Wheat from the Chaff Blog

Mark Danner is well known journalist and professor of journalism at Berkeley. He has written dozens of articles for the New York Review of Books, and has, in my mind, provided the definitive reportage on the Serbian massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica.

His latest article is a thorough yet blistering summary of the “ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody”, otherwise known as the “Red Cross Torture Report”. We may be tired of the issue, as it’s been a focal point for criticism of the Bush administration since 2001. However, Danner may have written the definitive summary again, and I think the question of torture will continue to haunt American politics for many years to come. The current debate over the release of the Bush torture memos, a possible South African-style truth and reconciliation commission, and possible war crime charges against Bush-era politicians, will ensure the past continues to inform (and deform) the present. Plus, the descriptions of torture, especially the waterboarding and beatings against plywood sheets, is too gripping to ignore. After reading Danner’s article, it’s almost impossible to believe that America hasn’t crossed some irreversible, unrepairable moral divide. The rank hypocrisy of American foreign policy has never been more exposed.

Here are some excerpts from his review:

… An awareness of this history makes reading the International Committee of the Red Cross report a strange exercise in climbing back through the looking glass. For in interviewing the fourteen “high-value detainees,” who had been imprisoned secretly in the “black sites” anywhere from “16 months to almost four and a half years,” the Red Cross experts were listening to descriptions of techniques applied to them that had been originally designed to be illegal “under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Conventions.” And then the Red Cross investigators, as members of the body designated by the Geneva Conventions to supervise treatment of prisoners of war and to judge that treatment’s legality, were called on to pronounce whether or not the techniques conformed to the conventions in the first place. In this judgment, they are, not surprisingly, unequivocal:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel and inhuman or degrading treatment….

… One fact, seemingly incontrovertible, after the descriptions contained and the judgments made in the ICRC report, is that officials of the United States, in interrogating prisoners in the “War on Terror,” have tortured and done so systematically. From many other sources, including the former president himself, we know that the decision to do so was taken at the highest level of the American government and carried out with the full knowledge and support of its most senior officials….

…Mr. Abu Zubaydah commented that when the collar was first used on him in his third place of detention, he was slammed directly against a hard concrete wall. He was then placed in a tall box for several hours (see Section 1.3.5, Confinement in boxes). After he was taken out of the box he noticed that a sheet of plywood had been placed against the wall. The collar was then used to slam him against the plywood sheet. He thought that the plywood was in order to absorb some of the impact so as to avoid the risk of physical injury….

… Torture has undermined the United States’ reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war—a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals [because torture=inadmissable evidence], instead sentencing them—and the country itself—to an endless limbo of injustice. That limbo stands as a kind of worldwide advertisement for the costs of the US reversion to torture, whose power President Obama has tried to reduce by announcing that he will close Guantánamo….

… The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the “politics of fear” is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration’s policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country….

The full article can be found at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614. Here is a video of Mark Danner talking with Bill Moyers:

The Paradoxes of Torture: Mark Danner in discussion with Bill Moyers and Bruce Fein from Mark Danner on Vimeo.

As we approach the upcoming referendum on the multi-member STV (Single Transferable Vote) system, I face a dilemma. Frankly, I favour neither the current First-Past-The-Post system nor the proposed STV method.

FPTP is surely past its time. In an age where deference to authority is on the wane, and everyone rightly expects his or her view to count, our current electoral scheme is obsolete. In election after election, we see most candidates win their ridings with a plurality that’s well below 50%, rendering the majority of votes worthless. Unless regional parties, like the BQ, upset the distribution of votes, FPTP usually leads to artificial majorities that appear to give winning parties more of a mandate than they actually have. The 1988 federal election is a case in point, from which Brian Mulroney claimed to have a strong mandate for free trade. Of course, he had to point to the seats in the House of Commons rather than the popular vote.

The STV electoral system, however, has its own considerable deficiencies.

