"In a thousand years we'll all be dead, and all that will matter will be our record of truth and beauty"

Peter, Paul and Mary, singing Bob Dylan's "Blown' in the Wind" in 1966, pass the truth-and-beauty test with flying colors. Corny as it sounds, they really will go on singing forever.

by Ken

As we have both had frequent occasion to mention, Howie and I go back a long ways -- specifically, to the ninth grade, when as it happened we had an English teacher who i think it's fair to say changed both our lives.

His name was Mr. Fulmer (well, Chet Fulmer, but Mr. Fulmer to us), and already I think he would be cross with me for saying "I think" -- twice now -- when I'm not really thinking. (Well, I was pretty close to thinking the first time, and the second time was for, you know, comical effect.) He was tough about that, and rarely let it pass. Which might make him sound severe, though he wasn't really. He spoke in a beautiful, commanding baritone voice, and was warm and funny and tolerant, but tolerant only up to a point. He wasn't very tolerant of insensitivity or willful stupidity. I wonder what he would make of Glenn Beck.

The thing is, it mattered to him that we didn't use the word "think" carelessly, because it really mattered to him that we did think. It was news to all of us that we didn't. We all resisted at first, until we started to get a glimmer of what he was talking about.

It was the dawn of the '60s, and so perhaps not a surprising time to be exalting "truth and beauty." The clip of Peter, Paul and Mary singing "If I Had a Hammer" I posted the morning after Mary died dates from 1963.

But I assure you that, at least in the Brooklyn of that time, truth and beauty were not standard preoccupations. Howie had grown up in the area, while I had just moved from Milwaukee and before that Baltimore. Let the record show that truth and beauty hadn't been standard preoccupations in any of the places I'd lived before either.

It was crucial that truth and beauty were linked, and perhaps I should be referring to them jointly as truth-and-beauty. Truth by itself is a fine thing, but it has a tendency by itself to overwhelm; beauty by itself is a lovely thing but has more than a tendency to obscure and trivialize. However, leaven truth with beauty and temper beauty with truth, and they make a terrific team.

It's not always possible, of course. There are, alas, all too many truths under the sun that are simply too onerous to allow for leavening with beauty. There's no way to beautify the horror of Abu Ghraib, for example. I think Mr. Fulmer would have wanted us to understand that our souls need the consolation of beauty, but that an honest soul can't be consoled without coming to grips with the horror of the truth. When officials were confronted with the horror of Abu Ghraib, mostly they either looked the other way, or pretended they hadn't seen anything, or made up fairy stories (like pretending that the behavior on display was an aberration, which it clearly wasn't -- though it would still have been pretty horrifying if it had been). Of course nobody accused people like George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld of having clean souls. Those are souls that must be built up of layer upon layer of scar tissue.

I was touched by the comment our friend Balakirev added to my "farewell to Mary" post: "Damn. You know, I kind of hoped they'd go on living and singing forever." I sensibly resisted the temptation with some cheeseball affirmation that they will indeed go on singing forever, because I understood full well what he meant.

And yet it's true. I watched the 1963 clip of "If I Had a Hammer" a bunch of times, and also the reunion-concert clip of "Puff, the Magic Dragon" I posted on New Year's Eve. Each time I teared up at the final stanza of "If I Had a Hammer," with its formidable wielding of "the hammer of justice" and "the bell of freedom" and "the song about love between my brothers and my sisters," a combination worthy of Mr. Fulmer's truth-and-beauty. I was in tears most of the way through "Puff," a haunting song that in its gentle, beautiful way asks the listener to reflect on the complexity of the concept of youthful innocence.

In the late-ish performance of "Puff" preserved in our clip, Peter -- the song's co-writer with Lenny Lipton -- manages to expand the opening stanza into an extended riff on the widespread assumption that the song contained hidden drug references, a subject that apparently still bothers him, and I sympathize. Wouldn't you think there's quite enough content in the song for adults as well as children to deal with without going looking for extraneous nonsense?

But then, probably neither Peter nor Lenny imagined they would one day hear "Puff" transformed into "Puff, the Magic N----r," to the juvenile-delinquent adolescent delight of the racist core of Today's Republican Party, which bubbled to the surface last year (as I wrote about in that New Year's Eve post). Now it appears they hardly bother to conceal it, and among Democrats only former President Jimmy Carter seems to have the sense and courage to object on the record.

Still, if you go back to the real "Puff," its power and beauty, and its challenge to the imaginations of children and adults, are still all there. I have a feeling they'll still be there in a thousand years.

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Just because Americans aren't ever likely to arise en masse against the practice of torture doesn't mean we can relax our efforts to put a stop it

"What hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty."

