President John Tyler..

..had fifteen children.

Ben was one of fifteen.

Nelson Mandela was one of thirteen. But, then, his great-grandfather was a King, and his father was the town’s chieftan, with four wives.

Memories of his college career: Nearly two decades after he led Wyoming to the Sweet 16, Dembo’s name continues to stick in the minds of college basketball fans.

After all, how many other people do you know named “Fennis?”

“My oldest sister named us,” Dembo said. “I had a twin sister, and we were the last of 11 kids. ‘Finis’ is French, meaning ‘the end.’ Zona, my oldest sister, didn’t want my mother to have any more kids. She thought that was enough. So she just went with Fennis and Fenise (his twin sister’s name).”

 
I have a feeling the Arndt Family will be a model for Ms. Suleman: make your giant family the center of the universe. Start a website, photo and videotape everything, blog all your thoughts.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfDDLFtmO6Y]

Heck, Dad even webcasts fireside chats for people to tune in and listen.

 
This is one of those stories that you end up staring at anyway. Who wouldn’t want eight babies?

Nadya Suleman’s goal in life was to be a mother, her friends and family said. That is why, even with a brood of six, including 2-year-old twins, she decided to have more embryos transferred in hopes, her mother said Friday, of getting “just one more girl.”

“And look what happened. Octuplets. Dear God,” Angela Suleman said four days after her 33-year-old daughter became the second person in the U.S. ever to give birth to eight babies at once.

Suleman stressed that her daughter “is not evil, but she is obsessed with children. She loves children, she is very good with children, but obviously she overdid herself.”

Angela Suleman said all the children are from the same sperm donor, but she did not identify him. Her daughter is divorced, but Suleman said the ex-husband was not the father.

Suleman said she is caring for her six grandchildren while their mother is in the hospital recovering. She said she had few details about how the octuplets were conceived and did not know the identity of the doctor or the clinic that transferred the frozen embryos into her daughter’s uterus. Suleman said it was not Kaiser Permanente, where the babies were born.

I just heard a report that said the mother had 8 fertilized embryos available from previous IVF work, and simply decided to implant them all.

Allison Frickert, a friend of Nadya Suleman, said the mother was not seeking potential fame or financial benefit. “There was no overriding situation, other than having more children to love,” she said.

“Her whole life, she couldn’t wait to be a mom,” Frickert said. “That was her No. 1 goal.”

Friends and family also reported that Nadya Suleman worked as a psychiatric technician until she was injured on the job. Then she began having children and enrolled in school.

She graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 2006 with a bachelor of science degree in child and adolescent development, school officials said. She returned to pursue a master’s in counseling, but last attended in the spring of 2008.

By juggling school and six children, Frickert said, Nadya Suleman proved to be “a lot more capable than the average person in handling stress.”

She and her children live with her mother in a 1,550-square-foot home in Whittier, and her father has been working in Iraq as a translator to help support the family.

In 2008, Angela Suleman filed for bankruptcy, claiming nearly $1 million in liabilities mostly due to a bad housing investment, her bankruptcy attorney said. Suleman said Friday that she had withdrawn the filing and paid her debts.

As the media camped outside the house, Angela Suleman said in a telephone interview that she could not explain her daughter’s decision.

Nadya Suleman has always loved children, her mother said. Then she sighed. “I wish she would have become a kindergarten teacher.”

Same report says Nadya’s father plans to return to Iraq as a contractor to help support the children financially. I did a quick bit of number-crunching and found it’ll cost the Sulemans about $78,000 a year to raise 14 children, conservatively. That, of course, is after the million or so bucks of care that Kaiser Permanente will provide the tiny octuplets.

There’s some sort of psychological problem in play here, right? Not that I’ll point it out, because baby humans are golden.

While her daughter recovers, Angela Suleman is taking care of the other six children, ages 2 through 7, at the family home in Whittier, about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

She said she warned her daughter that when she gets home from the hospital, “I’m going to be gone.”

