A Man For No Seasons

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At Esquire we find Thomas P.M. Barnett, the risen Darth Vader of Grand Strategy, who loves to prate about "rule sets" while being forgetful, perhaps defiant, of our Constitution: "Obama has the right instincts to avoid criminalizing past policy mistakes even as he corrects them...."

Avoid criminalizing "policy mistakes"? As if President Bush and Vice President Cheney had mistaken to repeal No Child Left Behind or their tax cuts (though they did by their torture regime hand gratis to al-Qaida, and to Moslems worldwide, a colossal propaganda gift that keeps on giving - to the enemy). Barnett applies the euphemism "policy mistakes" to President Bush's orders to Americans to torture, to specious legalistic "excuses" for torture, and to the infliction by Americans of torture - for each of which war crimes Allied tribunals in Nuremberg and Manila convicted and sentenced to death, or to long prison terms, Axis commanders of torturers, law-perverting attorney-enablers of torture, and low-on-the-totem-pole torturers. Bush and Cheney made no "policy mistakes": they, and their complaisant underlings, committed deliberate, cold-blooded, calculated war crimes.

Barnett seems reluctant to observe, or maybe he's incapable of recognizing, that torture violates US law, that it violates the Geneva conventions to which US is signatory - this from Mr. Rule Sets! He seems to be ignorant of, or sly enough to avoid telling that he recognizes that, these deeds cannot be criminalized - because such orders, excuses, and deeds are already, by definition, criminal violations of US law. This from the man who seeks to persuade us, the Pentagon, and whomever happens to sit in the Oval Office to believe that the US military exists to enforce "rule sets" over the entire land and sea surfaces of our wobbly globe. Rule sets! Talk about brass balls forged in Pittsburgh.

As he goes on Barnett attempts to hoodwink with this nugget of bait-and-switch: "[T]he [CIA IG] report...depicts a defensible performance under impossible conditions."

Defensible to whom? Torquemada? Heinrich Himmler? Lavrenti Beria? Ho Chi Minh? Charles Manson? Pol Pot? Not to me. Never to me. Never under our Constitution.

Barnett's next sentence is an equally appalling cynicism: "But its [the IG report's] sheer existence says the CIA knew this day would come, thus proving the existence of its institutional conscience."

Which begs the question: Why, Mr. Barnett, did the CIA, from Day One of its torturing captives, act immediately to cover its ass if it did not believe that the torture its public servants and contractors were committing was a) illegal, was b) immoral, and c) would slam dunk its "institutional" asses in hot legal water? Dare I point out the obvious? - that institutions cannot and do not have a conscience any more than a wet rag can or does have a conscience. That, absent the fictive "institutional conscience," institutions have public servants whose sworn duty is to uphold, protect, and defend our Constitution and the treaties and conventions to which the US is, as a signatory, legally, morally, and constitutionally bound. There is not one word, not one phrase, not one hint in any government employee oath or employment contract that pledges its taker or a contractor to cover his own ass for his or for his institution's breaking US law.

Barnett's Esquire piece and his other works - especially his breathtakingly cavalier blog posts but also his books, advertise successfully that he's a minor league political seer; but it's impossible to miss that his works show nothing of, and lack grounding in, Enlightenment Liberalism or Humanism. Like Marx's and Hitler's theoretical-political screeds, Barnett's perfervid grand strategizing lacks a human dimension, lacks even so much as reference to, let alone allowance for, human nature. His entire thesis is economic reductionism at its abjectly soulless, arrogant, myopic, and most pitiless form. He has, it seems, convinced himself that he knows not just what's best for our United States, but for the whole "Core and Gap" Globalizing world. If Barnett's not megalomania incarnate, then I'm a monkey's aunt.

So I'm not surprised to find on his blog Barnett ejaculating, "I catch 'Inglorious Basterds.' And I loved it like I love and worship all Tarantino." (There Barnett seems to have exceeded his cinematic idol's misspelling acumen.) Barnett "loves and" worships - worships! - every frame of gore-porn cranked out by the stunted, amoral, juvenile cretin-auteur. My late WWII-veteran father would have seen two minutes of a Tarantino movie, heard two minutes of his adolescent talk show ejaculations - or read two of Barnett's hubristic paragraphs - and of Barnett or his cinematic idol diagnosed solemnly, sadly: "There's something wrong with that boy."

