Andrew Sullivan

The Government Keeps The Lights On

https://twitter.com/TheFix/status/543434538266157056

Despite fierce opposition from both the left and the right, the “Cromnibus” (a portmanteau of “continuing resolution” and “omnibus”) spending bill passed the House last night, averting a government shutdown by mere hours:

Thanks in part to a rare alliance between President Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner, the House voted Thursday to pass a $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the government, clearing a hurdle to avoid an otherwise imminent government shutdown. The House also passed a measure that will fund the government for two additional days in order to give the Senate time to approve the legislation before the government runs out of funding on Friday, according to NBC News.

At the eleventh hour, Obama and Boehner scrambled to salvage the bill – which passed by a vote of 219 to 206 – amid a Republican revolt over immigration and a Democratic revolt over provisions that would deregulate Wall Street and increase the amount that individual donors can contribute to national political party committees.

Ben Jacobs outlines what the respective revolts were all about:

The pill that Democrats had trouble swallowing was a provision rolling back Dodd-Frank that would allow major banks to carry out certain risky derivatives trades through funds insured by the FDIC.

The idea of weakening financial reform only years after a financial crisis that almost brought down the American economy alarmed many Democrats. … The opponents in the GOP caucus were the usual conservative suspects, upset about the fact that the bill did not defund Obama’s executive order on undocumented immigrants.

Republicans were also less than thrilled that the bill didn’t slash funding for Obamacare. The Democratic revolt was led by the party’s liberal populist wing, with Nancy Pelosi leading the pack and Senator Elizabeth Warren urging them on. Tim Fernholz has the details on what liberal Dems found so irksome about the Dodd-Frank rule change:

The big financial firms that dominate the swaps markets were particularly unhappy with rules preventing them from holding or trading derivatives within their federally insured bank subsidiaries—where they typically have an advantage. (That’s because the prospect of government bailouts arguably affords the bank subsidiaries higher credit ratings, which comes in handy when you’re playing in the swaps market.)

Facing the prospect of having their derivatives activities “pushed out” to subsidiaries unprotected by federal deposit insurance, the big banks pushed back. During the drafting of Dodd-Frank, they succeeded in keeping some categories of swaps in-house, including foreign-exchange, gold, silver, and interest-rate swaps. But the banks earned a bigger victory in 2013 by getting the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass a bill essentially written by Citigroup lobbyists to create large exemptions in the rule. It turns out the same language was slipped into the current spending bill[.]

Matt O’Brien weighs in:

This actually isn’t that big a deal, but the principle is. Think about it this way. If insured banks can’t make these bets, then uninsured ones will—and we’d still have to bail them out if they threaten to bring down the whole financial system. But as long as we’re talking about run-of-the-mill, and not end-of-the-world, losses, then we, as taxpayers, should clearly prefer for these swaps to happen in the uninsured banks. That way, we don’t have to foot the, admittedly small, bill. And this isn’t really a debate. There’s no real counterargument that I’m aware of why it’d be better for the mega-banks to be allowed to take more risks with taxpayer-insured money (other than it’d be good for their bonuses).

Sarah Binder questions whether the drama was worth it for the Democrats:

My hunch is that Pelosi is too smart a politician and knows her caucus too well to have been surprised by the outcome. True to form, Pelosi provided cover for Democrats seeking to show their anti-Wall Street bona fides, yet managed not to derail a bipartisan deal (that was bound to be better for Democratic priorities than kicking the can into the new Congress with a 2-3 month stop gap spending bill).

Did Warren’s gambit put the liberal wing on stronger footing in the coming Congress? I’m skeptical. Warren clearly put Democratic party leaders and her colleagues on notice that she will continue to oppose measures that unduly advantage Wall Street interests. But unless she can secure stronger backing from the White House (and her colleagues), I suspect that the liberal wing of the Democratic party will face a tough road ahead in a Republican-led Congress.

But Cillizza thinks Pelosi got her point across:

Pelosi — and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who spoke out forcefully against it too — lost the battle on the spending bill. But, they may have won the wider war — or at least scored a tactical victory that puts her and the party’s liberal wing in a stronger position come the 114th Congress.

