Month: July 2006

Marty Lederman is skeptical of the Pentagon’s Geneva announcement. As so often with Cheney and Rumsfeld, their mastery of bureaucratic warfare and political dissembling requires maximal skepticism toward anything coming from this administration. Marty thinks they may be pulling a fast one to get the torture-endorser, Haynes, on a federal bench (as elaborated upon below).

The decision by the Pentagon to formally abide by the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan must, however, be seen in context. The critical context is today’s nomination hearings of Jim Haynes for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Haynes made the Pentagon announcement; and Haynes, when he worked as general counsel for president Bush the Pentagon, was instrumental in the endorsement and enabling of torture. When Haynes was in the White House Pentagon in November 2002, he endorsed the following list of "interrogation techniques" for use by the military and CIA:

"forced nudity; forced grooming; "[u]sing detainees[‘] individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress"; 20-hour interrogations; stress positions (i.e. hanging from wrists from the ceiling); waterboarding (the use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation); and "scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family."

Haynes, by all accounts, is a genial fellow who simply told the president what he wanted to hear. But no man who has endorsed waterboarding as an interrogation technique should be allowed near a federal bench. War criminals cannot be judges. The Senate must deny Haynes a "reward" for following the law. If Hamdan hadn’t forced his hand, torture would still be policy. You don’t reward such criminals; you ostracize them and keep them for ever from public office. One further caveat: we still have no assurance that the CIA won’t still be authorized to torture in secret sites beyond our purview. we know how deeply attached Cheney is to the torture policy. He may still be trying to find a way to get around the law, as he has so doggedly in the past. We have evefry reason to be thrilled this morning, but history cautions skepticism as well.

For more on Haynes’ complicity in torture, see posts by Marty Lederman here and here, and Jane Mayer’s piece here.

The United States has now apparently ended the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Gonzales nightmare of abandoning the base-line demands of the Geneva Conventions. After Hamdan, this is a great moment in a war we can now fight as honorably as the United States has fought every other war since the Geneva protocols were instituted. Much of the military, most of the CIA, almost all the JAGs, the Supreme Court and overwhelming majorities of both Senate and House disagreed with the torture policy. But the White House cabal prevailed. No longer – in the Pentagon, at least. As far as the military is concerned, America is America again. And this president’s brutality has been reined in. Money quote:

"This was the concern all along of the JAG’s," Admiral Guter said. "It’s a matter of defending what we always thought was the rule of law and proper behavior for civilized nations." …
"We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops," Admiral Hutson said. "They can’t try to write us out of this, because that means every two-bit dictator could do the same." He said it was "unbecoming for America to have people say, ‘We’re going to try to work our way around this because we find it to be inconvenient.’"
"If you don‚Äôt apply it when it’s inconvenient," he said, "it’s not a rule of law."

Thanks go to all those, especially in the military, who never gave in to the demands of foolish expediency or the cult of the president-as-monarch. On this day, I’d like to recall the words of Captain Ian Fishback, still fighting for his country in the Special Forces, who saw evil and took a stand while others looked away:

"Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Others argue that clear standards will limit the President’s ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable.

Both of these arguments stem from the larger question, the most important question that this generation will answer. Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’"

The idea endures.

"I’m generally not against what Bush is doing in principle, but I am totally opposed to the way he has gone about it. As I’ve said a thousand times before, think long term people. You might be one of the Kool Aid drinkers who thinks that George W. Bush has the light of God shooting out of his asshole, but what is going to happen the next time a liberal Democrat gets elected? What are you going to say when President Hillary decides to spy on the American people, and uses Bush as a precedent? I imagine all of these self-styled ‘conservatives’ are suddenly going to remember that old Constitution thing from way back.

Freedom and liberty are, at least in my mind, not negotiable, no matter which party is in power. The right in this country is split. On the one hand there are people like me who still give a shit about the concepts of limited government and individual liberty, and then there’s the other side, for whom making sure queers can’t marry and getting Adam and Eve into science class ranks a close second to blindly supporting anything a president does, provided he has an R after his name," – blogger Lee at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast.

