It was a phrase designed to attack the very idea of government programs by suggesting that taxpayers all over the country were subsidizing people who were too lazy to work.  

Well, in the current debate about health care reform, it may be time to coin a new phrase: Welfare Dons. They are the lazy, shiftless recipients of corporate welfare who have made America's health care system the most expensive and inefficient in the world. Let's take a look.

For some time, we have been told, in the words of Ronald Reagan, that government is not the solution; government is the problem. Private enterprise is good; government is bad. 

But it's been getting confusing lately as free market fundamentalists, such as the Republican Michael Steele, have been touting the value of Medicare (a government program that happens to be popular), while denigrating government's ability to deliver good health care.  There is a reason for this.  In the eyes of most Republicans and some Blue Dog Democrats, Medicare is a $2.6 trillion-dollar piggy bank for the medical Welfare Dons: drug-producers, device-makers, medical conglomerates, insurance companies, and manufacturers of high-tech diagnostic equipment.  By touting Medicare and denigrating government, the goal is to get government out of the business of protecting taxpayer dollars and hand over the keys to the Medicare piggy bank to corporations who want to be able to set high prices and mandate expensive procedures.  

Don't believe me? Set the wayback machine to the passage of the Medicare Modernization Act, a bill that was literally written by lobbyists and passed by a determined Tom Delay and Billy Tauzin. (Yes, this is the same Billy Tauzin - another Welfare Don - who is now paid millions of dollars by Pharma and who was caught smiling - like a cat with a canary in its mouth - walking out of the Obama White house after saying he had cut a "deal" to keep government out of the business of forcing discounted prices.) In that bill, the federal government was prohibited from using its size and clout to negotiate with drug companies.  Why? Well, that would have reduced profits and, oh yes, the cost of drugs.  Instead, Medicare became a piggy bank that dispensed corporate welfare to Pharma in the form of high drug costs to US citizens.  Yet Big Pharma doesn't really need our help; most of the big pharmaceutical firms take home profit margins of 16%. 

But looting the public treasury for Pharma wasn't enough for the Welfare Dons.  They also put in place a program for insurers called Medicare Advantage, a government hand-out of $16 billion (a trifle really) to compensate private insurers for the cost of offering Medicare to patients. In other words, the Welfare Dons took $16 billion from taxpayers to give to private insurers as a bonus for offering a government program!  Then insurers hiked co-pays.   

If you are a Welfare Don, how good is that!  Now, just imagine how good it would be if you could keep taxpayer dollars flowing to Medicare but eliminate any barriers to how it is dispensed.  What's that called?  Killing the public option.  Booyah! 

The fact is that, in a mixed system where private enterprise and public monies inhabit the same space, inefficiency and extravagance are profitable.  Remember the military industrial complex?  Private contractors make profits by charging the government for cost overruns.  Defense contractors call this "cost plus."  Pharma calls it "No Public Option."  

Why is it that free marketeers are so afraid of competing with a government program which, in their religion, is inherently inefficient? Well who wants to compete with a public option that won't take 10-20% in overhead, lobbying costs, administration costs and profit?  That's my bonus, dude.  Whoops, I mean, I have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver the highest possible return to my shareholders. 

And who wants to compete with a public option that won't just pay whatever drug-makers or others charge, without inquiring into the quality of the service or the product? Here's where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs.  Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous. My mother, for example, went to a hospital for a simple procedure and died from an infection she caught there.   

In the case of drugs, the problems can be even more troubling. To get discounts on some drugs, private insurers are willing to pay top prices for blockbuster pharmaceuticals like Vioxx, despite the fact that Vioxx was rumored to cause fatal strokes and heart attacks.  Contrast this with the Veterans Administration (a government program that is actually interested in the welfare of patients) and the Mayo Clinic (a non-profit that worries about patients, not shareholders), both of whom stopped covering Vioxx for most patients more than a year before the manufacturer,  Merck, was finally forced to take the drug off the market.  And who did the forcing? It was that old, arcane, inefficient outfit that still worries about the public welfare, the government.  

Welfare moms were mocked for doing nothing. The Welfare Dons are sensitive to charges of doing nothing (denying care to sick people, or people with preexisting conditions) so they have a slightly different m.o.: do something, even if it isn't necessary. Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is. That's why - with the exception of what Don Berwick, from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, calls "rescue care" (emergency surgery, radical cancer treatments, etc) - our health care outcomes are significantly worse than other fully industrialized nations even though we spend much more. More Ka-Ching! for the Welfare Dons.   

But don't believe me. Ask the doctors who administer health care in this country. They speak in a new film that I produced, "Money Driven Medicine," which will air in a shortened form on "Bill Moyers Journal" on August 28.  

Of course, one big difference between welfare moms and Welfare Dons is that the WDs are very politically powerful. And why is that? Well, our current Senators and congresspeople now spend up to half their time raising money for increasingly expensive elections.  And who can supply that money? Why it's the Welfare Dons. This is where things get really good for the Welfare Dons. They can publicly denigrate government and show their contempt for it by treating it as a commodity that can be bought and sold. And what does the government do in return? It gives the Welfare Dons a big fat welfare check.

