Christian Zionist Gathering Mired in Controversy

As well it should be!


Published on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 by Inter Press Service

by Bill Berkowitz

The battle lines over Pastor John Hagee have been drawn, redrawn, and are no doubt being drawn again as this is being written. The San Antonio, Texas-based mega-preacher with the multi-million-dollar empire has always been controversial, but these days, the pastor is a lightning rod for critics.

And as the days pass leading up to Hagee’s annual Christians United for Israel (CUFI) conference in Washington next month, new revelations of his anti-Semitism have come to light.

Preachers like Hagee, and there are many, many who are like him, have hated Jewish people for as long as I can remember. These kinds of preachers (some non-denominational, some Baptist, some from smaller denominations) have never had a kind word to say about Jewish people or Roman Catholics. We can now add Muslims to the mix, of course. Basically, they hate anyone and everyone who are not part of their "faith tradition." I use quotes, because I can't find anything faithful about them and the only real tradition they have is one of hate and division. The things they say in public are quite different from the things they say in private and they always have been.

At last year’s CUFI conference, Senator Joseph Lieberman called Hagee “an Ish Elochim”, saying he is “a man of God, and, like Moses, he is the leader of a mighty multitude.”

Hagee has been a whack-job for as long as I can remember but, in all seriousness, what has happened to Lieberman? Did we all just not realize how far 'round the bend "holy Joe" is or has something happened to him....like an internal head injury or a psycho-emotional breakdown of some kind?

"Like Moses, he is the leader of a mighty multitude?" A mighty multitude of what, exactly? A multitude of whack-jobs just like himself, except that his flock is much more poor than he is, for reasons obvious to any one who watches one of his sermons on occasion.

When it was first revealed that Hagee had made a series of anti-Catholic remarks, critics, including Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League, went ballistic. Hagee apologised. When Hagee blamed gay people for causing Hurricane Katrina, many were offended. Hagee offered up a half-hearted apology and quickly moved on.

Bill Donohue is like many others, in the Christian tradition, who seem shocked to find themselves in bed with snakes over the abortion and gay rights issues. Donohue, and others like him, really thought all of that Catholic-hating was over a long time ago. It is over among members and clergy of other mainline Christian Churches, for the most part. (There are always exceptions to every rule.) Nevertheless, the old saying still holds true; if one does not want to receive a deadly bite, one should not lie down with snakes.

When a preacher says a hateful thing about you or to you about another, why would you accept his apology and go on as if it had never happened? Because of a political bond of any kind? The diatribes of Hagee and those of his ilk are not mistakes he made in a fit of pique or while having a stroke. The snake meant every word he said, he just did not want you to hear it, for political expediency's sake.

To American Jews, Catholics and other targets of hatred by the far-right, fundamentalist, end-timer, crusading crackpots, I would issue, as I have on many a website other than this one, a dire warning: No matter what is at stake, don't hang out with the crazies. If you do, you will find crazy and, often times, dreadful things happening to you and to people you love.

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However, when Hagee’s remarks about Hitler being sent by God to force the Jews to pack their bags for Israel became a You Tube sensation — and then garnered the attention of the mainstream media — longtime allies in the Jewish community began to question what Hagee was up to.

As I said then, Hagee finally hit on the wrong voting block...............

They sure as hell better be questioning everything about Hagee and all of those who are like him. It has amazed and shocked me that Israeli politicians like Bibi Netanyahu and other Likudniks have allowed themselves to become so aligned with the likes of Hagee, Robertson, Falwell, when he was still alive, and others of the Religiously Insane of America, Inc. Perhaps the politicians of Israel, like the Neocons over here, don't believe that the beliefs of these nut-jobs matter all that much, as long as they and their flocks will help elect those friendly to Israel. WRONG!!!

Their beliefs will get you and, perhaps, us blown to hell and back, because their god is apparently so impotent and their theology so twisted, that they believe they have to help him out a little with Armageddon thing. It doesn't matter to them, you see, if Israel gets nuked, because Jesus will then descend and fix everything. Of course, all but around 144,000 of you guys will be road- kill on the road to heaven for them. When the Hagees of the world speak about the Jews being God's chosen people, it is to the 144,000 Jews, who will accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, that they are referring. Jews who remain Jewish are bound for hell-fire and damnation just after being cannon fodder for Armageddon, along with the Muslims, who are all damned to hell, according to crusading-crackpot theology.

