Month: April 2009

The speaker was briefed on waterboarding and other torture techniques used by the White House. She was part of the select group of congressmen and women told of the program. She did nothing to stop it and now claims she was never told it was going to be used. Porter Goss has a different recollection:

“We were briefed, and we certainly understood what C.I.A. was doing,” Mr. Goss said in an interview. “Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough.”

For what it's worth, I believe Goss. Getting to the bottom of how the US became a torturing nation is not about one party or another. It's about getting accountability from all those who made it happen.

When they are Bush administration officials:

Interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

“The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

Derek Thompson is as underwhelmed as I was by Obama shaving $100 million off the budget:

…killing the deficit beast with paper cuts is not what I would call "setting a tone." Actually, it's what I would call "perpetuating the idea that beasts can be killed by paper cuts." Meaningful steps to closing a $1.75+ trillion deficit this year will require exactly the kind of hard choices that Obama has talked about in public but appear nowhere in his policies. In the heart of a recession, maybe that's to be expected. But when it's finally time to set the tone on deficit cuts, I hope the music's a little bolder.

Obama stops using it. When will the New York Times start using it when referring to waterboarding?

Today was a heavy day of torture talk at the Dish. I mulled over: Cheney's panicked rhetoric, his former speechwriter's Orwellian op-ed, the destruction of torture evidence, the destruction of an American citizen, the tyrannical threat Yoo posed to "real America," the similarities between Peggy Noonan and the Vatican, and the similarities between the Bush-Cheney program and, yes, the Nazis. Also, the NYT dropped the ball on the torture memos and Typepad gave us more technical difficulties.  A reader shot Gitmo through his window while Emily Dickinson shone a bit of light through the day's darkness.

Ta-Nehisi unpacks the word:

I think people who meet and talk to me, who read this blog don’t think of me as “ghetto.” But I’m not sure they’d think the same if they saw me at 8 A.M. on Lenox Ave, rocking the black hoodie and grey New Balance, on my way to the Associated. Ghetto, in its most unironic usage, is a word for people you don’t know. It’s word that allows you to erase individuals and create boxes.

No surprise there. Phil Levy wonders what it means:

Does this matter? The election is long past. Perhaps it is just naïve to think that politicians will keep their word….Had the administration followed through on its commitment to renegotiate NAFTA, it would have soured relations with our two closest neighbors, with no evidence that the desired change (incorporating labor and environmental commitments into the body of the agreement) would have any real benefit.

Put differently, though, the answer may seem less obvious: Does it matter whether a leader persuades the public of a policy's merits? Is it a viable approach to convince the citizenry that a policy is bad, and then to pursue that very policy? It will depend on the extent to which a president can act autonomously, without relying upon either firmly-rooted public support or the support of institutions that are more sensitive to public opinion, like Congress.

While some of us were trying to absorb the full facts of the Bush-Cheney torture program, which rested on a claim of total extra-constitutional power of the president to suspend habeas corpus, detain anyone in the US without charges, and torture them, Jonah Goldberg was writing a book called "Liberal Fascism." Even now, he is conducting interesting discussions on whether taxation in a representative democracy could be described as "tyranny." After a single stimulus package and three months of Obama, Fox News is predicting fascism. I have long been at a loss to explain this. Some kind of psychological denial mechanism? Rank projection? Displaced panic? Partisanship so deep it erodes any moral faculties or critical reasoning? To Zelikow again:

The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.

In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest — if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.

But remember John Yoo:

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that…"

But a top tax rate in line with the Clinton era is tyranny.