Month: August 2009

by Patrick Appel

If you missed them, Conor Friedersdorf's long takedown of Mark Levin's new book and Andrew's post tackling the WaPo are worth your time.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Is it just me or do American presidents not give speeches like this one anymore? Since Ronald Reagan left office we've had two Bushes, neither of whom were particularly enjoyable in oratory, and two Democratic presidents, both of them deservedly known for captivating a crowd. I did enjoy some Bill Clinton speeches in the moment, though I cannot recall any that struck a chord on substance as well as delivery, and I say that setting aside political disagreements. As for Barack Obama, I've missed it if he's said anything since taking office that measures up to his best speaking performances during or even prior to the campaign. 

I'm always wary of the sentiment that "things used to be better in politics." Obviously the speeches of presidents past are remembered now insofar as they were exceptional. Nor would I want the country to face circumstances as dire as the divide over slavery and the Civil War merely to see another Abraham Lincoln match rhetoric to a moment. But can't someone at least match the density and substance of that Ronald Reagan speech if not the Gipper's delivery? I'm surprised on reading it that he gave such speeches on occasions so comparatively minor. Is it that changes in media have rendered those kids of speeches untenable? Or is it simply that a speechwriter as talented as Peggy Noonan hasn't graced the White House since she left it?

by Andrew

A commenter on Ann Althouse's pro-torture blog reminds readers what the Washington Post chose to omit from its story – KSM's debriefing from the Red Cross:

"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time," he said."

The bulk of the information seems to have come when he was not being tortured – from traditional, legal and ethical interrogatory methods used by the West as a way to distinguish civilization from barbarism. But, as we now know, the barbarians were at the very heart of the American government for seven years.

by Andrew

We don't know; but we do know that this morning's story – with no new details except anonymous torturers spinning facts from CIA docs that the docs themselves say prove nothing about the effectiveness of torture – is curiously constructed, placed, and by-lined. Ben Smith:

The story … bears all the marks of some complicated internal discussions over at the Post, which has been on the defensive since its reporting in the run up to the Iraq war. A sign of the internal focus on the piece: The story — appearing as the paper's top story on an off day, a Saturday — has three major bylines and just a tagline from national security reporter Walter Pincus.

It read, as Greenwald notes, like an op-ed from John Bolton, and not something that a serious reporter like Pincus would have written. It is as risible a piece of journalism as this other recent excrescence – another op-ed dressed up as reporting here. Mercifully, the readers are not unaware of its quality.

by Andrew

Glenn Greenwald dissects another example of the rank corruption of the MSM:

Who are the Post's sources for this full-scale vindication of Dick Cheney's defense of torture?  "Two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified"; "one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding"; "one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said"; "One former agency official."  It's unclear how much overlap there is in that orgy of pro-Cheney anonymity, but there is not a single on-the-record source to corroborate the Torture-Saved-Us-From-Mass-Death narrative, nor is there even a shred of information about the motives or views of these "officials."

What makes the Post's breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims — the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report — provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves…

The Post article today is one of the most astoundingly vapid and misleading efforts yet to justify torture — a true museum exhibit for the transformation of American journalism into little more than mindless amplifiers for those in power.  It simultaneously touts facts as new revelations that have, in fact, long been claimed (that KSM provided valuable intelligence), while deceitfully implying facts that are without any evidence whatsoever (that he did so because he was tortured).  Dick Cheney couldn't have said it better himself.  It's so strange how often that's true of The Liberal Media.

The WaPo is, I'm afraid, in almost terminal decline. Its enmeshment in power is far more striking these days than its search for the truth. Which is why it fires those columnists who call torture by its real name and gives war criminals anonymity to further their own self-defense.

by Patrick Appel

Sony is coming out with a new reader. Farhad Manjoo gives some free advice on how to kill the kindle:

I'd counsel Amazon's competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they'd be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he's got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I'd prefer if eBooks came with no copy protection—as is the case with most online music—but many in the publishing industry would never go for that.) Kindle's rivals could also get together to create a huge, single ePub bookstore. Publishers would have a big incentive to feed this store with all their books—if they provide books only to Amazon, they'd be helping to create a monopolist in their industry, and that's never good for business.

by Patrick Appel

Will Wilkinson defends living wills:

[P]eople tend underestimate the extent of adaptation to pain and reduced function. That’s the sort of thing a doctor might bring up in a counseling session. But it’s not clear how relevant it is. Living wills, as I understand them, primarily involve questions of what to do when a patient has lost consciousness, or is a state of heavily drugged consciousness, and is being kept alive by a respirator or other apparatus that is substituting for an organ that no longer functions. The big questions are about whether to withdraw active life-extending interventions or not, and under what conditions. If you’re functioning at a level sufficient to revise your living will, you can do that. It’s not like you’re locked into your first draft. And it’s not as if it is possible to set out in advance the conditions under which one would like to be legally euthanized. So I’m not sure I see the mistake.

