Month: October 2007

Slate lampoons Scalia’s love of illegal torture.

For a moment there, Romney took the high ground over Rush Limbaugh. Hewitt dutifully came to the rescue. Romney is such a tool, isn’t he?

A reader writes:

The problem with having no name for atheism is that it allows the atheists (people who choose to believe there is no god) to fudge the distinction between themselves and agnostics (people who assert that they do not know whether there is a god, and/or that it is impossible to know whether there is a god).  That would be beneficial P.R. for the atheists, because agnostics are quite a bit more popular than atheists.

What the atheists are avoiding is that their position, no less than that of theists, rests squarely on faith.  There is no way to reach by reason the proposition that there is or is not a god.  The only position compatible with reason is that we do not know.  That doesn’t satisfy the atheists, though — they must deny the existence of what they cannot know does not exist.

So, no, I don’t agree with not calling atheists atheists.  Atheists should be called atheists, and agnostics should be called agnostics.  It is not the same thing.

Which candidate is the first to use 9/11 imagery in a campaign ad? She is.

If there is such a thing:

"The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security. We must do whatever it takes to track down and capture or kill terrorists, but torture is not a part of the answer – it is a fundamental part of the problem with this administration’s approach.  Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America’s standing in the world, not how you strengthen it. It’s time to tell the world that America rejects torture without exception or equivocation. It’s time to stop telling the American people one thing in public while doing something else in the shadows. No more secret authorization of methods like simulated drowning. When I am president America will once again be the country that stands up to these deplorable tactics. When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution, we will be straight with the American people and true to our values," – Barack Obama, in a statement released today.

Venice, Italy, 8 am.

A reader writes

As a conservative lawyer, I must dissent from your statement that "conservative lawyers" have sanctioned or condoned the use of torture.  The political hacks with law licenses who twisted the Geneva Convention into "a quaint notion" did not do so on the basis of any conservative philosophy or underpinning. Conservative lawyers believe in the rule of law, and that the law is the foundation upon which civilized societies act. It is in times of our greatest peril when we need most to adhere to the rule of law. Otherwise, there is anarchy.

These so-called "conservative lawyers" need to either read "A Man for All Seasons," or perhaps read some of Ron Paul’s position papers. At this point, I am not hopeful that they will regain both moral and conservative principles. I’m reduced to settling for either one if we can get it.

 

A reader writes:

To answer your question: What are we going to do about it?

Sadly, the answer is: nothing. Nothing, because the mainstream media are unlikely to cover this for more than just a soundbite (Hell, they couldn’t even stay focused on massacres in Burma, once Britney Spears lost custody of her children), and perhaps even more disturbingly, it seems that the majority of people in the country don’t really have a problem with what you describe, as long as they think it’s keeping them "safe".

This should be our defining national conversation. Every Democratic presidential candidate should be talking about it non-stop, and every pundit called to speak on 24-hour news channels should be bringing this up. Every blog post should be about this subject until it reaches a tipping point where the media HAS to talk about it. I just don’t see that ever happening.

I have to disagree with Lederman – I do not think this will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation’s recent history. I think that the nation has been irrevocably changed, and in a way that will not mark the change at all, much less portray it as "the blackest mark." The Constitution has been shredded, our laws are now circumvented, and the people did nothing. America does not care.

I cannot believe that. But I do believe that this must be a defining criterion for the next election. For me, it is a defining matter in the corruption of conservatism, which is why I placed it at the heart of a book, detailing Bush and Rove’s sustained attack on the conservative tradition. When conservatives subvert the rule of law … to enable torture, and when only one man gets to decide who gets detained and tortured, they are no longer conservatives. They are fascists. And they need not just to be defeated; they need to be repudiated.

After reading the full investigative piece in the NYT today on how this administration decided on breaking America’s historic ban on torture and then pursued a long, corrupting policy of ensuring that the interpretation of the law was politicized to keep torture alive, it is hard to disagree with Marty Lederman:

Between this and Jane Mayer’s explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation’s recent history — not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals — lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers — without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes; the way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place, the way in which Republicans and Democrats in the Congress pathetically refused to stand up to these violations of American honor and decency in any serious way (and, I’m sorry, Senator McCain, but in the end, you caved, as you always do lately): these will go down in history as some of the most shameful decisions these people ever made. Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture  permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret – and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged. They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know. And the decision to allow one man – the decider – to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants – is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism.

James Comey – one of the principled conservatives, like Jack Goldsmith, who actually supported the rule of law and American decency – put it succinctly enough:

"We are likely to hear the words: ‘If we don’t do this, people will die,’" Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

"It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most," he said. "It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country."

A couple of things need to be stressed, because I’ve learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.

There is no doubt – no doubt at all – that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don’t have war criminals like AEI’s John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques – hypothermia, long-time standing, beating – and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" – "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German – were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

(Photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty.)