To his credit, Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, quickly threw Hagee off the bus, despite having spent a year courting the pastor for his endorsement.

To his credit? TO HIS CREDIT? McCain doesn't get any credit for this. When a politician goes seeking a preacher's endorsement, he had damned well better know what that preacher has been preaching, especially when typical preachin' of this type usually contains pure hatred for one group or another.

However, the condemnation hasn’t been universal. A number of fellow Christian conservatives and Jewish leaders have rushed to defend the beleaguered pastor. While last year Hagee was treated like royalty at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he prudently chose not to attend this year’s meeting earlier this month. Nevertheless, when his name was brought up by CUFI executive director David Brog, “the crowd broke into a lengthy round of applause, ending in a standing ovation,” the Jewish Daily Forward reported.

Hagee is an "us v. them," hate-mongering blabber-mouth. There is no way I will ever understand or defend Christians who would defend him and his ilk. Jews who defend him are either using him or they are too dumb to live, as a friend of mine describes anyone who does not know his enemies or, worse yet, mistakes his enemies for his friends.

From Jul. 21-24, Hagee’s Christians United for Israel will be holding its third annual “summit” in Washington. Among the scheduled speakers are Gary Bauer, a CUFI board member and longtime religious right activist and president of American Values; former Republican senator Rick Santorum; Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor; Brad Gordon, co-director of Policy and Government Affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); Daniel Pipes; and Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Leonard Fein, in a Jewish Daily Forward piece titled “Our Hagee Problem Has Yet to Be Addressed” asked: “How many of these [the scheduled speakers at the CUFI conference] will now, in light of the new information about Hagee’s beliefs, cancel out? Or will they twist and turn to rationalize their continuing support for this false witness?”

I have to admit it will be interesting to see who walks away and who doesn't.

Despite pleas not to attend the Washington meeting from a number of organizations, including the newly formed Jewish group, J Street — which has partnered with Democracy for America in an effort called “Say It Ain’t So, Joe” — Lieberman appears thus far steadfast in his willingness to stand with Hagee.

One does have to wonder if Lieberman has had a stroke or something.

Some of the other guests are also being asked to forgo attending the conference. At the same time, Hagee’s pals are urging their followers to go to Washington and support the embattled preacher.

In defending Hagee, Stephen Strang, president and chairman of Christian Life Missions and regional director for CUFI, wrote that “Hagee has done more than any other Christian in our generation to show love to the Jews and to stand strong with Israel. Yet he made one comment, taken out of context about Hitler, that some liberal blogger says makes him anti-Semitic.”

For anyone to say that Hitler was an instrument of God....how can that be taken out of context? Hagee "shows love to the Jews" and stands strong with Israel? Has anyone asked him why? I can assure Holy Joe that it isn't because he does, indeed, love Jewish people. He doesn't. Hagee and his ilk still see Jews as "Christ-killers." . He supports Israel for one reason and one reason only; so that all of the Jews of the earth can be shoved back into that small spit of sand at the other end of the Mediterranean and the Temple can be rebuilt.

One comment as Strang alleges? Bruce Wilson, the investigative journalist who first put together the video of Hagee’s Hitler sermon, has uncovered more anti-Jewish material tucked away in the Hagee archives.

In an e-mail interview, Wilson told IPS that all of the Hagee material that he has been “writing about and making videos (short documentary videos in some cases) of has come from material that Hagee has mass marketed himself, mostly from his sermons.”

It is always so with big egos. Sooner or later, they get hung with their own words, when there are enough good people around who hear those words and expose them to the rest of the world.

According to Wilson, at Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio on three consecutive Sundays in March 2003, the pastor delivered “sermons heavily loaded with anti-Jewish memes, stereotypes, slurs and conspiracy theories, one of which was almost identical to what was perhaps Adolph Hitler’s favorite conspiracy theory, which alleged that an international Jewish banking cabal, led by the Jewish Rothschild banking family, controls the fates of entire nations, even the progression of world events and history, through the manipulation of global money markets.”

