Month: May 2009

Bibi is discombobulated by the sea-change in Washington. Another Laura Rozen must-read:

According to many observers in Washington and Israel, the Israeli prime minister, looking for loopholes and hidden agreements that have often existed in the past with Washington, has been flummoxed by an unusually united line that has come not just from Obama White House and the secretary of state, but also from pro-Israel congressmen and women who have come through Israel for meetings with him over Memorial Day recess. To Netanyahu’s dismay, Obama doesn’t appear to have a hidden policy. It is what he said it was.

To actually have an American government and even Congress demanding that Israel actually stop its settlements because they are undermining both Israel’s and America’s security interests is a real refresher. And Netanyahu is behaving as Indyk noted: “like the boy who killed his parents and then asked for mercy because he was an orphan.” He should know who he’s dealing with. As Indyk also said,

I think that Bibi suffers from the fact that many people in the Obama administration know him too well: they were there during Clinton’s time. They have not forgotten.

(Photo: Leon Neal/Getty.)

James Joyner takes Hilzoy to task for equating food safety to 9/11:

Even smiling.

I'm not a lawyer so I will leave the legal parsings to others. But I do want to note something quite odd in Andy McCarthy's latest defense of torture as national policy for the US. He wants to argue that those who waterboarded terror suspects were not torturing per se because they were intending to procure intelligence, and not torturing purely for the hell of it.

I don't believe there's much evidence that the intent of the torture program was sadism, although obviously once you condone torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners in any war, the sadism will emerge. And I see no evidence that those who waterboarded Zubaydah were doing it for the evil joy of it (although we don't know who the torturers were exactly in that case, or most others). But this is all irrelevant. The crime of torture is not about sadism. It is specifically about getting intelligence. The UN Convention's definition couldn't be clearer on this:

Torture is not sadism; it can be done from misguided but not sadistic motives, i.e. the false belief that it's necessary to procure intelligence. No SERE training does this. No SERE-trained soldier is genuinely being coerced to give up information; they have the ability to end the session at any time; and the point is to help them resist such torture techniques. Those administering it are thereby not torturers – legally or morally. They are not trying to obliterate a human being's agency by subjecting him to this terrifying ordeal for 183 times; they are trying to train someone to retain their psychic integrity under this kind of pressure. (And you'll notice that waterboarding can be used this way on trainee soldiers in a way that, say, stress positions, or cold cells, can't. That's because stress positions and cold cells are, in most cases, worse than waterboarding.)

What the far right wants is to turn this into a question of graphic sadism or to present those of us who support Obama's return to the rule of law and human decency as seeking to prove the equivalence of George Bush and Pol Pot. We're not. We're saying that torture is torture; that the intent to procure intelligence from it in no way mitigates it (indeed more precisely fits the UN definition); that America did it; and that those responsible need to be held accountable.

Or maybe this wasn’t quite what he had in mind (from the Young Cons site via TPM):

Here's his own time-line on the torture memos:

I can imagine a scenario in which the president essentially directed the vice-president to go as far as he wanted within the law. And with Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury, Cheney was able to dictate what the "law" was and get Bush to sign off. Cheney clearly made a decision to use torture almost immediately after 9/11. He all but told us in the "dark side" interview. The law was not a boundary to be respected; it was a problem to be overcome. And, of course, the torturing had started before the first legal memo was fixed.

Andrew Sprung responds to Goldblog:

An ’80s classic video, Total Eclipse Of The Heart, gets some subtitles:

Emily Bazelon writes:

Sotomayor has been a good emissary for herself, based on the evidence I've gathered from her clerks and other chambers about how she has worked with Republican appointees on her court. What's remarkable isn't just her persuasive abilities, though. It's where those powers sometimes take her. In one case, Sotomayor talked a Republican-appointed judge around to a result that is all about taking the police at their word—even though the disturbing, even wrenching circumstances surrounding the arrest at the heart of the case might point exactly in the opposite direction. Liberals, be careful what you wish for.

Mike Crowley points to a "dramatic" passage from a NYT op-ed that went under the radar this week:

In conversations with Mr. [Dennis] Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.

Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate. Iranian officials are fully aware of Mr. Ross’s views — and are increasingly suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one senior Iranian diplomat said to us, “an offer we can’t accept,” simply to gain international support for coercive action.

Has Ross's outlook changed since the fall? He did not return Crowley's calls for comment, so it's hard to tell. I doubt Ross has any interest in anything but the hardest of pro-Israel positions.