 
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5reK-_e-02Q]

Time Check. Really good, love that clip.

Incidentally, I can hear ‘Point Break’ on my machine in the background. That has got to be one of the funniest movies ever made, Keanu is hilarious.

Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. Buddy slays everybody.

-3. The Supreme Court could, but won’t, bother.

They could act as the conscience of this ‘just’ country. They’ve done it before, they certainly could do it here. In times when right and wrong become fuzzy, the Supreme Court has acted as a sober friend, calling the nation to its senses, right?

The civil rights movement witnessed a number of decisions that staked the nation’s movement through violent times:

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954) | Case Background (from U.S. Courts)
  In this landmark case, the Court prohibited racial segregation of public schools.
• Brown v. Board of Education II (1955)
  This decision quickened the process for implementing the anti-segregation orders issued in “Brown I.”
• Bailey v. Patterson (1962)
  The Court in this case prohibited racial segregation of interstate and intrastate transportation facilities.
• Loving v. Virginia (1967)
  This decision holds that state laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage are unconstitutional.
• Jones v. Mayer Co. (1968 )
  The Court held in this case that federal law bars all racial discrimination (private or public), in sale or rental of property.
• Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971)
  In this case, the Court decided that certain education requirements and intelligence tests used as conditions of employment acted to exclude African-American job applicants, did not relate to job performance, and were prohibited.

 
There are a seemingly endless number of issues that the court could decide with respect to detention and the War on Terrorism: what defines an ‘enemy combatant’, what rights combatant detainees do and do not have, what principles military tribunals must adhere to, what are the rules of evidence, what is a reasonable period of time for someone to be held before being tried and/or released, what are the extents and limits of imprisonment. And, of course, what exactly is torture, and what should be done once it’s been used.

Almost everyone I know can tell me what a citizen’s Miranda rights are, but nobody can tell me anything at all about the list above. That’s no accident, these issues have been purposely ignored and obscured because the Bush administration are perverse, criminal and incompetent.

These legal questions regarding terrorists have been pressing us for years. We really are not sure what detainees are and where they belong in the legal system, and we really need to know. And the Supreme Court are the only people who can answer these questions, but they won’t. 

The first problem is that the Court currently can’t find a reason: the detainees have almost no rights, they therefore have no standing, so the justices can ignore them. The Second is that the Court is packed with right-wing ‘Federalist Society’ minions who see the Constitution as a dead document. The intent and the spirit of the Constitution are meaningless, do not exist, cannot be called into an argument.

It sounds nice and clean, but it’s actually pretty coarse and dumb. If you want the Court to decide if it’s okay to torture a detainee, the Federalists will ask ‘Where in the Constitution is torturing detainees mentioned?’ And I made them sound pretty smart by comparison if you look at their actual comments on the issue–here’s Scalia on torture relative to the Constitution’s ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment’:

STAHL: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person — if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?

SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.

STAHL: Well I think if you’re in custody, and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody–

SCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you? What’s he punishing you for? … When he’s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn’t say he’s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?

It’s simple being a Federalist, isn’t it? Scalia’s got a tiny understanding of ‘punishment’, and that’s that. Such are geniuses. Such are at least four other Supremes as well, and they literally rule the day so there’ll be no call to common sense from here.

The last best hope of the nation to invoke a conscience is a long shot.

————————————————–

So we remain a nation who tortures. We’re not supposed to be torturing still, but we could be. Why should we stop now? We liked it when we did it before, we have no empathy for the victims, and we’re not breaking any law, as far as we know. And we’re pissed.

 
-2. America only bothers to worry about the rights of Americans.

There are two pretty good precedents in American history to inform our guess as to the future consideration of the use of torture. Because they are also abominable fear-driven destructions of innocent lives, the McCarthy Red Hunt and the War in Vietnam show how Americans might recover from their own mistakes.

The Cold War witch hunt presided over by the right drunken Wisconsin Senator is the hopeful precedent, if that’s possible. The speed with which Americans finally realized the hunt’s essential evil, with its ridiculously never-ending scope or threats, is so impressive, it’s almost a separate historic event itself.

