Year: 2005

Dick Cheney’s new Scooter Libby, David Addington, is, as one would expect, a big believer in the military’s right to abuse detainees. In the aftermath of the abuse scandals, many in the Pentagon want the U.S. to return to the fold of civilized countries, and its own history, and stop the policy. The same goes for many, many people in the CIA. When honorable soldiers and CIA officials see their own agencies being accurately accused of activities that shock the conscience, they are not happy. Nor are critical allies of the U.S. in the war on terror. But all these voices have been railroaded by the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. They aren’t going to back down now:

A central player in the fight over the directive is David S. Addington, who was the vice president’s counsel until he was named on Monday to succeed I. Lewis Libby Jr. as Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff. According to several officials, Mr. Addington verbally assailed a Pentagon aide who was called to brief him and Mr. Libby on the draft, objecting to its use of language drawn from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
“He left bruised and bloody,” one Defense Department official said of the Pentagon aide, Matthew C. Waxman, Mr. Rumsfeld’s chief adviser on detainee issues. “He tried to champion Article 3, and Addington just ate him for lunch.”

Ah, yes. The Geneva Conventions. Remember them? To put it in their allegedly “vague” language, Cheney’s chief aide believes that the U.S. should legally and as a matter of policy be free to conduct interrogations that include “cruel treatment and torture,” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, humiliating and degrading treatment.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it?

Well, it’s all beginning to come out now. The CIA has been operating a secret network of detainment facilities across the globe to capture and interrogate suspected terrorists, facilities that would be illegal in the U.S. and where torture is enforced by explicit permission by the president. These facilities were improvised on the fly – like the rest of the war. Money quote:

“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?'”

What goes on in these centers? You already know, don’t you:

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning… Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the chairman and vice chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees on the program’s generalities.

As so often, the original plan to seize just those suspects who were responsible for 9/11 metastasized into a general program for seizing many suspects, incarcerating them in places like the elegantly named “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan, and torturing them:

[A]s the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials. The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. “They’ve got many, many more who don’t reach any threshold,” one intelligence official said.

One detainee was killed by the CIA, by being exposed naked to freezing cold temperatures overnight. Hey, this is America. We do this kind of thing now. Is it easier to understand why Bush wants an explicit torture exception for the CIA in the McCain Amendment? It’s particularly ironic that Eastern European countries, recently freed from the horrors of communism, now acquiesce to a new prison system where torture takes place beyond the law. These days, though, it’s run by the United States! Just for the record: when the president says he doesn’t condone torture, he is lying. By that I mean: deliberately telling the American people something he knows is not the truth.

THE PRESIDENT AND THE LAW: Here’s a more pertinent question: has Bush broken the law? The WaPo article states the following:

It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

All this was achieved by the president signing a “finding” on September 17, 2001:

Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.

The assumption is that the president has authority to set up prisons that would be illegal in the U.S. and illegal in foreign countries, but legal … according to what? No wonder Bush wants Roberts and Alito on the court.

Bloomberg, Bush and gay porn. That’s one hell of a way to lose.

ALITO AND THE STATE: Cass Sunstein examines some of Alito’s dissents. They do have a theme:

Prisoners in long-term segregation units were banned from receiving newspapers or magazines from either the prison library or the publisher. The majority struck down the ban as a violation of the First Amendment. Alito dissented, finding the ban to be within the prison’s legal authority… When a majority of the court found a violation of the right to a speedy trial, he dissented. So, too, when the majority ruled that a district court had the authority to reduce a convict’s sentence under the sentencing guidelines. So, too, when the majority ruled that habeas corpus relief was constitutionally required when the state had not met its burden of proving the defendant’s specific intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

He certainly seems to be a reasonable and careful judge. But you can see why Bush picked him. Bush is no fan of individual rights – especially when it comes to criminal justice.

About Saddam’s nuke program. I guess I should say I’m all in favor of examining how we got the WMD issue so wrong; and whether there was any shady business on the Bush administration’s part in selectively presenting intelligence. But the notion that this was the only reason given for deposing Saddam before the war, or that the nuclear matter was the only WMD concern, or that the Bush administration was in any way out of the ordinary in making the claims it did – is just empirically, historically wrong. As a matter of U.S. policy, the shift toward support for regime change in Iraq occurred under Clinton, not Bush. More evidence here.

