Obama and the ‘tea-ed off’ GOP

For a lot of people abroad who were following the events of last week in the United States on TV, this whole thing about the “tea parties” held around the country must have been baffling. In fact, with what some Americans themselves know about our history in this day and age, in which vast sectors of the population appear to have developed a virulent allergy to books and reading, it was probably just as puzzling an event to many of them as well. The fact is, however, that the original “Boston Tea Party”, was a brief but very major event in American history, since it constituted a catalytic episode in the run-up to the Revolution against British imperialist tyranny.

Caption: "The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor", an 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier.

The ones who know precisely how important that “party” was, however, are the guys in the Republican Party’s dirty-tricks think tank who organized and promoted it. And don’t give me that bull about how it was a spontaneous outpouring of American anti-tax and anti-liberal sentiment, because I’m not buying it. You don’t get the kind of press this protest got – especially on “fair and balance” Fox news (come on, Murdock, gimme a break!) – if it’s a spontaneous grassroots thing, especially not when it all ostensibly came together “overnight”. And particularly not when they bring out the big guns in prime time to rally ‘round the cause.

Fox and (Dubya’s) Friends.

Take “registered independent” (as he reminds us, ad pukeum) Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who “doth protest too much” when anyone accuses him of being a conservative lackey, but who, if he doesn’t already have a GOP elephant tattooed on his chest, should really get one, because he clearly got hit in butt with the White House door when ex-President Bush left office and is ticked off about it. Yes, Bill, we can tell. If not, his night-time “news” commentary show, The O’Reilly Factor, wouldn’t keep on defending the Bush Administration tooth and nail every evening, when it’s so obviously a new day in Washington. I means, geez louise, Bill! Get the heck over it! Dubya’s gone home. He’s through. And unless you’re going to stop toiling every single night with all of the rest of the far-right dinosaurs on your show (like your buddy and arch-conservative pit-bull Newt Gingrich) to prepare the groundwork for the next election four years down the road, then maybe you ought to quit insisting about how “independent” you are or how “fair and balanced” Fox is. How can you expect decent, fair-minded folks not to call you (to paraphrase one of your favorite epithets) a “rightwing loon” when you rant and rave like you do every night against the Obama Administration. Especially when the guy who writes your multi-million-dollar pay check each year (Fox President Roger Ailes) was a media consultant for Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush (the elder) – let’s face it, telling three US Presidents, all from the same party, how to meet the press, seems like a trend – before he was recruited from NBC’s cable division by Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdock to create Fox News.

And then there’s Sean Hannity who follows O’Reilly each night with practically the same format as his – bash everyone left of Adolph Hitler – but in this case, with no apologies for being a frothing-at-the-mouth far-right mad dog. Even the Fox News management seems to have thought that Hannity was too right to be “right” and for 12 years created a parody of fairness by running him alongside “Fox liberal” (and I use the term advisedly) Alan Colmes. Colmes’ job was basically to lose every argument and let Hannity bully and dump on him every night, but still, there was a limit to just how insanely far-right Hannity could get without someone saying, “Hey, wait a minute, Sean, get a grip!”

But even the almost comatosely mild Alan Colmes apparently decided a dozen seasons of playing the “straw man” to Sean Hannity’s ruthless attacks was more than enough and this year left the show, according to him, “to make a greater contribution” to the network. If his personal blog, Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, is anything to go by, Alan’s “greater contribution” isn’t going to scare Hannity in the ratings. Topping yesterday’s items was this lead, and I quote:

“Edgar Mitchell, who flew on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission to the moon, says there is extraterrestrial life, and that it’s being concealed by the United States government, among others.”

The story’s legitimate enough, though not original – it has already been on other TV channels as a human interest feature – but is just the sort of thing that promises to keep Colmes’ “contribution” as zanily “liberal” as possible and keep him or anybody else from undermining the apparent intention of Fox News to destabilize and, if possible, destroy the current administration of the United States.

