A Colossal Wreck (70 page)

Manning is accused of giving documents to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks. He has not been tried or convicted. Visitors report that Manning is going downhill mentally as well as physically. His lawyer’s efforts to improve his condition have been rebuffed by the Army.

Accusations that his treatment amounts to torture have been indignantly denounced by prominent conservatives calling for him to be summarily executed. After the columnist Glenn Greenwald publicised Manning’s treatment in mid-December, there was a moderate commotion. The UN’s top monitor of torture is investigating his case. Meanwhile Manning faces months, if not years, of the same. Torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal. Not in the shadows where it used to lurk, but up front and central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians. Coercion and humiliation seep through the culture.

On his second full day in office, President Obama signed a series of executive orders to close the Guantanamo detention center within a year, ban the harshest interrogation methods, and review military war crimes trials. In his first State of the Union address a week later, Obama declared to the joint session of Congress: “I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture. We can make that commitment here tonight.”

Nonetheless, the torture system is flourishing, and the boundaries of the American Empire are marked by overseas torture centers such as Bagram. There are still detainees in Guantanamo—as of November last year, 174 of them. They are supposedly destined for a supermax in Illinois. Manning fights for his sanity in Quantico.

January 13

Tucson is a schizoid town, pleasantly laid back but also with heavy enforcement under- and over-tones. The last time I spoke at a public meeting down there, a couple of years ago, the decidedly countercultural audience looked like a throwback to the late ’70s in New York, which is probably where many in the crowd originally hailed from.

It’s an informal place, which is why it was not surprising for Rep. Giffords to set up her table in a Safeway grocery store’s parking lot, chatting with locals. This is what she was doing on Saturday. So Jared Loughner, twenty-two, with his newly purchased 9mm Glock with extended magazine, was able to stride up to within a yard of the congresswoman and shoot her in the head, then spray the small area with an extended salvo.

With this twenty-second fusillade Loughner killed US District Judge John Roll, sixty-three; Dorothy Murray, seventy-six; Dorwin Stoddard, seventy-six; Phyllis Scheck, seventy-nine; Gabriel Zimmerman, thirty; and Christina Green, nine. Zimmerman was Giffords’s; director of community outreach and had helped organize the event. Christina Green, born on September 11, 2001, was taken along to see Giffords by a relative, because the nine-year-old was
interested in public affairs. Federal judge Roll had just dropped by to say hello to Giffords, who shared his liberal opposition to Arizona’s fierce stance on illegal immigrants.

Sarah Palin had played to her base all through the last four months of 2010 with website pictures of select Democratic candidates’ districts—where there was a Tea Party challenger—with crosshair gun sights over them. Giffords got this treatment and stated publicly that Palin should know this sort of rhetoric could have consequences. Palin pulled the image from her site only after the shooting, just after TLC cancelled her Alaska show and will not be bringing it back for a second season. The cancellation didn’t have anything to do with the shooting in Tucson. The show was fairly solid in the ratings at 3.2 million viewers and it seems TLC’s worry was that if Palin runs for the Republican presidential nomination, they’d have to give her opponents equal access time.

But will Palin now be pilloried as Loughner’s motivator? She’ll certainly get flak, but it will be from people who loathe her anyway. Her base will construe her as a martyr to the Commie conspiracy led by Obama and will turn out for her in even greater numbers. They’ll quote Jefferson even more fervently: “And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

January 15

Editor,

Alex Cockburn has been bashing the “Truthers” for many years now. He finds it OK to attack those who seek the truth of what really happened on 9-11-01. Now, he ridicules those who ask why the CIA “missed” the underpants bomber, even though they had plenty of warning.

“The Truthers reject the obvious answers—caution, bureaucratic
inertia, buck-passing, turf fights—and say it was a plot.” Oh really Mr. Cockburn, do we? We don’t know one way or another, and you are now the spokesperson for the Truthers? What’s obvious is your “strawman” attacks are very misplaced. Like, why spend so much time attacking truth seekers? Especially when these “failures” keep benefiting certain countries and military-industrial-corporations.

“The Israeli firm, ICTS, and two of its subsidiaries are at the crux of an international investigation in recent days, as experts try to pinpoint the reasons for the security failure that enabled Umar F. Abdulmutallab to board Northwest flight 253 and attempt to set alight explosives hidden in his underwear.”

A
Ha’aretz
investigation has learned that the security officers and their supervisor should have suspected the passenger, even without having early intelligence available to them. The failure was a twin flop: An intelligence failure, which US President Barack Obama has already stated, in the poor handling of information that arrived at the State Department and probably also the CIA from both the father of the would-be bomber and the British security service; and a failure within the security system, “including that of the Israeli firm ICTS.” Nothing to see here, move along Truther scumbags!

So, the US is relying on Israeli security, and we are to believe that everyone just messed up, again? Mr. Cockburn wants us all to fall in line with his theory, the Official US Government Incompetence Theory. OUSGIT. OUSGIT! OUSGIT!! OUSGIT!!! OUSGIT!!!! Over and over, again and again, just plain dumb goy? For how long? How many more times to fall for lies? As many as it takes. As one commenter wrote online, “If the plane went down, maybe Israel could of fed us intelligence saying it was Iran.” But, that’d NEVER happen, that’s a CRAZY conspiracy theory, false flag operations NEVER happen. I’m sure Mr. Cockburn would be glad to agree.

Cheers,

Rob Mahon, Covelo

P.S. I’d rather be a Truthseeker, than a Denialist.