--international law expert Philippe Sands, on Bill Moyers' Journal

If you have a chance to catch a PBS repeat of last night's Bill Moyers' Journal, don't miss it -- or check out the video (and transcript) and other coverage on the Journal area of the PBS website. Roughly the first 40 minutes are devoted to a remarkable interview with a remarkable Briton, a breathtakingly articulate law professor and international lawyer named Philippe Sands, who knows more about the subject of torture and probably more about America than anyone you're likely to have heard lately.

Most recently, Sands has (1) published an apparently astonishing new book called Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, and (2) testified on the subject before Rep. Jerrold Nadler's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee.

Here's part of how Moyers introduced Sands:

After 9/11, writes Philippe Sands, our highest government officials sanctioned a "culture of cruelty" that put our troops, our Constitution, and our own standing in the world at risk. This week, members of the House Judiciary Committee began hearings trying to find out how the President came to approve "enhanced interrogation methods" — that's the official code for the use of cruelty in the pursuit of confession. The administration has been fighting to stop a public accounting of the internal decisions behind that policy. The officials who took part in those discussions fear they could one day face prosecution if their actions turn out to have been illegal. Those key officials talked to Philippe Sands for his book, and this week he was asked to testify at those hearings in Congress.

I want to come back to this interview when I've had a chance to look at it again and digest it more fully. Meanwhile thanks to Sam Seder for tipping us off to Sands, whom he had as a guest on his Air America Radio show this week in connection with his House testimony. And Sam sent out a clip (which I tried but failed to embed) of Senator McCranky on 60 Minutes in October 1997 acknowledging that during his POW captivity in Vietnam, he broke under torture and "confessed" to assorted crimes against the Vietnamese people.

It's a point that Sands made again in his interview with Bill Moyers, and in case the point isn't obvious, we'll come back to it.

Now, torture is an exceedingly complex issue. Not on the merits, as Sands points out, because there is remarkably little civilized disagreement that it's wrong from a human and moral standpoint. There is even surprisingly little disagreement among professional interrogators that it's wrong from a practical standpoint: The "information" produced under torture is overwhelmingly likely to be whatever the torturee has to say to get the torture to stop, which is saying what the torturer wants to hear, whether it's true or not. Sands cites the example of Britain's long struggle with Irish separatists, which he argues was prolonged for an unnecessary 15-20 years by the government's use of torture.

No, where the complexity of torture kicks in is in the perception. I don't want to say "most people," but certainly a lot of people think it's just fine under the right, admittedly extreme circumstances, and that it produces life-saving, even civilization-saving results,

There are even professionals who hold this view, but they are the sort of professionals who, for example, will pontificate about waterboarding being a perfectly acceptable procedure, even claim to have undergone it themselves, when of course they knew from the first drop of water that entered their throat that it would stop, which is exactly what the actual waterboarding victim does not know -- and therefore makes their experience in no imaginable sense waterboarding. In other words, these macho morons who imagine that they have firsthand knowledge of the subject actually know less about the subject than anyone on the planet, because everything they think they know is 100 percent, no 200 percent wrong.

And of course the ordinary Americans who reflexively don't mind or even, deep down, approve of torture are just as wrong. I realize this blunt statement will cause a lot of screaming, but let's come back to that another time -- with some documentation from Philippe Sands. (Actually, there is an extended exchange in the Moyers inteview that makes the case remarkably succinctly. Maybe we can get to that later today.)

For now, though, I just want to make two points.

(1) TORTURE IS UN-AMERICAN

First, there's Sands's extended title: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He argues that official acceptance of torture as acceptable is in fact profoundly anti-American, and that this isn't just theoretical -- that in fact some of the most important backlash against abuses like those occurring at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib came from within the U.S. military itself, where there was apparently a deep and widespread revulsion against the wholesale overturning of the U.S. Army Field Manual, with its careful incorporation of the principles of the Geneva conventions.

The revulsion against torture, it turns out, is deeply embedded in American principles, and not least in the military itself. Of course, Sands acknowledges, torture has taken place before under U.S. government auspices. However, from an official government standpoint, "What hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty."

For the book, Sands talked to the people actually involved in the revolution in U.S. torture policy. He worked his way up the government legal chain, from the lawyers "on the ground" all the way up to Jim Haynes, "Mr. Rumsfeld's lawyer." If you're dying of suspense, I can tell you that all fingers point to one legal architect of the new policy, David Addington, who of course is Dick Cheney's lawyer, and can be presumed to have been acting on the instruction of his master.

(2) McCRANKY KNOWS THAT TORTURE VICTIMS LIE

Okay, so torture is deeply un-American. It's still true that an awful lot of Americans don't know that torture is deeply un-American. And for this reason, I have to part company with some of the blogospheric denizens (and other commentators) I respect most deeply and say that I don't think torture is now or is ever going to be a productive political issue. Yes, it's outrageous, but the mass of Americans don't care and don't want to know.