Poulos gets philosophical:

The archetypal or stereotypical conservative would say that even an old, isolated person has a reason to reject suicide that reaches to the foundations of what makes us human and what gives humans dignity. The archetypal or stereotypical progressive would say that conservatives need to abandon their romantic and/or religious fantasies that a dying person finds more dignity in enduring great suffering until their body fails than in choosing to die beforehand. Liberals, who, technically speaking, are stuck or torn between conservatism and progressivism, would be torn on this issue too. Liberalism — the political philosophy and worldview, not the ideological position — struggles to square or reconcile two competing visions of human dignity.

by Chris Bodenner

Stop-motioning Berlin:

OUROBOROS from sam3 on Vimeo.

by Andrew

In the latest release from those in the Bush administration and CIA who authorized and supported America's torture of prisoners of war, we get the following story today in the Washington Post. It details that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed gave up a wealth of information in the period after he was tortured by Cheney and Bush via the CIA. It does not and cannot prove that his information could not have been procured by legal or ethical interrogation methods. But what is interesting to me is the Washington Post's editorial and institutional position in favor of not calling waterboarding and sleep deprivation what they have always been called in every court of law and every society including the US in recent times: torture. They refuse to use the word "torture" for an act that is memorialized in Cambodia's museum of torture. That's how deeply the Washington Post is enmeshed in the pro-torture forces in Washington. The refusal to use this word is a clear, political act by the Post in defense of the Bush administration's torture and abuse policies. It places the Washington Post as an adjunct to the Bush-Cheney policy of torturing thousands of prisoners across every theater of war and across the globe.

For example, here's a classic couple of sentences where you have to strain to avoid the t-word:

Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.

"Coercive methods". "Torment". Notice something missing? Now read the piece stripped of its Orwellian newspeak:

Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of brutal torture sessions – he was shackled naked to maintain a stress position for a month, the shackles cutting into his wrists and forcing his feet to swell painfully, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, subjected to days and nights of loud noise and bright lights, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torture, he was not waterboarded again.

Now just imagine that we heard news that the soldier still captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan – mysteriously absent from the media since he went AWOL – had been subjected to these techniques. Do you believe that the Washington Post would not use the word "torture" to describe them? Of course they would. They have described John McCain's experience in Vietnam as torture, and yet what he endured was nothing like as brutal as what was done to KSM. Now check out the macho swaggering of Reuel Marc Berecht in the WSJ today, and Cheney's grandstanding on Fox tomorrow, and you see what the hard right, which now includes the Washington Post (having purged their only opinion columnist prepared to speak truth to torture power, Dan Froomkin), is doing.

And look at the cloak of anonymity given to "one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out." This Bushie is the main force in the piece arguing – by inference, not provable data – that torture worked. Why is he given anonymity, especially since he is describing war crimes he and others conspired to commit? The WaPo explains: "he requested anonymity because the events are still classified." What? He is analyzing a document that has been declassified. There is absolutely no reason for the Post to give him anonymity, except to promote the neoconservative project of torture as the core means for the war against terrorism.

The fight for America to remain a torturing nation is resilient. It's what the neocons believe in: the torture of terror suspects, especially Arab or Muslim ones, even if there is no imminent threat of a WMD (and the interrogations found that al Qaeda was nowhere near a nuclear capacity). The Post omits but for one quote the fact that many regarded many of his claims after being tortured as being false. Here's how the WaPo deals with this dynamic: "Not all of it was accurate, but it was quite extensive." They omit KSM's statement to the International Red Cross that he gave large amounts of disinformation as well. And look at what the report said it discovered through torture:

Mohammed told interrogators that after the Sept. 11 attacks, his "overriding priority" was to strike the United States, but that he "realized that a follow-on attack would be difficult because of security measures." Most of the plots, as a result, were "opportunistic and limited," according to the summary.

So the US became a torturing nation to avoid plots that were "opportunistic and limited." Remember how the chief intellectual architect of the torture apparatus, Charles Krauthammer, defended torture solely in the case of ticking time bomb? There were no ticking time bombs, but the US used torture anyway. The lone hypothetical became instantly a rationale for torturing and abusing anyone for any reason suspected of being a terrorist. The rare exception became an ongoing government program of torture, absent any imminent threat of the scale that Krauthammer used to defend an elite cadre of professional torturers.

The fight must go on, as it must against the forces resisting every other kind of change in Washington, change that the American people insisted upon last fall. And the more vulnerable many neocons sense Obama is in the polls, the more furiously they will go about playing the Dolchstoss card, accusing the president of allying with terrorists to kill the American people. After the next attack, they will not blame al Qaeda, they will blame Obama. And they will do all they can to restore torture as the pre-eminent form of interrogation for the leader of the free world. This is the threat we face. Electing Obama was just the start of restoring the US as a nation governed by the rule and core moral decency. We are learning that more acutely with every day that passes.