Dangerous Torture

The big news last weekend, other than President Obama's (gasp!) handshake with Hugo Chavez, was that the previously-classified "torture memos" were irresponsibly declassified, revealing state secrets, and forfeiting pivotal information in the long war against "Islamofascism."

No sooner were the memos made public did President Bush's remaining supporters on talk radio and Fox News jump to the microphone in a race to be the first to claim that President Obama was playing politics with America's security. Sean Hannity called it "stupid." Rush Limbaugh called the president "naieve." Bill O'Reilly doesn't want to use guidelines found in the army field manual, while in the same conversation, Karl Rove called the action "lunacy" and "a psychological victory for the terrorists."

All of these outrages reveal the twisted logic that suggests that "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually make the country safer.

As tempting as this view is, it all acts on an assumption that waterboarding, the most controversial of the techniques, saves lives. Apparently saying "Waterboarding isn't torture" enough times makes it true (or deciding that anything said because of waterboarding makes it true as well). Or saying "But waterboarding worked!" enough times, even if it might be a little morally questionable, makes it right. If Machiavelli would have approved, then I guess that's all that matters.

We routinely hear that these techniques kept America safe. After 9/11, we hear, we couldn't take any chances. After 9/11, the government didn't know what to do so they used waterboarding to get to the bottom of the issue and try to prevent another attack. Let's examine that claim.

Before 9/11, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States (1996) for stationing soldiers on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, supporting its corrupt regime, and offering unconditional support to the Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.

In 2000, the naval destroyer USS Cole was targeted for bombing by bin Laden. Conservatives, especially since 9/11, have routinely pointed to the bombing of the Cole as evidence of Bill Clinton's negligence concerning the terrorist threat. In this case, they are right. And since they are right, it undermines the claim that torture or waterboarding works and is necessary in the "Global War on Terror."

This shows that the terrorist threat was bubbling just beneath the surface and that the U.S. government could have begun taking action against terrorists because they were showing themselves to be a threat to the U.S., or at least making the U.S. a target. And put this on top of the fact that the government already knew bin Laden was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Surely someone could have connected the dots: the Cole, the 1993 bombing, and a declaration, and figured out that something was brewing. For people who were paying attention to U.S. actions around the world, the horrors of 9/11 were not an earth-shattering or earth-changing event, but a predictable event.

So, we should have known that an event like 9/11 was coming. It could have been figured out by following world news through a major national newspaper or reading on the internet. It would not take waterboarding someone to figure out that the country was due for blowback from its foreign policies.

Also consider this: the media habitually tell the American people that the only people who participate in these horrific acts of terror are religious fanatics who desire to die for their faith. Events like 9/11 give credence to this view. So if part of being a terrorist means dying for the cause, why would they reveal anything under waterboarding or torture? Dying is the goal, isn't it? Why would they bother telling anything even if they knew anything if dying is the goal?

I now feel compelled to ask waterboarding defenders this: What did waterboarding 2 people, one of them the supposed mastermind of 9/11, a total of 266 times tell us about the terrorist attacks that curious internet users could not have found out for themselves?

What this boils down to is that torture or "enhanced interrogation" does nothing to make America inherently safer. The real fear that I have regarding these memos is not that by revealing their contents, they make America less safe because terrorists will be able to train for waterboarding. No, the real fear I have is that the contents of these memos will make America less safe because they can be used as a recruiting tool for the terrorists.

Just as the invasion of Iraq fueled terrorist recruiting because it was viewed as the conquest and rape of an innocent Muslim country, these memos will say to the Muslim world "We tortured."

We can debate until Judgment Day whether waterboarding is torture or not but in the Muslim world, they see an imperial power incarcerating Muslims and torturing them. That creates a further incentive for people who might not be inclined to to join the jihad to do so. And that is why this matters.

Our country has made a mess for itself by not understanding our enemy. The waterboarding issue is just another incident of missing the point.

If we want to make the waterboarding issue moot, then we must make the impetus for terrorism moot as well and come home.

