Boiling Point

It hasn't been easy living the life as an independant/moderate in America post Sept. 11, especially in D.C. My view is that partisan squabling burns american government worse than either party at the helm, especially when the arguements taken in context of say, 60 years, makes no difference whatsoever. The word "Bi-partisan success" in terms of bigger ticket issues gives me warm fuzzies...say like a ban against torture of persons held by the U.S.

Shame...
I remember the winter of '04 vividly; it was a time when America became my America...specifically, "What the fuck is my America doing?"British tabloids publish photos of detainees with bags over their heads and dogs being restrained at the U.S. occupied Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. Stories were released detailing despicable acts to get information out of prisoners. Evidence was released showing earlier pentagon knowledge. It was a time that I remember thinking that this global war on extremism, just got another 10 years longer than the 10 years we anticipated. I remember thining "if the world didn't hate us enough already for invading Iraq." I remember thinking "these, are my countrymen." People all over the country, the world, denounced these actions, no matter what level of government it went up to, for the act in it self was deplorable.

Anger...
Then came the reports of the private jet liner, run by the CIA, flying Very Important Terrorists, to countries where torture was legal in act of "rendition." No pictures appeared, thankfully, and we were left to our government's word that no one was being tortured. The idea was to elevate the level of intimidation. "Hey, we can hand you over to your folks right now and have your right ball removed, or you could talk to us." Frankly, if this were the case, why not just blind fold the guy, do a few laps around the continental U.S. and land somewhere in the Arizona desert, and get a whole bunch of pakistanis to say they were in Pakistan and use the same arguement.

Fastforward to October '05....10/5/05 to be specific. Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) provision calling for a ban on torture was voted 90-9 to be included to a military spending bill. After such a "bipartisan" success, President Bush threatens to veto the bill because of the provision, arguing that it would "limit the president's ability as commander-in-chief to effectively carry out the war on terrorism." What? That just full blown ridiculous. Im sure once the public hears about this, the administration will change their stance.

November 2, 2005. Dana Priest reports for the Washington Post on a network of secret prisons located in Eastern Europe, Thailand, and Afghanistan used by the CIA to perform interogations on high profile terror suspects outside of U.S. borders.

I sometimes read the Whitehouse Briefing by Dan Froomkin on washpost, a blog that I find a bit slanted to the left, but the format is great with full quotes and hyperlinks to full transcripts and articles. Since the "black prison" article, there has been increased attention on the lobbying being carried out by the administration to keep the CIA exempt of the McCain anti-torture provision. I thought I might as well see what they have to say about it? Right? eh?

Full Blown Hate
The first page of today's Whitehouse Briefing had a few kick in the balls for me. You can read it for yourself, but when Bush, when posed the question that his administration was seeking an exemption for the CIA to the anti-torture provision, Bush, not denying this assertion, had the following to respond:

..."We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.And, therefore, we're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible -- more possible to do our job."

For a bunch of guys who make a big show to save one woman on a feeding tube, to "preserve the culture of life," "checking our shit" doesn't seem to be in their strategy. If the Vice President told me that torture was the only means, I'd say right back to them "That's all you got to save us? Raping prisoners with glow sticks?" I can see where the administration is going with this; say if we apprehended a suspect who knew about a plot to explode something big in a city in the next 24 hours, we should do anything and everything to stop it, which includes torture, if it will save the lives of countless americans.

Would we really be put in such a situation? Could the terrorists successfully craft a large bomb of some sort without anyone knowing, including their own? Is our color coded alert system, our heightened detection systems, higher awareness not good enough to prevent this scenerio from unfolding? And here is where I was going with this diatribe (philosophy and morality exluded); throw out the time aspect of this situation:

If a large threat was posed and had the high likelihood of succeeding that in the administration's eyes "warranted" torture, the government has already failed us twice over. First, the failure to identify the threat via intelligence beforehand. Secondly, compromising our values and becoming more like our enemies by lowering ourselves to torture.

As for the first, I'd say "WHY THE FUCK IS OUR GOD DAMN DEFENSE BUDGET SO HIGH AND OUR INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM STILL SUCK ASS?" (Yes, I know they are seperate budgets) The torture exclusion for the CIA screams that we are still chickens running around with our goddamn heads cut off in respect to intelligence activities post-9/11. If another successful terrorist attack did occur, don't you think they would hold a panel exactly like the 9/11 panel to find out where we failed and wouldn't the accountable sector of our government again be national intelligence? Or, given the unlikely ability of terrorists carrying out that quick a full blown attack without us knowing, then why do we run these black sites, why do we perform renditions? Signs point to torture. If we don't, then we'd better start explaining because that's what the rest of the world thinks.

