Monday, May 03, 2021
We Tortured The Shit Out Of Some Folks
Once Abu Zubaydah was said to be one of the most important al Qaeda captives of all. An infamous August 2002 memo from the Justice Department, instrumental to authorizing the CIA to torture him—and after him, at least 118 others—called him the “third or fourth man in al Qaeda.” But there were doubts inside the CIA at the outset. According to the landmark Senate torture report, on Aug. 16, 2006 the agency formally concluded that Abu Zubaydah “was not a member of al Qaeda.”I hold grudges because that period showed me how many of our elites are just fucking monsters. Still mad.Instead of freeing him, the U.S. brought Abu Zubaydah to Guantanamo Bay the following month, where he became the forgotten man he currently is. Some politicians, like Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official, have recently declared that the 9/11 era is “over.” But Abu Zubaydah’s ongoing and entirely uncontroversial confinement proves the opposite. He is one of 40 men, few of them charged with any crime even before a dysfunctional military tribunal, who languish at Guantanamo Bay. Abu Zubaydah’s captivity has influenced every one of them.
Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly "Sept. 10"--living in a country that no longer exists.One sign of how much things have changed is the reaction to the antiterrorism bill, which cleared the Senate last week by a vote of 98-1. While the ACLU felt obliged to quibble with a provision or two, the opposition was tepid, even from staunch civil libertarians. That great quote from the late Chief Justice Robert Jackson--"The Constitution is not a suicide pact"--is getting a good workout lately. "This was incomparably more sober and sensible than what some of our revered presidents did," says Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, referring to the severe restrictions on liberty imposed during the Civil War and World War I.
Ah, Well, Nevertheless
As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again."Herd immunity" was generally oversold and misunderstood, and similarly this piece conveys the impression the "not herd immunity" is necessarily super bad, but... get those vaccines in arms!!!Polls show that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough. “It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 percent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Were We Awake During The Campaign
But this isn't what actually happens and during campaigns "everyone" acknowledges it. It's more the opposite! Certainly in 2008 and 2016, savvy pundits would assert, where people could hear them, that Obama and Clinton were very likely to break their promises to "The Left" and not do those things that they were campaigning on. And this was after the primary was over.
They're just lying, they would say! As if this was a good thing! Vote for the liar!
At "best" you can see this as an attempt to send different messages to different audiences. Have the campaign lie to some voters, and have savvy pundits reassure the people who matter that they are full of shit. (I'm not saying this is what was happening, I just think pundits like to pretend candidates are secretly catering to them).
Then when the new president tries to do anything at all lefty, even the stuff they explicitly campaigned on, it gets reported as some sort of sneaky betrayal of Real Americans who thought they were voting for The Moderate.
But the campaign wasn't all that long ago! I assume reporters wrote about it! Biden was marked as the "moderate" but that isn't how he ultimately ran the presidential campaign, aside from stylistically. The policies he ran on were pretty lefty. Maybe it was "savvy" to think he was full of shit, but that doesn't mean he didn't do it.
In the polls taken in the months leading up to the 2020 election, his ideological score averaged a 69. Americans see Biden as the same ideologically now as they did in the lead up to the election.That's about voter perception, not necessarily reality, but the reality is that Biden is going to more break promises he made "to the left" than he's going to implement communism, as generally happens. Not that he campaigned as Mitt Romney but is governing instead as Bernie, which is entirely made up.Biden is best described as somewhat liberal in Americans' eyes.
Chris Christie Says Biden's Governing as a 'Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren Way-Out Socialist Liberal' https://t.co/PmVqouQky9
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) May 2, 2021
Shadows Across Your Window
The decision to charge Nearman follows a monthslong investigation by state police that began Dec. 21. As lawmakers met in a special legislative session to take up COVID-19 relief that day, surveillance footage showed Nearman exiting the locked Capitol building into a throng of protesters who were trying to get inside the statehouse. In doing so, he appeared to purposefully grant entrance to far right groups demanding an end to ongoing restrictions related to COVID-19.
