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From a column by Kenzaburo Oe in today’s New York Times:

Sixty-five years ago, after learning that a friend who was reported missing after the bombing of Hiroshima had turned up in a hospital there, my mother put together a meager care package and set out from our home in Shikoku to pay a visit. When she returned, she shared her friend’s description of that morning in August 1945.

Moments before the atomic bomb was dropped, my mother’s friend happened to seek shelter from the bright summer sunlight in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall, and she watched from there as two children who had been playing out in the open were vaporized in the blink of an eye. “I just felt outraged,” she told my mother, weeping.

From a speech delivered by President Barack Obama in Prague, April 5, 2009:

Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. (Applause.) And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

Thank you Mr. Fish for searing images into my brain of a camouflaged genitals and American GI’s traversing a hairy ass.

I’ve always thought war was way more disgusting than romantic, and now… even more so.

The U.S. Military invaded Afghanistan 9-1/2 years ago to topple the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden.  Our number one reason for being there vacated the caves of Tora Bora just months after we arrived and, since then, the mission has been one of keeping the Taliban at bay and instituting some form of modern democracy in a country populated by people that aren’t to keen about change. 

Obama’s strategy has been to stabilize the country, get the Afghan military trained well enough to do the job themselves, and then get out. 

But today we learned that there’s gold in them there hills!  Well not so much gold, but a lot of other minerals that we need to keep our high-tech, battery powered economy going.  Today’s NYT reports:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

…

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

Finally a reason to get greedy extraction-industry corporations interested enough in this war to wanna fight harder.   Maybe they’ll even be willing to help pay for it.

Mr. Fish delivers the news perfectly with this comic about the importance of what we’ve discovered that “was hidden beneath the feet of the worthless population” of Afghanistan.

From today’s New York Times:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — An American armed with a pistol and a 40-inch (102-centimeter) sword was detained in northern Pakistan and told investigators he was on a solo mission to kill Osama bin Laden, a police officer said Tuesday.

The man, identified as 52-year-old Californian construction worker Gary Brooks Faulkner, said he wanted to cross over into the nearby Afghan province of Nuristan because he had ”heard bin Laden was living there”, according to officer Mumtaz Ahmad Khan.

…

Khan said Faulkner was also carrying a book containing Christian verses and teachings.

When asked why he thought he had a chance of tracing bin Laden, Faulkner replied, ”God is with me, and I am confident I will be successful in killing him,” said Khan.

A man on a Mission Impossible like mission from God.

Exactly the kind of response that Bin Laden hoped to get from Americans.

Thank you Mr. Gary Brooks Faulkner for feeding the fire.

The New York Daily News reported last week that former President George W. Bush said:

Sure, we waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, former President George W. Bush reportedly said on Tuesday.

And he would “do it again to save lives.”

Bush and his military advisors adhered to the morally misguided “intelligence at any cost” school of thinking.  Bush was too stubborn and dumb to realize that the costs of obtaining intelligence through torture was too high. 

There’s a very well researched article in Military Review by Major Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, that examines the Bush way and the more dominant American tradition of the “shining city on the hill” way. 

The article includes a summary of email exchanges between military officers who approved of torture and those who opposed it.  The ethical side was represented by Major Nathan Hoepner, who wrote:

We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought—that is part of the very nature of war.  We also inflict casualties, generally many more than we take.  That in no way justifies letting go of our standards.   We have NEVER considered our enemies justified in doing such things to us.  Casualties are part of war—if you cannot take casualties then you cannot engage in war.  Period.  BOTTOM LINE: We are American Soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.

Pryer writes that  those who say that the use of torture saved lives (as Bush stated last week) are wrong:

Tragically, interrogators at Abu Ghraib, in the 3ACR, and at FOB Iron Horse had HUMINT leaders who felt morally justified in sanctioning enhanced interrogation techniques, and this belief led their interrogators to use techniques that slipped into truly serious abuse at Abu Ghraib and in the 3ACR.  Furthermore, due to personalities unique to Abu Ghraib, abuse descended further still into the sadistic, sexualized violence that shamed our Nation and nearly led to our defeat in Iraq.  In retrospect, it is ironic that, while these leaders had meant to save lives via enhanced interrogation techniques, their actions helped to destabilize Iraq.  This destabilization, in turn, created thousands more casualties than these leaders could ever have prevented through tactical methods.