An exaggeration? Suffice it to say that after cheerleading for the “tea parties” for days on end, Sean Hannity last night interviewed former Vice President Richard Cheney and the clear theme of his questioning was “just how dangerous is Barack Obama to the security of the United States and the world?” Cheney, the most dangerous vice president in history, as current Vice President Joe Biden once referred to him, was only too happy to comply in the orchestrated, nightly character assassination that Fox has sought to carry out since Day One of the Obama Presidency. The virulence of Hannity’s attacks is the kind formerly reserved by rightwing commentators only for figures like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, openly considered enemies of the United States. But it should be remembered that the person he is attacking in this way now is the overwhelmingly elected Chief of State of his own country, and his intention is obvious: to undermine the presidency of the United States of America. If the shoe were on the other foot, and the person under such virulent attack were George W. Bush instead of Barack Obama, both Hannity and O’Reilly would surely be asking their audiences if the perpetrator weren’t, perhaps, a terrorist and deserving of waterboarding to find out whom he is working for.

But, okay, let’s all pretend we don’t know who’s behind the “tea parties” – like many tried to pretend they didn’t know Nixon was behind the Watergate break-in scandal that ended up costing him his presidency – and just agree that whoever organized them, their purpose was to send out a message of rebellion, with a pseudo-patriotic bent.

The Original Festivities.

The original Boston Tea Party took place in 1773, three years before the 13 original New England colonies declared their independence from Britain and engaged the crown in full-scale war. Details are somewhat sketchy as to the event itself, but not so regarding the context. What it boils down to is that friends of the Court who formed part of the British East India Company – a concern that was long at the forefront of British expansionism – lost some of the tax breaks that it had been receiving under former agreements for the tea they brought into England from abroad. The East India Company did not supply tea directly to the American colonies, but sold it at auction in England to tea merchants who then exported it to the colonies, adding their commissions to the cost. However, when the crown imposed its thirst for greater revenues on the East India Company’s tea trade, it was the American colonists who took the hit for the higher costs that the East India monopoly passed on to the tea merchants.

To add insult to injury, the colonists could buy their tea much more cheaply from Dutch traders, for instance, but the East India monopoly began to lose vast sums of money to these traders from other countries. To get around this, the solution arrived at by the British government, with a nod from King George, was the Tea Act of 1773. This law gave the East India Company a full refund of a 25% tax it paid on the tea it imported into England, while permitting the monopoly, for the first time, to export tea directly to the colonies. This allowed it to cut out the cost of middle men and to better compete with Dutch traders. But to further cripple the competition, the only merchants that could handle tea in the colonies were now crown-appointed colonial merchants in major American ports, with any purchases they made elsewhere becoming tantamount to smuggling. The main fly in the ointment, however, was a tax known as the Townshend Tax that was only paid on tea shipped to the colonies. It was a direct imperial tax on the settlers and was considered discriminatory by the colonists. Those who favored the tax in Britain argued that it was used to defray the cost of salaries paid to British officials in the colonies. If the tax were repealed the risk was that payment of colonial officials would eventually become the responsibility of the colonists themselves and the fear was that the imperial officials’ loyalty would eventually lie with the British Americans who paid them, rather than with the crown. So the controversial tax on tea stood.

The colonists of Massachusetts protested that they had a right to only pay taxes levied by their elected colonial representatives – and this was backed by earlier agreements hammered out with the crown – since, in England itself, they were not adequately and directly represented and, therefore, whatever was dictated in this way was basically tyranny. Furthermore, it seemed to them that they were the butt of a cruel irony since the Townshend Tax paid colonial officials whose very job it was to protect the interests of the crown in detriment to those of the colonists themselves.

And they were not alone in their protests. By the time of the uprising in Massachusetts, demonstrators in three other colonies had already managed to prevent British merchant ships from unloading taxed tea in their ports. But the crown had apparently decided to make a stand in Boston Harbor and Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson was under pressure to keep the protest from succeeding in the influential Massachusetts Colony. Despite his subjects’ fervent requests – and, eventually, heated demands, with angry rallies in Boston where protesters numbered in the thousands – that the tea be turned away from the harbor, the governor refused to be a part of the self-styled embargo and the tea landed on Boston’s wharf, backed and enforced by the governorship.

