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Holding the Line on Torture: One Organization at a Time |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31568"><span class="small">Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 11 September 2018 08:28 |
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Gordon writes: "When we're smart, committed, and organized, the good guys can win."
A protest against torture in 2016. (photo: Justin Norman/cc/flickr)
Holding the Line on Torture: One Organization at a Time
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
11 September 18
I offer you this guarantee: there’s an anniversary coming on October 7th that no one in this country is going to celebrate or, I suspect, even think about. Seventeen years ago, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched the air campaign that began the invasion of Afghanistan. It would prove anything but a policing action to take out Osama bin Laden, our former ally in the Afghan anti-Soviet war of the 1980s, and his relatively modest organization, al-Qaeda. It focused instead on destroying the Taliban, then ruling most of Afghanistan, “liberating” that country, and launching what was already being called the war on terror. At the time, top Bush administration officials were thinking ahead to a similarly successful strike that would take out Iraqi autocrat (and former ally) Saddam Hussein. Victory came with remarkable speed in Afghanistan and then the conflict there just went right on. Almost 17 years later, the 16th U.S. commander, General John Nicholson, who once claimed that Washington had "turned the corner" in that country, has just left the scene, saying with a certain pathos, “It is time for this war in Afghanistan to end.” The 17th U.S. commander, General Scott Miller, has just arrived to pursue, like so many commanders before him, a truly winning strategy. So it’s understandable if no anniversary festivities are in order.
While the war on terror continues to rage in that country and across a significant swath of the rest of the planet and terror groups multiply and spread, this January another anniversary looms -- and I think I can offer you assurances that it, too, will be widely ignored here. Almost 16 years ago, in January 2002, the Bush administration began to build a detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to hold prisoners from the soon-to-be-successful war on terror. It was to be the crown jewel in what I long ago termed a global “Bermuda Triangle of injustice,” including a series of CIA “black sites” being set up around the world (and a CIA kidnapping campaign being launched to snatch terrorists from the streets of major cities and the backlands of the planet), all of which was to rid us of (Islamist) terrorists. Guantánamo and its smaller siblings would also sit conveniently offshore of American justice, so that anything could be done to detainees there to get the information the Bush administration so desperately sought without fear of legal consequences. Those who ran Guantánamo, which would eventually hold almost 800 prisoners and today has only 40 left, instituted a system of indefinite detention without charges, often under conditions that could only be called torture, and even started a fashion craze, the orange jumpsuit, grimly and mockingly picked up by various terror groups for their own prisoners.
Like the wars it was to help end, Guantánamo is still there. Who could forget that, during his election campaign, Donald Trump threatened to refill that prison and on entering the Oval Office soon signed an executive order to keep it open. His administration is now reportedly contemplating repopulating it with former ISIS fighters being held in the Middle East. And honestly, so many years later, what could possibly go wrong with such a plan? Given that we also have a president who has threatened to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” a recent decision by the American Psychological Association, when it comes to torture, matters. But let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, an expert on the subject and the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, explain.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Holding the Line on Torture
One Organization at a Time
 ometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The APA’s decision is important -- and not just symbolically. Today we have a president who has promised to bring back torture and “load up” Guantánamo “with some bad dudes.” When healing professionals refuse to work there, they are standing up for human rights and against torture.
It wasn’t always so. In the early days of Guantánamo, military psychologists contributed to detainee interrogations there. It was for Guantánamo that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved multiple torture methods, including among others excruciating stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced nudity. Military psychologists advised on which techniques would take advantage of the weaknesses of individual detainees. And it was two psychologists, one an APA member, who designed the CIA’s whole “enhanced interrogation program.”
Here’s a disclaimer of sorts: ever since I witnessed the effects of U.S. torture policy firsthand in Central America in the 1980s, I’ve had a deep personal interest in American torture practices. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I wrote two books focused on the subject, the latest being American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes.
For a year and a half, I also served on a special ethics commission established by the APA after ugly revelations came out about how that organization’s officials had, in the Bush years, maneuvered to allow its members to collude with the U.S. government in settings where torture was used. In fact, an independent review it commissioned in 2015 concluded that “some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies.” Indeed, those leaders colluded “with important DoD officials to have [the] APA issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain [the] DoD in any greater fashion than existing DoD interrogation guidelines.”
