Month: January 2009

Felix Salmon on the Tim Geithner mini-scandal:

There’s no realistic chance that Geithner will fail to become Treasury secretary as a result of this scandalette, if only because there’s zero chance that Republicans would be any happier with Obama’s second choice. Geithner is clearly qualified, and has worked very well with Republicans in the past: not only Bernanke and Paulson, in his present job, but also Anne Krueger, at the IMF. Had Mitt Romney, say, been elected president, Geithner would probably have been on his shortlist for Treasury secretary too.

A Bush official finally says what no objective individual could at this point deny:

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Notice that torture renders bringing terror suspects to justice legally impossible. So we get bad information; and they get to avoid true legal or moral accountability for their acts of terror (if they committed any).

What Crawford grasps is that torture is not defined by some cartoonish Jack Bauer-style sadism. It need not leave any physical marks (that’s why some of the techniques used by Bush were studied and used by the Gestapo). Things that might seem banal on paper – "sleep deprivation," for example – in practice when maintained for a sufficient amount of time can be among the worst torture there is. Put these techniques together – hypothermia, sleep deprivation, repeated beatings, constant nudity, sensory deprivation – and they become something often worse than an electric shock.

The definition of torture is when the victim has no effective choice but to say something, true or false, to end the ordeal. You can bring a victim to that point of surrender of his or her soul and will in many different ways. Maybe Bush was in denial; maybe Cheney wasn’t. But the objective truth of what they did cannot be denied.

And must be faced.

Kenai, Alaska, 1.56 pm.

For some reason, many Democratic politicians believe that, on the state level, voting for marriage rights for gay couples means political death. As an empirical matter, this isn’t true.

We won. Sincere thanks to everyone who voted.

Some amazing footage behind the scenes at the making of "The Shining."

Drum thinks 24 is going to tackle the torture issue head-on this season:

Is there any way for this end other than badly? After all, here in the blogosphere we opponents of torture like to argue that we don’t live in the world of 24, guys. And we don’t. But Jack Bauer, needless to say, does live in the world of 24. And in that world, there are well-heeled terrorists around every corner, ticking time bombs aplenty, and torture routinely saves thousands of lives. What are the odds that it won’t do so again this season — except this time after lots of talk about the rule of law blah blah liberals blah blah it’s your call blah blah? Pretty low, I’d guess. Hopefully the writers will surprise me.

I watched my first episode of 24 on Sunday. Seemed like silly Hollywood drama to me, with the usual relationship to reality. Enjoyable enough – but do people take this stuff seriously?

Oy. Marc:

Would Geithner’s nomination will be derailed by this kerfuffle? Based on what we know now, that wouldn’t be reasonable.

Via Noam Scheiber, Business Week‘s Michael Mande argues for citizens saving their tax cuts:

The conventional economic wisdom these days seems to be that tax cuts or tax credits are bad because people save the money, rather than spending it…But this conventional argument misses the whole point. Consumers have a massive hole in their balance sheets these days. Home prices are plunging, incomes are slowing, and many families have huge debts. Americans are staggering.

From this perspective, the main purpose of the tax cuts and tax credits is to help repair consumer balance sheets, just like the TARP is helping repair bank balance sheets. I don’t want consumers to spend the tax cuts—I want them to save the money, as much as possible, and get their debt back to reasonable levels. That’s the only to ensure that consumers will be on solid ground when the recession is finally over. …

Goldberg’s "thoughts" on alleged Israeli war crimes:

Unlike Andrew, I don’t think Israel is committing war crimes. Israel is fighting an enemy that intentionally seeks to kill civilians; in the course of fighting Hamas, Israel does some stupid and brutal things, but, by Andrew’s standard, every act of self-defense by a Western nation against Islamist insurgents is a war crime.

Er: no. There are countless acts of war, including invading Gaza and pounding Hamas, that do not necessarily come close to war crimes. (And for the record, I’ve stated that every undirected missile against Israeli civilians from Hamas is a war crime.) Maybe there’s a confusion here: I was not referring to the vexing question of proportionality (where I think Israel has stepped over the line, but agree this is a debatable point). I was referring to testimony from the Red Cross that reported actual war crimes – for example, leaving infants to live alongside the recently created corpses of their parents in the wreckage of what was once their homes. Maybe Jeffrey has some evidence to counter these claims, reported in the New York Times and elsewhere. If he does, I’d be glad to post it. But until he does, whether he "thinks" Israel is committing war crimes is as irrelevant as what I might "think". It’s an empirical question. Either they happened or they didn’t.