• To start with, it’s not a proportional electoral system. It is a preferential balloting system that allows a winning candidate to claim significant support, though usually with second and third preferences added to the initial first preference. This gives the candidate a somewhat contrived popular mandate. But let’s be clear: this is about greater inclusiveness and representativeness, not true proportionality.
• Second, as many commentators have noted, multi-member STV systems involve a great deal of complexity. The Droop quota that determines the threshold for victory is the easiest part of the calculation. The many unpredictable variables, like how many people will actually vote, the extent of their preferences, whether candidates will meet the threshold on the first ballot, and the distribution of fractional votes, all make tabulating the final results very difficult. Computers will be required to process the calculations and recalculations. [At least FPTP is easy to figure out: the candidate with the largest number of votes, majority or not, wins the riding.] So, if this exercise in electoral reform is largely about encouraging more participation, a black-box approach to counting will hardly generate renewed enthusiasm.
• Third, I continue to wonder who my MLA would be. Who of the five in my proposed super-riding would actually represent me? What if they all say it’s someone else’s problem?
• Fourth, we’ll have to deal with an unwieldy ballot. In 5, 6 or 7 member ridings, we will probably face an extremely large list of candidates, longer than a municipal ballot. It will be difficult to know most of the candidates, especially those who live outside your old riding. In the face of this, most people will likely vote for what they know: the political party. In Malta, one of the few places to use STV, few voters rank candidates outside their preferred party. It remains a two-party system. In
  Australia’s senate election, where you can vote one of two ways, most voters choose a party from a list of parties rather than rank individual candidates using STV. To the extent that we see party bloc voting, there will be little difference from our current system.
• Finally, multimember STV systems do not address the issue of party discipline and control by the leader. Riding associations will still need to follow head office rules and potential disallowance of candidates. In fact, these riding associations may become so big – because of the bigger ridings – that even less input from local members would be welcomed. Moreover, big ridings (like the one I would live in) would require more party resources if voters were to hear about distant candidates. This is hardly the recipe for lessening party control over the candidates.

I would prefer a wider referendum, like that in New Zealand in 1992. There, voters were asked to vote on maintaining FPTP, and, if not, which system should replace it. STV was only one of four choices. The voters, in their democratic wisdom, chose a different model – and the one I would pick if I were trusted to make the choice: MMP. Mixed member proportional systems acknowledge that no single electoral system is perfect, and prudently mix two systems to preserve the benefits (and minimize the drawbacks) of each. MMP gives the voter two ballots. In one ballot, a voter casts a party preference, and a directly proportional number of candidates are thus chosen from a descending party list. The list becomes a political artifact: if it has a skewed distribution of gender, region, class, etc., and too many party hacks from the largest city, the party risks harsh condemnation during an election. Since party leadership will be with us in any electoral system, at least MMP creates a form of explicit party accountability. Moreover, if it’s done right, creating the list can reinvigorate party activism, and make the party more than a part-time electoral machine. Moreover, quotas are usually introduced to prevent dozens of fringe parties from dominating parliament. Often ignored is that MMP also preserves a large portion of its seats for a traditional FPTP election. The second ballot asks you to choose a constituency representative like we have now. This preserves the benefit of having a locally accountable politician. The degree of proportional compensation and the ratio of riding and proportional list seats can vary, depending on whether the electorate prefers stable majorities with many local representatives, or greater democratic fairness.

In the end, the upcoming referendum offers two unacceptable options. I can therefore boycott the referendum, spoil the ballot, or hold my nose and choose one of the two options. I’m pretty sure I won’t vote for STV. I’d rather campaign for a real choice in electoral reform, and not settle for the lesser of two electoral evils. There should be more than two options available, and we ought to have the right to choose among them.

Jeffrey Simpson is one of those typical right-wing columnists who ensures The Globe and Mail’s firm commitment to the I’m-all-right-Jack philosophy that pervades Canada’s corporate media. Nevertheless, he is sometimes capable of refreshingly honest and atypical commentary. Here he talks about the inevitability of higher taxes that must follow a period of high debt. What is irritating – yet so predictable – is the lack of responsibility that he and his fellow corporate columnists take for the “twilight zone of veracity” that he decries below. Why can’t politicians talk about raising taxes? What has happened to our “political culture” that makes paying for our expenditures (or exhorbinantly high interest rates, like in the 1980’s) so poisonous? Given the concerted campaign from the CD Howe and Fraser Institutes (among others) for lower taxes, and the willing championing of this cause by the media arms of Hollinger, Canwest, Bell, etc, isn’t the corporate media part of this problem? If one is skeptical, compare the number of articles in any given month that discuss the benefit of taxes with those articles that assume we must lower taxes. Anyone who consumes a lot of the corporate media in North America already knows the result. In any case, no answers are given by Simpson. All we see is his acknowledgement of the problem. And I guess that’s better than nothing.