In criminal justice, this is called a protection racket. After all, while the term "Don" means a person of great importance, it also means the head of a crime family or syndicate. That's Welfare Don Corleone.  

"The Godfather" was one of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's favorite films. That's the subject of my next film, "Casino Jack (and the United States of Money)."  

Fact is: I was filming the Tour de France for a documentary on Lance Armstrong I am directing for Sony Pictures.  Yet, early in the morning on every stage, when I was supposed to be blogging, I was working on the editing of two other films I have been working on, "My Trip to Al Qaeda," based on a play by Lawrence Wright, and "Casino Jack (and the United States of Money)" about Jack Abramoff and the ongoing political corruption scandal in Washington.  Now that the editing of "My Trip to Al Qaeda" has been finished, I can resume some blogging.  

first up - the beginning of a blog I started in France, coupled with many pictures from the Tour. 

Here I am with cinematographer Maryse Alberti ("The Wrestler," "Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room"; "Taxi to the Dark Side") and Sound Recordist and Grand Prix Driver Rob Davis, on top of legendary Mont Ventoux.  Note that we are facing away from the action...

What follows was originally written on July 11: 

First of all, glimpsed from the window screens of our camera car, there are the trailers of heaven: scenes of Monaco; the cathedral of Gerona; the architectural wonders of Barcelona and the vista of Font de Magica high above the Plaza Espana; the craggy drama of Pyrenees.  And this is just the beginning.  

But filming the tour is some kind of hell.  

We have seven cameras here.  One is in the Astana Team car capturing the instructions to the riders of the legendary Directeur Sportif, Johan Bruyneel.  One is on a motorcycle following the riders. Four are out on the course at various times and one is an extremely lightweight camera that we were able to put on the bike of one of the Astana team members (more on that later).

Every morning most of our team gathers to plan for the day.  One crew usually starts filming at the Astana bus, where the crush of fans seeking a glimpse of Lance Armstrong is inexorable. The other crew gathers a bit of the daily circus around the starting gate. Jimmy Buffet, who made a brief cameo appearance in Barcelona, rightly calls the Tour Mardi Gras on wheels. 

Out on road, things get complicated.  The very best shots of the riders - head-on closeups - are mostly forbidden because a motorcycle in front of a rider can give him a draft. Also, for safety, the number of cars near the riders must be limited.  So, every day, in two press cars, our two teams set out on the "Hors Course" - the side route - to find a fast way around to get ahead of the race course to secure camera positions for the fleeting moments when the riders fly by. 

Care must be taken to avoid the Caravan Publicitaire, a nightmarish fleet of commercial floats, honking their horns, thumping bass-heavy music and showcasing hot young women throwing swag to drunken fans.  In a reversal of the Odyssey's Sirens, these hotties are the ones who are harnessed, tethered to the posts under the plaster statues lest they go flying into the crowds when the float driver takes a wicked turn down a switchback.  

The Caravan precedes the riders on the race course by an hour or so.  In trying to find our camera positions, it's tough to weave in and out of the floats.  So we try to precede the caravan.  When we find a spot, we set up two cameras - usually one with a telephoto lens and one with a wide angle - to capture what we hope will be a "moment." We have a list of shots we are looking for - full peleton, breakaways, etc. - but we are also ready to capture whatever might happen. 

Here's the drag.  Once in a spot, we have to sit there for hours waiting for the race. Now that's not all bad.  The fans are interesting - particularly if we catch them on a rising high before their stash of beers takes them to raucous oblivion. They come from all over and as far away as Australia.  In Andorra, we met Basques, Catalans, French, Italians, Germans, Dutch...Yesterday, we positioned ourselves next to the van of El Diablo.  He's a German "fan" who follows the Tour in his fan, getting smellier stage by stage.  

During the time trial in Annecy, he got a French network car bounced from the tour when he hitched a ride and then mooned the crowd in front of the race director. In the pictures below, you can see him sneak his way into a photo of me and the former editor (he's been kicked upstairs at Rodale Publishing) of Bicycling Magazine, Steve Madden.

Here's the start of a picture gallery: 

Stage One - Monaco -  Lance Armstrong in the daily crush of reporters and his fans:  

Monaco.  Lance Armstrong, in his hotel room, after his ride in the Prologue, watching Alberto Contador on his ride: 

The mass of bikes in Montpellier.

More later...

I am not a cycling expert, so do not expect unusual insights into the minutiae of strategy.  However, in the course of doing the film I have come to love the sport and this extraordinary event in particular. 

Of the 21 stages in this event, today's will be critical.  It is the first climb of the race from Barcelona to Andorra, a small landlocked tax haven nestled in the Pyrenees mountains.  (According to Wikipedia, Andorra has the highest life expectancy - 85 years - in the world.  Gee, Grover Norquist must be right: taxes will kill you.)  Climbing stages - along with time trials - are key opportunities for riders to open up big time gaps on their opponents.  Even more than usual, this stage is important because it will likely be head-to-head battle between Lance Armstrong and his Astana teammate and key rival in this race, Alberto Contador. 