In the wake of that independent review, the APA’s Council of Representatives voted that same year to keep psychologists out of national security interrogation settings.
It’s modestly encouraging that this August two-thirds of its governing body voted against a resolution that would have returned psychologists to sites like Gitmo.
What makes the new vote less than completely satisfying, however, is this: the 2015 vote establishing that policy was 157-to-1. This year, a third of the council was ready to send psychologists back to Guantánamo. Like much of the rest of Donald Trump’s United States, the APA seems to be in the process of backsliding on torture.
The details of the parliamentary wrangling at the August meeting are undoubtedly of little interest to outsiders. The actual motion under consideration was important, however, because it would have rescinded part of the organization’s historic 2015 decision, prohibiting its members from providing psychological treatment, as it put it,
“at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, ‘black sites,’ vessels in international waters, or sites where detainees are interrogated under foreign jurisdiction unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights or providing treatment to military personnel.”
Proponents of the new motion argued that keeping psychologists out of places like Guantánamo deprives detainees of much needed psychological treatment. If the association really cared about detainees, they claimed, it would not deny them the treatment they need.
Opponents argued that allowing psychologists to work at Guantánamo gives ethical cover to an illegal detention site where detainees are still being tortured with painful forced feedings, solitary confinement, and the hopelessness induced by indefinite detention without charges. It’s worth noting that the military still refuses to allow the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture to speak privately with detainees at Gitmo. In addition, at such a detention and interrogation site, any psychologist who was a member of, or employed by, the U.S. military would face an inevitable conflict of interest between the desires of his or her employers and the needs of detainee clients.
The 2015 resolution also prevented APA members from participating in national security interrogations, declaring that they
“shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation.”
Military psychologists within the APA were not happy in 2015 about being shut out of national security interrogations and they’d still like to see psychologists back in the interrogation business. This time around, they strategically chose to focus their rhetoric on treatment rather than interrogation. However, the long-term goals are clear. Indeed, in response to a request from those military psychologists, the APA’s Committee on Legal Issues recommended to the board of directors “broadening” the resolution “to allow psychologists to be involved in the practice and policy of humane interrogation.” The board declined -- this time, anyway.
Here's the problem with "humane interrogation": no one ever admits to using inhumane methods. Unfortunately, there’s a recent and sordid history of U.S. officials claiming that torture is actually humane -- albeit “enhanced” -- interrogation. In the George W. Bush administration, John Woo and Jay Bybee, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were among those who wrote memos justifying torture. As Bybee explained in an August 2002 memo to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "real" physical torture must involve pain similar to that experienced during “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” And the effects of psychological interrogation must last “months or even years” to constitute mental torture -- obviously an impossible standard to meet, since no one knows for sure what will happen in the future. In that way, they essentially redefined any form of cruelty, including waterboarding, in any of the CIA’s black sites then scattered around the world or at Guantánamo, as anything but torture.
As it happened, even as defined by the Bush administration, much of what was done in those years would have qualified as torture. Certainly, isolating people, depriving them of sleep, bombarding them with heat, cold, light, and endless loud noise, beating them, and providing them with no hope of eventual release were not exactly acts conducive to long-term mental health. In fact, in 2016 the New York Times interviewed several freed Guantánamo detainees, who reported that the effects of their abuse had indeed lasted “months or even years.”
A Bit of History
The role of American psychologists in designing torture programs goes back at least to the 1950s, as historian Alfred McCoy documented so graphically in his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. At that time, research psychologists at elite universities in the U.S. and Canada experimented on unwitting subjects -- including mental patients -- in an effort to develop techniques to produce a condition of compliancy in future prisoners, a condition that the CIA called “DDD” (for debility, dependency, and dread).
