our allies like the Israelis have known about it for what seems like forever and some have even helped us execute it. In some ways the Senate seems like the last to know.

The combination of a public that accepts our role as torturers with little more than a murmur of opposition, leadership that promotes or at least passively acquiesces in torture, and part of the majority political party that believes such things have actually helped, does not bode well for the moral health of the country. The CIA’s complaint is not that it is shown to have committed terrible and immoral acts, but that the report calls them ineffective. Of course many people are outraged by these revelations. However they seem to be swimming against the tide. Where are the public demonstrations?  It makes one wonder what has happened to the basic decency of our country? Was it too a casualty of 9/11?

In the title of this post I have paraphrased the name of a famous Harlan Ellison science fiction short story, but it is really the evening news that has driven me to this entry.  The following stories were on the news: Israel’s ground campaign into Gaza in which civilians are being killed; the Ukrainian airliner that was shot down as the peripheral damage in a war that was not theirs; the Sunni Muslim faction that is taking on the Shiite Muslim army in Iraq and the innocent New York City man who was choked by the police and died while emergency medics did nothing to help him. This does not mention several other ongoing stories: the continued civil war in Syria, the immigrant children from Central America who are being met with protests and a failed policy on immigration, the growing inequality in the United States and the world, the suddenly surging murder death rate in Chicago and many other ongoing stories.  All of these amongst the media stories on frivolous things that are supposed to make us feel better and a political system in which no one, no party and no individual seems to have an understanding of what causes those things or how to cure them. They do have a self-serving obsession with pandering to their uninformed constituencies and the cowardice to avoid doing anything while the world falls apart around them.

Let me be clear although some of these are disputes between Jews and Muslims, Sunni’s vs. Shiites etc. they are not religious disputes.  They are not about religious doctrines nor are others about ethnic hatreds and race. Yes, sides may be chosen up according to these criteria, but the disputes themselves are not about religion doctrines, nor ethnic differences nor even really about race. They are about human rights, money and political power that are distributed differently. One may distribute those rights on the basis of religion, ethnicity or race, but if the rights were distributed justly the disputes would not be so violent nor probably even occur. There are ideologies or beliefs based upon religion, ethnicity and race that are used to prop up whatever unequal distribution of rights, money and political power are in play in a given region. Unless the inequities are reduced to a level acceptable to all the principals in these disputes there will ultimately be no justice, no peace.

The other thing that angers me is a political debate that does not acknowledge the United States’ participation in these inequities.  For example there would be no influx of immigrant children from Central America if the United States had not for so long propped up dictators and powerful money grabbing political office holders who have created and sustained the poverty that grips the area. The armed support that we have given and continue to give to Israel, Syria’s Assad, the Iraqi Shiites, the Afghanis will never occur to the foreign policy hawks like John McCain to be causes of the unrest not its cure. The unfettering of corporate power that we have seen the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidencies of both Republicans and Democrats alike, all support; the increase in state surveillance that the Patriot Act unleashed; and the growing concern about ourselves and not others, has increased the obsession with “getting mine” and the fear that granting to others somehow lessens us. The protestors in California who blocked a bus full of immigrant children, who were not even going to settle in their communities, are a shame and a disgrace.  Even if all of the Central American immigrant children were incorporated into the United States it would not decrease the protestors’ share of the American pie one iota. The protestors have just been convinced by politicians and conservative talk radio (commentators like Rush who are most interested in ratings) that their very existence is at stake.

Nowhere are any of these issues discussed in the mainstream media. The media that the conservatives decry as “liberal’ are so right wing that one must go to the niche radical media like al-Jahzeera for example to get any take on this at all.  I recently encountered the preface to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables which reads:

So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century– the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light– are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;–in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

And I will have to continue to scream.

A recent CBS poll shows that 72% of the American public opposes the Republican shutdown of the government unless the Affordable Care Act is repealed or delayed. Even half of those who call themselves Republican do.  Among those who identify themselves as Tea Party some 57% approve while even among them some 43% disapprove. None of that is a surprise to me.  What is a surprise is that only 44% blame the Republican party for the shutdown while 35% blame the president and 17% say both parties are to blame. That is, a majority of the American public hold the president partly or entirely to blame for the shutdown.  This is astonishing.

No doubt part of this is the result of how the news has framed the shutdown. The mainstream media are portraying the current shutdown as a failure of the two sides to reach a compromise agreement.  Fox News and the right wing press are decrying Obama’s refusal to even meet with the Republicans to negotiate. Let us be clear here.  This is an attempt by a Republican minority to blackmail the president into repealing or delaying a law that has been passed by Congress, signed by the President and declared constitutional by the Supreme Court.  All three branches of the government have therefore had their say on this.  Yet a minority of Republican politicians have convinced the Republicans in the House to side with them on extorting the government into doing what they want or they will cut off their funding.  This is not a negotiation this is blackmail pure and simple.  President Obama has already said time and time again that we will not negotiate with terrorists blackmailers like this. And, for good reason.  Just as negotiating with terrorist about American hostages would endanger every American abroad, negotiating with these Congressional terrorists would put all in jeopardy.  If he even sat down with them it would embolden them to do it again and hold the country hostage to some other demand that we repeal or enact some other law.  As with other terrorists this governmental crisis will not be solved until the House Republicans withdraw their demands or a Seal Team goes in.