A reader writes:

I find it strange that the complaints of your alleged apostasy center principally around your opposition to torture.  I was unsurprised by the initial right-wing silence on the torture issues, and the minimization of Abu Graib seemed predictable.  Either version of denial imply a deep regret but a characteristic unwillingness to criticize a Republican administration.  But now we’re getting complaints that you’re not sufficiently pro-torture, as though the Republican party is proudly the party of torture.  It seems mere rationalization has transformed into something something else, as though rationalization wasn’t enough anymore.

Is this typical human nature?  Is the emotional solution to tolerating horror the eventual embrace of it?

First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as old as time.

The dean of Columbia Business School bursts into song – as a way to express his longing to replace Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman. Alas, the job went to Ben Bernanke. [Update: The video, to clarify, is a student-created parody of Hubbard, not the man himself.]

Kingston, Jamaica, 8 am.

Cheney and Rumsfeld have been there before.

A reader writes:

The far right has finally sunk to the level of Soviet propaganda. Just as Stalin had photos altered to remove those who had been shot or sent to the gulag for thoughtcrime, Mark Levin has erased your support for the Iraq war because you are guilty of thoughtcrime. In your case, the thoughtcrime is holding the United States’ conduct in war to a higher standard than that of Ba’athist Iraq.

I was also told by someone present at the Ramesh Ponnuru/Laura Ingraham discussion at Aspen that two other conservatives are now regarded as suspect by the ruling Republican intelligentsia: George Will and David Brooks. I imagine William F Buckley Jr, who has pronounced the Iraq war a failure, is also no longer a conservative in good standing. The attitude of people like Ponnuru and Ingraham and Levin is indeed Stalinist in form, if not content. But when you have to defend a massive increase in government spending and power in the name of conservatism, this kind of newspeak is necessary.

We have two competing narratives of the Bush administration out there. We have the court stenographer, Bob Woodward, and we have the dissident chronicler, Ron Suskind. His book, "The One Percent Doctrine," really is a must-read. Two things in particular stuck out for me. Suskind has CIA sources saying that, as part of the torture devised by Bush and Rumsfeld for Khalid Sheik Muhammed, they threatened to harm his wife and children if he did not talk. KSM told the interrogators to go ahead and kill his family, if necessary. I find it telling that the president, in this instance, became the moral equivalent of a mafia boss, committing what is clearly a violation of the Geneva Conventions, even if his motives were good ones. KSM is a disgusting, evil, Jihadist mass murderer. But he gave up no useful intelligence under this sort of tactic and succeeded in reducing the president of the United States to an evil thug, threatening violence against innocent children. One recalls the following exchange between John Yoo and Doug Cassel at Notre Dame law school:

"Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that…"

Suddenly you see that Yoo’s endorsement of evil had real life effect.

The second fascinating and completely convincing narrative is about the remarkable decision of Muammar Ghadafi to give up his entire WMD program. At the time, the president credited it to the psychological impact of the war to depose Saddam. He claimed it scared Ghadafi into compliance. Back in the days when I  trusted president Bush’s words, I echoed this analysis. It was a lie. I apologize to my readers for echoing it. It turns out Ghadafi had been entrapped by careful intelligence work long before the Iraq war was launched. The timing of the announcement was choreographed coincidence.

In the last few years, I have gone from lionizing this president’s courage and fortitude to being dismayed at his incompetence and now to being resigned to mistrusting every word he speaks. I have never hated him. But now I can see, at least, that he is a liar on some of the gravest issues before the country. He doesn’t trust us with the truth. Some lies, to be sure, are inevitable – even necessary – in wartime. But when you’re lying not to keep the enemy off-balance, but to maximize your own political fortunes at home, you forfeit the respect of people who would otherwise support you – and the important battle you have been tasked to wage.