Much of this research culminated in that Agency’s now-infamous 1963 KUBARK manual on interrogation, which the United States used to train the police and military forces of client states. That manual would be resurrected in 1983 and used in the CIA’s training of the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua’s civil war. Many of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that became so familiar to us in the George W. Bush years -- sensory bombardment, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, sexual humiliation -- were first laid out in that manual. But the CIA evidently misplaced it somewhere in their voluminous files because, after 9/11, instead of hauling it out yet again, they paid $80 million to two psychologists to reinvent the torture wheel. Those two, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, repackaged DDD as “learned helplessness” (borrowing a concept developed by another psychologist, Martin Seligman).
Seligman’s role in developing the CIA torture program has been in dispute ever since. At most, he seems to have willingly discussed his theories with CIA personnel. In December 2001, he met at his home with both James Mitchell and Kirk Hubbard, who was then the chief of research and analysis in the CIA’s Operational Division, among others. In 2002, at the invitation of CIA personnel, he lectured on learned helplessness at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school where U.S. military are trained to resist torture. Seligman claims he had no idea how his work was being used until “years later,” when he read a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer (perhaps this one) about CIA torture practices in the post-9/11 era. “If I had known about the methods employed,” says Seligman, “I would not have discussed learned helplessness with” Agency officials.
Mitchell and Jessen, however, had no such compunctions. They cheerfully designed an interrogation program for the CIA that included such “enhanced techniques” as slamming detainees against walls and locking them in tiny boxes. As no one is likely to forget, they also retrieved waterboarding from history. This practice had bluntly been called “the water torture” in Medieval Europe and American soldiers were using it in the Philippines, where it was referred to ironically as “the water cure,” as the twentieth century began. To waterboard is essentially to drown a prisoner to the point of unconsciousness, a “technique” the CIA used 83 times on one man (who didn’t even turn out to be an al-Qaeda leader). The whole program was implemented at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and Romania, among other places.
For part of this time, Mitchell was a member of the APA and so presumably subject to its code of ethics, which, theoretically at least, prohibited involvement in interrogations involving torture. When concerned APA members tried to bring an ethics claim against him to the group (whose only real sanction would have been to publicly expel him), they got nowhere. Eventually, Mitchell quietly resigned from the association.
Meanwhile, military psychologists were also working on interrogation matters for the Department of Defense. At Guantánamo, they participated in behavioral science control teams (BSCTs, pronounced “biscuits”). Despite the homey-sounding name, those BSCTs were anything but benign. Staffed by psychologists and psychiatrists, the teams, according to a 2005 New England Journal of Medicine op-ed by knowledgeable insiders, “prepared psychological profiles for use by interrogators; they also sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators.”
Guantánamo’s BSCTs, the Journal piece continues, favored an approach to behavioral control taught at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which “builds on the premise that acute, uncontrollable stress erodes established behavior (e.g., resistance to questioning), creating opportunities to reshape behavior.” This was to be achieved by introducing “stressors tailored to the psychological and cultural vulnerabilities of individual detainees (e.g., phobias, personality features, and religious beliefs).”
But where did the BSCTs get their information about the vulnerabilities of those individual detainees? The International Committee of the Red Cross discovered that it came from their medical records at the detention center, which, according to general medical ethics and the Geneva Conventions, are supposed to be kept confidential.
Those APA members who continue to argue for bringing military psychologists back to Guantánamo insist that it’s possible to keep a firewall between their work as clinicians and the role of interrogator. But how realistic is this, especially within an organization like the military, where obedience and hierarchical loyalty are key values? As the New England Journal of Medicine concludes,
“[The] proximity of health professionals to interrogation settings, even when they act as caregivers, carries risk. It may invite interrogators to be more aggressive, because they imagine that these professionals will set needed limits. The logic of caregiver involvement as a safeguard also risks pulling health professionals in ever more deeply. Once caregivers share information with interrogators, why should they refrain from giving advice about how to best use the data? Won't such advice better protect detainees, while furthering the intelligence-gathering mission? And if so, why not oversee isolation and sleep deprivation or monitor beatings to make sure nothing terrible happens?”
Who Cares What the American Psychological Association Does?
When it comes to torture, why should the internal politics of one professional association with relatively little power matter? The answer is: because what happens there offers a vivid illustration of how organizations (or even entire nations) can be deformed once torture gains an institutional home.