Part of the blame put upon the president is of course the racial animosity portrayed as political opposition that has always occurred with this president. Some of it is legitimate ideological difference with the president and the Democrats. Most of it however is about the failure of the media to portray the real situation.  The media are bending over backwards to show themselves as objective by presenting what is happening as a dispute and the failure to reach a compromise. I don’t know if they are afraid of losing sponsors, afraid that the Republicans might retaliate by refusing them access, afraid of losing conservative viewers or afraid of offending the big money that funds the Tea Party. Whatever the reason they are doing the American public a disservice, forsaking their own history of truth-telling, timidly surrendering their constitutional right to freely present and betraying their duty to keep the public informed. When one has to go to a source like America al-Jazeera to get a correct reading of the situation, you know that there is something wrong with the American media.

I may be old-fashioned on this but any stand you take on an issue should be based on knowledge of the facts, a review of other opinions, the history of the situation or situations like it, and a consideration of what consequences you are agreeing to. To this end I want to review the decision we are about to make in Syria. As with most countries in the Middle East and Africa, Syria as a nation state was created by the West.  Colonial powers simply drew lines on maps to fit their convenience. In so doing they linked the fate of many ethnic groups and religions together with little concern about how they would work it out. So it was with Syria. The result in many other parts of the world has been secessions,  internal ethnic strife, and even civil wars. So it is with Syria. It has taken brutal dictators like the Assad’s father and son to hold the Syrian state together. The strains are showing in the current civil war both in the splintered-ness of the opposition, the heavy handed-ness of the government crackdown and the absence of any foreseeable end.

It also makes any foreign attempts to achieve a solution difficult if not impossible. Nevertheless the U.S. is now considering three options which for convenience I will label no military action, limited military action and extensive military action. Some advocates for no military action cite Martin Luther King Jr.s pacifism over Vietnam embodied in Marvin Gaye’s song “What’s Goin’ On”: war is not the answer for only love can conquer hate. For these advocates this is a moral and ethical issue about the use of violence to settle disputes. Others cite international precedent in saying we have no business intervening in what is a civil war no matter how many people are killed. The U.S. is not nor should not be the policeman to the world. Still others say that there is no clear impact that this civil war has on U.S. national interests so we should stay clear of it.

The advocates for a limited military action, like President Obama, say the issue which justifies foreign intervention is the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Obama drew a line in the sand solely about this issue. Any military intervention should be missiles strikes either to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons capability or at least to punish him so severely that he and future leaders will not feel they can use such weapons which are against international law. The goal here is not to intervene in the civil war or to remove Assad from power, but to take action on the use of chemical weapons.

The argument for a more extensive military action is being made by hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.  They have argued since March that the U.S. goal should be to remove the Assad regime and intervene militarily to  end this civil war.  They argue that on humanitarian grounds as the “city on the hill” we should indeed be the world’s policeman and end a tragedy that has resulted in over 100,000 deaths and the displacement of a third of Syria’s population fleeing as refugees.

There are of course critiques that one could bring against any of these positions.  For example who has the high moral ground the folks who say no to violence or the ones who want military action to end the war and therefore to curtail needless civilian suffering? What is the real national interest here: discouraging the use of chemical weapons, preventing instability in the region or minding our own domestic business? What are the consequences we are willing to put up with: allowing more civilians to die as the civil war continues, the continued use of chemical weapons, a long term commitment that will inevitably see American boots on the ground and stirring up anti- Americanism or terrorism?

I would like to come at this a different way. I don’t think any of these choices will achieve their goals certainly within a year, maybe longer, maybe never. Max Fisher writing in the Washington Post bleakly concludes:

The killing will continue, probably for years. There’s no one to sign a peace treaty on the rebel side, even if the regime side were interested, and there’s no foreseeable victory for either. Refugees will continue fleeing into neighboring countries, causing instability and an entire other humanitarian crisis as conditions in the camps worsen. Syria as we know it, an ancient place with a rich and celebrated culture and history, will be a broken, failed society, probably for a generation or more. It’s very hard to see how you rebuild a functioning state after this. Maybe worse, it’s hard to see how you get back to a working social contract where everyone agrees to get along.

If none of these options will help Syria in the short run how are we to decide which one to choose if we have to choose? If Syria is damned if we do and damned if we don’t we should make the decision based on what is right for us. The fact of the matter is that the continued warfare of the last decade has had an enormous effect on our country.  Not only has it cost billions if not trillions of dollars and hundreds of lives, it has ruined the lives of of many of the people we have sent to fight.  They return home physically or mentally broken, have trouble finding jobs and fitting back into the lives they left behind. There is always a silent cost of war, of depending upon violence to solve problems.  Should we incur it in Syria?  I think not. I too go back to Martin Luther King Jr. who said:

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The massive security infrastructure, the unconstitutionality and the sheer overwhelming cost of the security state can be questioned once someone recognizes it for what it is: security theater. I am not saying that there haven’t been true security threats stopped by the security state, but that this is the most expensive and inefficient way to do it. It calls for us to do more damage to more people’s constitutional rights than the terrorists could ever do