What Pelosi’s revolt made clear is that while there will be more Republicans in the House and Senate come January, nothing can get done (or at least nothing can get done easily) without some portion of liberal Democrats on board. This was a warning to the White House and Senate Democrats not to cut Pelosi out or take her (or her liberal Democratic allies) for granted going forward. Point made.

Drum is relieved that bipartisanship worked in the end – albeit in its typical, clunky way:

This is one of those things that demonstrates the chasm between political activists and analysts on the one side, and working politicians on the other. If you take a look at the bill, it does indeed have a bunch of objectionable features. People like me, with nothing really at stake, can bitch and moan about them endlessly. But you know what? For all the interminable whining we do about the death of bipartisanship in Washington, this is what bipartisanship looks like. It always has. It’s messy, it’s ugly, and it’s petty. Little favors get inserted into bills to win votes. Other favors get inserted as payback for the initial favors. Special interests get stroked. Party whips get a workout.

That’s politics. The fact that it’s happening right now is, in a weird sense, actually good news. It means that, for a few days at least, politics is working normally again.

The Torture Regime’s Attack On Religious Freedom

Michael Peppard searches for religion-themed abuses in the torture report:

My own research on torture in U.S. detention facilities has emphasized the religious aspects of abuse (“The Secret Weapon” and “Disgrace“). And though today’s report does not contain as much along these lines as did the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report in 2009, it does analyze assertions made by CIA Director Hayden in 2007 about the role of religion in “enhanced interrogation.” … The new report does not describe the many techniques of religiously-themed abuse that I compiled from ex-detainee memoirs and interviews in 2007-08, nor does it extend our knowledge from the 2009 report, which admitted techniques such as forced prostration before an idol shrine to generate “religious disgrace.”

But what Hayden’s comments do show is that using religion as a weapon in prolonged psychological warfare was an actual “policy” – not a result of agents gone rogue. The goal was to create a burden so great that a person’s religious faith would be destroyed. Nothing could be further from our country’s founding principle.

And yet white evangelicals in America are the most supportive of this grotesque attack on the principle of religious freedom and conscience. Dreher is disturbed by these findings:

[T]o take a captured prisoner, even one we can reasonably be certain has done evil things from religious motivation, and compel him to desecrate his religion, is to my Christian mind one of the most evil things that one human being can do to another. That the history of the Church shows Muslims have done this to Christians again and again and again does not make it right. It is always and everywhere a manifestation of utter barbarism.

No Christian can believe otherwise. And the core Christian point here is that even the worst terrorist remains a human being. He can be fought, brought to justice, jailed and even killed in lawful combat. But he cannot be reduced to a sub-human level. No one can. And to treat another human being as an object to be violated even when under your total control dehumanizes the torturer as surely as the tortured. It is total power. The entire agency of a human being is taken from him or her. And that is what American did to countless of human beings – and even now it is hard to find any tone of actual remorse among those responsible.

The War Crimes The CIA Has Admitted

Yesterday, Brennan acknowledged that, “in a limited number of instances, agency officers used interrogation techniques that had not been authorized, were abhorrent, and rightly should be repudiated by all.” Friedersdorf asks why those officers are going unpunished:

If CIA officers did abhorrent things that even their waterboarding colleagues managed to avoid, exceeding the orders and legal strictures they were given, why haven’t they been prosecuted for torture as a duly ratified treaty compels the U.S. to do? Why hasn’t Brennan ever remedied the failure to hold those men accountable? Why has he allowed people even he regards as criminals to remain at the CIA?

The reason is that he does not believe the rule of law should apply to the CIA.

Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden, and Brennan make a big show of invoking the legal cover given by John Yoo and others, as if they respect the rule of law. But beneath the posturing, they oppose jailing CIA officers no matter what, perhaps because those officers know things that could put them in prison. Among torturers, there can be only one code: Stop Snitchin’. Do you think that I exaggerate? As The Week notes, the only person in jail over CIA torture is a man who tried to expose it.

