From Torture to Drone Assassination, How Washington Gave Itself a Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card By Alfred W. McCoy "The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence. They have, in fact, shaped the neo-conservative view of presidential power that has become broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed, Schmitt has influenced American politics directly through his intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who, as an émigré professor at the University of Chicago, trained Bush administration architects of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky. All that should be impressive enough for a discredited, long dead authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s dictum also became a philosophical foundation for the exercise of American global power in the quarter century that followed the end of the Cold War. Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power. Read more »
This is what the author considers "torture"... Stage One. As soon as Abu Zubaydah was captured in 2002, Ali Soufan flew to Bangkok where he built rapport in Arabic to gain the first intelligence about "the role of KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks." Angered by the FBI's success, CIA director George Tenet pounded the table and dispatched psychologist James Mitchell, who stripped Zubaydah naked and subjected him to "low-level sleep deprivation." Stage Two. After the CIA’s harsh methods got "no information,” the FBI men resumed their empathic questioning of Abu Zubaydah to learn "the details of Jose Padilla, the so-called 'dirty bomber.'" Then the CIA team took over and moved up the coercive continuum to loud noise, temperature manipulation, and forty-eight hours of sleep deprivation. Stage Three. But this tough CIA approach again failed, so, for a third time, the FBI men were brought back, using empathetic techniques that produced more details of the Padilla bomb plot. Stage Four. When the CIA ratcheted up the abuse to confinement that was clearly torture, the FBI ordered Ali Soufan home. With the CIA in sole control, Abu Zubaydah was subjected to weeks of sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation , nudity, and waterboarding but gave no further information. Yet in a stunning bit of illogic, Mitchell claimed this negative result was, in fact, positive since these enhanced techniques showed that the subject had no more secrets to hide. Amazingly, the CIA bought this bit of flim-flam. - See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/157950#sthash.q0cLxkni.dpuf
Leftist diversity: " In a country ostensibly devoted to political equality, inequality is the order of the day from the Left, which seeks to bolster its favored “victim” groups at the expense of everybody else. (That anyone would willingly embrace “victim” status is another matter.) To their eternal disgrace, the courts — including the Supreme Court — have upheld the bogus issue of “diversity” as a factor in college admissions. And so we have a system that has satisfied nobody, penalizes some of the best intellectual talent in the country and hinders American competitiveness just… because. The moral posturing of the unholy Left, which has no morals except situational morality, is bad enough, but the impact these wretched people have had on nearly everybody is sickening. On the proven theory that every single word out of the mouth of a Leftist is a lie, we have to ask ourselves: why are they doing this? Certainly not to “help” blacks and Hispanics. If you view the basic “progressive” in his native habitat of Manhattan, West Los Angeles and rural New England, you will quickly notice that he has a positive phobia of blacks and Hispanics, lives as far away from them as possible, and is inclined to call the cops should he happen to encounter one in his neighborhood. Further, if there is any evidence that “diversity” (as the Left defines it, which is exclusively racially) has any intrinsic, positive good, I have yet to see it. For the Left, “diversity” is purely about racial nose-counting and spoils delivering, nothing more. Which is why, of course, they’re Democrats — scions of the Tammany Party." Read more: http://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/201...se-theyre-smart-and-successful/#ixzz3T2zFA8Cn