This does not surprise me in the least. In the deep-south/bible-belt, where I grew up, it was often difficult to tell the difference between the preachers and the Klan or the NeoNazis.

The three sermons — delivered on the eve of, and just after, the invasion of Iraq — were packaged and sold by Hagee’s ministry as “Iraq: The Final War.”

There is no final war; not as long a mankind exists, untransformed, on the earth.


WWI was supposed to be the last world-war, as people actually believed that it would be the last war man would be willing to endure; the weapons of war having become so much more terrible with TNT. As a matter of fact, that was the hope of the maker of dynamite.

Then, as WWII was coming to a close, two atomic bombs were used by the U.S. on Japan, primarily to scare the wits out of Stalin. Many believed that those two Mushroom clouds signaled the end of world-wide war. Nope, those hideous clouds simply marked the beginning of the "cold-war," with hot out-breaks periodically, and the never-ending feeding of the beast, known as the military-industrial-complex.

Wilson claims that Hagee’s sermons are part of a distinct and “deeply disturbing pattern.” He notes that Hagee’s Cornerstone Church members have sung “Blow the Trumpet in Zion” at CUFI’s “signature event”, the Night to Honour Israel, with scripture drawn from the Second Book of Joel, Chapter 2, verses 1-11.

“That scripture…concerns prophecy forecasting the invasion and ‘desolation’ of Israel expected by Hagee and his church flock, which is divided into 12 administrative units each named for a Tribe of Israel,” Wilson said.

Hagee and his crowd are NUTZ, but that does not mean that they aren't dangerous as hell. They are. Of all the types of insanity, religious insanity is the most dangerous.

Although the preaching of Hagee and other conservative Christian evangelicals has been going on for decades, “Few in the American Jewish community, or the Israeli Jewish community, grasp the magnitude of the anti-Jewish hatred that has been stoked from American pulpits and American televangelist broadcast networks,” Wilson recently wrote.

And Mr Wilson is absolutely right.

After WWII and the horrors of Hitler's concentration camps came to light, antisemitism became more and more frowned upon in the U.S., except among some religious groups, such as that of Hagee, and semi-religious groups like the Klan/ the Neo-nazis. When it comes to hatred, there isn't a dimes worth of difference between them.

“The propaganda has been slightly coded but in the end not very subtle. Rather than directly vilify Jews, Christian fundamentalist preachers and leaders have for decades vilified groups and terms that traditionally, for better or worse, have been associated with Jews.”

While some Jewish leaders reject out of hand the End Times theory that sees Israel as the final battleground before the return of Christ, others prefer to look away, sometimes even laughing off the loopier aspects of these apocalyptic visions on the one hand, while accepting millions of dollars of support for their favorite Israel charities and powerful political network the Christian Zionists have built.

In other words, we have fools using fools using fools for their own political gains and mythic level theology.

Bruce Wilson’s research, and the attendant publicity it generated, has likely forced Hagee to the sidelines for the bulk of the presidential campaign. When asked whether his new discoveries will lead to the severing of ties between Hagee and some of his most fervent Jewish supporters, Wilson told IPS that “were they to get anything close to the same level of media play as the ‘God sent Hitler’ video it might. Barring that, it would probably take something even more shocking to cause such a rift.”

Fools and more fools.......

Will Lieberman and Pipes continue backing Hagee regardless of what other anti-Jewish commentaries might be discovered? Will CUFI continue to escalate its push for the Bush Administration to deal militarily with Iran? These questions might be answered when CUFI members flock to Washington next month.

Perhaps the fools should be joined and confronted....

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Willard Romney and American Theocracy

We knew that Romney was name challenged; Mitt? Makes you want to say, Hey Mitt,get a name!" Now we find out that his real name is Willard.

Now, we understand the Mitt handle. What in hell were his parents thinking?

Still, I just don't trust people with "country club names." It's a huge red flag. He knows nothing about how ordinary people live. Not a freakin' clue.