So far, the race has not disappointed.  In the first stage, in Monaco, Lance Armstrong appeared to be strong but not dominant as in years past.  He placed 10th in this short time trial, a twisty 13-kilometer course through the hilly streets of Monaco.  But three of his teammates, including Contador, had significantly better times.  So much so that one member of the group pronounced that the tour was over for Armstrong!  How could he make up 22 seconds on his teammate Contador?  (22 seconds doesn't sound like a lot but, between team members, it can be a big number.) 

Well tell that to Armstrong. 

On stage three, Armstrong staged a roaring comeback.  On a windy course, he sensed an opportunity.  "I was about forty guys back and I saw a hard right turn up ahead."  Suffering under a hard headwind, Armstrong knew that if he turned hard, he would be freed up by a crosswind.  "I was like, I better move up," he said.  He broke free from the main pack of riders called the peleton, and followed a group of riders in a breakaway.  Leaving his rival Contador back in the peleton, Armstrong bulled forward with a group of riders that included two members of his team and a former teammate and friend, George Hincapie. (In the Tour De France, it is not uncommon for riders from different teams to form temporary alliances.) By the time he crossed the finish line, Armstrong was 19 seconds up on Contador. 

Responding to criticism that he may have ignored calls for restraint from his coach, Johan Bruynel - who wanted to to save his riders' strength for the team time trial the following day - Armstrong noted that he just saw an opening and took it. Luck, as they say, is where opportunity meets the prepared mind. 

But today is the big day: There will be attacks by other riders and, possibly, a showdown between the 37-year old Armstrong and the extraordinarily talented 26-year old Contador. 

Avanti.

As it happens, I agree.  

But that does not mean that we should allow our government to withhold the release of the photos.  We can't interpret photos if we can't see them. 

Another key point: most, if not all, of the photos that the ACLU is asking to be released are not photos of Abu Ghraib at all.  They are photos from other US-controlled prisons.  Therefore, these photos may have quite a bit to say about whether there was a worldwide policy of detainee abuse.

I hold Gen. Taguba - who conducted the most thorough investigation to date into Abu Ghraib - in the highest regard.  But I am mystified by his remarks.  

The fact is that these photos are not just from Abu Ghraib.  They are, purportedly, over 200 images from six different prisons.  They can tell us a lot about the system of detainee abuse engendered by the Bush Administration.  As one who helped to make public some of the only photos from the Bagram Prison, I can testify to the fact that the photos we uncovered taught us a great deal. 

Gen. Taguba has argued for prosecuting Bush officials for war crimes.  But to prosecute crimes, one must have evidence.  Pictures that might show how "techniques" of abuse were similar in different US prisons are critical pieces of evidence because they indicate patterns which, in turn, are clues to policy decisions.  Refusing to release the photos is tantamount to suppressing evidence of a criminal conspiracy.  

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Philip Gourevitch also twists himself into rhetorical pretzels in arguing against the release of the photos.  On the one hand, he says that the original release of the photos was extraordinarily valuable: "they told us something that we suspected about ourselves but did not know," he said.  At the same time, he noted that he didn't show many of the more offensive pictures that he and filmmaker Errol Morris ("SOP") and many other filmmakers and TV producers, including myself, did obtain.  "Crime scene photographs," he wrote, "for all their power to reveal, can also serve as a distraction, even a deterrent, from precise understanding of the events they depict."  

That is certainly true.  But it is also misleading.  

One can get hung up on the duality of semioticians, until one day, you wake up and nothing means anything anymore. 

The fact is that these photographs, in conjunction with other bits of evidence - including the documents that the Obama Administration properly released - can still teach us a great deal.  Further, a release of the photos probably does not prefigure their display on cereal boxes.  Newspaper editors, bloggers, TV and Film Producers will still exercise judgement about whether the release of some photos merely amounts to a pornographic display, rather than leading to a greater public understanding. 

We shouldn't allow the government to shape its own narrative about crimes that have been committed in our name.  Through good judgement and analysis, American citizens should be able to have the opportunity to work out the forensic and cultural meaning of these photographs. 

Well, here are a few proposals to solve the political problems of the esteemed and principled Representatives and Senators like Lindsey Graham, who recently announced that it might be necessary to bring Gitmo detainees to the US, so long as they didn't land anywhere close to South Carolina. 

Modest Proposal #1: Eat Them.

OK, you're saying, this is a bit extreme.  After all, these men are living breathing human beings.  Well, don't worry: We would kill them first. 

There are a number of benefits to this approach.  First of all, we would eliminate any evidence of wrongdoing.  For those nitpicky Europeans, who are always decrying Guantanamo, let them try to lecture us if they can't find the bodies.  With sated smiles, we could honestly say:  "What detainees?" And no self-flagellating moral qualms.  After all, most God-fearing Americans say Grace before dinner.  Pick one: "bless this food that we have before us."  "Now we lay them down to sleep." "Bless us, O Commander-in-Chief, and thy gifts, which we have received from your hunters bulging with bounty." 