Alexander Cockburn replies: From this it’s impossible to discern what Mahon’s version of events is. I’d prefer to stay within the ambit
of buck-passing, bureaucratic rivalries, and incompetence, starting with the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn’t show up on the Watch List because someone had entered his name wrong. As for denialism, Rob, go preach Warming in Western Europe or Beijing, as temps plunge to new lows. The world has been cooling since 1998 and that’s da cold truth. Petrolia.

February 6

The career profiles of the man Obama picked to send to Egypt to talk to Mubarak give a useful mini-portrait of US-Egyptian realities, shorn of happy talk about democracy and the will of the people.

The seventy-two-year-old Frank Wisner is a former US ambassador to Egypt and a senior fixer in Washington. He has secure footholds in government and corporate America. Until recently he was vice chairman of AIG, which he left to become a foreign policy adviser at the politically powerful law firm and lobby shop, Patton Boggs. Wisner’s father, Frank Sr., ran the CIA’s covert arm, went mad after the failure of the Hungarian rising of 1956, and committed suicide in odd circumstances in a CIA secure house outside Washington, DC, in 1967.

As ambassador to Egypt, Wisner formed a close relationship with Mubarak and long after leaving Cairo continued to nourish it. In 2005 he celebrated the Egyptian election (Mubarak “won” with 88.6 percent of the vote) as a “historic day.” Wisner promptly headed further into egregious falsehood: “There were no instances of repression; there wasn’t heavy police presence on the streets. The atmosphere was not one of police intimidation.”

Mubarak is despised, as he has been throughout his entire career. These days, mutilated by neoliberal policies forced on it by the usual international agencies, Egypt is an economic disaster zone, able to feed its exploding population for only nine months in the year. The current political explosion has sharply aggravated the economic crisis.

The custodians of the American Empire are right to be perturbed. Those crowds in Tunis and in Cairo, facing projectiles “made in America,” know well enough the ultimate sponsor of the tyrannies
against which they have risen. A belated chirp for “democracy” from Obama or Secretary of State Clinton will not purge that record.

February 11

We need good news. When was the last time we had some, here in this country? The Seattle riots against the WTO? That was back in 1999. Around the world? Hard to remember—it’s been a long dry spell. It reminds me of the old Jacobin shivering in the chill night of Bourbon restoration, and crying out, “Oh, sun of ’93, when shall I feel thy warmth again!”

We raise our glass to the Egyptian people.

The brave Egyptian demonstrators did it. Conscripts ready to mutiny if ordered to fire on the crowds did it. Immensely courageous Egyptian union organizers active for years did it. Look at the numbers of striking workers enumerated by Esam al-Amin today; this was close to a general strike. It reminds me of France, its economy paralyzed in the uprising in the spring of 1968. That was when President de Gaulle, displaying a good deal more energy and sangfroid than Mubarak, flew to meetings with senior French military commanders to get pledges of loyalty and received requisite assurance.

And next for Egypt? These chapters are unwritten, but the world is bracingly different this week than what it was a month ago. Rulers and tyrants everywhere know that. They know bad news when they see it, same way we know good news when we hear its welcome knock on the door of history.

February 14

The Reagan cult celebrates the centenary of their idol’s birth this month, and the airwaves have been tumid with homage to the thirty-eighth President, who held office for two terms, 1981–1988, and who died in 2004. The script of these recurring homages is unchanging: with his straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering terms he and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands
of the American national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the vigor of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.

When he took over the Oval Office at the age of sixty-six whatever powers of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed off.

The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launch pads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the Joint Chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan’s brain, most of them to the effect that “we need more money.” The President really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.

March 11

The inhibitions that prompted his stutter extended to other regions of the King’s body, as Kitty Kelley narrates in her fine book
The Royals
. Sexual dysfunction plagued poor George VI. Allegedly, Elizabeth and Margaret were conceived (respectively in 1926 and 1930) with the help of artificial insemination, donor undisclosed.

My maternal grandfather, Jack Arbuthnot of the Scots Guards, could be a candidate as the mystery donor for the future Queen. In terms of physiognomy Margaret is less likely. When he was commanding the guard detail at Balmoral, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later George VI’s consort, would visit from Glamis castle as a young girl. The high-spirited Elizabeth used to insist that Major Jack play “Horse,” carrying her about on his shoulders. Perhaps in 1926 the Duchess, as she then was, remembered that early, fairly intimate proximity and sent him a royal request.

The popularity of the Royal family after the war should not be overestimated. In his excellent history
Austerity Britain
, David Kynaston
quotes James Lees-Milne as recording in his diary for November 18, 1947—apropos the announcement of the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip of Greece—a disturbing dinner with Simon Mosley of the Coldstream Guards: “Says that 50 percent of the guardsmen in his company refused to contribute towards a present for Princess Elizabeth. The dissentients came to him in a body and, quite pleasantly, gave him their reasons. One, the Royal Family did nothing for anybody, and two, the Royal Family would not contribute towards a present for their weddings.” Moreover, “when Simon Mosley said that without the Royal Family the Brigade of Guards, with its privileges and traditions, would cease to exist, they replied, ‘Good! Let them both cease to exist.’ ”

March 17

Last Sunday my phone rang a couple of times from people watching
60 Minutes
reporting that in a segment on Christopher Hitchens, the following exchange occurred:

INTERVIEWER (Steve Kroft): Alexander Cockburn, a former friend of yours, called you a “self-serving, fat-ass, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical contrarian.”

HITCHENS: Well, I don’t see what’s wrong with that … though he should see my ass now.