And as in the APA, in the United States, too, the fight over torture has not ended. On the first day of his presidency, Barack Obama issued two executive orders. One de-authorized the use of those “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and closed the CIA’s black sites. The other was meant to shut Guantánamo as well (but the fervent opposition of most congressional Republicans ultimately prevented this).
Obama also argued that nothing would be “gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Had America’s elected officials spent their time and energy that way, those in George W. Bush’s administration who authorized widespread acts of torture and those who committed them might have been held legally responsible -- which is exactly what the U.N. Convention Against Torture (of which the U.S. is a signatory) requires. As a nation, minimally we would have gotten a much fuller accounting of the many cruel and illegal acts committed in our names by top officials, intelligence agencies, and the military after September 11, 2001.
And had all of that happened, we might not be backsliding on torture the way we are. It’s just possible that this country might not have elected a man who campaigned on the promise that he would bring back “waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and who, on entering the Oval Office, signed an executive order keeping Guantánamo open.
In addition, the Senate would probably not have approved Gina Haspel who oversaw a CIA black site in Thailand (where acts of torture did take place) to run the Agency. She might have been prosecuted, not promoted to CIA director. And perhaps the president wouldn’t have nominated a Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who worked as staff secretary in the George W. Bush White House and was involved in detainee policy. The Washington Post reports that he attended more than one meeting on the treatment of detainees, suggested that they weren’t entitled to legal counsel and strategized about how to keep the Supreme Court from granting them habeas corpus rights. Now, President Trump, citing “executive privilege,” is even withholding 100,000 pages of records from Kavanaugh’s service in the Bush White House -- and who knows what they might contain on the subject.
How Did They Do It?
What happened at the APA convention recently also matters because it illustrates the power of organized ethical action. Association members who were determined to keep psychologists out of the torture business formed the APA Watch: Alliance for an Ethical APA. They consulted thoughtfully with each other and allies (including Veterans for Peace), developed and distributed materials aimed at persuading APA members in general, and made personal phone calls to most of the 170 members of the association’s governing Council of Representatives. They combined the wisdom and values of their profession -- including the all-important Hippocratic injunction not to harm one’s patients -- with energetic, organized action.
It’s an encouraging example for the rest of us, as we enter this crucial election cycle. When we’re smart, committed, and organized, the good guys can win.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.
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The Urgent Question of Trump and Money Laundering |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46005"><span class="small">David Leonhardt, The New York Times</span></a>
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Tuesday, 11 September 2018 08:27 |
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Leonhardt writes: "How Bruce Ohr, President Trump's latest Twitter target, fits a suspicious pattern of behavior on Russia."
Robert Mueller. (photo: Brooks Craft LLC/Getty Images/Corbis)
The Urgent Question of Trump and Money Laundering
By David Leonhardt, The New York Times
11 September 18
How Bruce Ohr, President Trump’s latest Twitter target, fits a suspicious pattern of behavior on Russia.
 onald Trump has a long history of doing what he thinks is best for Donald Trump. If he needs to discard friends, allies or wives along the way, so be it. “I’m a greedy person,” he has explained.
It’s important to keep this trait in mind when trying to make sense of the Russia story. Trump’s affinity for Russia, after all, is causing problems for him. It has created tensions with his own staff and his Republican allies in Congress. Most voters now believe he has something to hide. And the constant talk of Russia on television clearly enrages Trump.
He could make his life easier if only he treated Vladimir Putin the way he treats most people who cause problems — and cast Putin aside. Yet Trump can’t bring himself to do so.
READ MORE
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I Thought Democracy in Chile Was Safe. Now I See America Falling Into the Same Trap |
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Tuesday, 11 September 2018 08:22 |
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Dorfman writes: "The rights we take for granted are fragile and revocable, and only the resistance of ordinary citizens will save them."
Chilean troops fire on the La Moneda Palace, Santiago, on 11 September 1973 during the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
I Thought Democracy in Chile Was Safe. Now I See America Falling Into the Same Trap
By Ariel Dorfman, Guardian UK
11 September 18
The rights we take for granted are fragile and revocable, and only the resistance of ordinary citizens will save them
 t can’t happen here. That’s an avowal I have been hearing from Americans ever since my family and I, fleeing a dictatorship in our native Chile, finally came to settle in the United States in 1980.