This proposal also addresses certain budgetary issues in a time of record deficits.  As many of us know, Gitmo pampered detainees.  When they first arrived, many of these enemy combatants were sickly and thin as rails.  Then we fattened them up.  When I visited Gitmo, a proud officer let our package tour group know that, for compliant detainees, there was "ice cream night, Pizza night and Pepsi night."  I was fit to be tied.  How much was I paying for this "Pepsi for perps" program?   In my new proposal, we'd be getting something back for our tax dollars.  All the junk food that caused these towelheads to gain so much weight, well...now these chickens have come home to roast!  

Worth its weight in Mint Chip, this proposal is revenue positive and consistent with Grover Norquist's tax pledge: put your mouth where your money is. 

OK, you say, I'm all for eating these guys - so long as the meat pies aren't all thumbs - but what about the distasteful task of killing them.  Wouldn't that upset our boys and girls in uniform.  Right about that.  Also, there aren't really enough of them to set up a proper Arab Abbattoir.  Luckily, we have a good solution that has been proven in the field.  We arm Dick Cheney with a shotgun, give him "one or two beers," in his words, and then the rest is taken care of with a small cartage fee.  

Now, on to marketing.  Let's face it, when it comes to selling food, "the worst of the worst" just won't cut it.  How about "The wurst of the wurst"? It's elegant and the cost would be minimal - only two vowels.  Truth is, we could probably raise some more money for the Federal Treasury - in order to be able to sufficiently incentivize our poor put-upon bankers with more hookers and Porsches - by having a contest.  Just to start the process, I suggest a few: "Super Size Them!"; "Homeland Hummus"; Apple Kabuller"; "Tehran Tenders"; "Special KSM"; "Freedom Fries!" 

Modest Proposal #2: Let the Market Work Its Magic.

I realize that the Vegan lobby is strong and would likely resist MP#1. Even for more moderate vegetarians, it would probably be objectionable.  After all, as fishy as these enemy combatants are, they are not fish. 

One is tempted to say, what's the matter, you don't want to give our president the tools he needs - "aggressive cooking" or "enhanced kitchen techniques" - to protect our nation?  Well politics is the art of compromise so let's consider this: shipping all our violent prisoners to Guantanamo. 

Let's face it: there is something fundamentally dishonest about saying these Gitmo detainees are too dangerous to bring to America.  Cmon, nobody's better at taking care of tough guys than America.  We lead the world in "aggressive" and "enhanced" prisons - in prisons period! According to The Sentencing Project, the US rate of incarceration is a world beater: five to eight times that of other highly developed countries.   And we have more people in prison - 2.31 million - than any other nation except for China.  (China - you better watch out: we are gaining on you!)

It's another awkward fact that we already imprison many violent people in the US: mafiosi, serial killers, hit men, and terrorists, including some from Al Qaeda.  Here are a few examples: Charles Manson; David Berkowitz (aka "Son of Sam"); Gary Ridgway (known as the "Green River Killer" for the way he dumped the 48 prostitutes he killed in Washington's Green River); Al Qaeda's Abul Hakim Murad; Dandeny Munoz Mosquera, chief assassin for Pablo Escobar; The Unabomber; Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer (that stands for Bind, Torture and Kill); Al Qaeda's Ahmed Omar Abu Ali; and El Sayyid Nosair, of the World Trade Center bombing. (See a longer list below of those detained in Florence, Colorado.) 

We can't really claim that the folks in Guantanamo - one of whom was 14 when we captured him - are more dangerous than the guys we already have in prison in the US. Indeed, it's even more foolish to claim that the innocent men of Gitmo (most of those remaining) would be more dangerous than the Unabomber or the guy responsible for murdering Sharon Tate. 

So, to be consistent, it might make more sense to admit that we already have too many dangerous people in prison in the US.  Rather than move the relatively innocuous folks from Gitmo here, it would be better to move the "worst of the worst" of America to Gitmo.  Now, this will pose some problems.  After all, there are currently 1.2 million violent offenders in US prisons.  Luckily we have a philosophy that will get us out of our jam: the free market's view that the survival of the fittest is always the best solution to every problem.

Here's how it will work.  There are approximately 700 prison cell units at Guantanamo.  With only 240 detainees there now, the facilities are embarrassingly underutilized.  So if we sent all 1.2 million violent offenders there, that would result in approximately 1,714 detainees per unit.   We would continue the Pepsi and Pizza night policy and then let the market work its magic.  Over time, the most ambitious and entrepreneurial detainees would survive, and the rest would be referred to our cartage program (see above).  Not only would this be efficient, this policy would keep us safe and be consistent with our free market principles.  

Modest Proposal #3: If They're All Guilty, We're Free from Guilt.

I once gave my sister a spray can called "Guilt Away," a special elixir for liberals, allowing for the instant removal of any feelings of guilt.  Well, thanks to President Bush and, seemingly, President Obama, we now have a detention formula that will work that same "guilt away" magic on all Americans: guilty even if proven innocent.

For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the "Global War on Terror." We eliminated the military's system of competent tribunals in the field of battle (where JAG officers would conduct hearings to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys) and instituted a system of Combatant Status Review Tribunals that allowed us - without showing a whiff of proof - to tell the detainees over and over again that they were guilty, while turning a deaf ear to any solid evidence that would prove their innocence.