The more I read his gobsmackingly hubristic manifestos - which, by the way, are chock full of stunning self-contradictions and iced all over with fantastic bombast, the more Barnett and the rest of our constitution-contemptuous elite seem to give testimony that for them in high places the Enlightenment is dead; that Enlightenment principles and those who hold them sacred have become superfluous; that our Constitution is merely a paper that denotes "rule sets" to be rigorously, contemptuously ignored and evaded by the Bushes, Cheneys, Obamas, and Barnetts of the world - who pay lip service to Enlightenment Liberal principles while they evade and traduce them.

The more I read of Barnett's fulsome megalomaniacal "strategizing," the more I apprehend that Mr. Barnett is not about right or wrong, not about upholding our Constitution, not about any kind of American - let alone Catholic - ideals; the more it becomes plain that he's just another one of our time's legion, morally squalid, meretricious mountebanks in feverish pursuit of fame and Big Bucks- A Man For No Seasons.

Yet I fear that Barnett may prove to have been prescient about one thing, with which he introduced his Esquire pontification: "The closer you read the newly released CIA reports and read into the Justice Department's torture probe, the more you realize nothing much is going to come of them...."

That will ensue because we, the people, have not troubled ourselves to have yet noticed that we've ceded to our elected and appointed officials the power to suspend habeas corpus and the absolute power to torture whomever they will choose to torture. Do not mistake that if President Obama fails to hold the previous adminstration to the rule of law, those who pretend to represent us, who pretend to uphold our Constitution, will not choose again, and again, and again to torture.

You'll not find anything so boldly Hitlerian as an Enabling Act behind the sordid Bush-Cheney torture regime. Those two didn't bother with an Enabling Act, or even with an Emergency Powers Bill: instead they simply and brazenly, to the sycophantic regurgitative narration of our brown-nosing mainstream media elite, and with the ex post facto paper contortions of obeisant careerist lawyers, trod on our Constitution as if for them it was the convenient doormat beneath the gaping portal to their arrogated tower of power. We, the people, aided by the honest reportage of a media of genuine conscience, were supposed to form that gate's portcullis. But we did not, and we've not yet, let ourselves down from our couches, set aside our video game joysticks, or peeled our eyes away from American Idol to hold these Beltway Bandits monumental criminal odium to rule of law, and to punish them and everyone who enabled and executed their successful criminal takedowns of our most fundamental constitutional rights.

None of us should wonder why we now have the prophet Barnett propounding his Big Picture Long View Super-Realist notion that Mega-Finance and Globalization, that perpetual American military world policing and wide open borders - instead of the sober, wise, healthful bounds written by our Founders into our Constitution - must be America's (mis)guiding anti-principles. Barnett, on what nowadays passes for the intellectual Right, appears to form the perfect, and no less hideous, mirror image of the Left's unhinged Moslem barbarism apologists and mum-keepers. Barnett's and the Washington and media elite's myopic mantra is economic reductionism, which is wilfully and dangerously ignorant of Islam's Comprehensive Tyranny; the Left's is merely its parrots' bankrupt, narcissistic, fashionable ideologicial posturing blended with its terror-enabling romantic notions of the "value" of barbarous cultures.

Before you, I, and Mr. Barnett came into this world our American and Allied parents and grandparents recognized grasping, arrogant Barnetts for what they were; and these forebears in their marvelously demotic citizen armed forces had the sense and the guts to cut them down to size. Now that our Constitution is under vicious assault from within as well as from without, will we have the sense and guts to cut down to size America's war criminal torturers, Moslem supremacists abroad, and Moslem hate-spreading imams and cells that have insinuated themselves and the poisonous tentacles of their sharia throughout our very society?

As the Bush-Cheney torture war crimes rise to prominence in our national discourse, bear in mind that it's utterly immaterial whether information compelled by torture from detainees was accurate or inaccurate: because even if the detainees' cohorts-at-large had attacked the US or its allies, even if under torture the detainees gave information about future mass-murder attempts that spared Allied lives, torture is under our rule of law always a crime. Torture is even a crime before the fact of a future enemy attack - and two wrongs do not make a right. Ever. Let that put a proper end to Cheney's and his morally adrift apologists' crowing about the "value" of information compelled by torture, because that crowing is their cunning attempt to divert focus from the crux of this matter, which is that under our Constitution torture is illegal, and the ordering, "excusing," and infliction of torture are war crimes.

If President Obama determines to overlook war crimes committed by Americans from top to bottom of the chain of command, if he determines to "move forward" without his first having brought to justice the whole rotten roots-and-tree-and-branches-and-fruit of the many, many bad apples who played their criminal parts in the (it sickens me to write it) American Torture Regime, then he will have mistaken to have erected America's future on a rotten foundation, and he will have doomed the whole American enterprise to catastrophic collapse or to slow self-asphyxiation.