Victim, Player, Perpetrator

Now comes the U.S. Senate to tell us what had already become clear: abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba came from the top: a memo signed by President Bush in February, 2002, declaring that Al Qaeda and Taliban taken captive were not eligible for the protections of the Geneva Convention. (It's odd, then - if not infuriating - to see the headline on the linked article, "Rumsfeld Responsible for Torture." What exactly does the phrase "commander in chief" mean?)

The dark humor in all this is the source of the techniques: the military turned to Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school instructors to learn waterboarding and other techniques. The Air Force created SERE after the Korean War, to offer its aircrews real training in case of being taken prisoner; the program later expanded to include Navy and Air Force aircrews.

I went through SERE training in 1984 in the desert east of San Diego. It involved plenty of sleep deprivation and some mild violence; shaking, banging off walls, but mostly empty threats (they were not, after all, really going to purposely injure a US military officer). Nobody in my group got waterboarded, but we heard plenty of detailed stories about how it worked. What's amazing to me is the circular nature of the torture program: we developed SERE to help our people resist torture; the SERE program involved people pretending to be torturers and pretending to be tortured, and now we've taken that play-acting and used it for real. We've gone from the victims, to players, to perpetrators.

I like General Petraeus's simple summation of what should make us the good guys: "Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy."

"Realism"

Marc Ash at TruthOut shares this thoughtful analysis of the incoming Obama "national security team" and the ideas they seem to share.

This Little Light of Ours

Another great one gone - Odetta, the folk singer, who performed songs of the African American experience for decades. Odetta inspired and influenced everybody in the folk music world, from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to Johnny Clegg and Ani DiFranco. She often said that music - especially the blues - gave her a positive way to express her deep anger. Her beautiful rich voice rang out over the mall in the March on Washington on 28 August 1963, where she sang "I'm On my Way" and "Oh Freedom," drawn from traditional slave blues. She had hoped to sing at Barack Obama's inauguration - but we still have the songs; here's some snippets - listen to the amazing miner's hammer sounds she makes on "Water Boy."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miXQ265dMZM

And this:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20081203_odetta.html?hp