Dude! How good was that system!  Whenever we made a mistake, and got all "aggressive" with the wrong person, we could cover our tracks and pretend we were right all along.  If only our criminal justice system worked like that more consistently.  Talk about "guilt away"!

Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the US Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren't guilty of anything.  Whoops!  However, even more problematic for President Obama, it appears that many of these previously "innocent" men have become radicalized and pissed off after being held for seven years in Supermax prisons in southeastern Cuba.  We can't possibly let them go now because they don't like us anymore.  As we know from our own experience with American prisons, being locked up with hardened criminals (or terrorists) doesn't turn prisoners away from crime; it educates them on how to commit bigger and better crimes.  

So now that we've turned nice Afghan farmers into hardened jihadis, what do we do: apologize and turn them loose to grow wheat in Idaho?  No way. 

Luckily, we have found a wonderful all-encompassing phrase: preventive detention.  That means we can lock 'em up forever (preferably in Bagram where no one pays attention) unless and until they agree to work for us.  If they do, we can export terror the way we used to export cars.  Trade deficits?  Not any more.  Want to mess with America on wheat or sugar subsidies?  How about a taste of Gitmo-grown terror from Uighur warriors? Trouble with North Korean nukes? How about a parachute drop of a few hardened peanut farmers!  If you're not on your best behavior with America, count on a visit from the worst of the worst.  Guilt Awaaaaaaaaaaay! 

What's with the ongoing "wussification" name-calling by cable chit-chat provocateurs like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity?  While Hannity and others have offered to be waterboarded - a sign they hope will convey just how mild the process is - Coulter has compared CIA interrogation techniques to the sexual highjinks of disgraced politicians.  (In her fondness for an easy mix of sex and violence, Coulter may have been right at home at Abu Ghraib.)  While I regard her - and other "wussy" callers - as beneath contempt, I have been disturbed that intelligent friends of mine cite her "work" as evidence of what they want to believe: that the enhanced interrogation techniques that so-called liberals call torture are nothing more than fraternity pranks.

Well, Ms. Coulter, work on this: is murder a frat prank?

There has been a lot of arcane talk about the memos produced by the Office of Legal Counsel about specific "no-touch" torture techniques which, out-of-context, can sound harmless, if a bit weird.  (In one of Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Steven Bradbury, he notes that, while it's OK to strip a detainee naked and make him wear a diaper, one must be careful not to chafe the skin with the Velcro straps when taking them on and off.)

What has been mostly missing from the recent debate about detainee abuse is that over 100 detainees died in custody during the war on terror.  Nearly half of those deaths have been classified as homicides.  For all sorts of reasons, it's worth looking at one case in particular.  It's the story of Dilawar, a 22-year old taxi driver whose murder was at the center of my film, "Taxi to the Dark Side." 

Dilawar lived in Yakubi, a small peanut-farming village in Afghanistan, not far from the Pakistan border.  Shy and a bit of a dreamer, Dilawar drove a taxi to support his wife and young daughter because he wasn't really cut out for the hard work of farming. On December 1, 2002, he was carrying three paid fares home from the provincial capital of Khost when he and his passengers were stopped and arrested by Afghan militia.  Accused of launching a rocket attack on Camp Salerno, a nearby US base, Dilawar and his passengers were turned over to American forces.

On December 5, Dilawar was flown to Bagram, the headquarters for US forces in Afghanistan and a key detention and interrogation center, where he was designated a PUC - person under control - number 421.  Five days later, he was dead. 

Only a week before, another detainee named Habibullah had died.   The medical examiner noted that he had a pre-existing pulmonary condition.  But it was the beatings he sustained at Bagram that led to the cause of his death: a blood clot that traveled to his lungs.   As one member of the 519^th Military Intelligence Battalion recalled, "two prisoners dying within a week of each other.  That's bad." 

Indeed it was.

The army initially declared in a press release that both men had died of natural causes.  But an enterprising NY Times reporter named Carlotta Gall managed to track down Dilawar's family in Yakubi.  Dilawar's brother, Shahpoor, showed her a folded paper he had received with Dilawar's body.  He couldn't read because it was in English.  It was a death certificate.  As Gall scanned to the cause of death, a small "x" was marked in the box for "Homicide."

Further investigation revealed that Dilawar's cause of death was remarkably similar to that of Habibullah.  He died of a pulmonary embolism caused by trauma to his legs that was so severe that the coroner said his legs were "pulpified," and looked like they had been run over by a truck.  Had he lived, the coroner later testified, Dilawar's legs would have had to have been amputated.  (Another note on the importance of photographs: by finding the autopsy pictures of Dilawar -"Taxi" made a handful of these public for the first time - I confirmed the findings of the coroner with images of Dilawar's wounds that showed such extraordinary tissue damage that many were too gruesome to be shown  in the film.)

What could have caused such trauma?  A criminal investigation revealed that the Military Police at Bagram had pummeled Dilawar's legs with peroneal strikes, an "approved" control measure that the MPs had learned one day in their guard training.  It involved slamming their knees into the nerve endings on Dilawar's thighs.  "It drops 'em pretty good," said one MP.