Good for him, bad for us, if he is elected.

Dr. J.'s 'He Really Said That':

Willard 'Mit' Romney and the Case for Theocracy

Steven Jonas

In his speech on "freedom" of religion, Mit Romney really said: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

I have been a skier for close to 50 years. For the first 30 of those I skied in the Northeast, where I live. For the last 20 or so, I have been lucky enough to be able to ski in the Colorado Rockies, mainly at Breckenridge. I am occasionally asked if I have ever skied in Utah (which does have excellent skiing, so I am told). "No," I reply, hoping to be jocular, "I don't ski in theocracies." Well, now I know that I wasn't being funny. The true intent of Romney's speech was not to deal with religious freedom, which in the American tradition is as much about the freedom from religion as about freedom of religion. For Romney, it is now quite clear, what he oddly calls "freedom" requires religious belief, requires belief in something he calls "God." He also makes it quite clear that if you don't believe in a Goddist form of "religion" as he defines it (no Buddhists allowed, apparently), you are not entitled to freedom.

Anyone who hasn't read the Book of Mormon should do so, ASAP

This philosophy is the essence of theocracy: the melding of government and religion. It happens that it has always turned out, that means a particular religion, the formulation of that government's rules around what the particular religion says they should be as, for example, in Islamic theocratic states such as (oh my, talk about irony) Iran and Saudi Arabia, and no "freedom" in the traditional American sense. Although this statement of Romney's surprises some, we should not be surprised. The most important thing about him, the element of him that in my view totally disqualifies him to be President of the United States, is that he grew up in a theocracy and obviously thinks that form of government and governing is the most natural thing in the world. Unusually for this classic flip-flopper on so many issues, on this one he is being entirely consistent. So why the spelling of his nickname above with only one "T?" Why on the belt buckle of every Nazi Wehrmacht soldier was the slogan: "Gott mit Uns."

The Nazis, we must correct, were not Theocrats. They were Fascists. Fascism is the close combination of government and corporations; so close, in fact, that one cannot really tell the difference. The corporations actually own government, kind of like they do here. It could well be called corporatism. Hitler founded his own church of sorts, but Nazi Germany was not a religious state in any way. That's not to say that religious totalitarianism is any better than fascism. It may even be worse because people will do incredibly horrible things in the name of God, more than they would for the sake of just about anything else, even money (though money and power are usually involved.)

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly Contributing Author for the Web zine The Political Junkies.net; a Special Contributing Editor for Cyrano’s Journal Online; and an invited contributor to the Web log The Daily Scare.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Freakin', Arrogant, Sicko Bastards Can't Help Themselves.

As a student of history, just for the fun of it, and a psychologist by career choice, it always amazed me that the Nazis left so many documents for their enemies to find, knowing, as they must have toward the end, that that were going down to defeat.

Was it was their version of O.J.'s "If I Did It." Yes, in a way it was.

Again I was shocked the first time I read the PNAC Document on the WEB.

Damn!

It was as good as an admission of guilt of, at least, complicity regarding 9/11, yet there it was, over a year after 9/11, on the WWW for all to see.

People get way to hung up on towers imploding and Tow missiles flying into he Pentagon. Forget all that BS for a moment and think.

The hardest thing of all to believe is that the PNACers stated the need for a new Pearl Harbor, catalyzing event in order to carry our their plan for a Pax Americana, worldwide, beginning with the re-ordering of the middle east.

Then, low and behold, it happens. What a coincidence! Indeed!

One would think the NeoCons would be building monuments to Osama bin Laden. (That would be little too much, I imagine.) Allowing him his freedom is enough for now.

Still, Americans, in large part, refuse to see the obvious. Why? (For one reason, the very thought that our government would allow such a thing, just for the glory of an ideology, is terrifying. Secondly, once an American actually believes such a thing, something must be done about it. That's a scary damn thought as well.)

But, just think about it.