Hutchinson was obviously out of touch with the depth of sentiment among the colonists he governed regarding actions taken by a Parliament on the other side of the ocean in which they had no direct representation and it was his stubborn refusal to listen to reason that led to the direct action taken by a group of what today would probably be called “terrorists” and “leftwing loons” – especially by “conservatives” of the ilk of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and former Speaker of the House Gingrich.

Details of this action, as I say, are sketchy but it seems that somewhere between 30 and 130 men (…um, what shall we call them? Militant activists? Far-left extremists? Freedom fighters? Enemy terrorists? Far-left loons? Patriots? Pinheads? You call it, O’Reilly…), some disguised as Indians to avoid identification, climbed aboard the ships under cover of night, broke open the crates on board and dumped the taxed tea into the waters of the Boston Harbor.

British demands that the rebel colony pay for the damages were rejected, resulting in a British embargo on trade with Massachusetts until reparation was made. It was indeed a controversial point, and even some people who would later be considered major American patriots, such as Benjamin Franklin, thought such a vandalistic act was going too far and that reparation should be made. But the stand-off between the colonies and the crown over this and other increasingly coercive acts on the part of the British government eventually led to the first shots of the Revolution’s being fired just two years later.

Tea Parties Today.

So what does this have to do with last week’s “tea parties” organized and orchestrated across the United States? In point of fact, nothing. Indeed, it is important here – since the GOP has insisted on making the comparison by shamelessly using an act of rebellion against imperialist tyranny with a tax package passed by the elected Congress of the United States in a desperate effort to clean up the ungodly mess that an eight-year Republican administration left behind – to figure out who’s who in this farcical tableau.

What every schoolchild recalls about the Boston Tea Party is that it was about “taxation without representation”. But what no one knows without in-depth study of the event, is that the accent was on representation. The tax was no more than a symbol of imperial tyranny. What the colonists were seeking by refusing to pay the Townshend tax was self-determination and what the British crown was seeking by insisting on imposing it was authoritarian control over its American subjects. The protests of last week that shamelessly sought to link the Obama Administration’s policies to this historical event were about perceived high taxes. That was never the issue in the Boston Tea Party. In fact, with the passage of the Tea Act, certain taxes were repealed and the price of tea in the colonies went down to such a degree that it became competitive with smuggled Dutch tea. The Townshend tax on the colonists was only 3%. So the protest and direct action were not because of taxation as such, but because of the principle involved. What the colonists rejected was London’s tyrannical decision to impose a tax in which they had no say and from which they derived no benefits. What they were opposing was despotic interference in their internal affairs. The tax was merely a symbol of their enslavement to and exploitation by the crown.

Last week’s protest has nothing to do with anything except the GOP’s whining about losing the election last November and being so soundly trounced by Barack Obama. Typically, rather than seeking to cooperate and help find a consensual solution to a grave crisis that is affecting the nation, the ultra-conservative political machine is busy seeking ways of taking advantage of the situation in order to undermine the authority of the Democratic Administration and further deepen the perception of crisis and chaos, with the aim of weakening the president’s position at every turn and ensuring that he will be replaced by a Republican at the end of his four years. It is an attitude that is unworthy and unpatriotic, but, unfortunately, not unexpected in a group of self-interested, far-right radicals who refuse to admit that the problem, like the bailout itself, started with them and that it is now President Obama’s job to try and fix the overwhelming mess they left behind.

Waterboarding – Aquatic Sport or Torture?

Night-time talk show host Jay Leno recently did an on-the-street survey in which he asked random urban Americans questions that just about anybody who watches TV news (let alone anyone who ever went to grade school) should know the answers to – things like: Who is the President of the Senate? What is Gitmo? And so on. About the only give-away question he didn't ask was the classic Groucho Marx bonus query on the iconic comic's 1950s TV game show, You Bet Your Life: Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

And like the responses Groucho used to get, the ones Leno's survey elicited were as hilarious as they were pathetic, in a country where information and the technology to acquire it are available to the point of overload.