Fair enough. I have to concede this one:

It’s black and white: If gays are allowed to marry then the price of weddings will sky-rocket, pure and simple.
Here’s one example: Sue and Tom decide to marry. They are looking at a basic affair in the northeast, so this means a price tag of $30,000 to $50,000. In New York, this is no frills. Now, Sue goes to the wedding of her co-worker Steve and his partner Gary. Fancy reception in a loft overlooking the river or ocean at sunset, a small lite-jazz combo, wonderful wine from a small vineyard out west, terrific finger food with ingredients the relatives from Pennsylvania cannot even spell, video montages of their vacations and favorite scenes from films and plays, maybe a minor 70s disco diva comes in and sings her one-hit wonder before the crowd, balloons and confetti from Kate’s Paperie in SOHO, dessert from a chef who was flown in for the occasion…
The nuptials now cost six figures. Tom’s life is in a quandary — cobalt or cranberry napkins?! — just because Steve and Gary were selfish enough to want to commit to one another.
Stop gay marriage now!

By the way, South Park Wednesday night is the gay marriage episode.

Here’s the original source of Chris Matthews’ complaint about Italian-baiting from the anti-Alito forces. It’s the first item in a series of crude, results-oriented attacks on Alito. But I have to say I don’t think it’s prima facie evidence of trying to use his ethnicity against him. It’s an allegation of incompetence as a prosecutor, and it falls before his record as a judge chronologically, and so its inclusion near the top of a list of attacks is not necessarily damning. I’d say that the bulk of this ethnic huffing and puffing has actually come rather cynically from the pro-Alito side. Crude and unnecessary.

I asked “Why is it in society’s interests to keep gay women and men from [civil marriage’s] stability and security?” Here’s one answer:

As long as “God” says it is a sin you must be punished, banished and not allowed to prosper.
And we have to make the old adage true that homosexuals live and die alone. Otherwise our children will think it’s okay to be gay.

Anyone else care to respond to my specific question? To put it another way: Given that around 3 percent of the population is gay and always will be; given that we live in a free society and do not wish to lock them up or deport them; why is it in society’s broader interest to discourage them from forming stable bonds? In some ways, it cuts to the chase of the debate.

US AND THEM? We are often asked not to judge other cultures and other religions, and, in general, it seems to me a wise presumption. We often misunderstand what we do not know; and tolerance is a good thing. But then there are lines where culture really does matter; and where social and cultural norms in other places really do strike us in the West as profoundly wrong. Like involuntary female genital mutilation; or the hanging of teen-age gays; or infanticide. Here’s what appears to be one of them. I’d be grateful if anyone knows exactly how, why, where and when this occurred; whether the Iranian government sanctioned it; whether Sharia somehow sanctions it; and other details. The images are deeply disturbing, so PLEASE do not click on this link if you are squeamish.

Here’s a take from someone who knows Alito well – Kate Pringle, a liberal Democrat who once clerked for the guy. She’s on board:

Pringle, as I noted earlier, is a liberal Democrat. I wondered whether her ideological bent was an anomaly in Alito’s chambers, or whether Alito routinely hired left-of-center law clerks. She didn’t know whether Alito intentionally hires law clerks with diverse viewpoints, but she did know that she was not alone – a good number of Alito’s past law clerks are far more liberal than he is. She also emphasized that Alito was always asking his clerks for their viewpoints, and that he enjoyed the debate when different opinions emerged on particular cases (this, too, was echoed in the NPR interview with ex-clerk Lombardi).

Pringle’s bottom line is a pragmatic one. Of course, Alito would not have been on John Kerry’s or any other Democrat’s short list for the Supreme Court. But, as we all know, John Kerry didn’t win in 2004, nor did the Democrats capture a majority in the Senate. Given that reality, Pringle said, “I’d rather have someone who has real intellectual ability, who has experience, who has a history of making these kinds of difficult decisions, and who has demonstrated respect for the Court as an institution, than a stealth candidate.” And given the other candidates on the “conservative short list,” Pringle is optimistic about Alito. She says that he will treat every case fairly, and that “we’ll be proud to have him on the Court.”

Just one more piece of information.

Some interesting facts worth keeping in mind.

“Sam Alito is just what George Bush is looking for: a big government conservative who will almost always side with the government against the individual, and the federal government against the state,” – Andrew Napolitano, a senior judicial analyst for Fox News and a former New Jersey Superior Court judge. (Hat tip: Julian.)

FRANCE’S ISLAMIST PROBLEM: It’s not getting any better.