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Debts and deficits lead to higher taxes as night follows day

By Jeffrey Simpson
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

April 24, 2009

Lesson one for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff: Don’t answer hypothetical questions in a sound-bite era. Lesson two: Don’t even hint at the truth.

Last week, in answer to a question about what he might do if the federal deficit reached $80-billion, Mr. Ignatieff said he couldn’t take any policy options “off the table,” including raising taxes. Boom, the media pack went into action, and the Conservative yapping brigade hit him for espousing higher taxes. Such is political life.

Mr. Ignatieff did not call for higher taxes; indeed, he stressed that “no one in their right mind wants to shut off the recovery by raising taxes in any capacity.” But in ruminating about the hypothetical, Mr. Ignatieff danced around a certain truth: Taxes will eventually go up to pay for the deficit and increasing debt brought on by the recession and government responses to it.

The Harper government has forecast $64-billion deficits in the next two years. Forget about it. They will be higher, because the economic circumstances are gloomier than anticipated. The Western world is awash in debt, led by the United States, whose projected deficits are astronomical, whose financial-sector debts are gigantic, whose personal indebtedness is enormous but whose political culture still refuses to acknowledge that, at some point, the piper must be paid.

As long as the United States refuses to face this fact, it will struggle to recapitalize itself. And as long as that recapitalization is delayed, the country’s long-term economic future will be cloudy and the relative decline in which it now finds itself will continue.

High debts and ongoing deficits lead to higher taxes as night follows day. Canadians should know this truth. That was the Canadian experience once federal deficits began in the mid-1970s. The Mulroney Conservatives and, in their early years, the Chrétien Liberals raised taxes (and cut services) because there was no other realistic way to fight the Siamese twins of ongoing deficits and higher debts.

There was plenty of nonsense in those years about solving the problem with industrial strategies, pro-growth measures, eliminating “waste” in government spending, laying off civil servants. Everyone who wanted to avoid hard truths had a formula, just as so many do today. Eventually, the truth hit home, as it will after this recession. That Canada is heading toward more debt will merely increase the subsequent tax load. But, of course, politicians live in the twilight zone of veracity, suspended between what they know privately to be right and what their instincts and handlers tell them the political culture will allow.

So neither Mr. Ignatieff nor Prime Minister Stephen Harper will tell the whole truth about what lies ahead, in part because the truth will play itself out long after the next election. And since the country’s economic literacy is so low, there is no point allowing your political opponent to embark on a scare campaign.

Deficits are dangerous for liberals, but especially hard for conservatives, to talk about sensibly. A mantra of conservative parties is that deficits are bad, but the way they govern invariably produces deficits, or at least weakens the fiscal position of the government.

This observation is heretical to conservatives and counterintuitive to others, but the evidence in Canada and the United States bears it out.

In opposition, then in office, conservatives promise lower taxes, and try to deliver them, as the Harper Conservatives did with their two-point cut to the GST that cost the treasury about $12-billion.

Having eroded the government’s fiscal capacity, conservatives then promise to eliminate “wasteful” spending. When that effort produces meagre results, as it always does, the government either cuts programs (but never enough to make up for the tax reductions) or lets spending proceed apace, as the Harper crowd has done.

Twenty years of Republican administrations under three presidents followed this formula: a political campaign based on lower taxes and an attack on “wasteful” spending, followed by lower taxes but higher spending, with resulting chronic deficits.

Deficits of the kind conservative parties left in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Ottawa (Alberta was the exception because of energy royalties) also suggest that deficits and conservatives go together, rhetoric notwithstanding.