How likely is it that a powerful group of huge, fragmented egos like the NeoCons at the AEI and their temporary off-shoot of loons, crazier than even they are, the Project For The New American Century crowd, actually wrote about the need for a New Pearl Harbor and then, 9 mos. into the Bush administration, have just such an event happen.? ( They even tried to sell it to Clinton, but he wasn't buying (perhaps because he couldn't with Ken Starr in his pants all the time or perhaps because he isn't freakin' NUTZ). ) I would simply love for a odds-maker from Vegas to give us the odds on something like that happening....without inside help.

They put this insanity on the Internet for all to see.

Well, of course they did. They see the PNAC Document as proof positive of their superiority and briliance, just as the Nazis saw every piece of paper as documenting their Aryan superiority. One day, these documents would be read by an admiring public, one appreciative of the very genius of the Nazis, PNACers, whomever.

Adolph Hitler never saw himself as evil. Neither does Dick Cheney or George W Bush. Evil never sees itself in the mirror, only in the face of its enemy.

This is what I learned from my years of fascination with the unmitigated nerve of the Nazis. Arrogant, imperialist, sicko SOBs just can't help themselves. They just know that sooner or later they will be admired by all, so they must document, document, document. Of course, they have their moments of sanity, when they keep their shredders smokin' all night, but those moments are rare.

Published on Saturday, October 20, 2007 by TomDispatch.com

Bush’s Pentagon Papers
The Urge to Confess

by Tom Engelhardt

They can’t help themselves. They want to confess.

How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times. Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years. As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February of that year, was “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The second “secret opinion” was issued as Congress moved to outlaw “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment (not that such acts weren’t already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly “declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard”; and, the Times assured us, “the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums.”

All of these memorandums, in turn, were written years after John Yoo’s infamous “torture memo” of August 2002 and a host of other grim documents on detention, torture, and interrogation had already been leaked to the public, along with graphic FBI emailed observations of torture and abuse at Guantanamo, those “screen savers” from Abu Ghraib, and so much other incriminating evidence. In other words, in early 2005 when that endorsement of “the harshest interrogation techniques” was being written, its authors could hardly have avoided knowing that it, too, would someday become part of the public record.

But, it seems, they couldn’t help themselves. Torture, along with repetitious, pretzled “legal” justifications for doing so, were bones that administration officials — from the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense on down — just couldn’t resist gnawing on again and again. So, what we’re dealing with is an obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly irrational in its intensity, that’s gripped this administration. None of the predictable we’re shocked! we’re shocked! editorial responses to the Times latest revelations begin to account for this.

Torture as the Royal Road to Commander-in-Chief Power

So let’s back up a moment and consider the nature of the torture controversy in these last years. In a sense, the Bush administration has confronted a strange policy conundrum. Its compulsive urge to possess the power to detain without oversight and to wield torture as a tool of interrogation has led it, however unexpectedly, into what can only be called a confessional stance. The result has been what it feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not exhaustive, public record of the criminal inner thinking of the most secretive administration in our history.

Let’s recall that, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration’s top officials had an overpowering urge to “take the gloves off” (instructions sent from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s office directly to the Afghan battlefield), to “unshackle” the CIA. They were in a rush to release a commander-in-chief “unitary executive,” untrammeled by the restrictions they associated with the fall of President Richard Nixon and with the Watergate era. They wanted to abrogate the Geneva Conventions (parts of which Alberto Gonzales, then White House Council and companion-in-arms to the President, declared “quaint” and “obsolete” in 2002). They were eager to develop their own categories of imprisonment that freed them from all legal constraints, as well as their own secret, offshore prison system in which their power would be total. All of this went to the heart of their sense of entitlement, their belief that such powers were their political birthright. The last thing they wanted to do was have this all happen in secret and with full deniability. Thus, Guantanamo.

