The Real Blackwater Scandal: Build a Frontier, You Get Cowboys

Two weeks ago, I talked with Naomi Klein about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. If you missed the original video, you can watch it here, and the longer transcript is here. You can also learn more about the book and read excerpts here.

At that point, the Blackwater scandal over the massacre in Baghdad's Nisoor Square was just breaking. Since then, the story has blown wide open, with more mind-boggling details coming to light every day. It turns out the US occupation is so dependent on this one private mercenary company that it can't even function without Blackwater on the roads, providing the kind of protection that levels everything in its path... including the lives of Iraqi civilians.

Now we find out that the original report exonerating Blackwater, issued on U.S. diplomatic letterhead, was actually written by a Blackwater guy. As we are gripped by the unfolding scandal, it's easy -- and dangerous -- to see this as a story about a single rogue outfit, just another accountability scandal in the epic and tragic reality of this war.

What Naomi does so well is put the corruption scandals into a broader context, unveiling and meticulously documenting how the scandals of the Bush regime -- from the invasion of Iraq to the inability of FEMA to locate the Superdome for days after Katrina hit -- are actually part of a new emerging economy, what she calls the Disaster Capitalism Complex, which itself is the culmination of a 35 year ideological campaign of radical privatization and de-regulation. It is not a conspiracy in any sense, but a very open, fundamentalist ideological war against the New Deal in America and Keynesian economics around the globe. Francis Fukuyama called the supposed peak of this movement "the End of History." But what may actually be ending is the illusion that this campaign has done anything but great damage to people around the globe. Blackwater is a perfect case in point.

Here's more from our ongoing conversation:

Cusack: The Blackwater scandal broke just as you hit the US on your book tour. What do you make of the coverage?

Klein: It definitely feels like a watershed moment. There is this collective understanding that this wasn't an accident, it was inevitable: give a bunch of pumped-up guys guns, and send them to a place where they're above the law, and they'll act like cowboys. But what's missing from too much of the analysis is the obvious next point: this is true of the entire occupation.

Give a bunch of contractors billions of dollars with no accountability, while simultaneously eviscerating the Iraqi state (de-Baathification, laying off the army, flinging open the economy with no regulation) and they'll gorge. Give a bunch of Heritage Foundation interns control of an economy with no oversight and they'll try to privatize everything in sight. The entire disaster in Iraq was utterly predictable. But what I argue in the book is that not only was this predictable, it was the plan. The plan wasn't to destroy Iraq; it was to create a market frontier. And the reason you build a frontier is always the same: nothing is more profitable. Adam Smith wrote about it in The Wealth of Nations: on the colonial frontier, land can be grabbed, taxes are few, and capitalism can exist in its purest, most profitable form. That's why the Wall Street Journal has been comparing Iraq to a "gold rush" from the very first reconstruction conferences in 2003 -- any frontier is a gold rush.

So what frustrates me about the current Blackwater scandal is the attitude of surprise in the media and congress -- surprise that these companies are acting like "cowboys" in a "wild west." Of course they are -- the occupation was built to be the Wild West. For four years the White House systematically fought every attempt at oversight of the contractors, specifically granted them immunity under Iraqi law and made no serious attempt to monitor their activities. And it's not just Blackwater -- think of all the tens of billions of public dollars allocated to reconstructing Iraq. The money has all been given away to contractors while Iraq is in worse shape than ever -- those contractors are cowboys too. And that's not even including the roughly $9 billion of Iraq's own oil money that has gone missing.

And what's even worse than the feigned astonishment we are seeing is this insistence on framing everything as an individual "corruption" scandal. Companies are built to profit from opportunity -- to do everything they can get away with to make as much money as possible. It's their legal duty. So the scandal isn't Blackwater or Halliburton or Exxon; it's the vision of politics we have been living with since Reagan that holds that the central role of government is to be the executive chef for this corporate feeding frenzy. In the eighties and nineties, that meant chopping of major limbs of the state -- water, electricity, the airwaves -- and feeding them to corporations. Today the process has moved into the very core of the state: armies, interrogation, evacuations. But rampant corruption has always been part of these neo-colonial privatization frenzies -- think of the instant billionaires in Latin America's privatization wave, when Carlos Slim, now the third richest man in the world, made his fortune, or the lawless rise of the Russian oligarchs during "shock therapy."