The CIA is above the law. It can do anything because it can also hide anything. It took years of extraordinary hard work and political struggle to get the Senate Report out – and the CIA did all it could to derail it. It was delayed for two years as the CIA objected and objected and redacted and redacted. The president, through John Kerry, tried to kill it at the last minute. And when it is revealed that 26 human beings were tortured – because of mistaken identity – no one is disciplined. No one. When someone is tortured to death, the officer in charge of the torture camp is promoted. There is simply no other institution that exists that has this level of utter impunity under the law. And that puts the CIA in a more powerful position even than the president. If the president breaks the law, he can be prosecuted and even impeached. If the CIA does, it can hide that fact, and even if it is exposed, can escape any consequences.

What I simply don’t understand is how conservatives – those most skeptical of the power and reach of big government – are not appalled by this state of affairs. It is the biggest threat to our liberty and constitution around. And yet they defend it. And find excuses for it. And even celebrate it.

(Photo: CIA director John Brennan speaks during a press conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, December 11, 2014. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Dating Site Of The Day

https://twitter.com/tylerowens22/status/534196247234879488

A reader flags “Bristlr: connecting those with beards to those who want to stroke beards”:

I shit you not.

The guy who told me about this, well, let’s just say he could be in the running for Beard of the Week any week, a guy who worked in a backcountry, off-the-grid lodging facility and ran beard-shaping equipment off solar power.

Bonus Sully bait: beard baubles for Christmas.

Would You Report Your Rape? Ctd

From the reader who shared in August her story of rape:

I’m writing you back on the topic of rape once again, but it’s important and I’m glad you continue to have this conversation and that you are focusing on the real issues, and dissecting them, especially now that the UVA story has muddied the waters for so many.

I also didn’t report my rape. If I could explain why in one simple sentence, I’d say this: because my brain didn’t have space for a fight, or a crusade, or a trial. It was too busy dealing with having just been raped. Believe me, that’s plenty to absorb. Living quietly in shame felt like the default, not going straight to the police.

To put it another way, I’ll refer you back to the marvelous essay “No. No. No.” you posted from the reader recounting her horrific rape:

Rather than openly confront what had happened, I tried to bury it. I couldn’t say anything. I wasn’t worried about what would happen to him; I was worried about what would happen to me. … I never wanted to be a victim, even though that’s what I was. It’s why so many of us don’t tell a soul, especially initially. You figure if no one knows they can’t look at you differently or treat you differently than they had before. You won’t receive their looks of pity, or even worse, some sense of skepticism or disbelief. They won’t see you as damaged, somehow less than the woman you were before. Even though that’s how you feel.

That’s exactly right. Or think about it in terms of cost vs benefits. The benefit of putting your rapist in jail, or at least getting him thrown out of school, is not small. It means knowing he will pay for what he did to you and that he will be less likely to do the same to another woman. That’s not nothing.

But the costs are also great, and it’s all of the things mentioned above and more. Add in the less than 50/50 chance you have of getting a conviction, or even having people believe you. The prospect of going through all of that (in my case, while I tried to get through my freshman year of college) without much of a chance of success, knowing it would turn into a he said/she said, tilted the balance for me – even if we pretend I was making calm, rational decisions at that point!

Then add in how the people around you, especially the men but also the women, will perceive you once you go public, how their opinions will change and how they need to treat you will change, and it tilts the balance toward not reporting further. I didn’t want to be “the girl who’d been raped.” I knew that I would be. So, from two bad options, and at a horrible, vulnerable time, I choose not to report.

To put it more accurately, it chose me. That brings with it another level of pain. Or as that woman put it:

And yes, part of the shame is knowing I did nothing to hold him to account, and that I may have put other women at risk by not doing so. …So, add that on to the shame of something I’m not guilty of, that I didn’t ask for.

Right again. Let’s not pretend that not reporting is some great weight off our shoulders. It wasn’t for me, and I know it isn’t for other women in these situations. Not reporting, not standing up, adds another layer of shame on to what’s already happened. It made me feel weak all over again. It still does. Do I sometimes wish I’d made a different choice? Yup, I do. I try not to second guess myself because it hurts too much, and because it’s over. Mostly.

Hope that helps. It’s one more story anyway. Much love to you guys. You’re the best site on the Internet!

We just have the best readers. More of their stories here.