That prison complex was to be the public face of their right to do anything. Perched on an American base in Cuba just beyond the reach of The Law — American-leased but not court-overseen soil — the new prison was to be the proud symbol of their expansive power. It was also to be the public face of a new, secret regime of punishment that would quickly spread around the world — into the torture chambers of despotic regimes in places like Egypt and Syria, onto American bases like the island fastness of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, onto U.S. Navy and other ships floating in who knew which waters, into the former prisons of the old Soviet Empire, and into a growing network of American detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, when those first shots of prisoners, in orange jumpsuits, manacled and blindfolded, entering Guantanamo were released, no one officially howled (though the grim, leaked shots of those prisoners being transported to Guantanamo were another matter). After all, they wanted the world to know just how powerful this administration was — powerful enough to redefine the terms of detention, imprisonment, and interrogation to the point of committing acts that traditionally were abhorred and ruled illegal by humanity and by U.S. law (even if sometimes committed anyway).

Though certain administration officials undoubtedly believed that “harsh interrogation techniques” would produce reliable information, this can’t account for the absolute fascination with torture that gripped them, as well as assorted pundits and talking heads (and then, through “24″ and other TV shows and movies, Americans in general). In search of a world where they could do anything, they reached instinctively for torture as a symbol. After all, was there any more striking way to remove those “gloves” or “unshackle” a presidency? If you could stake a claim the right to torture, then you could stake a claim to do just about anything.

Think of it this way: If Freud believed that dreams were the royal road to the individual unconscious, then the top officials of the Bush administration believed torture to be the royal road to their ultimate dream of unconstrained power, what John Yoo in his “torture memo” referred to as “the Commander-in-Chief Power.”

It was via Guantanamo that they meant to announce the arrival of this power on planet Earth. They were proud of it. And that prison complex was to function as their bragging rights. Their message was clear enough: In this world of ours, democracy would indeed run rampant and a vote of one would, in every case, be considered a majority.

The Crimes Are in the Definitions

This, then, was one form of confession — a much desired one. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their subordinates (with few exceptions) wished to affirm their position as directors of the planet’s “sole superpower,” intent as they were on creating a Pentagon-led Pax Americana abroad and a Rovian Pax Republicana at home. But there was another, seldom noted form of confession at work.

As if to fit their expansive sense of their own potential powers, it seems that these officials, and the corps of lawyers that accompanied them, had expansive, gnawing fears. Given this cast of characters, you can’t talk about a collective “guilty conscience,” but there was certainly an ongoing awareness that what they were doing contravened normal American and global standards of legality; that their acts, when it came to detention and torture, might be judged illegal; and that those who committed — or ordered — such acts might someday, somehow, actually be brought before a court of law to account for them. These fears, by the way, were usually pinned on low-level operatives and interrogators, who were indeed fearful of the obvious: that they had no legal leg to stand on when it came to kidnapping terror suspects, disappearing them, and subjecting them to a remarkably wide range of acts of torture and abuse, often in deadly combination over long periods of time.

Out-sized egos, bound to fragment under the right kind of pressure, are always the downfall of the evil ones. The problem is, it could take years...decades.)

Perhaps Bush’s men (and women) feared that even a triumphantly successful commander-in-chief presidency might — à la the Pinochet regime in Chile — have its limits in time. Perhaps they simply sensed an essential contradiction that lay at the very heart of their position: The urge to take pride in their “accomplishments,” to assert their powers, and to claim bragging rights for redefining what was legal could also be seen as the urge to confess (if matters took a wrong turn as, in the case of the Bush administration, they always have). And so, along with the pride, along with the kidnappings, the new-style imprisonment, the acts of torture (and, in some cases, murder), the pretzled documents began to pour out of the administration — each a tortured extremity of bizarre legalisms (as with Yoo’s August 2002 document, which essentially managed to reposition torture as something that existed mainly in the mind of, and could only be defined by, the torturer himself); each was but another example of legalisms following upon and directed by desire. (Yoo himself was reportedly known by Attorney General John Ashcroft as Dr. Yes, “for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired.”) Each, in the end, might also be read as a confession of wrongdoing.