What I argue in The Shock Doctrine is that privatization is the post-modern frontier. Essentially, what shock therapy means is selling off as much as possible before the law catches up, just as an earlier era of conquistadors grabbed land and minerals and signed treaties after the fact. The same goes for today: after each one of these feeding frenzies, the same policy makers who opened up the neo-frontier turn around and act surprised and scandalized that the corporations who they themselves have liberated are caught scamming wildly. It's only then that we hear the pious lectures about the need for oversight and rules and regulations. My question is this: how does the capacity for corporate greed keep coming as a surprise? The politicians who designed this war are all supposed to be adherents to a philosophy that holds that there is nothing more powerful in the world than greed -- that it should be the governing force in as many human interactions as possible. Isn't that what Milton Friedman wanted? Iraq's occupation was organized by the Bush Administration to unleash that instinct with absolutely no restraint.

Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.

Cusack: This notion of the frontier seems important to understanding the occupation. It reminds me of what Garry Wills said in his great book by the same name: it's John Wayne's America. And it seems that exploiting the frontier mythology has been key to selling what you call the Shock Doctrine to the public -- drawing on its whole aesthetic, so central to the American identity. Ideas of rugged individualism, tribal but not collective loyalties, the freedom archetype -- the cowboy as symbolized by Wayne, who is still seen as the greatest of American icons some 30 years after his death. He's a killer, a tamer of lands -- principled and ruthless, but ultimately benevolent and kind. First and foremost, of course, he is a law unto himself. Which is exactly how the occupation has been sold -- as you say, an attempt to build a model state in someone else's land. And rugged cowboy idealism was the packaging for the whole murderous and lawless project.

So let's talk about Paul Bremer, who single-handedly imposed many of the laws that are still on the books in Iraq, including the one giving Blackwater and other private contractors immunity from prosecution -- in effect putting them above the law. He set the tone, as well as the legal structure for what's happening now, yes?

Klein: He did -- but with the full support of Rumsfeld, from whom he was getting his orders directly, and from Bush. Blaming Bremer is kind of an easy out, which is probably why some of the war's architects have taken to scapegoating him for everything that has gone wrong. Richard Perle said in late 2006 that "the seminal mistake" was "bringing Bremer in." David Frum now says that they should have had "any kind of an Iraqi face" on the remaking of Iraq right away.

Of course none of these guys complained about it publicly during that whole first year of the occupation, when there was just Paul Bremer, holed up in Saddam's turquoise-domed Republican Palace, receiving trade and investment laws by email from the Department of Defense -- usually drafted by private companies like KPMG's Bearing Point, which had the contract to rewrite much of Iraq's economic architecture. According to his own memoirs, Bremer would print out the laws, sign them and impose them by fiat on the Iraqi people -- less the king of Iraq than the CEO of Iraq Inc. And he was completely in-your-face about it, criss-crossing the country in a Blackhawk helicopter, flanked by his ubiquitous Blackwater guards and always in his perfectly pressed Brooks Brothers suits and army boots -- the uniform of the disaster capitalism complex.

Cusack: It's a good look. Why did Bremer go with Blackwater in the first place, why not be protected by U.S. Marines?

Klein: Apparently he thought he would be safer with a private company, and he may well have been right. Because unlike soldiers, Blackwater has never had to worry about a broader mission of securing Iraq. The company's job with Bremer was just to bodyguard the CEO -- which has a brutal simplicity to it.

And Bremer and Blackwater made the perfect match. Blackwater's mission was to protect Paul Bremer at all costs -- "protect the principal." Bremer was protecting a principal too, his principal was the disastrous and ultimately failed project of forcibly transforming Iraq into a "model free-market," which was code for a wild-west utopia for western multinationals.

Cusack: But Bremer wasn't just a rogue, or an errand boy. That would be too convenient, as you say. He played a more significant historical role than that, trying to implement the broader vision of privatized government, pioneered by Milton Friedman and taken to its apotheosis by his acolyte Donald Rumsfeld... with the full approval and blessings of the entire Bush administration and the other intellectual architects of this disastrous war. Even within that context, however, Rumsfeld was quite the visionary.