The Fed Did It

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Last fall the bank bailouts, Wall Street bailouts, and home foreclosure crisis all hit at virtually the same time creating a fiscal disaster for millions and a political disaster for the incumbent party, its president, and his potential successor. People panicked when John McCain, who had been picking up steam, validated his Republican primary assertion that he didn’t understand much about the economy, and anxious voters sitting on the fence flocked to the freshman senator from Illinois.

Talking heads filled the TV screens with each party hack pointing to their adversary, claiming that it was their party’s policies that set up the financial Armageddon. Democrats pointed to the Bush tax cuts and Republican deregulation policies while the GOP said it was the affirmative action-backed Community Reinvestment Act begun under Jimmy Carter and rejuvenated by Bill Clinton that was the real reason for the economic tsunami.

The Democrats claimed that it was all the banks’ fault for the housing crisis. It was because of President Bush’s deregulation of the market that caused banks to loan out money to people who could not pay it back. They used the crisis as the justification for economic regulation because laissez-faire economics, like everything else he touched, had obviously failed under George W. Bush. In fact, George W. Bush did true free marketeers no favors when he made his prime-time television address pleading for the bank bailout and readily conceded that he had to "chuck" his free market principles.

The speech was played perfectly by the Democrats who could point out that even President Bush could concede that his deregulation contributed to the problem. That, however, operates on the assumption that just because George W. Bush said something means it is true.

An alternative reading of recent history is made by historian and best-selling author Tom Woods of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the prominent libertarian think tank. In his concise, highly readable, but quickly assembled book, Dr. Woods points to an altogether different culprit, one that is neither the Republicans’ supposed deregulation nor the Democrats’ affirmative action feel-good policies.

The author asks, why would so many institutions, in different areas of the business world, suddenly collapse and look like total buffoons all at the same time? Perhaps the variable is something outside of them. Woods’ thesis is that the source of all our money problems is the Federal Reserve.

One of the most neglected components of American life, Woods argues that the actions of the Fed preclude us from having a genuinely free market. The Fed was brought into life to succeed the First and Second Banks of the United States by a legislative act in 1913. For nearly 100 years, the Fed has been a part of American life that has received virtually no scrutiny. Woods believes it is time to scrutinize.

The Federal Reserve, he says, keeps interest rates artificially low by continually injecting dollars into the money supply, creating the illusion that more saving has been done which can thus be used in long-term projects such as home construction. Woods (along with economists Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek) concludes that these conditions, manipulated by the Fed in an earlier epoch, also caused the Great Depression.

Woods address both sides of the political aisle and indicts both for their hand in the crisis. Woods digs into the history of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), a piece of legislation supported by President Jimmy Carter designed to pressure banks into making home loans to people of all segments of society, regardless of their credit history. The act resurfaced during Bill Clinton’s administration and the spirit of the act was invoked by George W. Bush in his push for an "ownership society."

The CRA resulted with banks receiving threats of lawsuits which ultimately led to the lowering of their lending standards, and a symptom of the crisis becomes evident. A condemnatory passage of the Democrats, Woods relates the story of Clinton HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo patting himself on the back for winning a "discrimination" settlement against AccuBanc Mortgage that ended with the bank being forced to issue loans on an affirmative action basis, which the secretary knew full well would end in a higher number of defaults (20-21).

Far from a real laissez-faire capitalist, George W. Bush threw in his lot with the "home-owning for minorities" scheme that his Democratic predecessors conjured up. He regularly supported regulations, even if not in word, certainly in deed.

Woods unequivocally rejects regulation as the solution for this and any financial crisis. Similar to security restrictions after a terrorist attack, the regulations and restrictions imposed are designed to protect people from yesterday’s catastrophe. Regulations are, in short, counterproductive and miss the current and potentially future crisis.

The answer, Woods insists, is not regulation because it has already been tried and failed.

