Month: April 2009

A Republican strategist explains how he knows whether a person should be tortured for intelligence. The combination of bigotry, stupidity and violence that the last president empowered for eight years in the name of national security is truly terrifying.

Hilzoy wants to know:

If most people tried to make the case that prosecuting their criminal acts was just "looking backwards", or a sign that the prosecutor was motivated by a desire for retribution, they'd be laughed out of court. Imagine the likely reaction if your average crack dealer were to urge the judge not to dwell on the past, or if someone who used accounting fraud to flip houses told offered a prosecutor the chance to be "very Mandelalike in the sense [of] saying let the past be the past and let us move into the future", or if I were pulled over for speeding and, when asked if I knew how fast I was going, replied that "Some things in life need to be mysterious … Sometimes you need to just keep walking." I don't think any of us would get very far.

Antioch, California, 10.40 am

Mark Shea, a conservative Catholic blogger who never faltered in opposing illegal torture, voices his disgust with torture boosters on the right:

…never underestimate the power of rationalization. So those who are (finally) admitting that Bush/Cheney lied through their teeth when they said "we do not torture" seem to have no problem granting total and complete credulity to everything else they say. "It yielded great intelligence!" "They had it coming!" "War means moral carte blanche for whatever we feel we have to do." All these and many other dubious assertions and outright lies continue to circulate on the Rubber Hose Right and will do so–because Obama has no intention of doing anything about it.

That's not because Obama is a great big huggy bear who just wants to forgive and forget. It's because George Dubya Bush handed all future executives some really nifty power…

Levi's on Larry King tonight.

Yes, that Orson Scott Card.

Illegally by-passing the Geneva Conventions and torturing prisoners in a secret program in black sites is in line with American values and the law, but investigating evidence of war crimes? According to the architect of Republican collapse, Karl Rove, that's

"the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses."

No, Mr Rove, that was what the United States secretly became in the last eight years. And you thought you could cover it up for ever?

 Joel Makower, author of The Green Consumer, is thinking of giving up:

It's only a matter of time before…the public recognizes that for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 40 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes—and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings.

At that point, the locus of concern could shift away from beverage containers, grocery bags, and the other mundane leftovers of daily life to what happens behind the scenes—the production, crating, storing, and shipping of the goods we buy and use…

Truth is, there's no reliable way of judging the environmental commitments of companies—all companies, not just the ecogroovy brands we know and love. Ecolabels, activist watchdogs, and governmental regulatory schemes can't tell us. They focus on what is in the product, but not on the upstream activities involved in producing it.

"Which group — Cheney/Mukasey/Hayden or the Obama administration has more credibility now?" – Jennifer Rubin.  On a related note, it appears that Cheney did request documents be released.

Before you buy the Bushies’ latest self-defence – they had no idea what they were authorizing and had no knowledge of the techniques’ history or provenance and were acting totally in good faith – you might want to read another part of former Bushie Philip Zelikow’s post:

At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn’t entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that:  The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department’s archives.

My italics. A.L. sees the profound significance of this nugget:

The only reason to collect and destroy all copies of this memo would be in order to preserve, for as many Bush administration officials as possible, a potential defense against later prosecution. If the extent of these activities ever became public and investigations were commenced, the White House wanted to be able to argue that everyone involved relied in good faith on the advice of counsel. That defense would be severely undermined if it could be shown that these officials were warned, by a lawyer of Zelikow’s caliber and rank within the administration, that the legal arguments they were relying on were poorly reasoned and unlikely to be sustained by a court.

These people were determined to torture. And torture they did.