Joseph McCarthy hit the big time after a speech to the women’s Republican club of Wheeling, West Virginia in early 1950. He went on an ever increasing and glory-rich tear, hunting reds, wilding strangers and condemning innocents for years, leading up to his greatest fame in early 1954; his public polling at the time was favorable/unfavorable 50/29%. In March, Edward R. Murrow did his expose on the Senator, and his polling was 46/36%. In April it fell to 38/46%. In May, 35/49%, and that was the end of the Senator’s career. He died of alcoholism in 1957, age 48.

This story might not now be shocking for its paranoia and violent need to identify, hound and destroy perhaps enemies. It’s a sadly familiar theme. What’s shocking is the tale’s nearly instantaneous reversal. I can’t find another modern instance where the nation was feverishly mobilized by a universal fear, and a credible fear at that when you consider how many nations had been gobbled up by Communism and how many people killed, and yet rapidly returned to its senses, resetting civilization generally.

Contrast that with the War in Vietnam. Started by the dubious Gulf of Tonkin resolution, it went on for 10 years because most of the nation couldn’t decide what was the right thing to do. Millions of  ’enemy’ Vietnamese were killed. Consider Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia and the resultant destabilization of their government and you can throw in a couple million more.

This is truly wanton cruelty: the vast majority of the slaughtered were neither soldiers nor Communists. No one to be fearful of, living thousands of miles away. Yet Americans still can’t finally admit that attacking them was the wrong thing to do. Some still wish they could go back and hammer the Vietnamese even more brutally in hopes they’d epically surrender.

The War is far more bloody and disgusting an act, and yet Americans even now want to champion it. They still say it was a noble effort. What’s the difference between the two paranoid spasms of violence? The monster, Communism, was the same. The time in America was only slightly shifted between the two, they’re practically concurrent. The actual threat probably favors the interior one, not the external. There were commies in the army, the State Department, in the cultural institutions: the design of the atomic bomb was in Soviet hands almost immediately after it was successfully constructed.

The only difference I can see is the identity of the victims. When it’s fellow citizens getting their lives destroyed, people are quicker to recognize the crime and to want a just society to return.

Consider the two cases and you’re left with a worrisome question: how will Americans come to reject cruelty when they’ve been historically incapable of seeing foreigners as fully-fledged victims? How will they accept anonymous others’ pains when they can’t even recognize their deaths?

 
…torturing people somehow conveniently fit into a ‘the quiet big guy beats the upstart punk’ mythology. So, here we are.

And aren’t we stuck here, very likely? Aren’t we unlikely to simply reject ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ after they’ve insinuated themselves into our minds? Aren’t we likely to feel vulnerable in their definitive-and-forever absence after we decided (or agreed) that the enemy was so threatening and so bent on our deaths that cruelty was appropriate? If only it weren’t so.

I’ve tried to figure all the possible ways out of this mess, out and down some road in which our torturing people becomes a hideous mistake we can all decry–a hard-knock moral lesson for us all to take to heart. I can’t for the life of me imagine it happening soon. All I see are the seamless way cruelty became accepted and the bottomless emotional residues of ’9/11′, massive swamps of fear and revenge in which reasonable arguments continue to go to die.

Not that I really know better than anybody else; I can’t come close to predicting what all Americans think and feel and will choose for themselves in the future. So I tried to look at this through the lenses of other events and other histories. But every time I imagine a way out of the ‘fun’ house, all I hit are trap doors and dead ends.

-1. Once a nation accepts cruelty as a tool, it’s hard to then reject.

Many forget that Israel officially used torture techniques until 1999, and these were eerily close to the protocols that we currently use.

It has been known for fifteen years that Israel legalized what most human rights groups and United Nations expert bodies (including the Committee Against Torture and the Human Rights Committee) consider to be torture. Countless affidavits from victims and reports by monitoring groups, as well as admissions of state officials, confirm the systematic and routine torture of Palestinian interogees by Israeli state functionaries, including police and General Security Services agents. During these fifteen years, Israel gained international attention as being the only state which explicitly legalized torture.