He points out that regulators are government employees, not business savvy men. Shortly before Enron imploded in 2001, the SEC checked them out and found things A-OK. As we know from the Enron debacle, it was insiders who really knew what was going on and figured it out, which, while certainly late in the game, was still faster than the government discovered it.

Another example of government regulation of the economy is the presence of insured commercial bank deposits. He writes, "Any 'deregulation' of the banking system that permits the banks to take greater risks while maintaining government (that is, tax payer) insurance of their deposits is not genuine deregulation from a free-market point of view," (46).

But all of these examples are really symptoms of the problem. While affirmative action legislation is bad and regulations are unfruitful and government pressure on banks is also bad, they would all go away if only the Federal Reserve was abolished. The Fed is the instrument that powers all of these poor economic activities. The Fed is the lender responsible for the money banks lend out to unqualified borrowers. The Fed is run by unelected men and truly accountable to no one. It prints paper money which, by virtue of no metal backing, can never be exchanged, and is literally, only paper.

A secondary aspect of Woods’ solution is to return to a gold standard monetary system. Since 1971 and the Bretton-Woods accord, the United States has been on fiat money, that is, money that is not backed by any metal, be it gold, silver, or anything else. Since the government never has to worry about people coming in and demanding gold or silver in exchange for their reserve notes, the people are stuck with them. And since there is nothing to restrain the government by way of the people regarding money, they are free to continue printing as much paper money as they want. This, Woods concludes, is what makes bailouts possible.

This, in fact, is one of Woods’ most compelling arguments. If money can truly be printed at will, and there is nothing people can do that would force government to spend responsibly, that makes bailouts not only possible, but likely. A currency that is based on an exchangeable metal is actually a restraint on government. If politicians have to worry about people coming in and demanding gold or silver for their paper money, they will think twice before spending beyond their means. Also, the very existence of a central bank feeds into the bailout mentality as the "lender of last resort," usually means it will ultimately get to fulfill that duty.

All of this supports the famed Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, a theory which won F. A Hayek the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. The theory states that whenever a central bank creates circumstances which create a false prosperity through the printing of money, which lowers interest rates, a bust will inevitably end the boom. This is precisely what happened in America. People who would have otherwise been considered unqualified for loans received loans. Woods says it is similar to a basketball team expanding the roster by two spots. Even though two more people get to be on the team, they would not have otherwise been considered qualified for the team.

The point is that reality eventually caught up with the housing bubble and caused the collapse. It was a predictable but inevitable event. The central bank can try to delay the bust but doing so only makes the bust worse, since there would be more time to manipulate the false sense of prosperity. According to this argument and logic, the Federal Reserve is the institution that made the housing bubble and bust possible.

The only downside of Meltdown is a common one among free market uber alles advocates. Woods writes about the free market as if all problems would instantly vanish without regulations and the central bank. While I cannot help but agree that the country’s financial situation would improve if we really enacted a laissez-faire economic where the government actually kept its hands off the economic system, the reader cannot help but notice the faith rhetoric that is inherent to the free market system.

Take a passage from page 65: "The market gradually weeds out business owners who do a poor job as stewards of capital and forecasters of consumer demand by punishing them with losses and, if their inefficiency persists, driving them out of business altogether. So why should businessmen, even those well established and who have passed the market test year after year, suddenly all make the same error?" Now simply replace "market" with "God" and the reader can get the sense that the free market is supposed to be infallible. If only the market was really free, then all the financial problems of this country would be resolved. One can almost see the biting satire of Stephen Colbert and his claims of Republican "Moneytheism." Yet, that is really the only shortcoming in Meltdown, one of interpretation and the fear of parody.

Now that the recession is in full swing, and by virtue of this book, we have an opportunity to confront the problem. Shall we continue to blame everyone on the other side and point to policies that have made themselves obsolete while an institution, the Fed, remains untouched? If Woods (and his polemical predecessor Murray Rothbard) is correct and the Fed is the main reason for not only the current crisis but the Great Depression, isn’t it time that there was finally at least a debate on the American central bank? Isn’t it time that we at least begin to discuss whether an unaccountable government institution might be the source of our problems instead of some inane bickering about regulations or the CRA?

