Month: June 2007

Steve Benen detects a surrender to propaganda:

I’m all for spirited debate. When it comes to law, political science, and religion, there are a nearly endless supply of ideas and perspectives. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But facts are stubborn things, and “Wall of Separation” is not history. It’s a religious-right-style interpretation of history, presented by PBS to its viewers as fact.

Indeed, PBS’s ombudsman seems to realize that this film is driven by a religious agenda, and made by religious activists, who brush over details in order to make a religious point. He seems to believe airing misleading information, intentionally, is consistent with "diverse" programming. That’s absurd.

From Salon, the latest information on the Bush administration’s knowing endorsement and implementation of many of the techniques – and worse – exposed at Abu Ghraib:

The military’s use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA’s use of such tactics – working in close coordination with the military – until now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel Dell’Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, sent a "document preservation" order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell’Orto’s order was in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody…

Close coordination between the CIA and the Pentagon is referred to in military lingo as "jointness." A retired high-level military official, familiar with the detainee abuse scandals, confirmed that such "jointness" requires orchestration at the top levels of government. "This says that somebody is acting as a bridge between the CIA and the Defense Department," he said, "because you’ve got the [CIA] side and the military side, and they are collaborating." Human-rights expert Scott Horton, who chairs the International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association, also says that the cross-agency coordination "reflects the fact that the decision to introduce and develop these methods was made at a very high level."

We need to follow this all the way to the White House.

From John Whitehead, evangelical conservative and defender of civil liberties:

This issue is bigger than Al-Marri. It’s even bigger than the Bush   Administration and its so-called war on terror. The groundwork is being laid for a new kind of government where   it will no longer matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation or   even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the president—or whoever happens to be occupying   the Oval Office at the time—thinks. And if he or she thinks you’re a threat to the nation and   should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution   provides. In effect, you will disappear.

Ilya Somin comes to terms with his pop-cultural ignorance:

The lesson to be learned, if there is one, is that rational ignorance is a universal phenomenon, not limited to the "stupid" unwashed masses. We are all inevitably ignorant about a wide range of topics. Unfortunately, however, popular ignorance about politics probably causes more social harm than academic geeks’ ignorance about pop culture.

The highest-ranking celebrity I’d never heard of: Jay-Z, ranked no. 9.

Who he?

"Arizona is in play like never before. And the Republicans are literally handing it to us," –  David Waid, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party (TimesDelete).

The reason the civil rights movement for gay equality under the law has been so successful so swiftly is because gay people have an army of allies: our families. Among the most powerful advocates in particular are relatively conservative families of gay people. The following story can be replicated in many, many ways in many, many places. It may even move the New York Senate:

Teresa R. Sayward did not hesitate when she rose from her seat on Tuesday night to address her colleagues in the State Assembly. An observant Catholic from a small, conservative upstate town, she had rarely shared the story of her son, Glenn, 42, and his struggle to come to terms with his gay identity decades ago.

But she said the occasion — a chance to make New York the second state in the country to pass a bill legalizing same-sex marriage — called for a highly personal approach.

"We would spend long nights crying together and talking," she told a full house of hushed lawmakers. "And one night I said to him, ‘You have to be what you are; you can’t be what people think you should be.’"

Th goal of the movement: to enlarge the space in which people can be fully themselves. And that includes straight people.

So that’s what we’re calling it now, is it? The Observer goes cable on the 2.5 New Yorkers running for president here. MyMannMitt is unfazed by Bloomberg:

Of course, all the fanfare is much ado about nothing given that we all know that Romney will win, regardless of who he’s pitted against.

Did Hugh Hewitt just give birth?

(Photo: Mario Tama/Getty.)

Jerusalem, Israel, 6.30 am.

For an interactive gallery of Dish readers’ window views across the world, click here.

He just won the Politico straw poll at "Taking Back America." How many darlings of the left also appeal to someone like former Bushie Mark McKinnon and Marty Peretz? Ambers puts it simply enough:

Obama remains popular with self-identified liberals and self-indentified independents. His popularity spans a broader spectrum at this point that any other Democrat in the race.

So why Clinton? Aren’t eight years in the White House and two terms in the Senate enough?

Glenn Greenwald sees it in his new book, "A Tragic Legacy":

The president who vowed to lead America in a moral crusade to win hearts and minds around the world has so inflamed anti-American sentiment that America’s moral standing in the world is at an all-time low. The president who vowed to defend the Good in the world from the forces of Evil has caused the United States to be held in deep contempt by large segments of virtually every country on every continent of the world, including large portions of nations with which the U.S. has historically been allied. The president who vowed to undertake a war in defense of American values and freedoms has presided over such radical departures from the defining values and liberties of this country that many Americans find their country and its government unrecognizable. And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world.

And yet this tale of Manicheanism gone awry, of a utopian vision ending in a dystopia, of the terrible dangers of any moral crusade that sanctifies "any method necessary" (in Giuliani’s language) in its well-intentioned pursuit of evil is not a new story. It is one of the oldest stories human beings have told to themselves. Human beings seem to need to relearn it with each generation; and I can only express remorse that, in my time, I needed a lesson as well.

The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.

It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak. We have an elite class in Washington either too cowardly to stand up to the power grab or too co-opted by the perquisites of power to care. And we have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them – because, right now, it’s mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced. And the Hollywood fantasies of Jack Bauer can distract from an honest moral assessment of how far we’ve degenerated in so short a time.

There is still a chance to repair the damage – but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it’s because I honestly didn’t expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity – indefinitely. But these are the facts; and my own book was an attempt to account for them within the conservative philosophical tradition. Glenn Greenwald comes from a very different place, but we have sadly come to the same conclusion.

America has exchanged some if its basic freedoms for the patina of phony security – and so easily. The Republican party, to its historic shame, has been the main vehicle for the replacement of doubt, empiricism and calm judgment with certainty, fundamentalism and raw force. We have terrible enemies abroad, seeking to destroy our way of life. But this truth should never blind us to the danger within as well. Al Qaeda can only give us death. It is up to us to surrender the liberty they despise. In so many ways, we already have.