Klein: Yeah, in the sixties, Rumsfeld used to attend seminars at the University of Chicago, and he described Milton Friedman and his colleagues as "a cluster of geniuses," while he and other "young pups" would "come in and learn at their feet." I think Rumsfeld's pedigree as a corporatist ideologue has really been lost in the focus on his military failures. Especially because even if he was a flop as a military strategist, from a business perspective, he was remarkably successful -- he oversaw the creation of a booming new economy in disaster.

We forget that he was very open about this goal when he took office, Fortune magazine ran an article at the time titled "Mr. CEO Goes to Washington" all about how he was going to bring a corporate-style downsizing and outsourcing revolution to the Pentagon. And of course Rumsfeld himself is a quintessential disaster capitalist -- he was chair of the board of Gilead Sciences, a drug company that owns the patent on Tamiflu, which is the treatment for Avian Flu. With every pandemic scare, Gilead's stock rises. So Rumsfeld, who held on to his Gilead stocks throughout his term in office -- watching their value soar as he recused himself from every meeting about drug supplies for flu pandemics -- knows all about this booming market.

More importantly, Rumsfeld was coming out of the private sector at a time when it was very trendy for corporations to unburden themselves of factories and full-time workers and focus exclusively on marketing and design -- the so-called Nike model. And that's pretty much what he did when he took over at the Pentagon: he downsized the full-time troops to the bare minimum and outsourced and contracted-out everything in sight. That freed his hand to focus on the military equivalent of marketing -- the shock and awe projection of U.S. power to the world.

And the outsourcing orgy he sparked keeps blowing up in the face of the administration: in Iraq and Afghanistan, companies like Blackwater and Halliburton perform ever more central functions of war fighting, while at home, Rumsfeld and Cheney oversaw the creation of the privatized homeland security state. The first stage was to give themselves special powers to detain, spy and authorize torture; the second stage was to outsource the performing of these functions to private companies. We only catch glimpses of this through scandal -- like the private contractors exposed during the Abu Ghraib controversy. Or remember the debacle about the conditions at Walter Reed? That was because the hospital's management was in the midst of being outsourced.

The stats on this new disaster economy are incredible: Counterintelligence Field Activity, a new intelligence agency created under Rumsfeld that is independent of the CIA, outsources 70 percent of its budget to private contractors. In 2003, the U.S. government handed out 3,512 contracts to companies to perform security functions; in the twenty-two-month period ending in August 2006, the Department of Homeland Security had issued more than 115,000 such contracts. The global "homeland security industry" -- economically insignificant before 2001 -- is now a $200 billion sector, bigger than Hollywood or the music industry. And the private companies performing these functions are a kind of shadow state, with extraordinary power and very little oversight, since the details of most of these contracts are completely obscured under the blanket of "classified" intelligence. In other words, extraordinarily sensitive state functions are being privatized -- but we can't know about it because they are too sensitive.

Cusack: That's always the Catch-22. On Blackwater, I would make the case that these privatized modern-day Hessians are illegal, and in every way an affront to the very idea of this country -- operating completely outside the checks and balances of the constitutional structure of the Republic. I mean, if privatizing homeland security and letting mercenaries go totally unregulated in Iraq is ok -- with no possible chance of the hired guns being prosecuted by state, federal or international law aren't we sanctioning roving corporate armies? Where does it end? This is really deeply down the rabbit hole. And the sickest part, in a weird way, is that this privatization revolution is not even a free market, it's entirely corporate welfare -- corporations taking our tax dollars to fund their private illegal armies.

Klein: Most people, when they learn about it, completely agree that what is going on is insane and surreal. Where this fits in with the thesis of my book is that the Disaster Capitalism Complex was launched without public debate -- the startup phase was after the extraordinary shock and disorientation of 9/11, and it was taken to market under the cover of crisis management in Iraq. It's why I am obsessed with disasters. They enable these leaps forward for corporate rule, precisely because debate is supposedly impossible during a state of emergency. So Rumsfeld's radical corporate downsizing and outsourcing of the military was never openly discussed while it was happening. Instead, we heard a lot about troop levels for the war and occupation -- it was basically reported as a numbers game, and as a power struggle between Rumsfeld and the generals or Rumsfeld and Powell, when something much more profound was going on: the birth of a new economy.