One question I don’t believe Mr. Leno asked, but which he might well have, if he had wanted to hear some truly side-splitting answers is: What is waterboarding? Even after all of the debate that this practice has generated in the news, in government and among political and social organizations from one end of the spectrum to the other, I am almost willing to bet that there would have been any number of answers involving aquatic sports: You know, like, snow-skiing/snowboarding, water-skiing/waterboarding…

Actually, it would have come as no surprise to me at all if no one in an on-the-street survey were to have described it as a form of torture. After all, President Bush doesn't. And neither do certain high-profile apologists for some of Mr. Bush’s more questionable policies, like top conservative news show host Bill O'Reilly at Fox News. In fact, when once backed into a corner by Carol Bogart of the NGO, Human Rights Watch, over his support of waterboarding as an alternative interrogation technique to save American lives, Mr. O’Reilly blithely described waterboarding as having a little water poured over your face. Mr. O’Reilly has repeatedly brought up waterboarding on his prime time show, The O’Reilly Factor, always in a positive light and always minimizing its pernicious effects – both on the victim and, more importantly, on rule of law.

This is not an attitude that is worthy of Mr. O’Reilly’s intelligence, experience, learning or background. Waterboarding is torture, pure and simple, and his reiterated defense of it – like the President’s – is simply unconscionable and wrong. He might as well say right out what he is thinking, that it’s okay as long as it is being done to what he considers “bad guys” and not to him or anyone he knows – you know, good guys. It doesn’t seem to matter to him, or to the President that torture precludes due process of law and that it is precisely through due process that we find out who the bad guys really are, instead of torturing anyone he or President Bush would like to torture in order to find out if they are – or so as to get them to confess that they are, whether they are or not.

Mr. O’Reilly holds degrees in history, journalism and public administration and, as such, should surely be aware of the threat that such “flexibility” with other people’s rights signifies for society as a whole. Especially since he covered Argentina during the Malvinas (Falklands) War, at the end of the authoritarian regime that I myself had been covering for most of a decade when he arrived, and if he didn’t learn anything else from that experience or from his coverage of the civil war carnage in El Salvador, which he also covered, he should have at least learned what happens when authoritarians are permitted to suspend individual rights “in the name of national security”. If, despite his vast education and experience, he can continue to promote the “limited use” of waterboarding at the discretion of the Executive Branch, then, as he himself might say, he needs to “wise up”.

What is Waterboarding?

Waterboarding is a form of torture - I repeat, a form of torture – that dates back, at least, to the Spanish Inquisition. Back then, the Inquisitors would stuff a cloth into the victim’s mouth and pour pitchers of water over it so that all of the water was forced into the prisoner’s gullet, causing him/her to choke and strangle and experience drowning, but permitting the torturer to control how fast the drowning process occurred and, thus, prolong the symptoms – and the suffering – until the victim cracked and confessed to whatever “demonic ritual” he or she was accused of.

Water torture of this and other kinds has been applied by just about every authoritarian regime before and since the Inquisition and has played a role in some of the darkest chapters of America’s own human rights abuse history from the Salem witch trials – in which women accused of witchcraft were strapped to a seat on a long lever and dunked in a river or pond repeatedly until they “confessed” to being witches – to the modern-day waterboarding of post-911 terror suspects held by the government without trial or due process.