At first, soldiers told me, they used strikes to control the 122-pound Dilawar because he would often try to take off his hood, perhaps because he suffered from severe asthma.  Later, as Dilawar continued to moan and cry out for his mother and father - which MPs, who couldn't understand him, may have mistaken for the signs of a troublemaker - the guards would pummel him with knee strikes over and over again, just to shut him up, or sometimes, for their amusement, just to hear him scream "allah."

Now, at this point, the reader must be thinking: this is the work of a few bad apples, rogue sadists, mean motherfuckers.  Well, having met a number of Dilawar's guards and interrogators, I don't share that view at all.  Most of the young men I met were physically imposing but polite, soft-spoken and haunted by their experiences. "Sometimes," said MP Tony Morden, "I feel I should have uh, gone with my own morality more than what was common." 

Some have been convicted by the military of various crimes, including assault and maiming, and punished with light sentences for their roles in Dilawar's death. They all admit that they did something wrong, and they accept their punishment.  Yet they resent the fact that they were singled out and prosecuted while their superior officers were barely investigated for condoning or ordering the crimes that the soldiers committed.

Who was ultimately responsible?

Dilawar and Habibullah died, in part, because they were hooded and shackled to the wire mesh ceiling of their holding cells for hours at a time so that the blood flowed to their legs, turning peroneal strikes into death blows.  But the illegal practice of overhead shackling was not the work of bad apples.  It was routine at Bagram.  It was policy. 

For reasons no one can explain, and without written orders that anyone can or is willing to produce, a program of sleep deprivation was instituted at Bagram whereby MPs would shackle detainees to the ceiling of holding cells so that if they tried to fall asleep they would be awakened by the tugging of the handcuffs on their bloody wrists.   There was nothing secret about this.  There was a regular "sleep dep" schedule posted on a white board in the prison that was visible to the many high-ranking officers and Bush Administration officials who toured the prison.  (It was only erased and the prisoners unshackled when the Red Cross visited Bagram.)   The office of Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, then commander of US forces in Afghanistan, was a stone's throw away from the prison. 

Off-limits to journalists, the Bagram prison was a showplace for many touring dignitaries and high-ranking military officers.  As Damien Corsetti, a member of the 519^th MI unit told me, "Mr. Rumsfeld's office called our office frequently. Very high commanders would want to be kept up to date on a daily basis on certain prisoners there. The brass knew. They saw them shackled, they saw them hooded and they said right on. You all are doing a great job."

There were other "techniques" in regular use at Bagram: the use of snarling dogs, deafening music, forced nudity, and, according a number of soldiers, a kind of low-rent, homemade waterboarding set-up: wetting down a hood, putting it on a detainee's head and then heating it up to let the steam to suffocate the detainee.

It should be noted that none of these techniques were interrogation techniques per se.  But they were all in the service of softening up detainees for interrogation.  Other techniques - such as stress positions, like "the invisible chair," in which the detainee is made to sit as if there were a chair under him - were used in interrogations.  In Dilawar's case, however, the beatings to his legs made him unable to sit on "the invisible chair," during one of his last interrogations.  Thinking Dilawar was mocking him when he slid down the wall and fell on the floor - he couldn't see the deep bruises under his orange jump suit - his interrogator punished him some more.

Now, let's move on to the results of Dilawar's interrogation.  After all, the "torture-is-tough-but-necessary" crowd maintains that torture always delivers the goods.  Let's see what actionable intelligence was obtained: After the third day of trying to find out about the rocket attack, Dilawar's interrogators concluded that he was utterly innocent.  Yet the beatings continued for another two days until Dilawar was dead.

To cover-up the fact that the Army had murdered an innocent man, the Army sent his passengers (who had also been incarcerated at Bagram) to Guantanamo.  There they sat until March 2004, when military officials concluded that the unlucky passengers "posed no threat" to American forces and sent them, without explanation, back home to the peanut fields of Yakubi.   Upon further investigation, it turned out that Afgans who had originally detained Dilawar and his passengers were the very ones who were actually responsible for the rocket attacks on Camp Salerno.  They had a record of arresting innocents, proclaiming them guilty and turning them over to US troops in order to curry favor with the Americans.

What happened to Captain Carolyn Wood, the officer in charge of interrogation at Bagram during Dilawar's incarceration?  She was given a bronze star and sent to Abu Ghraib, just prior to the abuses there.  (It appears that, at long last, she may have been questioned as part of the recent Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee treatment.)

Her full testimony - if revealed - should be instructive.  But, as a Captain, Carolyn Wood was implementing, not formulating policy at either Bagram or Abu Ghraib.  By all accounts, she was a "can-do" soldier, popular with her soldiers (she would send post cards home to their families) who was trying to make things work for her superiors.  Yet no written orders have been produced to show us what senior officers had authorized interrogation techniques in Bagram that were forbidden according to the Army Field Manual.  So where did the orders come from?

In her testimony to the Senate, Wood claims that she first saw a power point presentation about new "aggressive" techniques approved for Guantanamo in January, 2003.  Yet there was already a very "aggressive" program going on in Bagram - complete with sleep deprivation and overhead shackling - that resulted in the murder of two detainees in December 2002.