Secondly, according to all the evangelicals, we're the moral authority of this world, that's one thing I'd like to agree with them on but hesitantly do not. Even having the option to torture shows that we are flexible in our morals. This not only creates more anti-american sentiment from our allies but increases the hatred of those who wish to harm us.

This war on terror (global extremism, whatever the fuck you want to call it) doesn't demand armies, it demands accurate and voluminous intelligence with succinct analysis without denigrating ourselves to what is universally unacceptable. In the past, everyday americans were asked to sacrifice for the greater good (well at least for WWII), to join the military, to save metal cans, etc etc. What we do today? Bitch about the housing market. If there was a greater cause to all this, it would be greater intelligence. Instead of calling for greater military recruitment, the government should create something like a clandestine civilian branch of the CIA. Train the crap out of people about languages, geography, culture, history of their assigned locations, have trained analysts at every location taking in the data. Throw so many americans out there that they are afraid to even breath the word jihad.

Or just do your goddamn homework and ixnay on the owstickglay.

I mean...Damn.

My life is like a car on the highway with no brakes...I'm steerin but I can't pull over to take a piss. I really wish I could update this thing more, but between night grad class @ Hopkins, swimming, climbing, overtime, hanging out, and keeping it fucking real, it's hard to find the time to type out all the fun stuff that oozes from my brain and into my bran flakes every morning. Shit, look at my last post, it's dated September 22, 2005. I just published it tonight, Nov 2...and it starts out with "this entry has been in my PDA for 3 months" That means it's been poking around since...well JUNE.

It's funny sometimes. If you've never tried the RSS (real simple syndication) reader function of Mozilla Thunderbird, or any other RSS reader I highly recommend it. I use Thunderbird; not only does it tell you the minute someone posted something to their blog, it also allows you to subscribe to any news outlet with the little orange RSS box, where it gets funny sometimes, which was I guess the meaning of this post. I am now convinced that NASA/Wal-Mart or someone is scanning my brains and sending my thoughts to the media because by the time I think about something enough to write a post about it, some media agency goes and publishes something about it.

Let's go with a recent example. Since I first downloaded my entire collection of 5.7k songs onto my Uber-huge mp3 player, I've been frustrated with the absolute retardness of it's random number generator. The thing is that my mp3 player gets into "funks" in that it will play some song by artist X on album Y from the thousands of songs I have, play another random song, but return back to another song by artist X or from album Y...sometimes even playing the next track on the album. At first, I thought when I pressed the random button on the player, it would shuffle the songs, assign them new numbers, then randomize this new song ordering, like shuffling a shuffled deck. This was eliminated as a possibility pretty quickly after seeing song's assigned numbers in the entire queue a few times. So then I thought "this is fuckin absurd...out of 5700 songs, what is the probability that within 30 random songs, I would hit 5 songs out from the 4970s to 4990s range?" Then I started noticing concurrent "funks" where i would hear artist X, then artist Y, artist Z, then may be a few songs later I would hear songs from artists X and Y again (I've actually seen funks of 5 or 6 artists at a time, which can be quite frustrating when they are something like MC Hammer, Winger, M, and Mr. T when all you want are some chill tunes). So I started poking around, knowing that statistically, this random number generator was apparently performing magic (or sucking...I say tom-ay-to, you say toe-ma-toe). One of my climbing trips, I started poking my friend Abe's head for more info on his field of Alchemy/Comp Sci and how random numbers are generated knowing computers are dumber than crap and many random functions are based off of a digit of Pi (my one true love). He didn't remember too many functions but told me to look up stuff like Chaos math and the like. No later than a week after this exchange, Wired Magazine goes and publishes the article "My Ipod For A Random Playlist" This is seriously like the 7th time this has happened. After they publish it, I'm just like "yea...uh....what he said." Which makes for a wonderful blog article doesn't it.

It's not just with Wired...Jim Hoagland, I putting you on alert. You may be an extremely instightful and intelligent columnist, but stop stealing my publishable ideas.