Gun Control Continues To Lose Ground

As the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting approaches, Emily Badger observes that public opinion has shifted strongly in favor of gun rights over gun control:

For the first time since Pew began asking the question two decades ago, a majority of Americans now say that gun rights are more important than gun control — a striking shift in public opinion over both the last generation and just the last few years. As recently as December 2012, in the immediate aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, 51 percent of people surveyed by Pew said it was more important to control gun ownership than protect the rights of gun owners.

That consensus has since disappeared, confirming the fears of many gun-control advocates that outrage after Newtown wouldn’t last long.

What’s most striking in Pew’s new data is that views have shifted more in favor of gun rights since then among nearly every demographic group, including women, blacks, city-dwellers, parents, college graduates, millennials and independents. The two groups that haven’t budged? Hispanics and liberal Democrats.

Aaron Blake adds:

While the numbers are striking, this isn’t really all that new.

Polls have long shown this trend toward gun rights over gun control.

Here’s Gallup’s version. In 2000, 62 percent wanted stricter gun control. Today, it’s 47 percent, and 52 percent either want gun laws kept as their are or scaled back. Those numbers are essentially the same as Pew’s. You’ll notice the blip on Gallup’s chart in 2013. That was in the immediate aftermath of Newtown. For a short time, people wanted more gun control. But it was just a blip, and the underlying currents of the gun issue didn’t change.

As Mark Follman points out, school shootings haven’t stopped happening – they just don’t get as much press as Newtown did:

In the two years since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, no school shooting has claimed as many lives, nor ones as young, as on that terrible day. But fatal gun attacks at schools and on college campuses remain a fixture of American life. They have occurred once every five weeks on average since Sandy Hook, including two attacks—one in Santa Monica and another near Seattle—in which four or more victims were killed. With an investigation drawing on data from dozens of news reports, Mother Jones has identified and analyzed 21 deadly school shootings in the past two years. … During the same period, there have been dozens of other gun incidents on school grounds that caused injuries, as well as seven additional cases where someone committed suicide with a firearm, but no one else died.

Morrissey thinks Obama had a chance for a constructive compromise with the pro-gun camp but blew it by asking too much:

Had the White House and its activist allies limited their push to expanded background checks, they probably would have succeeded. The NRA doesn’t oppose background checks as long as they are not so onerous as to deny people the right to possess firearms responsibly. However, the White House and Bloomberg exploited Newtown to push for a renewed assault-weapons ban and restrictions on handguns and magazines, only retreating to background checks after those efforts largely failed. By pushing for a broad gun-control regime, the White House lost any support from Republicans they might have otherwise had, and poisoned the well for any future efforts.

How The Establishment Picks Its Candidate

Ponnuru takes us through the process:

Why do the donors and bigwigs settle on their candidate earlier than the activists do? Partly because they’re more concerned about picking a winner. Compared to Tea Party ralliers, their support is more of an investment and less of a statement. The most ideologically minded Republicans are willing to back longshot candidates like Herman Cain (the former Godfather’s Pizza executive, never elected to anything, who ran for the nomination last time). The big-money people in the party are less sentimental. They might have liked Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, who also ran last time. But they never saw any signs he could win, and so they never helped him.

The donor class, as a rule, doesn’t seek a candidate with whom it can fall in love.

Hans Hassell presents his findings on candidate selection:

Can parties essentially limit the field of candidates presented to primary voters? My research suggests that they do. …

This isn’t to say that party coordination is easy. As one former Democratic party chair explained to me, “It’s more shifting coalitions, rather than a center, command and control type of model. As chair, I remember walking around often saying ‘Where’s the back room? Where’s the room where I get to go smoke cigars and make all the decisions, because I haven’t found the door.’”

Will a small group of elite GOP donors clear the 2016 presidential field for a particular candidate, whoever that may be? That remains to be seen. But it is clear that parties do have the ability to do so if they can agree on such a candidate.

Bernstein chips in:

Especially on the Republican side, you hear a lot of talk about “establishment” Republicans. There’s no guarantee, however, that any particular faction will win intraparty contests. It’s best to see previous winners, Bob Dole and John McCain and Mitt Romney, as having been acceptable to a broad range of party actors, rather than think of those three as having been anointed by a cabal of “establishment” insiders.

