Month: April 2009

Greenwald takes aim at the journalist class:

I have to say I have rarely felt as alienated from my fellow Beltway pundits than on this issue. Greenwald is right about this in particular:

Amazingly, when it comes to crimes by ordinary Americans, being "tough on crime" is a virtually nonnegotiable prerequisite to being Serious, but when it comes to political officials who commit crimes in the exercise of their power, absolute leniency is the mandated belief upon pain of being dismissed as "shrill" and extremist.  Can anyone find an establishment media pundit anywhere — just one — who is advocating that Bush officials who broke the law be held accountable under our laws?  That view seems actively excluded from establishment media discussions. 

Well, I'm still here and although I've stopped going on cable for lack of time, I have said this consistently for years on whatever TV show I've been on. But there are very few others. If you actually demand answers, you become "shrill". And we now know that the key value of most leading Beltway journalists is deference to those in power and contempt for those who have none.

Ta-Nehisi says it well:

This is one core reason I supported him. My endorsement, which focused almost exclusively on undoing the Cheney regime of total executive power and torture to buttress it, is here. Money quote:

If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government…

We cannot be a beacon to the world until we have reformed ourselves. In this war, we are also fighting for an America that does not lose its soul in fighting our enemy. Just because we are fighting evil does not mean we cannot ourselves succumb to it. That is what my Christian faith teaches me – that no nation has a monopoly on virtue, and that every generation has to earn its own integrity. I fear and believe we have given away far too much – and that, while this loss is permanent, it can nonetheless be mitigated by a new start, a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.

A reader writes:

You contrast impeaching a president for perjury in a civil trial with prosecuting a president for war crimes. But there is a key difference between them. An impeachment proceeding is an attempt to remove someone from office. It is not a criminal proceeding whose object it is to put someone behind bars. I would think that is a fundamental difference, don’t you?

Incidentally, when President Clinton completed his term in office, his prosecutors elected to offer him leniency, rather than indict him, letting him off with a slap on the wrist, despite physical evidence that, in his capacity as head of the executive branch of government, he had not been truthful under oath.  As best I can recall, there were no persistent and obsessive angry recriminations from conservatives outraged that the former president would not have to face the prospect of jail time.  As one of those who had favored impeachment, I thought it was the right move, and still do. 

As for the former president’s supporters, there is a historical reason why the organization Moveon.org chose the moniker “move on.”  The point was that the controversy had run its course, and it was in the best interest of the country to move forward.  Not so much for Clinton’s sake, but for ours.

Finally, I would note one other historical precedent that bears mentioning — the pardoning of Richard Nixon.

That pardon was hugely controversial and was widely viewed as a huge stain that would forever tarnish President Ford.  It did, for awhile, at least until the tables had been turned and Democrats had to face the prospect of a Democratic president being impeached.  Suddenly, the left had an epiphany on Mr. Ford’s act of conscience.  The coup de grace came in 2001, shortly after the end of Clinton’s term, when Gerald Ford was honored by the Kennedy Library as recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.  In the words of Caroline Kennedy, in presenting the award:

“As President, he made a controversial decision of conscience to pardon former president Nixon and end the national trauma of Watergate. In doing so, he placed his love of country ahead of his own political future.”

Likewise, however misguided you believe the Bush Administration to have been in responding to an unprecedented national emergency, I don’t doubt that Mr. Bush thought that he was acting in the best interest of the country.  That’s my opinion; you are entitled to yours. You can speculate all you like along with your comrades in the echo chambers of the liberal blogosphere that Mr. Bush is a truly evil person who would eat his children for dinner if he could get away with it, but some Americans beg to differ, and a few of us may well end up on a jury pool.  Truth be told, we only need one like-minded soul.  This is a democracy, you know.

For that reason, I don’t believe that you would ever get a unanimous verdict from a jury in favor of the conviction that you are agitating for, unless you limit the pool of prospective jurors to avowed Bush haters like yourself.  If you don’t believe me, read avowed liberal Richard Cohen’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post, and ask yourself whether you could get even his vote in favor of conviction. 

The issue would not be whether what transpired was torture in a literal sense, but whether it was justifiable or excusable under the circumstances in light of fears of a possible second 9/11.  In other words, the reasons for the torture, and the surrounding circumstances very much matter.  Still don’t believe me?  Ask yourself, what is the difference between kidnapping someone, and arresting them and putting behind bars.  Don’t the police in effect “kidnap” someone whenever they put a person under arrest?  It is all about the circumstances, isn’t it?  Arresting someone is a legal form of kidnapping, an act which is otherwise treated as a felonious crime that is punishable in every jurisdiction.  Some of us, at least, are capable of drawing such fine distinctions.

Ironically, if Bush’s case ever went to trial, and anguished jurors felt obliged to acquit, you would have perversely created a precedent whereby a president who arguably blatantly violates the law is given a free pass. Bush, at least, had to take into account the prospect of future recriminations somewhere down the road, and that fear of the unknown itself is potentially a useful deterrent to misbehavior.  Do you really want to create such a dubious precedent?  How much confidence do you have in a conviction, Andrew?

Finally, allow me to quote further from the Kennedy Award Announcement for Mr. Ford, which I believe has continuing resonance today.