What happened to you in Chile can’t happen here. Democracy in the US is too stable, the institutions too deeply rooted, the people too much in love with liberty.
Weary of wandering, desperate for refuge, I wanted to believe that the American experiment would not abide tyranny. And yet I remained sceptical, stubbornly wary. I had pronounced similar words about Chile, and had also once succumbed to the illusion that democracy in the land I called my own could never be destroyed, that it “couldn’t happen here”.
Chilean democracy in the early 1970s, like that in the US, was imperfect: we had our share of civil strife, the persecution of minorities and workers, disproportionate influence of big money, restrictions of voting rights and women’s empowerment and purging of immigrants and foreigners. But the system was robust enough for the left, led by Salvador Allende, to envisage the possibility of building socialism through peaceful, electoral means rather than violence – a unique experiment in social justice that, for the three years of Allende’s government from 1970 to 1973, opened the doors to the dream of a Chile free of exploitation and injustice.
And then came the military coup of 11 September 1973 that, with the active backing of President Richard Nixon’s intelligence agencies, overthrew Chile’s constitutional government. The reign of terror that followed was to last for almost 17 years, comprising extrajudicial executions and disappearances, torture and imprisonment on a vast scale, exile and widespread hounding of dissidents. The repression that afflicted those victims was not accidental. It was a way of teaching millions of Allende’s followers that they should never again dare to question the way power was organised and wealth was distributed in the world.
Such deliberate savagery was only feasible and normalised because millions of Chileans who had felt threatened to their core by the Allende revolution accepted this war on their compatriots as necessary to save the nation from communism – even if there had been no human rights abuses by Allende’s government and absolute freedom of assembly and the press. Whipped into a frenzy by a campaign of hate-filled lies, the supporters of General Augusto Pinochet were persuaded, as in Franco’s Spain, that democracy was a cancer that had to be eradicated in the name of western civilisation.
In time, enough Chileans came to their senses and, through popular mobilisations and at great cost in lives and pain, created a coalition that restored democratic rule in 1990. But the consequences of those traumatic events, the division of the country against itself, persist today, 45 years after the military takeover. We also, however, emerged from that tragedy with insights that might be relevant to this current moment in history, when democracy is under siege in the US and across the globe, with countless citizens enthralled by strongmen who manipulate their frustrations and resentments and play to their worst nativist instincts.
There are, of course, significant differences between the situations in Chile almost half a century ago and in the US today. And yet the similarities are sobering. Having once lost democracy in Chile, I can recognise the signs of malignancy that fester in the US, a country of which I am now a citizen. I reluctantly note in my adopted homeland the same sort of polarisation that contaminated Chile before the coup; the same weakening of the bonds of a shared, inclusive national community; the same sense of victimhood among large swaths of the populace, troubled that their command over the traditional contours of their identity is slipping away; the same faulting of intruders, upstarts and aliens for that loss; the same tensions and rage exacerbated by shameful disparities in wealth and power. And, alas, the same seduction by authoritarian, simplistic solutions that promise to restore order to a complex, difficult, menacing reality.
Blaming this on a president contemptuous of the rule of law, who inflames confrontation in a country urgently needing consensus and dialogue, or the cowardice of leaders of his party who have enabled such intemperance, or a foreign power for intervening to stir havoc, misses the crucial point and does not answer the question of how to stem such a tide of rising illiberalism.
Again, Chile provides a blueprint, warning us that democracy can be subverted only if large multitudes stand by and look away while it is corroded and demolished. Our deepest values are in most danger when people feel defenceless and despairing, mere spectators watching a nightmare slowly unfold as if there was nothing they could do to stop it, ready to abrogate their responsibility. It is ultimately the passivity of those silent accomplices that eats away at the fabric and foundations of a republic, leaves it vulnerable to demagoguery and dread.
The main lesson that the Chilean cataclysm bequeaths us is to never forget that the rights we take for granted are fragile and revocable, protected only by the unceasing, vigilant, vigorous struggle of millions upon millions of ordinary citizens. Salvation can’t be outsourced to some sort of heroic figure who will ride to the rescue. The only real saviours are the people themselves.
