Watching Masterpiece Mystery Theater tonight [a modernized Sherlock Holmes], I was thinking that that part of the charm of those stories [or any decent mystery stories] is the "figuring out" that the reader joins in while reading – but the really good ones can’t quite be figured out, because we readers aren’t really bad guys – so the twist is in the criminal mind part. I always feel surprised by that. Sherlock always has that criminal mind part up his sleeve.
I’m mentioning it here because I recall a similar surprise in the last couple of years of following the revelations about the goings on in the Bush Administration in the year and a half between 9/11 and the Invasion of Iraq. As more and more details of our Torture Program were revealed, it just didn’t make sense. Why would they keep it up, go to such elaborate lengths, send people all over the planet to keep torturing the same few guys over and over. Surely they didn’t think that Bin Laden would have given all his future plans to these minor confederates, and then keep the same plans, knowing that we had them in custody. And the Administration didn’t need evidence that al Qaeda was responsible. They had tapes of him crowing about al Qaeda’s success. And yet they kept at people like Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, Abu Zubaydah, KSM. It just didn’t make any sense. Then I read an op-ed by Frank Rich in the New York Times that said:
But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to ‘protect’ us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from ‘another 9/11,’ torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
He wrote that when the INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES UNITED STATES SENATE was released in November 2008. In it, an Army Psychiatrist, Major Burney, who had been at GITMO testified:
At the time, there was a view by some at GTMO that interrogation operations had not yielded the anticipated intelligence, MAJ Burney testified to the Army IG regarding interrogations: "This is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link .. , there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
Of course! They kept torturing those guys because the needed to get them to say that Hussein and al Qaeda were linked as an excuse to go to war. They got al-Libi to say it when he was overseas, but the CIA & DIA didn’t believe his story, and he himself quickly recanted when he was returned to US custody. He was kept out of view, sent to Lybia, and later either committed suicide or was more likely murdered. But back to the thread, I would have never figured out that a major thrust of their torture program was to get the detainees to link Hussein and Bin Laden. I just don’t have the right kind of mind to figure something like that out.
Well, I’m having a similar kind of feeling right now about something less dramatic, but equally hard for me to believe. The topic is these huge Corporate Bonuses that are apparently the standard operating procedure at the upper levels of our Corporations and Financial Institutions. What I’m beginning to thiink is that all the resistance to regulating the Financial Institutions and Big Business, the people who are pouring money into political ads, is not about any philosophy of Capitalism, or direct thoughts about Corporate profits, or the shareholders, or any thing except the Executives holding on to their mega-bonuses.
I feel naive saying that, like, "Of course that’s right, what else could it be? It’s just the personal greed at the top. What did you think it was? You naive idiot!" I don’t even know what I thought the alternative might be. Of course GM is supporting Republican Candidates. Of Course the Chamber of Commerce has been mobilized to support Republican Candidates. Of course the Hedge funds are ponying up to Karl Rove’s War Chest. In April, that damned Obama went to Wall Street and said:
Now, Americans don’t begrudge anybody for success when that success is earned. But when we read in the past, and sometimes in the present, about enormous executive bonuses at firms – even as they’re relying on assistance from taxpayers or they’re taking huge risks that threaten the system as a whole or their company is doing badly – it offends our fundamental values. Not only that, some of the salaries and bonuses that we’ve seen creates perverse incentives to take reckless risks that contributed to the crisis. It’s what helped lead to a relentless focus on a company’s next quarter, to the detriment of its next year or its next decade. And it led to a situation in which folks with the most to lose – stock and pension holders – had the least to say in the process. And that has to change.
It just hadn’t occurred to me that at a time when the country is in this much trouble, that these people would go completely crazy trying to bring down the government, the President, the Congress, just to hold onto their obscene pay scales. Sherlock Holmes would’ve known that without even thinking about it twice. This whole thing may be about just that point. And the rest of you already maybe knew that but didn’t tell me [just kidding]. It boggles my mind that it could all be reduced to something that simple – they want to be even richer. But, like the torture program, what’s the alternative explanation?…
Four days into the Bush Administration and the Veep was already selling regime change in Iraq. 9/11 comes along and helps start the revenge-fueled war.
http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Showcase.view&showcaseid=00136
And Republicans and those who fill the their money chest say they don’t like entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare but they sure like their bonus entitlements don’t they.
It’s just a wealthier version of “keep the government out of my life — but don’t you dare touch my Medicare !!”