In the modern version of waterboarding, victims are immobilized by being strapped to a board on their backs with their heads inclined downward. Water is then poured from a hose, tap, bucket or pitcher onto the face, running into and filling up victims’ breathing passages and causing them to feel that they are drowning. The difference between waterboarding and more common water torture techniques – like dunking the victim or holding the victim’s head under water until asphyxia is imminent, is that waterboarding has the added element of activating the gag reflex. Victims cannot fight waterboarding by holding their breath because the water is poured directly into the breathing passages through the mouth and nose, immediately causing severe gagging and choking. This is said by experts to cause the victim’s resistance to break down in record time – usually less than half a minute. For tough to break prisoners (one of the recent victims of U.S. government torture is reported to have held out for more than 20 minutes of water torture before finally breaking down) there are varying degrees of waterboarding, with one of the advanced stages including tightly wrapping the victim's entire face, including the nose, in clear plastic cling-type wrap, then opening a hole for the mouth and repeatedly pouring water in through the opening. This is a variation on the long-used technique applied by the ruthless mass murders of the Khmer Rouge in torturing prisoners at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after the United States pulled out of Indo-China at the end of the Vietnam War. Testimonies by prison survivors tell how the Khmer Rouge interrogators would strap prisoners down with an absorbent cloth over their entire face and then gradually pour on water with a sprinkling can or bucket until the fabric was so saturated that the victim had no choice but to breathe in the water that ran from it. One such survivor was Vann Nath, who painted an illustration of the technique, which now hangs on the wall of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

The added advantage for those applying this torture is that, unlike techniques that make use of instruments of torture (electric cattle prods; blow torches; beatings with rubber truncheons; flogging; pliers, clamps or vices applied to nails, appendages, genitalia or other body parts, etc.) waterboarding leaves no obvious physical marks. What this means is that it is hard for the victim to prove he or she was ever tortured if they later wish to claim that their confession was obtained under duress.

Bad Company

Water tortures including waterboarding have been used by the very regimes that, over the course of modern history, the United States has denounced as inhuman and as being violators of international law and treaties (the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, among others): Both Hitler’s Gestapo and the Imperial Japanese forces made use of variations on waterboarding alone or in combination with other tortures during World War II, with some of their number being sentenced to long years in prison for war crimes as a result of their interrogation techniques in Allied war crime trials that followed the war – trials of which Washington was a major proponent.

One compelling testimony of such cruelty to prisoners came from a US airman called Chase Nielsen who was captured in a retaliatory raid on the Japanese following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Providing a chilling and concise account of the waterboarding process, Nielsen said that he was “put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I’d get my breath, then they’d start over again... I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.” What the former airman describes is a perfect definition of the waterboarding technique that Mr. Bush’s administration would have the world believe is a legitimate, alternative, interrogation method.

The elite French paratroopers used the method in Algeria against suspected rebels during French colonial occupation of that country. French law eventually placed an official ban on waterboarding, but not before numerous captives died from induced drowning and a campaign against these methods was organized by renowned French intellectuals including Sartre.

In President Bush’s own state of Texas, in 1983, a county sheriff and three of his deputies were convicted of “conspiring to force confessions” for using waterboarding on prisoners. They ended up being sentenced for the crime – the sheriff to ten years in prison and his deputies to four – described in court as “a suffocating water torture ordeal” and which was detailed as very much the same method that President Bush and his apologists have repeatedly condoned.

Many experts including not only human rights activists but also former law enforcement, military and CIA officers point out that the procedure is not only illegal and morally objectionable, but also unreliable. As with any torture, when the level of suffering reaches a certain phase, at which the prisoner either fears imminent death or wishes for it, he or she will “confess” to almost anything merely in order to make the torment stop. And as Arthur Miller so masterfully points out in his classic “The Crucible”, we’ve been aware of that fact since the Salem witch trials, where innocent women were tortured until they could bear it no more and confessed to witchcraft, only to be summarily executed (murdered) afterwards, with the blessing of the local authorities.

Just as the Puritan authorities of those times filled the people with such fear that they saw witchcraft at every turn, so too the Bush Administration has managed in eight years to generate such a high level of paranoia among large sectors of the US population that many Americans also see a terrorist behind every tree and so have been willing to give the President any latitude he wants in order to exterminate this perceived threat. But with the Bush government on its way out of office, the question Americans should be asking themselves is, at what cost to democracy and civil and human rights has this license been granted?