Oh sure, there was a lot of revulsion to those amateur photos of the sickening goings-on at Abu Ghraib. But did you notice how that stopped, how it all went away?

A lot of Americans who were paying some attention managed to explain it away. Oh, it's faked, or exaggerated, or taken out of context. Oh, that sort of thing always happens. And in the extreme case, they applied the equivalent of a solution that the Car Talk guys [that's Ray and Tom at right] often suggest when a caller reports having an annoying noise in his/her car: Can you turn the radio up? If your goal is just not to hear the noise, there are almost always of managing it.

So I have to say to colleagues of mine who are waiting for great waves of popular revulsion to arise at the disclosure, for example, that Chimpy the Prez himself participated in meetings where new horizons in official American torture were thrashed out: It's not going to happen. The people who watch that dumb, utterly unbelievable, and thorouhgoingly dishonest pile of crap 24 think torture is not only selectively OK but effective, and it's what, y'know, really manly men do.

Which doesn't in any way change the wrongness of it, and that is absolutely an issue we have to fight tooth and nail, even understanding that, while we may try to elevate the level of public awareness and understanding, we aren't ever likely to rally any kind of mass revulsion.

However, on some level even the manly-mannest proponents of torture do get it. Which brings us back to the example of McCranky. His public record on the subject is frankly terrible. But nobody has more concrete knowledge than the senator that people under torture say whatever they have to say to make the torture stop.

It's interesting that in McCranky's public career no reasonable person has ever blamed him for the "confessions" he made under Vietnamese torture. I think we all understand that we would likely have broken a lot sooner than he did. Still, break he did. It's certainly possible that he told his tormentors some things that were true, but no one knows better than he does that his "confessions" were not true.


UPDATE: TORTURE TEAM ONLINE

Reader Woid notes in the comments:

Vanity Fair ran a long, chilling, excerpt from the Philippe Sands book in their May issue.

It's online at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805?printable=true&currentPage=all

In case the link hasn't come out right, what with all the copying-and-pasting, just work your way to the May Vanity Fair (www.vanityfair.com).


SUNDAY UPDATE: TORTURE TOO, THE FOLLOW-UP

I've finally posted the follow-up to this post, in which Philippe provides the basis for his assertion that torture doesn't work, and explains how the British government's use of it is now generally thought to have extended the I.R.A. conflict by 15-20 years.

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IS LINDSEY GRAHAM A HOMO? DOES THE POPE GO POO-POO IN THE WOODS?

As I explained for a couple years before Foley was caught boinking the teenage male pages, even if "everyone" knows an elected official is gay, that doesn't mean his constituents know. In DC it was common knowledge that Foley was an outrageous closet queen with a penchant for young military boys. In West Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale circles he was a mad queen first and a congressman second. But when it came to the FL-16, to the sugar cane farmers and the churchgoers... not a clue.

Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an unmarried/never married 52 year old with a funny, forced way of walking, has been far more fastidious with his homosexuality. Again, "everyone" knows-- except the voters in conservative South Carolina. Not that it doesn't come up from time to time; people talk. In fact, the head of the Democratic Party in South Carolina said something when the effeminate Lindsey decided to run for Thurmond's senate seat. "He's a little too light in the loafers" to succeed Strom Thurmond. Graham got into a really queenie tizzy fit and loudly threatened to sue-- although he didn't. (They never do.)

One thing is clear, Brig. General Janis Karpinski appears a lot more butch than Lindsey. And today's Wall Street Journal has an hysterical example. Following a screening of Ghosts of Abu Ghraib in Washington on Monday. Pompous little Lindsey got a bit carried away with his usually cautious self and blurted out that Karpinski, then military police commander in Baghdad, got off easy with a demotion to colonel. She should have faced a court-martial, he declared. He was unaware that Karpinski, who had been in the film, was also in the theater. Oh, girl!

The moderator invited her to reply. She didn't challenge Lindsey to a duel. But she had a declaration as well. "Sen. Graham… I consider you as cowardly as Rumsfeld, as Sanchez, and Miller and all of them," said Karpinski, a South Carolina resident who had demanded-- and was denied-- a court martial to clear her name, who has long claimed to be a scapegoat for superiors including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller.


Graham tried joking that he had probably lost her vote. She said she couldn't wait to get home and make sure everyone found out what he had said. Presumably he went running to his best gal-pals Lieberman and McCain to weep on their shoulders after the little contretemps. (Now look at these pics and tell me that's a straight man! I dare you. And look how he likes to dress up in uniforms. That is so gay!)