Andrew Sullivan was on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday, and he observed that most former presidents advocate human rights, but this one advocates torture, proving he is truly a monster.

Marc Thiessen is out doing talk shows to promote his book, Courting Disaster:  How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.  It’s a book about how if our country stops torturing its war prisoners, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!

Thiessen, who when asked by CNN’s Christine Amanpour if he’d submit himself to waterboarding, said:    ”No because it’s terribly unpleasant and I’m not a terrorist.  heh heh heh…”  (link)

Yes… “terribly unpleasant.”  More like “brutally excruciating” according to a review of recently released internal CIA documents describing the Bush Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques.  Read all about it in the “Waterboarding for Dummies” article by Mark Benjamin over on Salon.com.

Thiessen will appear on The Daily Show tonight.

Here’s an excerpt from a review of his most un-American book written by a former senior military Interrogator:

First, Thiessen promulgates a theory that Islamic extremists are uniquely deserving of torture because they are doctrinally obligated to resist cooperating, after which they may disclose information. Of course this isn’t unique to Islamic extremists.  The U.S. military’s own Code of Conduct and the resistance training given American soldiers impose the exact same requirements. Article V, pertaining to interrogations states:  I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability.

…

Thiessen also argues that we will never know what other information we would have gotten out of KSM had we not used torture and abuse. … Serious interrogators have little doubt that we would have gotten better information from KSM, and sooner, had the interrogations been conducted by professional interrogators using noncoercive techniques.

…

Thiessen never bothers to cite military doctrine in his research.  Had he read the Army Field Manual’s instructions, he would have to answer for the fact that it cautions: “Revelation of use of torture by US personnel will bring discredit upon the US and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort.  It may also place US and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse by their captors.” Torture makes Americans less safe, not more so.

…

Thiessen and the torture apologists mock every American soldier who has followed the rules of law and ethical warfare.  He insults every interrogator who has learned to elicit information without resorting to medieval abuses. The America that I know and signed up to defend does not stand exclusively for security.  It also stands for freedom, justice, and liberty.  It stands for universal rights afforded to every human being (even unlawful combatants or “detained persons”).  America, as Thiessen surely has written into many a presidential speech, is a beacon of light precisely because it represents the protection of basic human rights.  Yet, in Courting Disaster, Thiessen thoroughly villainizes those who defend individual rights against the state (such as members of the Center for Constitutional Rights).  Thiessen’s ideology represents exactly what we are fighting against in the battle with Islamic extremism—the regression of human rights and the sacrifice of individual protections to the state.

I am looking forward to watching Jon Stewart pick this guy apart.

Update:  Here’s Jon Stewart’s interview of Thiessen on The Daily Show. 

If you thought Thiessen was a total dick before seeing this, well you’ll think even worse of him after watcthing it.  He truly is about as un-American as one can get.  As for Jon, he gets hot in this interview and gets accused by Thiessen of not letting him say his piece.  Note to Thiessen:  You weren’t invited on the show to give a speech.  It’s SUPPOSED to be a discussion.  And furthermore, when you place yourself in front of someone who truly believes in freedom and the rule of law, and you go off on how Liz Cheney is right to call those in the Justice Dept that represented Guantanamo detainees “the Al Qaeda 7” and question their loyalty, AND  you come on to promote your book that defends the military’s use of torture, you have to expect to be involved in a heated conversation like this.  So be a man and deal with it.

Well it’s easy enough to pull the trigger on a sniper rifle, drop a bomb from an airplane, or even launch artillery into a house full of Iraqi insurgents, but it’s not so easy to live with what you see when you enter the house to survey the results and find out you’ve made a terrible mistake.  So writes Army lieutenant Shannon Meehan for The New York Times:

I thought we had struck enemy fighters, but I was wrong. A father, mother and their children had been huddled inside.

The feelings of disbelief that initially filled me quickly transformed into feelings of rage and self-loathing.  The following weeks, months and years would prove that my life was forever changed.