In retrospect we can see that Rumsfeld's "mistakes" were extremely profitable for a small group of crony capitalists, and continue to be. It began when Rumsfeld rejected all solutions that required increasing the size of the army in Iraq. That meant the military had to find other ways to get more soldiers into combat roles. So private security companies flooded into Iraq to perform functions that had previously been done by soldiers -- security for diplomats and other officials, guarding bases, escorting other contractors. Once they were there, their roles expanded further in response to the chaos. As Jeremy Scahill argues in his excellent book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the company's original contract in Iraq was to provide private security for Bremer, but a year into the occupation, it was engaging in all-out street combat. During the April 2004 uprising of Moqtada al-Sadr's movement in Najaf, Blackwater actually assumed command over active-duty U.S. marines in a daylong battle with the Mahdi Army, during which dozens of Iraqis were killed.

In the book, I call this "corporate mission creep" and the numbers tell the story. At the start of the occupation of Iraq, there was one contractor for every ten soldiers -- already far more than during the first Gulf War. Today, private contractors outnumber U.S. soldiers, making this the most privatized war in modern history. Once again, a sea change that was never debated -- it just happened. The worse things get in Iraq, the more the market in private warfare expands into new territory.

These days, everyone is beating up on Blackwater. But at the time this new economy was being built, the press treated the corporate mission creep as absolutely normal, unworthy of serious examination except in extreme cases when a contractor was caught stealing. The financial press, of course, was raving about the so-called "Baghdad boom" in private security, urging investors to get a piece of the action.

Before the current scandal, Blackwater had been working incredibly hard to present itself as a kind of friendly, McMercenary company, with nothing to be ashamed of, just patriotic soldiers out to fight terrorism. They have hired aggressive Washington lobbyists to erase the word "mercenary" from the public vocabulary, launched a line of Blackwater fashions, and Erik Prince likes to compare what he is doing to the military to what FedEx did to the post office.

Cusack: See now that's not a joke -- the man actually said that. The man actually compared running a for-profit occupation to delivering the mail. And there is no function of the state that they don't want to turn into a business, is there?

Klein: I think the short answer is no. Not once you've already opened up prisoner interrogation, wiretapping, and border patrol -- what's left? As you know, in the book I talk about how evacuation from disasters is a burgeoning industry. A company in Florida called HelpJet is urging people to turn "a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." Even military recruiting, which has always been seen as the job of soldiers, has become a for-profit business. A new generation of soldiers is being recruited by private headhunting firms like Serco, or the weapons giant L-3 Communications. The private recruiters are paid bonuses every time they sign up a soldier, so one company spokesperson bragged, "If you want to eat steak, you have to put people in the army." It's like Amway with sidearms.

All of this is ripe for corruption, for the most obvious of reasons. If recruitment is on commission, quantity will outweigh quality. If "intelligence" is a service provided to the government by a private contractor, then the customer is always right. And that's pretty scary when the customer is Dick Cheney. Want to prove Iraq has WMDs? Right away, sir. Anything else I can do for you, sir?

The other thing that happens when the working philosophy of the country's leaders is that private is always better is that the public sector is left to erode and atrophy -- in-house equipment falls out of date, the best people leave, the skills are no longer there. The CIA has lost so many staffers to the privatized spy sector that it has barred contractors from recruiting in the agency dining room.

The end result is that you have Blackwater being asked to investigate its own alleged massacre in Baghdad, or CH2M Hill given a contract in Iraq to oversee other contractors. And remember that when Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. My favorite example is that when it came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors, the Army outsourced the job to one of its major contractors, because it no longer had the in-house expertise. The Department of Homeland Security is paying Boeing $2.5 billion not just to build a "virtual fence" on U.S. borders but also to design the entire border initiative because, according to the department's inspector general, the DHS "does not have the capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee, and execute the program."