What made all this so strange was not just the “tortured” nature of the “torture memo” (just rejected by the new attorney general nominee as “worse than a sin, it was a mistake”), but the repetitious nature of these dismantling documents which, with the help of an army of leakers inside the government, have been making their way into public view for years. Or how about the strange situation of an American president, who has, in so many backhanded ways, admitted to being deeply involved in the issues of detainment and torture — as, for instance, in a February 7, 2002 memorandum to his top officials in which he signed off on his power to “suspend [the] Geneva [Conventions] as between the United States and Afghanistan” (which he then declined to do “at this time”) and his right to wipe out the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War when it came to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That document began with the following: “Our recent extensive discussions regarding the status of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees confirm…”

“Our recent extensive discussions…” You won’t find that often in previous presidential documents about the abrogation of international and domestic law. It wasn’t, of course, that the U.S. had never imprisoned anyone abroad and certainly not that the U.S. had never used torture abroad. Water-boarding, for instance, was first employed by U.S. soldiers in the Philippine Insurrection at the dawn of the previous century; torture was widely used and taught by CIA and other American operatives in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and elsewhere. But American presidents didn’t then see the bragging rights in such acts, any more than a previous American president would have sent his vice president to Capitol Hill to lobby openly for torture (however labeled). Past presidents held on to the considerable benefits of deniability (and perhaps the psychological benefits of not knowing too much themselves). They didn’t regularly and repeatedly commit to paper their “extensive discussions” on distasteful and illegal subjects.

Nor did they get up in public, against all news, all reason (but based on the fantastic redefinitions of torture created to fulfill a presidential desire to use “harsh interrogation techniques”) to deny repeatedly that their administrations ever tortured. Here is an exchange on the subject from Bush’s most recent press conference:

“Q What’s your definition of the word ‘torture’?

“THE PRESIDENT: Of what?

“Q The word ‘torture.’ What’s your definition?

“THE PRESIDENT: That’s defined in U.S. law, and we don’t torture.

“Q Can you give me your version of it, sir?

“THE PRESIDENT: Whatever the law says.”

After a while, this, too, becomes a form of confession — that, among other things, the President has never rejected John Yoo’s definition of torture in that 2002 memorandum. Combine that with the admission of “extensive discussions” on detention matters and, minimally, you have a President, who has proven himself deeply engaged in such subjects. A President who makes such no-torture claims repeatedly cannot also claim to be in the dark on the subject. In other words, you’re already moving from the Clintonesque parsing of definitions (”It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’”) into unfathomable realms of presidential definitional darkness.

On the Record

Of course, plumbing the psychology of a single individual while in office — of a President or a Vice President — is a nearly impossible task. Plumbing the psychology of an administration? Who can do it? And yet, sometimes officials may essentially do it for you. They may leave bureaucratic clues everywhere and then, as if seized by an impulsion, return again and again to what can only be termed the scene of the crime. Documents they just couldn’t not write. Acts they just couldn’t not take. Think of these as the Freudian slips of officials under pressure. Think of them as small, repeated confessions granted under the interrogation of reality and history, under the fearful pressure of the future, and granted in the best way possible: willingly, without opposition, and not under torture.

Sometimes, it’s just a matter of refocusing to see the documents, the statements, the acts for what they are. Such is the case with the torture memos that continue to emerge. Never has an administration — and hardly has a torturing regime anywhere — had so many of its secret documents aired while it was still in the act. Seldom has a ruling group made such an open case for its own crimes.

We’re talking, of course, about the most secretive administration in American history — so secretive, in fact, that Congressional representatives considering classified portions of an intelligence bill, have to go to “a secret, secure room in the Capitol, turn in their Blackberrys and cellphones, and read the document without help from any staff members.” Such briefings are given to Congressional representatives, but under ground rules in which “participants are prohibited from future discussions of the information — even if it is subsequently revealed in the media…” So representatives who are briefed are also effectively prohibited from discussing what they have learned in Congress.

And yet, none of this mattered when it came to the administration establishing its own record of illegality — and exhibiting its own outsized fears of future prosecution. Let’s just take one labor intensive — and exceedingly strange, if now largely forgotten — example of these fears in action. In 2002, a new tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), was established in the Hague to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. “[T]hen-Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton nullified the U.S. signature on the International Criminal Court treaty one month into President Bush’s first term” and Congress subsequently passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act which prohibited “certain types of military aid to countries that have signed on to the International Criminal Court but have not signed a separate accord with the United States, called an Article 98 agreement.” The Bush administration, opposed to international “fora” of all sorts, then proceeded to go individually, repeatedly, and over years, to more than 100 countries, demanding that the representatives of each sign such an agreement “not to surrender American citizens to the international court without the consent of officials in Washington.”