Unless we understand this, we risk awakening one day in a land that is unrecognisable, with consequences that will be paid for by generations to come. My message to my fellow Americans, and to many others abroad, is alarmingly simple: do not cry tomorrow for what you did not have the courage and the wisdom to defend today.
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RSN: Anonymous Masks Identity to Distract From Op-Ed's Emptiness |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 10 September 2018 14:19 |
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Boardman writes: "The Anonymous Op-Ed was a cleverly constructed Rorschach blot that invited the reader to see any number of positions, principled and unprincipled, but offered none itself."
The White House (photo: ABC7)
Anonymous Masks Identity to Distract From Op-Ed's Emptiness
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 September 18
This was a very strongly, clearly written piece by someone who was staking out what we felt was a very principled position that deserved an airing.
 ell, no, that wasn’t what the Anonymous Op-Ed was, although it makes sense in our dishonest world for the Times to sell it that way. The Anonymous Op-Ed was a cleverly constructed Rorschach blot that invited the reader to see any number of positions, principled and unprincipled, but offered none itself. The Anonymous Op-Ed offered little if anything that hasn’t gotten plenty of airing. The Anonymous Op-Ed reads as if it were written by committee or as if it were designed as a squirrelly hoax. The Anonymous Op-Ed touches on plenty of serious issues without actually getting serious about any of them. Let’s go to the text.
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
That would be a good hook if it were true. A criminal indictment of the president would be unprecedented, but Anonymous doesn’t predict that. Republican loss of control of both houses of Congress might produce unprecedented results, but Anonymous doesn’t predict that, either. The unprecedented test facing the president “is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” This isn’t unprecedented at all; President Nixon faced much more serious internal opposition in 1974. Depending on the specifics of Trump’s agenda and inclinations, Anonymous might be describing good staff work. Anonymous does not provide specifics. Having over-promised the importance of the message, Anonymous then gives the game away:
We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
Anonymous seems to think the Trump administration is somehow separate from President Trump, a neat bit of doublethink for people who want to pick and choose where their loyalties lie, as Anonymous immediately tried to explain:
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
Illustrated with particular issues, this could be a potent argument. Anonymous offers no particulars of bad policies thwarted or good policies preserved. Anonymous merely engages in the popular evasion of an ad hominem anti-Trump rant, here centered on “the president’s amorality,” undefined and unargued. In place of actual argument, Anonymous slips in a familiar lie:
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.
Is there anyone who doesn’t realize that most Republicans aren’t anything like honest conservatives? And those supposed “ideals long espoused by conservatives” can’t stand up under close scrutiny:
- “Free minds” is the opposite of what Republican lock-step ideologues display in running the country, for example refusing even to allow hearings on a legitimate Supreme Court nominee. Free minds are anathema to the right-wing think tanks that have so successfully narrowed and conformed public debate over the past forty years.
- “Free markets” don’t exist, can’t exist, and are wholly unacceptable to successful capitalists, but we’re supposed to believe in them anyway?
- “Free people” as a Republican or conservative ideal is just a sick joke. Ask the free people of Afghanistan or Iraq or Latin America or any other country where the US has waged freedom. Ask the people of the US who have been gerrymandered, denied voting rights, crushed by predatory banks and fake universities, jailed for behavior that elites indulge with impunity, turned into profit centers by corrupt private prisons, abused for the race, ethnicity, and other circumstances of their birth. Yes, ask those free people.
Anonymous offers no evidence of caring for any of this, or for any other articulated humane concerns. The only values Anonymous actually affirms, albeit sketchily, are implied values at best:
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
- “Effective deregulation” is meaninglessly neutral, but in this administration it includes killing people with coal waste, subjecting public land to extraction destruction, arming school teachers, protecting payday loan sharks, and so on. No wonder Anonymous gives no specifics.
- “Historic tax reform” presumably refers to the tax bill that makes the rich richer, but also hemorrhages the national debt, providing a future, fatuous argument for gutting Social Security and other programs for those free people who need to be free of support. Sweet.
- “More robust military” is just scary, given the performance of recent decades, the horrendous cost, the unaudited waste, or the lack of any rational justification by any conceivable cost/benefit analysis. And military expansion isn’t a Trump achievement, it’s a bi-partisan corruption that cannot be discussed rationally in public.