Ahistoric Election

*I composed this several weeks ago but hesitated about publishing it. The recent thoughts of a friend of mine got me to reconsider.


Everytime I see that ridiculously sanctimonious commercial telling people to buy these specially-made coins commemorating the “historic” election of Barack Obama, I get sick to my stomach. I do so because I can’t figure out anything historic about his election other than the fact that Barack Obama is the first person to ever be elected 44th president of the United States and that he has a darker shade of skin than any previous president, and nothing to do with anything he has accomplished before in his life.

Readers of this blog (if any exist) have probably noticed that I continually refer to our newest president as the “Mulatto Messiah.” For anyone too dense to figure it out, I do that because columnists, commentators, and talking heads of both parties make it a point to ram it down our collective throats that our first black president has been elected. Since millions were inundated with the notion that a black man might be elected in “the most racist country in history” I feel it is necessary to remind people, who are so concerned with a particular man’s race, that he is not actually black, but a mulatto, a mix, a hybrid. The president-elect has a long-forgotten white mother. But that does not fit into the narrative of electing a black man, in a country that has supposedly moved past race.

If you don’t believe that this society is still consumed with race, I ask you to please reflect on how many times in the past two years that you encountered news stories on TV, radio, print, or internet, that called attention to Mr. Obama’s race.

That this country is still preoccupied with race proves that the millions of people who voted for Mr. Obama because of his race made a grave mistake in believing that this man’s election would heal this country’s “racial wounds.”

I make this conclusion based largely on what one caller to the Rush Limbaugh program declared on Thursday, December 18, 2008. A black man called from Detroit who informed the King of Talk Radio that while the caller was pleased with the outcome of the election, the host was unhappy because the color of the victor’s skin was brown. Never mind that Mr. Limbaugh consistently denounced Mr. Obama’s evocations of socialism, but take this is an example of minorities still thinking (or being brainwashed) into believing that any opposition to “one of their own” is equal to racism. It’s an entitlement that strangely resembles the entitlement racist whites exercised over black Americans for years. The only difference is that the roles are gradually being reversed.

We should have figured this out during the primaries. Bill Clinton, “the first black president,” was branded a racist because he said it was a fairy tale that Mr. Obama’s Iraq position has been consistent. While I agreed with Bubba’s assessment at the time, the former president has been more than proven right as Mr. Obama has certainly waffled on his Iraq position ever since he clinched the nomination. What this means is that race and the race racket won’t let any vestige or hint of racism die. It’s too lucrative and powerful of a political issue. There is no better way to shut up a critic of the Mulatto Messiah than by calling them a racist.

Do not be fooled into thinking that Barack Obama’s election alone will do anything to solve racial problems in this country. Dissent will be hard to come by during an Obama administration. It will be muzzled when the president’s sycophants begin circulating that the opposition the president is facing has "a tint of racism to it." Just wait and see how much grief President Obama will receive when a potential political opponent is implied as a racist.

All of this should serve as lesson in human nature and the imperfectability of man. If people look down on others because of their different race or support someone only because of race, one election will not change them.

Voting in favor of someone because of race is just as bad as voting against them because of race. Race is still the guiding factor of why someone voted for this particular person, it's just from the other side of the argument.

And does this attitude not cheapen Mr. Obama's electoral victory? Millions voted for him because he is "black" without regard to any of his political convictions. How is it any different compared to someone who voted against him because he is black, without regard to any of his political convictions?

Racism runs deeper in a person than who they cast their ballot for. In his book The Revolution, Ron Paul calls racism a “disease of the heart.” It takes prayer and the power of ideas to cure someone of racism. It takes time and it takes persuasion. And if Mr. Obama's election and adminstration would heal our racial wounds, how would he do that if some people still have a hatred of others in their hearts?

Perhaps it's just the old racist within me, but since we're still talking about the color of this man's skin, it appears we might not have really gotten over race, it's just not in the way we thought.