The response from the press, members of Congress, and the general public was overwhelmingly negative. The critics contended that the pardon was premature because it precluded possible indictment that might have led to answers to some of the remaining Watergate questions. Appearing before the U. S. House Committee on the Judiciary, President Ford explained under oath, in the only sworn congressional testimony ever given by a sitting president, that there were no deals connected with the pardon. He said he hoped his action would begin the process of healing the presidency and a deeply wounded nation.

In November 1976, President Ford lost the White House to Jimmy Carter in one of the closest elections in American history. Many historians believe Ford’s pardon of Nixon contributed to his defeat. Many have also come to believe that President Ford was the right man at the right time who played a leadership role in helping to restore the American people’s trust in their government.”

In short, Andrew, it is not about showing mercy, or retribution, for Mr. Bush, or his aides.  It is about the rest of us and what is in the best interest of the country.  Is the country going to be focussed on Mr. Obama’s forward looking agenda, or with settling old scores?  The Bush administration is in fact being held accountable in the court of public opinion, as was President Clinton before him.  As well he should be.  Denounce him as you wish.  But some of us simply do not wish to live in an America in which vengeful supporters of a new president seek to put his immediate predecessor behind bars, because believe me, this will not be the last time.

My concern is the precedent. If the precedent is set that a president can assume extra-legal and extra-constitutional powers to seize and detain and torture anyone he deems an “enemy combatant”, and an attack occurs in the future, and a future president invokes the Cheney-Bush torture precedent as justification for even more draconian measures, then the constitution is in grave danger. This is obviously a horrible situation to be in – forced between prosecuting former officials and allowing war crimes to stand buttressed by a claim of constitutionality – but it is not the fault of those of us who favor the rule of law. It is Bush’s and Cheney’s fault – to have both claimed unprecedented powers to break all laws and treaties and to have suspend all requirements to follow the laws on torture and abuse of prisoners.

You and I may be able to move on. Obama will be able to move on. But the constitution will continue to take on water below the surface. And one future president – Giuliani? Palin? – can take us to the next level of executive autocracy.

It is vital to recall, as we revisit and gain more concrete evidence of the dark era we are emerging from, that it did not and does not define all of America. Dick Cheney's authoritarianism cannot be allowed to distort the fact that many good people resisted America's descent into the torture warren, and some paid a real price.

One of the key analysts of the torture memos, Marcy Wheeler aka emptywheel, broke the story that Bush ordered the waterboarding of two terror suspects 266 times. She is not a professional reporter and needs support. There's a new tip-jar for her. Do the world a favor and if you have a few bucks, give them.

When you have no constructive policy to offer, just re-label your opponents "Democrat Socialist Party." Yep: it's getting worse.

Conor Friedersdorf reminds Jonah Goldberg that not everything you see in the movies is real.

That's the famous quote wrested by Ron Suskind from a "senior adviser" to president Bush. We have long thought of it as a coda to the refusal to see reality in the fiasco of the Iraq war (and the failure of the Afghanistan war). But, in retrospect, it might also tell us something about the real point of the torture program. If the CIA were telling Cheney that Zubaydah, for example, had told everything he could know, and Cheney had not secured the informtion linking Saddam to 9/11, torture was an obvious next option. It could "create a reality" that comported with what Cheney already believed as a matter of faith. If you want to "create" such a reality, you can "fix" the intelligence to make the case for war, as we now know happened; but if you want to "create" the original intelligence, you need to torture. Specifically, you need to craft torture techniques designed to procure false confessions. Ta-da! We have SERE, inversely adapted from Communist totalitarian methods for producing propagandistic false confessions.

From David Rose's VF piece last year:

The deception was real and premeditated:

Remember too that the only previous hard evidence of a Saddam-Qaeda link came from another torture victim, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. For those in power, torture is a drug, because it can create the evidence to sustain their power.

The more you think about the role torture played in constructing a false premise for a war where more torture would be unleashed, the more terrifying and dark this chapter in American history becomes.

Cliff May has done great work over the years advancing democracy and defending human rights. But his defense of torture when and only when America does it deeply undermines his credibility and makes a mockery of his previous work. How on earth can a man who heads up an outfit called "Foundation for Defense of Democracies," support torture? Not content with describing the torture techniques of the Communist Chinese as "enhanced interrogation techniques," May tries to distance himself from even that euphemism, coined by the Gestapo. It's now "EITs". Feel better? And the willful refusal to look at the evidence in the eye is staggering. He really believes that what Cheney authorized was "a few nights of sleep deprivation? A few weeks of boredom?" This alleged defender of human rights has obviously not bothered to find out even basic details of massive human rights abuses committed by his own government. Why on earth should anybody else take him seriously?

What he does not concede, because it might make his head explode, is that the administration he slavishly supported has made and will make torture more prevalent and more justified in every dictatorship on earth. And when these monsters are called to account, they will forever be able to say: America does it. And they will be impossible to refute. It is very hard to put a price on that loss of moral standing. But I'd say it renders the future much darker for humanity; and I'd say that someone soon will be tortured because America helped legitimize it.

I spent many years growing up in Britain and as a grad student in America debating lefties who defended the Soviets or attacked America's role in the world or made specious arguments about the moral equivalence of the USSR and USA. You had to concede some points – the US support for some very nasty characters over the years in South and Latin America, the Middle East, and so on. But there was always one argument that I could use: Americans don't torture.

They do now. Unless we prosecute, America and torture will become synonymous in the global consciousness. This is Cheney's doing; and he must be called to account.