In fact, it’s been nearly three years, and I still cannot remove from my mind the image of that family gathered together in the final moments of their lives.  I can’t shake it.  It simply lingers.

While reading this column today, I was thinking about the conversation I had with my ten-year-old son during a battle scene in The Sand Pebbles.  The movie stars  Steve McQueen who plays Jake Holman, a Navy engineer assigned to a gunboat cruising China’s Yangtze River in 1926 as the Nationalist revolution led by Chiang Kai-shek  breaks out.  The battle scene takes place near the end of the film when the Navy boat must get past a blockade of junks set up by the Chinese revolutionaries.  After much shooting and hand-to-hand combat to clear the center junk, Holman uses an axe to the cut the thick ropes that string the boats together.  While he’s chopping at the ropes, a Chinese fighter sneaks up on him with a machete and raises it for the killing blow.  Holman catches a glimpse of  him approaching and moves just in time for the machete weilder to miss his mark.  The blade hits Holman’s helmet and glances away from him.  He then swings his axe head right into the gut of the Chinese man who doubles over and dies.  

Holman stands there with his axe hanging by his side staring at the dying man while his boat, just a few yards behind him, begins to advance past the blockade.  At that point, my son said, “What’s he doing?  Why is he just standing there?”  All I could say was something like, “Well, it’s not easy to kill a man.  It’s a terrible thing to take another man’s life.  That’s what he’s feeling, and it doesn’t feel good to him.”  As I’m saying this, Holman shake his head, shoulders his axe, and gets on board the gun boat.

Meehan wrote about that feeling in his column. 

Killing enemy combatants comes with its own emotional costs.  On the surface, we feel as soldiers that killing the enemy should not affect us — it is our job, after all.  But it is still killing, and on a subconscious level, it changes you.  You’ve killed.  You’ve taken life. What I found, though, is that you feel the shock and weight of it only when you kill an enemy for the first time, when you move from zero to one.  Once you’ve crossed that line, there is little difference in killing 10 or 20 or 30 more after that.

…The deaths that I caused also killed any regard I had for my own life.  I felt that I did not deserve something that I had taken from them. I fell into a downward spiral, doubting if I even deserved to be alive.  The value, or regard, I once had for my own life dissipated.

My son plays a series of computer war games that are mostly based on historical events.  In these games, he builds villages and farms to supply them with food and materials, and he must also build armies to protect them from enemies that want to take what he’s built.  Battles ensue, and one side or the other ultimately wins.  The games do teach a bit of history, but they doesn’t delve into the morality of war and allow for contemplation about the victims.

I’ll share this piece with him and hope that it makes him think a little about what might be going on in the minds of the tiny little warriors on his computer screen.

Here’s another section of Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech that reveals a little something about Obama’s thoughts on another war he inherited.

To begin with, I believe that all nations – strong and weak alike – must adhere to standards that govern the use of force.  I – like any head of state – reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.  Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards strengthens those who do, and isolates – and weakens – those who don’t.

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.  Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait – a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.

Furthermore, America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves.  For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention – no matter how justified.

This becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.  More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.

Notice how he singles out the war to take back Kuwait, but makes no mention of the Iraq War that’s been going on since 2003.  That war is not one that adheres to “standards that govern the use of force.”  It was a war of choice (a very poor choice), not a war of necessity.

I searched the entire text of the speech and the word “Iraq” was never mentioned.  I guess it’s kind of like “Voldemort” to him.  If only we could make it go away for real with such ease.

Oh, and another phrase I did not find is “War on Terror.”  This guy is way different than the fool that started these wars he has to finish.  I was not to thrilled about his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, but if he abides by the moral code he outlined in his speech today and he does not waiver in his role as the leader of the free world, we might actually not just win the battle, but also the war of ideas that is key to defeating the religious fanatics that seek to undermine centuries of human progress and freedom.

This is disappointing:

The Obama administration has decided not to seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Wednesday.

Instead, the administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.

But President Obama’s advisers are not embracing the more disputed Bush contention that the president has inherent power under the Constitution to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely regardless of Congress.

The Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday night that “the administration would rely on authority already provided by Congress” under the use of force resolution. “The administration is not currently seeking additional authorization,” the statement said.