America’s History Of Torture

Beinart wants us to face it:

In the 19th century, American slavery relied on torture. At the turn of the 20th, when America began assembling its empire overseas, the U.S. army waterboarded Filipinos during the Spanish-American War. As part of the Phoenix Program, an effort to gain intelligence during the Vietnam War, CIA-trained interrogators delivered electric shocks to the genitals of some Vietnamese communists, and raped, starved, and beat others.

He argues that “when you claim that the United States is intrinsically moral, and torture therefore represents an aberration, you undermine the fight against such practices”:

Being a successful American politician today requires declaring that America is different, blessed, exceptional. Thus, when other countries torture, it reflects their basic character. When we torture, it violates ours. But the wisest American thinkers have found a way to reconcile this need to feel special with the recognition that, as human beings, Americans are just as fallen as everyone else. In the mid-20th century, men like Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr argued that, paradoxically, the more Americans recognized their sinfulness, and restrained it within systems of law, the more America would prove its superiority over those totalitarian systems that refused such restraints.

(Caption from The New Yorker: “A picture of a “water detail,” reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. “It is a terrible torture,” one soldier wrote. Credit attributed to Corporal George J. Vennage/Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library)

Can Southern Democrats Still Compete? Ctd

Sean Trende weighs in on the question:

There are no permanent majorities in politics. An unpopular Republican president would move the needle. A Democratic fundraising base that chose not to go nuclear on a Democratic candidate who opposed Obamacare or the stimulus would have done it. A more culturally “red” Democratic nominee would help.

The voters who elected Phil Bredesen governor of Tennessee by 40 points are largely still around, as are the people who elected Mike Beebe governor of Arkansas by 30 points in 2010 and 14 points in 2006. The same goes for the folks who sent Landrieu and Hagan back to the Senate in 2008, or Blanche Lincoln in 2004. The people who elected a swath of moderate-to-conservative Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are still there.

The party just has to try to appeal to them, or at least give more latitude to its candidates to appeal to them, as Rahm Emanuel did in 2006.

The bad news for Southern Democrats is that Democrats aren’t likely to do this anytime soon, and if they did, they’d pay a price. Politics, again, is about tradeoffs, and by appealing to a more downscale coalition, Democrats would sacrifice enthusiasm gains among their new coalition. As I’ve said before, if Hillary Clinton had been the nominee in 2008, Mitch McConnell might not have been a senator in 2009, but Gordon Smith might have survived in Oregon. National Democrats don’t seem inclined to make this tradeoff anytime soon (plus, the wipeouts have left Democrats without much of a bench in these states), and the zeitgeist seems to be against it.

The South isn’t a lost cause for Democrats if they don’t want it to be one. Their problem is that the national party doesn’t seem to care right now if it is one, and there are clear electoral benefits from focusing elsewhere.

But Tomasky continues to argue that the South is a lost cause:

[T]he way the Democratic Party can best help the poor people of Mississippi is to control Congress and the White House. So the point is to win those. With respect to the White House, no one can guarantee anything of course, but at least the Democrats do have these days a built-in Electoral College advantage.

As for congressional majorities, I say it’s far more likely they’ll win them in the North and on the West coast, and to some extent in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states, than via the South. And if they ever get that majority, they will (one hopes) pass progressive laws, and those laws will benefit the people who live in the South.

So I’m not for abandoning the people of the South. I’m just saying the best way to help them is by building a congressional majority in the quickest and easiest way possible, and that, alas, is not through the South.

Neal Dewing disagrees with Tomasky:

Naturally, in light of what I know to be true about Southern people, Tomasky’s article struck me as peevish and small-minded. Yet beyond the offense to honor he intended with his unfair description of Dixie, Tomasky seemed to be advising Democrats to abandon all strategic electoral sense along with the South. Far be it from me to offer aid and succor to my ideological opposites, but this idea just seems too ill-conceived to be allowed to live. The following may be a reductive assertion, and I invite any professional political operatives to correct my ignorance, but:

1. If you allow your opponent to march unopposed to victory in one area,

2. Then he is free to commit the resources he might have spent there to other areas, where he has a real fight on his hands,

3. Therefore, it is unwise to simply abandon the field.

Kilgore’s take:

Yes, the realignment of southern rural and small-town whites is now virtually complete. The possibility of a “replacement” Democratic coalition depends on how many retirees, secular suburbanites, transplants, knowledge workers, and of course minority voters are in any one place, and sometimes it also depends on real-life events such as GOP misgovernment. That’s another reason I see no need for Democrats to “Dump Dixie,” though they’d be foolish to consider most of it anything other than missionary territory at the moment.