If it Walks Like a Duck…

Even if we throw the international rule book out the window because “they did it to us and now it’s payback time”, or simply because Washington suddenly feels itself completely above international law and above long-standing treaties that it not only signed but once championed, torture is still prohibited under the US War Crimes Act. So is there a technical question here for defending the indefensible? I mean, is waterboarding torture, or isn’t it?

There are plenty of military men, forensic medical examiners, jurists, intelligence experts, lawmakers and other interested parties, including victims, that would agree that it is. But the best way to tell is to look at the evidence and if it looks like a duck, talks like a duck and walks like a duck, then...you know the rest. And every description or testimony that you hear about it makes it clear that waterboarding is, indeed, torture – that is, unless you believe, like Mr. O’Reilly pretends to, that “they just pour a little water on your face”.

In its advanced stages, waterboarding cannot even be considered mild torture, much less “a valid, professional interrogation technique”, as those advocating it have suggested: Human rights researchers say that while waterboarding, if very moderately applied, doesn't always cause lasting physical damage to the victim, in its most extreme stages, it poses the risks of severe pain, brain damage, pulmonary damage, indirectly related injuries like joint dislocations and fractures (from the victim's desperate struggle against restraints and impending death), heart failure and, not infrequently, death by asphyxiation. Furthermore, the psychological effects on the survivors of waterboarding can be long-lasting, even permanent.

The bottom line is that if you have to torture someone to find out what he or she knows, there is clearly reasonable doubt about their guilt or innocence, and therefore, doubt too about whether the torture is being applied to someone whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time, no matter what their prior criminal or political record may look like.

Good Company

Furthermore, any American who recognizes the inherent wrongness in the authorities' condoning this kind of behavior – indeed, promoting it, as the Bush Administration has – is in excellent company, historically speaking. Some US Armed Forces officers who have, in the past, applied waterboarding to captured enemy elements have been tried and convicted of torture and sentenced to lengthy prison terms since at least as far back as the Spanish-American War (when, for instance, Major Edwin Glenn was handed a ten-year sentence for waterboarding a terror suspect in the Philippines). Perhaps one of the most renowned cases was one involving one of America’s toughest presidents ever, a man whose stunning political career was preceded by a brilliant military history, in which he reached the stature of folk hero, not only among the common people, but also among his military colleagues: namely, Theodore Roosevelt. It was Rough Rider Teddy who, as President, ordered the court martial of a US general for permitting his men to employ waterboarding in interrogating prisoners on the island of Samar. The subsequent court of the officer’s peers evidently wanted to send a message to President Roosevelt – like the one so often sent to the American people by Mr. Bush and Mr. O’Reilly – to the effect that extraordinary circumstances sometimes called for extraordinary measures, so they only concluded that the general had been overzealous in his duties. But as commander-in-chief, President Roosevelt cast aside the court martial’s verdict and drummed the general out of the Army.

A Little Bit Pregnant?

There are issues in the life of a nation that permit no shades of grey, and when it comes to rule of law and civil and human rights, there is simply no such thing as “sort of”. Exceptions of convenience with regard to individual rights are tantamount to being “a little bit pregnant”. When it comes to upholding the law and the Bill of Rights, you do it or you don't. There's no in-between. Permitting a country's political leaders to take on powers that belong to Justice, especially in as far as they affect the rights of every individual to due process of law, is an invitation to tyranny.

“Bending” the tenets of due process and rule of law to suit whatever historical stage a country may be going through – as the Bush Administration has done in Guantanamo and elsewhere – is a dangerous precedent, one that we who have long researched and reported on authoritarian regimes know all too well. Far too many dictators elsewhere in the world have awarded themselves sweeping power “to protect democracy against external and internal attack.” And although Americans tend to think that a dictatorship would be impossible in the United States, the Bush Administration has given us a glimpse of just how far authoritarianism can advance just by permitting the Executive Branch to take a bit more “latitude” all the time.

Whoever ends up in the White House next year would do well to focus on getting the country back on the straight and narrow with regard to truly defending democracy and human rights, instead of giving lip service to both while clearly violating them in the name of executive power.