Month: April 2009

A New Majority writer proposes some gay-friendly GOP reforms.

Brendan Borrell thinks our obsession with climate change helped accelerate disastrous deforestation:

Even if we consider the impact of environmental degradation on humanity, deforestation has a more significant and immediate impact on local weather, water availability, water quality, and soil erosion than does global climate change from greenhouse gases.

The roots of trees and native brush hold loose, nutrient-rich topsoils together, slowing erosion and absorbing precipitation. You can see the impact of habitat loss on local climate by poking a stick into the parched soils of the Brazilian cerrado or wandering along the boundary of the expanding Sahel Desert in Africa. Then there's Cherrapunjee, India, once considered the wettest place on Earth—and now facing climbing temperatures and water shortages as the once lush landscape has been denuded.

Only recently have conservationists begun to grasp what a debacle it was to enact climate change legislation in Europe without first putting in place global deforestation treaties. EU policies promoting a market for biofuels triggered the destruction of Indonesian rain forests in favor of palm plantations.

The assertion of total power through unchecked violence – outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of the law (apart from legal memos from hired hacks instructed to retroactively redefine torture into 'legality') – will be seen in retrospect as the key defining theory of Bush conservatism. It ended with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing "facts" from broken bodies and minds.

This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power, even if they first use it out of what they think is necessity or good intentions: it provides a way for them to coerce reality into the shape they desire. This is also why it is so uniquely dangerous. Because it creates a closed circle of untruth, which is then used to justify more torture, which generates more "truth." This is the Imaginationland some of us have been so concerned about.

The Western anathema on torture began as a way to ensure the survival of truth.

And that is the root of the West's entire legal and constitutional system. Remove a secure way to discover the truth – or create a system that can manufacture it or render it indistinguishable from lies – and the entire system unravels. That's why in the West suspects are innocent before being found guilty; and that's why in the West even those captured in wartime have long been accorded protection from forced confessions. Because it creates a world where truth is always the last priority and power is always the first.

This is not a policy difference. It is a foundational element of Western civilization. The way Cheney constructed it, it was not even a mere war-power as we have usually understood it – because the war was defined in ways we haven't usually understood it. Since the war had no geographical boundaries, since an "enemy combatant" could be an American citizen or resident, since the enemy could never surrender, and since the war could never end, the dictatorial powers, allied with the power to torture, undermined the balance of the American constitution. Until this is fully accounted for and the law-breakers brought to justice, that constitution remains with a massive breach below its waterline. It may not sink immediately; but its fate is sealed unless this precedent is not just moved on from, but erased.

David Ignatius says that Obama's decision to release the memos has hurt the CIA:

Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I'm told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn't even try to interrogate him. They handed him over to the U.S. military.

But, in the words of Jane Mayer, "the CIA had no experience really in interrogating prisoners" before 9/11. Why is turning detainees over to the military or FBI worse than letting the CIA keep them? David also wants Obama "to recommend limits on any congressional inquiry and resist demands for a special prosecutor." Appointing a special prosecutor is the DOJ's decision, not Obama's. Ignatius continues, "[Obama] should push the White House's preferred alternative — a commission that can review secret evidence behind closed doors, then report to the nation." We should not trust Obama to investigate this in secret any more than we should have trusted Bush and Cheney to run it in secret. Let's have a Truth Commission; give it time; give it money; and then let us see all of it. Then, and only then, should the attorney general decide whether to launch prosecutions. And, in my view, those at the highest levels of authority should be those first prosecuted.

If that means prosecution of a former president, so be it. He is not above the law.

I love the Internet. Can you imagine what those thugs would have gotten away with without it?

A reader writes:

Reading the blog post you linked to by Jennifer Rubin in which she states "Which group — Cheney/Mukasey/Hayden or the Obama administration has more credibility now?" what jumped immediately to my mind was "Could this be another rope-a-dope by Obama?"

How would you try to bait a reluctant group into doing what they would not otherwise do?  By tempting them to a fight they think they could win?

That is, by releasing partial statements by Blair that they could easily point to and say, like Rubin, "One wonders how the administration thought it was going to get away with this bit of deceit — revealing the interrogation techniques yet concealing their benefit from the American people."  All the while knowing what Blair's full beliefs are, as you linked to with Greg Sargent: "Blair believes that some valuable info was collected via torture, but that torture is not essential to our security and has done far more harm than good."  Finally the hypothetically "reluctant group" takes the bait, as Rubin does: "Let the truth hearings commence, if they must. Let it all come out. The first witness I would suggest: Admiral Blair."  And then Obama lowers the boom by letting it all come to light.

Am I reading too much into this?

Probably. The Blair mix-up was probably just a mix-up. But the way in which Obama has been able to show that he doesn't want the division and rancor that restoring the rule of law requires, while deftly allowing the rule of law to move forward: well, that's classic Obama. And the bravado, vanity, Beltway posturing and lies of Dick Cheney? Well: remember what happened to Clinton and McCain and Palin.

Mario Loyola tries to thread the needle on getting Iran to drop its nuke program.

The torture policy was Cheney's baby, not the military's. They resisted, as my email in-tray over the years is testimony to. Cheney himself told us when he warned us of his walking over to the "dark side" what he was going to do, and a pliant, ignorant, overwhelmed president with a sadistic streak was powerless to resist, even if one clings to the hope he might have wanted to. Why torture for Cheney? I cannot know for sure, but suspect it was a way to gain some personal traction against an amorphous enemy that had no territory to defend and no army to destroy; it was a means of feeling in control; it was a way to reverse what Cheney believed was the neutering of the post-Watergate presidency; it was revenge; and it was secret, allowing Cheney and his small circle total control over the bodies of individuals they wanted to penetrate and destroy.

Fatally, it was also, according to the Senate report, a way to coerce evidence of an al Qaeda-Saddam link. Remember that the Bush-Cheney techniques were most aggressively used by the Communist Chinese to extract false confessions. These false confessions legitimized the torture and provided the justification for the next torture. This is the Imaginationland some of us have been worried about for quite a while now. Once you have abandoned the rule of law and placed your trust in the hands of human beings with the power to torture, there is no returning. All you can do at some point is turn the lights on and see exactly the human wreckage and reality that remains.

Yglesias weighs in: