Month: April 2009

A reader writes:

With people like Jeff Emmanuel around, now seems like a good moment to revisit a brief passage from Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side.” Mayer depicts what happened when a Bush-Cheney lawyer named Jack Goldsmith read through the tens of thousands of pages in a 2004 report by the CIA’s Inspector General:

“As Goldsmith absorbed the details, the report transformed the antiseptic list of authorized interrogation techniques, which he had previously seen, into a Technicolor horror show. Goldsmith declined to be interviewed about the classified report for legal reasons, but according to those who dealt with him, the report caused him to question the whole program. The CIA interrogations seemed very different when described by participants than they had when approved on a simple menu of options.”

I’m struggling to read through the OLC memos. There’s so much that’s so troubling. In the Bybee memo, there’s no excusing the lack of independent fact-checking. When judging whether detainees would be safe when subjected to torture that was reverse-engineered from the Air Force’s SERE torture-resistance training, Bybee seems to be citing the second-hand testimony of the very same SERE trainers who were already on the ground to abet the torture. Even so, the reported outliers of the SERE training should have prompted Bybee to dig a bit for more information. Bybee’s memo describes a SERE guy who “trained 10,000 students. Of those students, only two dropped out of the training following the use of these techniques. Although on rare occasions some students temporarily postponed the remainder of their training and received psychological counseling, those students were able to finish the program without any indication of subsequent mental health effects.”

So Americans who experienced torture DURING THEIR SCHEDULED TRAINING sometimes needed to stop their scheduled training and get psych counseling. But this was rare. So Bybee’s conscience permitted him to generalize that a terror detainee — who could not simply postpone the remainder of his torture and receive psych counseling — was going to be just fine?!

Absolutely astonishing.

Not if you realize that this exercise was not done in good faith. Once you realize it’s an attempt by lawyers to provide specious legal backing for already approved torture, it makes much more sense. Which is why, in my view, Yoo and Bybee and Bradbury need to be disbarred from practising law.

A reader writes:

Your reader's comments here are excellent, but I think he leaves out an important point.  He correctly points out that the costs of government health-care is being borne by the privately insured.  What he fails to mention is that the privately insured don't have real choice when it comes to the product they can buy. The current system of employer-provided health care has created a market for policies that would not exist in a real free market. 

Instead, these policies come from union-negotiated contracts with large employers.  Once these large companies establish what policies they must provide to these large groups, the rest of us are forced to buy that kind of a policy.

This is not a knock on the unions, but rather a knock on the whole notion of employer-provided health care.  When large groups of people can negotiate for what they want (while someone else is paying) they will always negotiate for the Cadillac rather than the Kia.  What that has bought us is a system that is supposed to be providing insurance, but in fact is providing routine care where the costs are shared by everyone.

Kling gets it right here:

" Our system tends to subsidize "first-dollar" coverage rather than catastrophic coverage. Catastrophic coverage is like auto insurance that pays in the case of an accident. First-dollar coverage is like auto insurance that pays for gas and tolls. First-dollar coverage results in more paperwork and reduced incentives to control costs."

This "first dollar coverage" also happens to include the vast majority of customers that the insurance companies serve, so these are the policies they support.
 
So when I go to buy a policy for myself as a one-man company, I have to buy the same policy that the Boeing Employees Union negotiated for.

I don't know what you call it, but it sure isn't a free market.  I get almost no choice of policies, so it's not a market, and it sure isn't free

Ryan Avent likes Obama's rail plan:

…as was the case with highway construction, improved rail service will create its own demand. Faster, more reliable trains will attract riders and drive investment. New investment will attract new riders, and so on. The result will be a more balanced, reliable, redundant transportation system, that also happens to be more convenient and greener.

James Surowiecki is somewhat puzzled by his fellow econo-pundits:

I would argue that there are good reasons to believe that the economy, while still very weak, is much closer to a bottom than it was two months ago, and that the Obama Administration’s management of the crisis—which we could only guess at in January—has been a net plus for the economy (and therefore for the stock market). Yet despite all this, the simple fact is that the stock market has not gone up since February. In fact, for all its ups and downs, after four months of action it’s ended up pretty much where it started. It’s a strange world, indeed, in which that counts as euphoria.

The Illinois Family Institute does NOM’s “Gathering Storm” ad one better:

Jim Burroway writes:

This video reminds me of a short movie that was put out in the 1950’s which imagined the United States invaded by the Communists. It featured Jack Webb and was called Red Nightmare.

A reader writes:

I am a lawyer who has practiced in Washington for more than 20 years.  I'm not sure I have the words to describe my reaction upon reading the Bybee memo, but it's fair to say it sent chills down my spine. Lawyers are a cynical lot – it comes with the territory – but we all know that we have some basic obligations to our clients.  One of them is to tell them the truth, and not to conceal facts or law that the client should know about.  Even as you must represent your client zealously in disputes, you are required as an officer of the court not to hide adverse precedent.  And failing to tell your client about cases that run against the client's preferred result is a profound dereliction of duty. In that context, the Bybee memo is a lawyer's worst nightmare.  It's an F-minus in law school, a zero on the bar exam, grounds for firing a first-year lawyer for an utter lack of understanding of what the practice of law requires. 

It is beyond conception to imagine a competent lawyer not even mentioning the cases when the U.S. prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding, let alone asserting that "there have been no prosecutions" under the specific statute.  It is nearly as inconceivable that the memo concludes that the insect technique, used against someone with a known insect phobia, would not cause "severe mental pain."

The only rational conclusion is that this memo is not, in fact, legal advice at all, at least not in the sense that a lawyer would use the term.  None of the people involved in writing are incompetent, after all, and none of them would have made these kinds of elementary mistakes in writing for a private client.  It was written purely to provide cover.  To do that, Bybee and the others involved in these memos knowingly subordinated their oaths as officers of the court and their ethical obligations to give carte blanche to the interrogators and those who directed them.  Perhaps they thought it was their patriotic duty; perhaps they thought that the "chatter" mentioned in the memo created an exigent circumstance that demanded that shortcuts be taken; or perhaps they expected that the memos never would see the light of day.  I doubt we'll ever really know.  Regardless of the reason, though, the dull legalese conceals an utter lack of respect for the law and for any constraints that the law might require.  And that's what's really chilling about it.

A reader writes:

Anyone with half a brain knows that ridiculous levels of taxation will be required for at least a couple of generations because of the spending splurge Obama has promised.  The idea that we can sustain the deficits Obama is talking about (notwithstanding his rosy scenarios) is absurd.  The idea that we can fund the proposed government spending solely on the backs of those who make more than $250,000 is absurd as well.

What higher taxes?

Taxes to pay for a disastrous healthcare system like the UK’s.  The cap-and-trade tax which every consumer of energy will bear.  Higher state taxes to pay for all the state programs that may initially be funded by the federal government as part of the “stimulus” legislation but which will remain long after the economic downturn and federal funding ends.  Higher state and local taxes to fund the longer school day and school year Obama proposes.  Higher state and local taxes to provide universal pre-school and universal higher education.  Higher taxes as far as the eye can see.

The problem, Andrew, is that you’re looking backwards to find fault with George W. Bush and those attending the tea-parties are looking at what is in the works for the future.  I think those attending the tea-parties have the correct focus.