New Quaker Notebook

Friday, January 12, 2007

On Marketing Torture

This is a week late, but still worth reading. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, wants to know why, if torture works so well, we don't see it promoted more often:

I used to think that torture probably worked well, at least in selective cases, based on the fact that it is so often the method of choice. All of those law-enforcement professionals around the world couldn't be wrong, could they? Plus, I imagine that if someone attached electrodes to my scrotum, I'd be talking plenty compared with the "let's be friends" interrogation method. So torture certainly passes the sniff test.

Yet the media have trotted out expert after expert to say that regular non-torture interrogation is more effective than torture. I discounted those experts as selectively chosen by the liberal media. One thing that all the experts seemed to have in common was that none of them had actually used torture. So how would they know that torture didn't work as well as an alternative?

But much time has passed since this debate began. You'd think that the proponents of torture would have produced one credible torturer to say, "Torture works great! I get all of my information in minutes and I'm home by 5 to help the kids with homework!"

Or perhaps the media could find one torture victim who would say, "I wasn't going to tell them anything until they started waterboarding me. Man, that stuff works!"

Now granted, it may be hard to find someone who will confess to being a torturer. And it may be even harder to find someone who was tortured and then is willing to endorse it. But it seems that with all the torturing going on, you could at least find a friend of a friend who saw it work.

Or the American government could find some CIA operative willing to be filmed in silhouette with his voice garbled saying that he has seen torture produce excellent results.¹

Do you suppose torture is somewhat like AMWAY? At least it resembles multi-level marketing by the anecdotal way it gets passed around as a method for getting what you want. I'm waiting for someone to promote torture by drawing the circles.

1. Scott Adams: "I'm Tortured by Doubt," Washington Post, January 7, 2007.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 11:30 PM |

Thursday, January 11, 2007

War Is the Answer

Last year I speculated that the proper role George Bush the younger has in the Cheney-Bush presidency is basically to distract people so that the other Busheviks can pick our pockets. Well, it gets worse: they plan to do much more than pick our pockets.

Did you wonder, along with me, why a US Navy admiral was picked to replace the commander of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Gen John Abizaid is out as commander of the Central Command and in is Adm William Fallon, currently the commander of the Pacific Command. Weighing in on the reason for this weird choice of commanders are Paul Craig Roberts¹ and Michael T. Klare.² Both see Bush's new surge forward as monkey business, as a really big distraction for starting war with Iran and/or Syria.³

1. Read "Troop Escalation and Iran: Distracting Congress from the Real War Plan" in CounterPunch, January 10, 2007. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.
2. Read "Ominous Signs of a Wider War" in The Nation, January 10, 2007. Klare's commentary is archived at Common Dreams News Center.
3. As for our history of finding reasons to start wars, we only have to look to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or to the sinking of the USS Maine, which precipitated the Spanish-American War, or to the Thornton Skirmish, which precipitated the Mexican-American War. There are other examples. The president may not read history, but the voices in his head certainly do.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 11:10 PM |

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Gates Foundation Gives and Takes Away

Today Democracy Now! has an interview with the lead writer of the January 7 Los Angeles Times report on the tragic investment history of the Gates Foundation and how its investments are working against the very humanitarian interests it seeks to advance:

But the LA Times investigation reveals the Gates Foundation's humanitarian concerns are not reflected in how it invests its money. In the Niger Delta—where the Foundation funds programs to fight polio and measles—the Foundation has also invested more than $400 million dollars in companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron. These oil firms have been responsible for much of the pollution many blame for respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.

The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical. It holds stakes in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most AIDS patients around the world can afford. Other companies in the Foundation's portfolio have been accused of transgressions including forcing thousands of people to lose their homes; supporting child labor; and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.

Don't we call this "blood money"? I've ranted before about the unwanted consequences of investing in multinational corporations. So this is just too predictable—for an investment strategy that aims to maximize profits by investing in corporations whose sole reason for existence is to increase profits for investors who purchase shares in the corporation in order to increase return on their investment, and etc.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 11:30 PM |

Monday, January 08, 2007

Cheney-Bush Get Victory in Iraq!

In a special contribution today at Truthout.org, Chris Floyd argues three critical issues. One, the new "hydrocarbon law" about to be approved by the Iraqi Council of Ministers means that the Cheney-Bush presidency has achieved victory in getting full US/UK oil-industry access to the the third-largest oil reserves in the world.¹ Two, the Cheney-Bush administration's forthcoming troop escalation means sacrificing American soldiers by throwing them into the "maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder," not for the sake of democracy, but rather for a "stable government," a government able to continue feeding the American machine:

So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse—as it almost certainly will—Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability"—a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, who then answered his own question: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

But that's not end of the matter at all, says Floyd:

For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything—their bases, their contracts, their collaborators—the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan US war machine—725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military.

And third, he argues, there is only one way the Cheney-Bush presidency can lose:

So Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights—because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist"—who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state—until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen.

If this is what's at issue, then as Christians we ought to put our focus on the international crimes committed by the Cheney-Bush administration.² Surely we have already seen their sins.

1. "New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush," Truthout.org, January 8, 2007. See also "Iraq's oil reserves to be thrown open to the West," The Times of India, January 8, 2007: "It would give oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972, a media report on Sunday said."
2. On this see "'Impeach Bush' chorus grows," The Sunday Times, March 19, 2006. While the emphasis has been on impeaching the president, we tend to forget that next in line is Dick Cheney, and that can't be good. Surely impeaching Cheney will require having Bush admit that Cheney is responsible for the voices he hears in his head.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 2:35 PM |

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Quote of the Day

Former Pentagon analyst Franklin Spinney has a poignant take on the impending "surge" of US troops into Baghdad that will save the people there by turning everything to rubble. In this weekend's issue of CounterPunch, he argues that the "rubblization of Baghdad" will have an undesired end—if this madness will have an end.

Oh, here's the Quote of the Day:

"Given the dubious nature of Mr Bush's real motives for invading Iraq and our military's predilection for substituting firepower for ideas, the strategy of providing greater security to Baghdad's local population by destroying their city is an oxymoronic fantasy that will increase division at home, embolden adversaries, alienate allies and uncommitted nations, and make it impossible to end this conflict on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflict."

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 3:00 PM |

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