Month: April 2009

If you've ever wondered who this chap is – he appears regularly at the Corner opposing abortion – you will learn something from the bowels of the Senate Armed Services Intelligence Committee Report (PDF):

My italics. In the spring of 2003, that post was held by M Edward Whelan III, an arch-Catholic. Whelan is the head of – wait for it – the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Speaking of which, where are the Catholic bishops? They can manage to get into the news opposing a commencement speech by the president, but when incontrovertible evidence that the Bush administration tortured prisoners emerges, the silence from the top is deafening.

[Update: Whelan denies everything, and says he was not at the meeting at all and opposes torture in all forms. I have corrected this post to reflect that, have no reason to disbelieve him and apologize to him for my first impression that he was a supporter of torture. He has no comment on the interrogation techniques approved by his former colleagues at the OLC. My apology can be read here.]

A spin, revealing the cynicism beneath – in a tweet:

What's interesting here is the subtext, which does indeed illustrate what was clearly the mindset of Bush and Cheney. They decided to torture, believed in it, and felt merely obliged to come up with a legal rationale to justify it. This tweet is actually useful evidence of the criminal mindset of these people.

It’s hard to think of a more establishment figure – particularly close to the Bush family, for example. He is also well-versed in intelligence and policy. He was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1987 to 1993. And when he was sent to be briefed at Langley in February on the torture program set up by Dick Cheney, he said that:

Is this debate still going to be refracted through the prism of right and left in the lazy MSM? Or are they even capable of telling right from wrong?

A bloggy holiday.

One reason one begins to despair of the MSM is its inability to report an issue like the facts of the torture program. There are plenty of facts in the ICRC report, the OLC Memos and the Senate report. One of these facts is that waterboarding is torture under US domestic law, and this question has never been legally debatable until Dick Cheney decided he wanted to do it. There is no real genuine debate about this. Just because one person decides to say black is white does not make a debate; it makes that person merely a liar or delusional.

And so the MSM – Dan Balz is a useful pinata for Arianna – has to create a left vs right debate. It has to refer to "left-wing bloggers" as the only torture critics, as if it is somehow left-wing to accept the unanimous consensus of every American legal authority on waterboarding: that it is definitionally torture which is definitionally a war crime. Until Bush, no conservative in America, upon hearing that a captive had been waterboarded, would have hesitated for a second to call it torture. And yet now they leap as one to say it isn't.

I wish Norah O'Donnell had simply asked Liz Cheney how she can possibly say with a straight face that waterboarding a human being 183 times is not torture. How? You try it in the mirror.

If Liz Cheney were captured by an enemy, thrown into a dark and windowless cell, strung from the ceiling by shackles, kept awake for weeks on end, thrown headlong against a plywood wall for thirty times in a row and waterboarded 183 times, would she really emerge from that ordeal and say she wasn't tortured? I mean: really? Let's get real here: she's a fraud defending a monster.

Is Michael Goldfarb, for that matter, really saying in public that the man he used to work for, John McCain, was not tortured in Vietnam? Is Goldfarb calling McCain a liar or an exaggerator? And yet everything that was done to McCain has been done by Bush. And his spokesman calls the torturers "American heroes." And he renames torturers "freedom-questioners".

These people are not making a good faith argument. They are transparent defenders of the indefensible. Arianna is right: this is a defining moment for America. This is not now and never has been a question of right versus left. It is right vs wrong. It is a bright line which the black-and-white crowd has suddenly decided is oh-so-gray. But we have their testimony now. And history has it for ever.

The NYT is debating the Miss California USA answer on marriage equality. Dan Savage:

Anti-gay attitudes — whatever motivates them — are increasingly less popular. No contestant would stand on that stage and argue for a ban on interracial marriage or come to the defense of a country clubs that banned Jewish members or condemn single mothers. All those positions were once considered thoroughly respectable, and people could argue for them on TV — pundits, candidates, beauty pageant contestants — without fear or repercussion. Not true today. It’s not that there are racial thought police, or anti-Semitic thought police, or single-mom thought police. It’s just that times and attitudes change.

Robert Reich wants Obama to pop the credit bubble:

Postrel's defense of credit here.

I'm going to read the full Senate report this weekend but I am struck by one footnote a reader directed me to. It's a memo related to the torture of Qahtani in Gitmo, written January 17, 2003, and documented that he had been "forced to pray to an idol shrine." One recalls similar abuse of religious freedom at Abu Ghraib, which the Senate report unequivocally blames on official policy at the highest levels:

One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted in broken English: ''They stripped me naked, they asked me, 'Do you pray to Allah?' I said, 'Yes.' They said 'F – – – you' and 'F – – – him.' '' Later, this inmate recounts: ''Someone else asked me, 'Do you believe in anything?' I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.'

This from an administration more deeply committed to public Christianity than any other in recent times; and from a military one of whose commanders had publicly pronounced:

"We're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian … and the enemy is a guy named Satan."

Today the Dish learned that interrogators from both the FBI and CIA resisted torturing Zubaydah, and only did so because the White House sought to find an Iraq-Qaeda connection. Also, they used spiders. Churchill and even the Luftwaffe in wartime had higher moral standards than Cheney, whose incompetence eclipsed even his vanity. Shep Smith and the Weekly Standard have shown that some conservative pundits have not lost their way on torture, while New York Magazine rounded up the ones who have. In their company is also Cliff May, a once-great humanitarian for the right. (And speaking of humanity, read this tragic story.)  In blog news, a new star reporter and our photo book need your help. Finally, get your Levi fix here, your Reihan fix here, and your German weirdness here. 

"The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial," – Peggy Noonan, December 21. 1998.

"It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, ‘Oh, much good will come of that.’ Sometimes in life you want to keep walking… Some of life has to be mysterious." – Peggy Noonan, April 19, 2009.

Remember also that the issue with Clinton was perjury in a civil suit. That required impeachment. But war crimes?

Faster, Peggy, faster.