So the Dilawar story tells us that long before Abu Ghraib, at about exactly the same time as Mohammed al-Qahtani was being interrogated in Guantanamo - supposedly in a unique way - under Rumsfeld's  "Special Interrogation Program" ("We tortured Qahtani," said Susan Crawford, a Pentagon official who was in charge of the Guantanamo military commissions, in an interview with the Washington Post) a defacto worldwide policy of lawless, cruel, inhumane treatment, often rising to the level of torture and murder, was in place that had nothing to do with the explicit authorizations for a few high-value detainees given by the Secretary of Defense and the Office of Legal Counsel. Is that worth investigating further?  I think so. 

On a more basic cultural level, for those who still consider torture to be "tough" and lawful interrogation to be "weak," I would ask the following questions.  Is it good to get bad intelligence?  Once torture starts, can it be stopped?  Is it "tough" to brutalize the innocent along with the guilty?  Is it a sign of "weakness" to wonder if captured prisoners might be innocent? Is it "tough" to confront a helpless man and beat him to death while he is shackled to the ceiling?  Is it "tough" to be so panicky that we abandon our fundamental principles at the first sign of attack? 

For Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity (or newfound TV torture promoter Dick Cheney) the Dilawar story raises the stakes in the "wussification" debate: for the amusement of your cable tv viewers, would either of you be willing to undergo the Dilawar treatment?  

Flying back from Italy, I'm finding it hard to continue to reckon with the ongoing debate about torture.  There is an inexorable psychological undertow pulling me away from a reckoning with something so painful.  Can't we just move on? 

Yet every time I give in to the idea of going with the flow, I'm interrupted by something more upsetting: ongoing attempts to bury the past or to make light of it. 

Last week, President Obama announced that he would resist the release of more photos chronicling the abuse of Abu Ghraib - not long after he agreed to make them public.   His military advisers apparently convinced him that making more photos public would put our soldiers in danger overseas.  Yet, not so very long ago, other military voices had made the argument that any American tolerance of torture - and not releasing the photos is a kind of tolerance - would put our soldiers in jeopardy because ruthless favors would be returned.   So which is it? 

What message does hiding the Abu Ghraib photos send to our allies and our enemies?   By resisting the release of the photos, Obama is on record as saying, in effect, that we will hide evidence of wrongdoing.  What kind of sunlight is that?  As many, notably including Gen. Petraeus (who is resisting the release of the photos), have made clear, a policy of torture is dangerous for our soldiers on purely pragmatic grounds because it makes enemies out of friends, provides unreliable intelligence, and offers our enemies a recruiting platform.  It also encourages corruption and undermines the very values for which we fight.   Phrased another way, a strong public stance against torture will undermine our enemies and protect our soldiers. Why then, do Petraeus and others resist the release of the remaining Abu Ghraib photos? 

On the one hand, there is the argument that these new photos are not so very different from the others that have been seen.  Do we really need to plow this same ground?  I confess that I was initially somewhat sympathetic to this argument because I think that too much attention has been devoted to Abu Ghraib.  It has become a convenient smokescreen of exceptionalism to mask the systemic nature of the brutal policies of the Bush Administration. 

On the other hand, Christopher Brownfield, a former Naval officer (his book on his experiences in Iraq, "My Nuclear Family" will be published by Knopf this fall) reminds me of a Pentagon briefing in 2006, in which a Deputy Secretary of Defense declared that "the problem with Abu Ghraib is that they let those guys have cameras."  When another officer wondered if the "problem was that it happened in the first place," he was censured for being disrespectful to a senior officer. The official message was clearly conveyed: It was not the abuse that was wrong; it was the taking and the leaking of the photographs that was the real crime.

Well, that solves my ambivalence.  I don't want to go back to that point of view.  After initially agreeing to support the release of the photos, Obama's sudden turnabout sends a dangerous signal left over from the previous administration: it's not ok to show pictures of torture because, well, they might upset people and because we need to cover up our crimes in order to protect ourselves. That's like saying we have to destroy our principles in order to protect them. I also don't take President Obama's word that there is "nothing new" in these pictures.   

When I was making "Taxi to the Dark Side," we scanned scores of previously unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib and discovered disturbing evidence of widespread abuse and lack of discipline.  For example, mixed with the famous pictures of Sabrina Harman giving the "thumbs up" over a murder victim, and Lynndie England holding the dog collar on the neck of a stripped detainee on all fours beside her, were shots of half-dressed US soldiers flashing and fucking each other, fondling detainees and using their weapons to blow the heads off camels.  Because the mix was so indiscriminate, all the images took on a pornographic cast, evidence that bonds of discipline and restraint had been loosened, and the dispassionate practice of interrogation had been overcome by  darker impulses from that uncontrollable place in the psyche where the prison cell meets the orgasmatron.   In other words, the photos confirmed a de facto policy that was meant, according to an investigation conducted by Major General Fay "to condone depravity and degradation."

