Month: September 2006

So Bush admits he ran a secret gulag of extra-judicial black sites where the CIA tortured detainees. And now he’s sending some of the victims to Gitmo. Why? It’s 9/11 week in the Congressional campaign and Khalid Sheik Muhammad is one terror detainee who should indeed be detained and interrogated as a prisoner of war. But Spencer Ackerman has some further thoughts:

Look deeper and not only is the White House not giving an inch in the debate, the KSM Shift of 2006 actually takes a mile. That’s because, to be blunt, we have tortured the dickens (to use a Rumsfeldian locution) out of KSM. All Guant√°namo detainees, according to the Supreme Court, have the right to at least some access to the U.S. legal system. KSM, therefore, will pose an interesting test: Should his probable trial reflect the legal doctrine of the "fruit of the poisoned tree" – that is, will evidence obtained through torture be admissible in the military tribunals or not? McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 says "of course not!" but Bush indicated in his infamous "signing statement" that he thinks he has the right to torture whoever he pleases.

Now Congress will face a very unpleasant question: Unless it rejiggers the military tribunals to bless torture/coercion, KSM and other Al Qaeda figures might in fact be set free by the courts. Is Bush so cynical as to force Congress into the odious position of either setting the stage for murderers to walk out of Gitmo or blessing torture? Of course he is!

I’ve learned through bitter experience that almost every time the Bush administration announces what appears to be a relaxation of its illegal and unconstitutional torture and detention policies, it’s usually part of a gambit to retain and expand them. More on this later. I need some time to analyze and scrutinize the announcements.

Two small but telling examples of Ramesh Ponnuru’s intellectual slipperiness. Here’s his convoluted attempt to explain why he won’t be explicit on how banning all abortions for all reasons will actually be enforced. There is one huge reason: if he did, the debate would instantly enter territory he wants to avoid: the practical impact on women, doctors, families, and individual freedom. Jon Rauch is a fair reviewer, and his point is a fair one. Ponnuru’s fundamental objective, of course, is advancing Republican power. Being explicit about the implications of the GOP’s support for a total ban on all abortion would not be politically prudent. On a minor note, Ponnuru says my criticism of Mark Steyn’s review of my book was hypocritical. Didn’t I criticize Ponnuru’s book without reading it? Au contraire. See the original post for yourself. I criticized the title and the Coulter cover-blurb – not the contents, which I said I hadn’t read and might even, in part, agree with.

David Lat has fun with a recent Washington Post headline.

They’d do well to listen more to John Tierney.

A reader suggests an alternative take on Karl Rove’s bank-rolling of Joe Lieberman:

What Rove presumably wanted was for Lieberman to lose the primary but  by a relatively small margin (which he did)–thereby insuring that he in fact activate his independent candidacy and that it be plausible. The GOP money achieved just that. At the same time, Rove undertook the seduction of Lieberman by supporting him as a Democrat before the primary defeat. As in: ‘We love you, Joe, whatever kind of banner you fly under.’ So the White House has now achieved its optimal situation. Joe‚Äôs beholden to it for the narrowness of his loss, and has been made to feel loved in a ‘nonpartisan’ way. And the more the Democrats distance themselves from him (as they must), the closer he feels to the Republicans. Niccol√≤ couldn‚Äôt have arranged it better.

Madison, Wisconsin, Capital of Lesbianism.

They’re the Iranian people. Here’s why.

Joe Gandelman cites this Washington Times item about funding for Joe Lieberman’s primary campaign:

The White House funneled millions of dollars through major Republican Party contributors to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s primary campaign in a failed effort to ensure the support of the former Democrat for the Bush administration.

A senior GOP source said the money was part of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove’s strategy to maintain a Republican majority in the Senate in November. The source said Mr. Rove, together with Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, directed leading pro-Bush contributors to donate millions of dollars to Mr. Lieberman’s campaign for re-election in Connecticut in an attempt that he would be a "Republican-leaning" senator.

"Joe [Lieberman] took the money but said he would not play ball," the source said. "That doesn’t mean that this was a wasted investment."

It’s not very Machiavellian in any case. Wouldn’t Rove want Lieberman to lose the Democratic primary? Doesn’t that help in the general fall campaign attempt to describe the Democrats as pro-terrorist?

(Photo: Bob Falcetti/Getty.)

We know how the right-wing blogosphere did their best to turn away from, deny, ignore or minimize the introduction of torture as an interrogation technique by president Bush. We also know that John Kerry focus-grouped the issue and decided not to challenge the president on it once during the campaign. But Eric Umansky shows how the press played its part too. His full report is here. One of the more gripping nuggets is the New York Times breaking the story of the premeditated military torture-murder of an Afghan detainee, by hanging him from a cell ceiling and beating his legs until, according to a military medical examiner, they had "basically been pulpified." The NYT had the Carlotta Gall story first. Foreign editor Roger Cohen lobbied frantically for it to be on Page One, but it ended up buried in the paper. This was long before Abu Ghraib and showed that the torture policy long predated that scandal – and caused it. Money quote:

Carlotta’s piece was ‘the real deal,’ he told me. ‘It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can‚Äôt get much clearer than that. I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.’

Fear and denial. It is indeed hard to believe that a president could have set in train a policy that would end in U.S. troops believing they could treat any captives like animals. But those were the limits they were operating under. And the man responsible is still president, his torture-implementer, Don Rumsfeld, is still secretary of defense, and the man who helped provide the legal cover is now attorney-general.