- “And more….” Anonymous doesn’t say.
In the midst of a long passage of more ad hominem Trump-trashing, Anonymous makes a startling claim about the executive branch of the US government, if one is to take the claim literally:
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
If Anonymous is to be taken at face value, that means there are eight of 15 cabinet members (“most”) working to limit the president’s authority, not to mention literally hundreds if not thousands of other sub-cabinet officials all doing the same, although not presumably in the same way or for the same reasons. One might or might not hope any of this was true, but Anonymous is a relentless self-promoter and not to be believed without independent verification.
Anonymous offers a long, largely empty aside about foreign policy that omits Iran, Syria, Myanmar, the Philippines, or any of the other places where Anonymous and his allies have managed to persuade their president to do anything that improves the prospects for peace. Instead, Anonymous puts heavy emphasis on “hold[ing] Moscow accountable,” using kneejerk Cold War rhetoric to denigrate one of the few decent ideas the president has expressed, reducing US-Russian tensions. This would be complicated by the as-yet-unresolved role Russia played in the US 2016 election, but Anonymous ignores that altogether. It’s still all about Trump’s behavior couched in non-specific ad hominem terms:
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
What does “early whispers within the cabinet” actually mean? Anonymous and others were considering removing the president in early 2017? Anonymous doesn’t say, of course, but offers instead the craven rationalization that “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.” That is so bogus. In the first place, the 25th Amendment is designed to resolve a constitutional crisis created by a dysfunctional president. More to the point, given the uncertain legitimacy of Trump’s election and his willingness to violate the Constitution for self-gain (emoluments clause), the US has been in a constitutional crisis at least since Inauguration Day. Anonymous is a shape-shifting self-server who pretends to be on the side of the angels (“the right direction”).
Anonymous offers few clues as to what that “right direction” is, and those Anonymous gives (above) are neither reassuring nor democratically determined. Anonymous seems to acknowledge that with the mysterious phrasing: “in the right direction until – one way or another – it’s over.”
Anonymous is anticipating an ending, maybe predicting one, maybe promoting one. Anonymous remains a slippery, unreliable witness. Anonymous wallows in imprecise distractions:
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
Wait, what? Trump is all OUR fault, even though a majority of voters opposed him? Anonymous is pushing liberal guilt on us, with no basis in fact, and for no stated reason. Anonymous is also lying. Political discourse has been uncivil for decades. Gingrich Republicans pioneered the new incivility that culminated in impeachment for a blow job, a constitutional process in which one of the players made his bones to earn a seat on the Supreme Court. Incivility for Bush and Cheney was rife, only partly because they lied us into war. And the Republican racist boycott of Obama initiatives (with Trump playing birther tunes in the background) only formalized the incivility of today. And incivility isn’t the issue, it’s a ruse to allow people to avoid facts, truth, evidence, reality, integrity. Anonymous has none of these, as illustrated by his fawning appeals to “our shared values” (unnamed) and “choosing to put the country first” (as if that was one clear thing we all agree on).
Anonymous is, if not a hypocrite, clearly someone who refuses to speak the truth in plain language. Anonymous does not take a clear stand and try to defend it. But Anonymous appears to have a real, hidden agenda. What is that agenda, and who benefits from it?
The message Anonymous seems most intent on conveying is: don’t worry, folks, the country is in good hands, we’re principled people, we weren’t elected to anything, but we have your best interests in mind, stay calm and trust us.
Sounds like Republican Plan B to me. Maybe it works like this: the fall elections go badly enough for Republicans that they feel the need to do something to stabilize the country and maintain power, a neat trick if they can pull it off. Maybe they can do that by sacrificing Trump, one way or another, as anonymous says. The Anonymous Op-Ed lays the groundwork for that, for replacing Trump with Vice President Mike Pence. Anonymous has assured us that the secret government of which he’s a part is made up of all honorable men (and women), they just want to save the republic, everything will be fine if we’re just civil about it. Well, we’ll see about that, one way or another.
And thanks to the Times for airing that “very principled position.”
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience
in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20
years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers
Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life
magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
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