In other words, they put the sort of effort that might normally have gone into establishing an international agreement into threatening weak countries with the loss of U.S. aid in order to give themselves — and of course those lower-level soldiers and operatives on whom so much is blamed — a free pass for crimes yet to be committed (but which they obviously felt they would commit). We’re talking here about small, impoverished lands like Cambodia, still attempting to bring its own war criminals of the Pol Pot era to justice.

In the process of twisting arms, the administration suspended over $47 million in military aid “to 35 countries that ha[d] not signed deals to grant American soldiers immunity from prosecution for war crimes.” In this attempt to get every country on the planet aboard the American no-war-crimes-prosecution train before it left the station, you can sense once again the administration’s obsessional intensity on this subject (especially since experts agreed that the realistic possibility of the ICC bringing Americans up on war crimes was essentially nil).

The Bush administration regularly reached for its dictionaries to redefine reality, even before it reached for its guns. It not only wrote its own rules and its own “law,” but when problems nonetheless emerged from its secret world of detention and pain and wouldn’t go away — at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere — it proceeded to investigate itself with the expectable results. For Bush’s officials, this should have seemed like a perfect way to maintain a no-fault system that would never reach up any chain of command. Indeed, as Mark Danner has commented, such practices plunged us into an age of “frozen scandals” in which, as with the latest torture memos, the shocked-shocked effect repeats itself but nothing follows. As he has written: “One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed — and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.”

How true. And yet, looked at another way, the administration — with outsized help from outraged government officials who knew crimes when they saw them and were willing to take chances to reveal them — has already created a remarkable record of its own criminal activity, which can now be purchased in any bookstore in the land.

Back in the early fall of 2004, when the first collection of such documents arrived in the bookstores, Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth, America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, it was already more than 600 pages long. In early 2005, when Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, and Josh Dratel, the civilian defense attorney for Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, released their monumental The Torture Papers, The Road to Abu Ghraib, another collection of secret memoranda, official investigations of Abu Ghraib, and the like, it was already an oversized book of more than 1,200 pages — a doorstopper large enough to keep a massive prison gate open. And, of course, even it couldn’t hold all the documents. A later Greenberg book, The Torture Debate in America, for instance, has military documents not included in the first volume.

Then, there were the two-years worth of FBI memos and emails about Guantanamo that the ACLU pried loose from the government and released on line, also in 2005. This material was damning indeed, including direct reports from FBI agents witnessing — and protesting as well as pointing fingers at — military interrogators at the prison, as in an August 2, 2004 report that said: “On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water…Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more.” Or a Jan. 21, 2004 email in which an FBI agent complained that the technique of a military interrogator impersonating an FBI agent “and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the DepSecDef,” a reference to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.

Other paperback volumes have also been published that include selections from these and other documents like Crimes of War: Iraq by Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert Jay Lifton and In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith. If all of these documents, including the latest ones evidently in the hands of the New York Times, were collected, you would have a little library of volumes — all functionally confessional — for a future prosecutor. (And there are undoubtedly scads more documents where these came from, including perhaps a John Yoo “torture memo,” rumored to exist, that preceded the August 2002 one.)

What an archive, then, is already available in our world. It’s as if, to offer a Vietnam comparison, the contents of The Pentagon Papers had simply slipped out into the light of day, one by one, without a Daniel Ellsberg in sight, without anyone quite realizing it had happened.

The urge of any criminal regime — to ditch, burn, or destroy incriminating documents, or erase emails — has, in a sense, already been obviated. So much of the Bush/Cheney “record” is on the record. As Karen J. Greenberg wrote, back in December 2006, “What more could a prosecutor want than a trail of implicit confessions, consistent with one another, increasingly brazen over time, and leading right into the Oval Office?”

Looking back on these last years, it turns out that the President, Vice President, their aides, and the other top officials of this administration were always in the confessional booth. There’s no exit now.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.