Category: Old Dish

Could it be paying off? Kos has backed Schwarzenegger’s attempt to end the partisan gerrymandering of California’s districts; now the LA Times is endorsing his bid to curtail the political clout of public sector unions.

So far, the base is evenly split between those who support her and those who don’t know enough yet to say.

Here’s Senator Wayne Allard’s explanation for why he opposes an amendment to the military appropriations bill that would codify in law the existing ban on torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees:

As you know, the incidents of torture and abuse of military detainees captured in the efforts of the Global War on Terror continue to make headlines in the media. Such acts are despicable and deplorable and are not representative of our armed forces. Those who have committed such acts in the past have violated more than the Army’s regulations for interrogation, they have rejected the very values this nation holds dear.

The President and the Secretary of Defense have made it very clear to our military men and women that the United States does not condone torture, and has punished those who have committed such acts. In the wake of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, the Defense Department has conducted 12 major reviews into detainee operations. There have been more than 500 criminal investigations and 30 congressional hearings, resulting in career-ending actions of the commanding general and the commanding officer of the military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib.

Furthermore, codifying the Army field manual, as required by the McCain amendment, does not right the wrongs committed by those individuals who were clearly acting outside of the Army’s existing regulations and the laws of our country. In fact, in my mind, all it does is tie the hands of the Department of Defense at a time when maximum flexibility within the boundaries of the U.S. law is needed.

If the amendment does nothing but add legislative force behind existing administration policy, how does it “tie the hands” of the president? Why wouldn’t a president, horrified by accounts of abuse and torture, not embrace extra emphasis from the Congress on the same matter? If he wants to be “very clear,” why wouldn’t he be delighted by Congressional support?

A useful summary of the state-of-play from Tom Maguire.

I’m not ignoring what looks like a big success. It’s just that in order to judge whether the Sunni vote really did split, which is the critical issue, we need more accurate data than we now have. I don’t want to be premature. But it’s encouraging simply to witness a largely peaceful exercise of mass democracy in an Arab-Muslim country. For the second time. That in itself is a positive sign.

She even succeeded in delaying her own story with the result that 100,000 copies of the national edition of the paper couldn’t include the package. Why hasn’t she been fired?

Could marijuana actually help long and short-term memory? New research offers some surprising clues. Meanwhile, in Bush’s America, marijuana arrests continue to spiral upwards. There are now more arrests for mere pot possession than for violent crime. The whole policy is insane.

THE TORTURE STRUGGLE: Here’s a simple question. Since, according to the president, the United States doesn’t torture anyone or apply cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to detainees as a matter of policy, why would he threaten to veto a bill that merely outlines what is already illegal under our existing obligations? Hmmm. He doesn’t want his hands tied, so to speak? He means tied by the law and the existing codes in the army field manual? But why on earth would he ever need to circumvent those if he doesn’t endorse cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees? Meanwhile, of the nine pro-torture senators, three are on the House-Senate conference committee responsible for coming up with a final amendment to the military appopriations bill. The amendment is in dange of actually codifying torture in some respects, if those senators get their way. Marty Lederman explains why here.

There’s an important new piece in the Scottish Sunday Herald. It’s important because it has two on-the-record sources: the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, who set up the rendition program for alleged terrorists under Clinton and saw its evolution under Bush; and Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who saw the rendition program first-hand in one of its more notorious locations. Two points are absolutely clear. The United States under president Bush has a pro-torture policy. The U.S. now uses torture – both by its own officials and out-sourced to grotesque dictatorships like that in Uzbekistan. Money quote from Scheuer:

“You’d think I’m an ass if I said nobody was tortured. There was more of a willingness in the White House to turn a blind eye to the legal niceties than within the CIA. The Agency always knew it would be left holding the baby for this one.”

The reason for the original White House memos, redefining torture into meaninglessness, was precisely CIA resistance to White House pressure to torture captives. The CIA torturers wanted legal and political cover. They got it. The second point is that torture was invariably useless as an intelligence extracter. As Scheuer confides, “[W]e never expected to get anything from interrogations. Al-Qaeda are trained to fight the jihad from their jail cells, they are masters of counter-interrogation. They’ll give you old information or false information. The CIA never felt it would help to torture these people.” The decision to allow torture was not a rational one; it was irrational. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan outlines what went on:

“In Uzbekistan, it works like this. Person X is tortured and signs a statement saying he’s going to crash planes into buildings, or that he’s linked to Osama bin Laden. He’s also asked if he knows persons X, Y and Z in the UK who are involved in terrorism. He’ll be tortured until he agrees, though he’s never met them.”
The confession is sent to the CIA where, according to Murray, it is ‘sanitised’. Before sanitisation the report “will have the guy’s name on it, the date of the interrogation, where it took place – and might still be bloodstained. The CIA then issues a debriefing document, which does not name the individual. It does not say he was tortured. It only says that it is a detainee debriefing from a friendly overseas security service. This will set out the brief facts, such as ‘we now know person X in London is in Islamic Jihad and plans to blow up Canary Wharf’. This goes to MI6 – the British and Americans share everything – and then it goes to MI6’s customers: the Prime Minister, the defence secretary, the home secretary, the foreign secretary, and other key ministers and officials. I was one of these customers too because I was the ambassador to Tashkent. I’d look at these reports and, to be frank, I realised they were bollocks. One talked about terror camps in the hills near Samarkand. I knew the precise location being talked about and it wasn’t true.”

We sold our soul for nothing. Nat Hentoff has more to say here.

HECHT VERSUS HECHT: The man closest to Harriet Miers has different views, depending on whether he’s talking in private to fellow conservatives or in public. Quote One:

“What followed, according to the notes, was a free-wheeling discussion about many topics, including same-sex marriage. Justice Hecht said he had never discussed that issue with Ms. Miers. Then an unidentified voice asked the two men, “Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?”

“Absolutely,” said Judge Kinkeade.

“I agree with that,” said Justice Hecht. “I concur.”

Quote Two:

Justice Hecht also said he couldn’t predict how Ms. Miers might vote on a challenge to Roe v. Wade.

“If you’re asking, ‘Is she going vote to overrule Roe v. Wade, or Lawrence v. Texas [a 2003 decision striking down Texas’ law against same-sex sodomy], I don’t know that you can ask anyone that because you don’t know until you are there.”

So which is it? Time to ask Mr Hecht again, no? (Hat tip: Info-theory.)

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller. I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her … She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,” and “tried to stampede it into the paper.” – former NYT contract reporter, Craig Pyes, in a 2000 memo to NYT editors, after working with Miller in Iraq on a story about WMDs.

At least Ramesh is honest, with somewhat forced cheeriness, in the NYT. Limbaugh’s “state-of-conservatism” piece reads like something an aide to Andropov might have written in the waning years of the Soviet Union. We still get exhausted, dead-as-a-parrot cliches like this one:

The left, on the other hand, sees the courts as the only way to advance their big-government agenda.

How many ways does this sentence not make sense? Limbaugh later details how “the left” is actually divided in a hundred ways. If it is split into warring factions, why is it so monolithic a few paragraphs earlier? And the relationship between the Supreme Court and the expansion of government spending and power is, shall we say, strained. If anything, the Court has been the only brake on the Bush administration’s astonishing expansion of government power. Maybe the memo never made it to Rush, so let’s see if we can get this through to him: it was the “held-in-contempt” Bill Clinton who reduced the size of government; it is your president and the conservative movement that has expanded it at a faster clip than at any time since FDR. That’s not an opinion. It’s what is called a fact. Deal with it. Or you too will never haul yourself out of the past.

Where has he been these past two months? And is he really coming back? Some speculation on my part here.