Update from a reader:

Tomasky is right. The South is a lost cause for Democrats for the foreseeable future. Whether or not Johnson actually made his famous quote after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the prediction of a mass migration in the South from D to R was uncannily accurate. In fact, it was probably an understatement.

Having lived in the South for much of my life, I’ve witnessed the transformation, which I attribute to the entire civil rights movement from Brown v Board of Education to Engel and Abington to the Civil Rights Act to school busing to Roe v Wade (yes, I think that fits within civil rights) to more recent developments like gay marriage. Sure, it took a couple of generations, but that has more to do with the habits of the American voter than anything else. All those older voters who voted down party lines for Democrats and would never dream of voting Republican (like my grandmother) had to die off while the generations that followed began Republican and will probably be so for life. It took 100 years or so after the Civil War for the South to start moving towards the Republicans, and I expect the current party affiliation of the South will outlive all of us. Bill Clinton blurred the lines a little bit in the ’90s, but Obama has successfully righted the narrative just by his existence.

So, why did civil rights prompt such a transformation? Well, racism. But that’s a little too easy. More broadly, fear. Economic insecurity. Fear of “The Other.” Fear of change. Fear of losing what they see as their God given prominence. That’s why the typical Southern voter, now a Republican, embraces the following sentiments:

1. Public education is bad. It’s poor quality, it’s dangerous for my children to attend, and it is a front for Godless liberal indoctrination. How dare they call the extermination of Native Americans genocide. Why are they talking about slavery so much, it was like 200 years ago? Why are they talking about natural selection and not creation? I want charter schools and school choice.

2. Christianity is the foundation of America and should be more heavily codified in schools and government, but liberals and activist judges have undermined Christianity’s rightful place as the national religion.

3. Science is its own religion. Evolution and global warming are hoaxes.

4. Gay marriage threatens civil society and is only talked about because the gay agenda is so good at propaganda and is supported by the liberals who control the federal government.

5. The Feds want to take away guns in order to exert further control over the population.

6. Obama hates America and white people, so it’s okay to hate him without being able to name a single thing Obama has done to justify that hatred.

7. I’m not racist. I have a black friend or two. I just think black people are lazy and entitled, and they’re just not generally as smart as other races, but the government gives them advantages over me out of guilt and to buy their votes. Black people and self loathing white guilt liberals are the real racists.

8. I’m fine with disparities in capital punishment, race based disenfranchisement, and police shootings of unarmed civilians. Those only happen to “The Other” anyway, and they probably deserve it. People should stop whining about the little things.

9. Obamacare is a government takeover of healthcare and a giveaway to minorities.

10. The Democrats are responsible for all of the above.

Sounds silly, right? Overstated? It isn’t. They’re deadly serious. I know many otherwise reasonable people who believe the above. Fear does that to people, even if that fear is unfounded. That’s why Tomasky is right, at least until demographics overwhelm the South later this century.

Watching Cheney: He’s Got Nothing

[Re-posted from earlier today]

His interview last night is worth revisiting again. He says what he has previously said – adding nothing to the factual record, and addressing none of the specifics in the report. But he is also clearly rattled. He is used to proclaiming categorical truths about things he knows will never be made public. He is used to invoking what he says he knows from secret intelligence without any possibility of being contradicted. This interview is the first time he has made statements about torture that can be fact-checked by the record. And, he is proven to be a liar, as shown below.

When someone presents a public official with a large tranche of the CIA’s own documents and operational cables and internal memos, and that paper-trail contradicts previous statements by the public official, he has a couple of options. The first is to point out where any particular allegation is factually wrong, to show a flaw in the data, to defend himself factually from the claims presented. The second is to flail around, dodge any specifics and double-down on various talking points that evade the central facts at hand.