There has also been some public debate of the issue within Israel, and the work of human rights organizations helped force the issue into the courts on several occasions. Until September 1999, however, every ruling re-established the legality of General Security Services (GSS) agents‘ use of torture. The 1999 Israeli Supreme Court decision to outlaw four methods that use “physical pressure“-Israel‘s euphemism for torture— during GSS interrogation of “security“ detainees was hailed by human rights organizations and other observers as a huge success. The ruling declared that “the GSS does not have the authority to ‘shake‘ a man, hold him in the ‘Shabach‘ [shabeh] position…force him into a ‘frog crouch‘ position and deprive him of sleep in a manner other than that which is inherently required by the interrogation.”

Finally, their own courts stepped in and did the right thing, and that’s to be commended. But almost nobody believes all Israeli soldiers refrain from the once routine and at least occasionally hallowed techniques, and the allegations of torture of imprisoned kids continue. And anybody could see that sealing millions of Palestinians tight inside Gaza and then pounding them with missiles day after day amounts to cruelty (and don’t bother arguing those were ‘smart bombs’–or go tell it to the U.N. workers who got blasted). ’Collective punishment‘ has been a war crime since it was outlawed by the Geneva Convention of 1949. 

Do you feel that these reactions are okay as long as the ’war’ continues? When was it last that America was free of terrorism? Once cruelty becomes a reality, it just seems to go on.

 
-more zed later-

 
Here’s an excellent article on torture and the information culled by its methods here in America vis-a-vis the War on Terrorism. Published last month by Vanity Fair’s David Rose, it alleges, among a number of other troubling things, that Jose Padilla was never a ‘dirty bomber’, much less the Dirty Bomber. It paints a disturbing portrait of a number of these ‘terrorists’, so hailed by the adminstration as mass killers, as low-level unfortunates who said whatever interrogators wanted to hear in order to stop the pain. Once the ‘information’ was in the bag, back-slapping and confusion set in.

Tortured Reasoning

..The case of Abu Zubaydah is a suitable place to begin answering some pressing but little-considered questions. Putting aside all legal and ethical issues (not to mention the P.R. ramifications), does such treatment—categorized unhesitatingly by the International Committee of the Red Cross as torture—actually work, in the sense of providing reliable, actionable intelligence? Is it superior to other interrogation methods, and if they had the choice, free of moral qualms or the fear of prosecution, would interrogators use it freely?

President Bush has said it works extremely well, insisting it has been a vital weapon in America’s counterterrorist arsenal. Vice President Dick Cheney and C.I.A. director Michael Hayden have made similar assertions. In fact, time and again, Bush has been given opportunities to distance his administration from the use of coercive methods but has stood steadfastly by their use. His most detailed exposition came in a White House announcement on September 6, 2006, when he said such tactics had led to the capture of top al-Qaeda operatives and had thwarted a number of planned attacks, including plots to strike U.S. Marines in Djibouti, fly planes into office towers in London, and detonate a radioactive “dirty” bomb in America. “Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved innocent lives.”

Really? In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts—with Abu Zubaydah’s case one of the most glaring examples.

Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq…

————————————————-

..In an interview in London in April 2008, I remind F.B.I. director Robert Mueller of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents have disrupted: for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers and synagogues in and around Torrance, California. These and other homegrown conspiracies were foiled by regular police work. The F.B.I. learned of the Fort Dix plot from a Circuit City store where a technician raised the alarm when asked to copy firearms-training videos, while the Torrance cell was rounded up when cops probed the backgrounds of two of its members after they allegedly robbed a local gas station.

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

 
..for those of you who haven’t already seen it, Christopher Hitchens gets briefly waterboarded:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58]

 
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBBzXNFUfJI]

mercifully, the last of an eye-closing 5-clip series