The photos we discovered also clearly indicated that certain specific softening-up "techniques" - like shackling detainees in painful positions (see below) often with underwear on their heads- had mutated and migrated from Afghanistan and the relatively controlled laboratory of Guantanamo to Iraq.  So, painful as they may be to examine, these new Abu Ghraib pictures probably have even more to teach us about how the "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved by the Office of Legal Counsel, for a few detainees in CIA custody, somehow managed to spread to Iraq, where even John Yoo has said that the Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply. 

Our enemies already know much of what we have done in the CIA black sites, and in our prisons in Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq.  By following the rule of law, and abiding by our principles of openness and inquiry, we don't give comfort to our enemies.  Just the opposite.  We send a powerful signal that we mean what we say about investigating crimes, rather than covering them up.  We show that we mean what we say about the rights of the individual and that we are strong enough to assert them, not so weak that we must hide our principles - or our photographs - whenever our military forces are engaged in combat. 

Internet at the hotel is spotty and the server is choking on the massive use of the system by scores of journalists, cyclists and coaches.  I am posting only part one of my thoughts today, owing to the furtive nature of my internet connection.

I have been following the ongoing torture debate and wanted to put the sometimes bloodless discussions of memos in the Office of Legal Counsel into pserspective.  Over 100 detainees died in custody in the war on terror, and some, by the army's own account, were murdered.  "Murder," as Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief-of staff told me, "is the ultimate torture."  

The basic facts of al-Libi's case (in my previous blog) show that the Bush Administration didn't care for the good, actionable intelligence obtained from al-Libi by the FBI so he was transferred to the CIA who presided over a brutal interrogation in Egypt which led to information linking al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.  

Some background here.  Egypt's prisons and its "enhanced interrogation techniques" were a breeding ground for terror, turning radicals like Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former surgeon often known as "the brains of al-Qaeda, into hardened jihadis for whom death became an all-consuming mission.  The Egyptian "techniques" included stripping people naked, tying them to chairs, and letting them be sodomized by wild dogs.  What better place, then, to take al-Libi for his special interrogation program in which the CIA were not-disinterested "observers." 

We don't know exactly what happened to al-Libi in Egypt but he was apparently waterboarded and much more. His ensuing confession about the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq later turned out to be false but only after his "intelligence" was used to make the case for the Iraq War.  

Today, al-Libi would seem to be an ideal witness to try to understand whether or not "torture works," and, further, whether the Bush Administration used "enhanced interrogation techniques" to invent a rationale for invading Iraq. 

Alas, it appears to be too late. A Libyan newspaper reported last week that al-Libi recently died in a Libyan prison.  The cause of death? Suicide.  Oh really?  

Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation.  I agree.  

Hope I don't mess up.  The reputation of my brother (who is an editor at this magazine) is at stake.

First of all, happy 90^th birthday to Pete Seeger.   For all of you who haven't seen it, take a look at Seeger leading the Obama inauguration crowd - and Bruce Springsteen - in a sing-a-long of "This Land Is Your Land," complete with the two oft-excised verses:

As I went walking I saw a sign there 
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." 
But on the other side it didn't say nothing 
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, 
By the relief office I seen my people; 
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking 
Is this land made for you and me?

Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thsKDYapXz4

My favorite moment is after this link ends when Seeger - then only 89 years young - hops off the stage.  Another gig.  Gotta go!

What follows is a blurt (slightly longer than a blog) I started in response to a piece that David Broder wrote in the Washington Post on April 26.  I should have posted it right away but I was interrupted by a sudden production trip to New Mexico for a film I am doing on Lance Armstrong. 

(Here's my favorite sign from the half-hippie/half rancher culture of Gila, New Mexico):

 It's a poster advertising a "Gully workshop" - a special class to learn how to build better gullies on your ranch. 

 

Anyway, the concerns of the rant below are related to torture, the subject of a film I recently wrote and directed called "Taxi to the Dark Side."  In recent days, I have been surprised - and thrilled - that this issue has not gone away.  Obama had threatened to move on - looking forward, not back, as he said.  But I really think that is a dangerous mistake.  We can't move forward until we reckon with our past.  Thanks to the ACLU and, for the moment, the Obama Administration, that reckoning is ongoing with the release of key documents.  And the Senate Armed Services Committee has produced a very important report that shows ever more what many have suspected and charged: torture was not the work of a few bad apples.  It  was a conscious policy by the Bush Administration (though the "T-word" was never used") that, once set in motion, mutated and migrated throughout the world like a virulent virus. There has been much written by esteemed thinkers and writers about the need for a truth commission or for prosecutions.  For some time, I didn't see the need to add to the ongoing commentary.

But, for some reason, when I saw the Broder piece I flew into a fury.  I don't know exactly why.  Perhaps because Mr. Broder is considered such a Washington sage and because his expressed view epitomized all that is pitifully shallow in the professional political culture of Washington, DC.  In essence, he said that there should be no further investigation because, in essence, what the Bush Administration did was "just politics." Any further investigation would be a kind of political retribution that would just end up scapegoating a few bad apples.  Therefore, said Broder, we should just drop the whole matter and move on.

Well, I have to say that kind of logic made me ill.  So rather than mess up my work station with a bilious discharge, I wrote what follows.