Governing is reduced to running an ATM machine -- awarding contracts to private players. And increasingly, we are hearing about the contracts themselves being written by the companies that eventually win the contracts, while another company is contracted to see that the contract is fulfilled. Under George W. Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government -- the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles -- but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike's Oregon headquarters actually stitch running shoes.


Read the second part of this conversation here.

Comments

[waynesmyer]

I mean, uh, like when Blackwater shoots and kills women and little children, it's not for real! after they are killed, they get up and walk away! It's like a TV show! Right?? yeah! right!
p.s. This program has been edited to protect the innocent, Annie Koulter,Ch­airman,Ves­tal Virgins For Baby Bush

[maggiemay]

Reading both books. well written and reseached. I always felt that the welfare for american corporations was wrong. Like the claims for public welfare makes people lazy and greedy. The same welfare for these capitalist has made them too greedy and too lazy to compete with other firms. These corporate elite told the american worker to compete with the world labor market.
but yet they are not willing to do so. and that where blackwater comes in.

I do not trust Ms clinton. to me, she another version of bushes' policies. she will continue the corporte welfare policies and there no one there to stop her. corporation leadership has made that possible.

The good news is people are finally realize this. but we are without leadership to do anything about it. or leadership we can trust.

we better do something fast. our dollar is worthless. american businesses are being sued by other countries and want them out their country. we are in a mess. and if we invade iran. think on this. russia has claim a new war missile and friend to iran. south america made friends with iran,,cut the sale of oil to this country. china made friend with iran. cash in our dollar to the market. Iran doesn't have to fight us when bush invade them.
Iran will distroy us economy with the help of their friends.

[GrayShockley]

There are mumblings in the streets, intelligent people are avoiding the one-eyed monster and irony is lost on all.

It might be noted that the Ruler of the Sun Never Sets empire who sent the Britishers and the Hessians into defeat against the colonists was, oh, my! What was his name?

Oh, yes; King George.

[splashy]

Because of all this, it has turned into one big scam, fleecing the workers of their taxes to give to corporatists who prey on them.

[splashy]

Because of all this, it has turned into one big scam, fleecing the workers of their taxes to give to corporatists who prey on them.

[BushBites]

Good point. I hadn't thought about it that way before.

BTW: You gonna come back to Illinois and run for something one of these days?

[KarlaElisa]

Bloody fabulous article.
Blackwater is going to continue to grow and there is every indication American citizens will be introduced to their presence when push comes to shove and it will.
Not sure how to change this but best to get the word out.

[TJTelecaster]

There is a new Blackwater related Video by Jeremy Scahill on Brasscheck TV..he's speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now..

Right Wing Christian Murder for Hire..

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/174.html

Check it out...

[Wyndespelle]

The real Blackwater scandal is that there is a Blackwater, inc., at all. Yes, there should be bodyguard services available to those who think their bods need guarding, for whatever reason, at their own expense but a para-military organization that operates without rules passed by Congress and, equally, without the authority of Command / Oversight that is offered by our Armed Forces, NO, Absolutely Not. As for the army of specialty contractors that need guardin: It seems to me that the armies of the past got along without them quite well.
The fact is that Blackwater came to its position during the nineties and really grew under the Bush foray into Iraq. Bush, himself, needed the protection offered by the biggest and the most brutal of the US Security companies. And he also needed it for his cohorts in crime: Rice, Rummy, Rover, Cheney, Gonzales et al. If Bush declares Martial Law he really needs it and he will support it with his makeshift interpretation of the Constitution / Executive Orders, whatever. If Ron Paul is even nominated, there will be a resumption of activity around declaring Martial Law and its sister, Totalitarianism, in the USA. Believe it.

[janmB]

The ol wild-west still lives on many streets of our country. Why wouldn't we bring the same mindset whereever our people go.
Can any other country in the world boast of having such a strong lobby for guns as our own NRA ?
Does any other country have school shootings like we do---OOPS another one today in OHIO but its the guns that kill not people.
YEEHAWWW !!!