Cheney picked the second path. That tells you a huge amount, it seems to me. He doesn’t address abugrahib4_gallery-dish-SD the mountain of evidence. He is simply ruling it out of bounds – after admitting he hasn’t even read it! If you had a two-bit tax evader who is presented by the IRS with a tranche of his own tax records proving he was delinquent, and he simply insisted that he hadn’t read them and still emphatically denies the charge, he’s self-evidently guilty. Why is this not self-evidently the case with Cheney?

His response to the facts as documented is simply: I know otherwise. He gives no specifics. He merely invokes other CIA official denials as an authority – when they too are charged with war crimes. That’s like a gangster claiming he is innocent on the basis of his gang-members’ testimony. He blusters on. In a court of law, his performance would be, quite simply, risible as an act of self-defense. It becomes some primal scream version of “Because I said it worked!”

Now look at what else he said. He describes this as a classic example of politicians throwing the “professionals” under the bus. One is forced to ask: what professionals? All the professionals in interrogation in the military and the FBI were kept out of the torture program, which was assigned to two contractors, who assessed themselves, who had never interrogated anyone in their lives, and who had no linguistic or interrogation backgrounds. What this report does is throw the amateurs under the bus, and among those rank amateurs is Dick Cheney.

When Cheney is asked about a prisoner chained Abu_Ghraib_56 to the ceiling in a cell and forced to defecate on himself in a diaper, he says “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” As if that is relevant. If he hadn’t heard of such a thing, he should have. And if he hadn’t until this week, he could have read about it in the report. And then, revealingly, he immediately gets angry. He expresses no regret and no remorse about another human being’s unimaginable suffering. He cites the alternative to torture – legal powerful, effective interrogation that the report proves gave us great intelligence – as “kiss him on both cheeks and tell us, please, please tell us what you know”. Again, this is risible as an argument.

In fact, it is prima facie evidence that torture was used as a first resort, and it was a first resort because Cheney already knew it was the only way to get intelligence. How he knew we don’t know. No one in professional interrogation believed or believes it. So you have clear evidence that the decision to torture was taken early on – and nothing was allowed to stand in its way. This was an ideological decision – not a policy judgment based on evidence.

Here’s the truly revealing part. Cheney is told about a prisoner, Gul Rahman, who died after unimaginable brutality – beaten, kept awake for 48 hours, kept in total darkness for days, thrown into the Gestapo-pioneered cold bath treatment, and then chained to a wall and left to die of hypothermia. The factors in his death included “dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to ‘short chaining.” This is Cheney’s response:

3,000 Americans died on 9/11 because of what these guys did, and I have no sympathy for them. I don’t know the specific details … I haven’t read the report … I keep coming back to the basic, fundamental proposition: how nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3000 Americans?

But Gul Rahman had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 plot.

He had engaged in no plots to kill Americans. He was a guard to the Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, part of an organization that began by fighting the Soviets in occupied Afghanistan. It had alliances with al Qaeda at the time, but subsequently engaged in peace negotiations with the Karzai government. His brother claims Rahman was even involved in rescuing Hamid Kharzai in 1994. To equate him with individuals who committed mass murder of Americans or who were actively plotting against Americans is preposterous. He was emphatically not a threat to the US. Yet we tortured him to death. And the man running the torture camp was promoted thereafter.

To put it more bluntly, Cheney’s response is unhinged. It is suffused with indiscriminate rage which is indifferent to such standards as whether the prisoner is innocent or guilty, or even if he should be in a prison at all. He is acting out a revenge fantasy, no doubt fueled in part by the understanding that 3,000 Americans lost their lives because he failed to prevent it – when the facts were lying there in the existing surveillance and intelligence system and somehow never got put together.

What we have here is a staggering thing: the second highest official in a democracy, proud and unrepentant of war crimes targeted at hundreds of prisoners, equating every single one of the prisoners – including those who were victims of mistaken identity, including American citizens reading satirical websites, including countless who had nothing to do with any attacks on the US at all – with the nineteen plotters of one terror attack. We have a man who, upon being presented with a meticulous set of documents and facts, brags of not reading them and who continues to say things that are definitively disproved in the report by CIA documents themselves.

This is a man who not only broke the law and the basic norms of Western civilization, but who celebrates that. If this man is not brought to justice, the whole idea of justice in this country is a joke.

(Photos: scenes from Abu Ghraib prison, showing the results of torture techniques pioneered by Dick Cheney.)