The department pointed out that courts would continue to review the cases of those held without charges through habeas corpus hearings. The Washington Post first reported the decision.

…

Sarah E. Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who led a study about closing Guantánamo, said forgoing legislation was “overall a good step” because it prevented Congress from making things worse. “We don’t know if it closes the door definitively on efforts to institutionalize detention without charge,” she added, “since the White House might seek to do this by itself.”

That’s two steps back maybe one step forward.

A fear-mongering, power-grabbing president created the Guantánamo Bay detention camp without explicit congressional backing, so an emboldened, pragmatic president ought to be able to undo it in the same way.  It looks like Obama has backed away from being that president.

As far as the ridiculous politically charged fears of holding terrorists on American soil – it’s completely irrational.  We have hundreds, maybe even thousands of very despicable American people incarcerated in maximum security prisons on our soil already.  Are you scared?  I’m not, and I wouldn’t be scared if our government tried and convicted some despicable Middle Eastern people and held them in maximum security prisons on our soil.

Obama is a constitutional lawyer.  He knows the right thing to do, and he spoke about it last May.

There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law — a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That’s why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year.

… It is my responsibility to solve the problem. Our security interests will not permit us to delay. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.

… In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.

Obama should just forget about the fickle congress and do what he said back in May:  Close Guantanamo, move the remaining prisoners to maximum security prisons on American soil, try those we can prove committed crimes, and develop a system consistent with our constitution and values that deals with those who are truly at war with us.

UPDATE:  A few hours after posting this, I read this column on Salon.com by Glenn Greewald, who is very thorough as always.  He is glad that Congress has been taken out of the loop.

…nothing good — and plenty of bad — could come from having Congress write a new detention law.  As bad as the Obama administration is on detention issues, the Congress is far worse.  Any time the words “Terrorism” or “Al Qaeda” are uttered, they leap to the most extreme and authoritarian measures.  Congress is intended to be a check on presidential powers, but each time Terrorism is the issue, the ironic opposite occurs:  when the Obama administration and Congress are at odds, it is Congress demanding greater powers of executive detention (as happened when Congress blocked Obama from transferring Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.).

In the 30 years I’ve lived in this country, I have never witnessed a more shameful and cowardly performance than that of Congress denying the Obama administration funds to move Guantanamo detainees to high security prisons  in the United States.

It’s not like the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) concept is alien to me; it’s just that I never thought I would see such irrational fear and illogic displayed to the world in a way that was so utterly brainless, gutless and weak-kneed.

America’s prisons house serial killers, rapists, sociopaths and psychopaths and other evil doers to compare with any country in the world. Yet our representatives and senators, not to mention their constituents, are scared shitless at the thought of having some of the prisoners at Guantanamo incarcerated even in US military prisons. It’s hard to know whether their fear is of the detainees escaping en masse to wreak havoc in their communities or the thought that al-Qaida might launch an invasion of, say, Fort Leavenworth to free them.

The city council of Hardin, Montana, hoping to boost a sagging economy, has stepped up to the plate by offering to house some of the detainees in a newly built prison that the state now says it no longer needs. “Over my dead health-care plan” says Senator Max Baucus (or words to that effect anyway), ever the study in political courage.

And then there’s the issue of where to put those detainees who have been determined not to be enemy combatants. These are the people whom we scooped up in the Bush administration’s panic-ridden response to 9/11, held for several years in conditions that most of us don’t want to know about, only to find that they were no threat to us after all. Many of them can’t go home because they would likely be imprisoned, tortured and killed by their own governments.

We had an opportunity to release one such group, Muslim Chinese called Uighurs, into the US. These have no axe to grind against the US but oppose the Chinese government’s policies towards the Muslim population. There are Uighurs in the US already, including a community in the Washington DC area. Had we been willing to bring them to the US we might have had more luck convincing European governments to take other detainees.

But no, jittery politicians and a frightened electorate don’t want to hear about it.  The gutsier souls of Bermuda and Palau have put us to shame and agreed to take in some of the Uighurs.

So my question is this: how is it that a country capable of fielding such valiant and dedicated men and women in its armed forces who serve their country so bravely, can be otherwise so bereft of courage?