[judyj]

It seems the cards were quickly stacked after 9/11 for America. I had never heard of paying the kind of money that was paid out by the administration to the victims of that horrific day, after all what about Pearl Harbour, or Oklahoma? Bush and his team were so shrewed, handing out all that money, what a great guy taking care of America like that; while making sure that anyone who spoke of restraint regarding targets or money was unpatriotic and don't forget the revenge on everyone's tongue. He shut the mouths of Democrats and any other "questioner" with chants of fear and a firm belief that this would be just like his Daddy's war, a quickie, a no brainer. Instead he went after easy target, them the innocent people of Iraq, with a brief fly by over Afganistan to see if they could spot Osama in the hills. He has been funneling money and resources that rightfully belong to the people of the United States, systematically destroying a country to simply get their oil. He has set that region back a hundred years, and the overall cost to rebuild what infrastructure there was, I can't even count. All the while, he put in place a private back up army, beholden to no one but their paychecks. But American soldiers have taken the real hits. Not only those dying, but oh God, the men and women coming home to sometimes overwhelming challenges, burned, lost limbs, no sight, for what do they fight... a Commander in Chief whose real target and interest is MONEY AND GREED? Why does no one investigate the base he's building, where I can only assume, the plans are to stay in Iraq FOREVER? Why do we not have our seasoned reporters asking the questions Americans so despretely need to know? Wait a minute, they've all been put out to pasture, the young ones, much easier to control and edit. Come on America, WAKE THE HELL UP!

[SteveParadis]

With all due respect I must disagree with your description of Blackwater contractors as "cowboys"; they do not follow the established rubric:

Gene Autry's Cowboy Code
1. The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.
2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.
3. He must always tell the truth.
4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.
5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.
6. He must help people in distress.
7. He must be a good worker.
8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.
9. He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws.
10. The Cowboy is a patriot.

I think the word you are looking for is "freicorps"--if not now, then when they come home to roost.

[dotmafia]

One of the most important questions which has never been addressed in any meaningful way -- why is the United States of America self-excluded from international law and signed treaties and obligations? Other nations are expected by the U.S. to keep to the laws and deals they have made with them, but the same does not hold true for the U.S. This seems to me to be the extreme heights of hypocrisy, stemming from the very wrong ideology that the United States, as the world's supposed strongest nation, automatically accords itself the right to police the world.

Why are Blackwater USA mercenaries working for the State Department exempt from prosecution in Iraq for murder? If it had been the murder of 17 American civilians, the U.S. government would have been screaming bloody murder and calling for their extradition.

In fact, a lawsuit was filed by family members against Blackwater USA for the wrongful deaths of four contractors killed in the city which used to be Fallujah. Remember the outrage in America when their burned bodies were shown on TV? What was the response of the American forces to these four deaths? They flattened the city, killed and displaced thousands of Iraqi civilians, and violating Geneva Convention articles of war in the process.

Noam Chomsky deals with this serious question of America's self-exclusion from international law and world order in his books "Failed States" and "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance". He basically states that if the U.S. does not respect law and world order according to the standards by which it expects other nations to follow, then chaos and nuclear holocaust will result.

The United States cannot continue to police and bully the world unilaterally. I have yet to see this serious and important issue recognized and addressed by U.S. commentators.
_

[dotmafia]

The United States tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Carter said Wednesday.

Former President Carter says the U.S. "has abandoned the basic principle of human rights."

"I don't think it. I know it," Carter told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

"Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter said. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused."

Responding to the newspaper report Friday, Bush defended the techniques used, saying, "This government does not torture people."

Asked about Bush's comments, Carter said, "That's not an accurate statement if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored -- certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

"But you can make your own definition of human rights and say we don't violate them, and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don't violate them."

Another example of how the United States excludes itself from following international law.
_

[Archie1955]

A single rogue outfit representing a single rogue country!

[imadf]

Thanks a million John for being one of the tiny fistful of hopeful celebrities who put decency above hollywood fakery. Thanks for this outstanding work, everytime I read about your work with Naomi I learn tons (and I'm one who *follows* news.) Not to belittle the awesome real work of Naomi but she's getting more traction with your voicing her & your quite insightful concerns.

You give our constitution hope to not get sold out.

Matt