KSM’s Confession

It doesn’t ring true. Robert Baer explains why. Money quote:

I’m told by people involved in the investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl’s execution but was in fact not the person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM’s role. And if KSM did indeed exaggerate his role in the Pearl murder, it raises the question of just what else he has exaggerated, or outright fabricated.

The fruit of torture is bad intelligence. The point of torture is always and only torture.

Bobby and Marilyn II

A reader writes:

The Bobby Kennedy-Marilyn Monroe allegations have been bouncing around in the public prints for 30 years now and we are no closer today than we ever were to knowing whether there is any basis for them. It does not surprise me in the slightest to find that the story appears in RFK’s FBI file. This is precisely the kind of unverified calumny that Hoover trafficked in. As for the "sheer detail" of the reports, that to me adds nothing to their credence.

Another writes:

I’m a researcher and doc filmmaker who has researched Ms. Monroe extensively since childhood and AP’d a PBS American Masters documentary on her last year – Marilyn Monroe: Still Life. The new FBI document is not new at all.  I downloaded it years ago from the FBI’s site.  That particular document cannot be authenticated. If it were true, you can bet the FBI would not be publishing it.

But it was in the FBI files, right?

Quote for the Day

Yoomandelnganafpgetty

"Death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them. I don’t see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don’t have an absolute prohibition on killing. Reasonable people will disagree about when torture is justified. But that, in some circumstances, it is justified seems to me to be just moral common sense. How could it be better that 10,000 or 50,000 or a million people die than that one person be injured?" – John Yoo, defending the torture he helped legalize under Bush.

Yoo also seemed to confirm that waterboarding has been used by the Bush administration and is still being used:

"Does water-boarding (inducing the perception of drowning in someone to make him talk) inflict serious pain?" Yoo asks. "I doubt that the CIA thinks that it does … or that it is going to stop using the technique, if the stakes are high enough." So despite the new law, the old tactics will be available? "I think so. And more important, so do they …"

Marty Lederman comments here. Yoo seems completely unaware of just war theory. There is an obvious distinction between the killing necessary in a just war – killing that should  nonetheless be minimized and directed solely at legitimate military targets – and torturing defenseless detainees who are already under your complete control. With Yoo, one is tempted to wonder what is worse: his ignorance of basic moral concepts, his support for any means necessary against terrorism, his empowrement at the highest levels of the Bush administration, or the completely dispassionate way in which he discusses the most horrifying acts of sadism and cruelty. One day, we must find a way to bring this war criminal to justice.

(Photo of John Yoo, chief architect of the Bush torture policy, by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

“Covert”

I have gotten dizzy trying to keep a grip on the various uses and meaning of the word "covert" in the Plame case. Like you, I’m not an expert. But I don’t think you have to accept the maximal claims of either side to see what happened. The bottom line is that there was some doubt about how covert she was – even within the Bush administration. They knew they were very close to the line, if not over it. Hence the bizarre and convoluted downlow media strategy in leaking the information. All that matters to me is their motive. It seems to me clear that at the very least, Rove, Bush and Cheney knew they were playing with fire when they targeted Plame. They thought the journalists would never testify, and they thought they could get away with it. It seems like recklessness to me. The key question for me is why they were so prepared to be so reckless. Was Cheney just furious at being misrepresented in the media? Or did he see knocking down two-bit Wilson as essential to preventing his bad faith with respect to WMD intelligence being exposed? Maybe he feared that if the media pulled at this string, others might get pulled as well. I don’t know. Either scenario is plausible. And they’re not mutually exclusive. Maybe Cheney was furious and his fury promoted the reckless strategy. And maybe the fury was intensified by knowledge of his own deception.

As time goes by, I’m more inclined to believe that Cheney knew he had deceived the country with respect to WMDs (perhaps with good intentions, fearing the worst, but still knowingly parlaying theories as facts), was alarmed when the military couldn’t find even token stockpiles to justify pre-war intelligence, and over-reacted by outing an agent whose covert status was unclear. That’s why this still matters. It points to the question of bad faith in persuading a country to go to war. Nothing in this case has added to the evidence of good faith on Cheney’s part. And much has pointed in the opposite direction. The charge, if true, is impeachable.

Conservatives Against “24”

Once again, The American Conservative leads the way. Money quote:

The devotion to "24" and its protagonist demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility. As escapism, "24" is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting.

Rod Dreher comments here. Money quote:

One can certainly understand the attraction of a Bauer figure in these times, just as Dirty Harry was completely understandable as an expression of the popular anxiety of the 1970s. But as Dougherty points out with reference to Bauer, it’s a dangerous temptation for conservatives to accept and esteem a fantasy figure who breaks the law — especially the moral law (e.g., torture) — in the service of his mission. And conservatives are very quick (and quite accurate) to argue, when it comes to sexuality, that the content of popular culture has real-world consequences by making acceptable previously taboo ideas. As the Jane Mayer piece cited by Dougherty pointed out, "24"’s valorization of torture is having an impact.

I watched Rory Kennedy’s HBO documentary, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," all the way through last night. What she captures best is the chronology of it all, something that seems more damning when viewed from a distance – the initial authorization of torture by the president, the widespread understanding by the torturers at Abu Ghraib themselves that they were doing what Rumsfeld wanted, the techniques at Abu Ghraib spelled out in memos, the move of Miller from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to Gitmoize the place through torture, Rumsfeld’s temper-tantrum at the lack of good intel from Iraq as his war collapsed beneath him – and then the lies Rumsfeld blatantly told to Congress. In retrospect, Rumsfeld’s mastery of the bureaucracy worked. His handling of the fallout from Abu Ghraib was masterful. Even now, no one has been held responsible up the chain of command. Even now, many Americans still don’t realize that Abu Ghraib reflected presidential policy. The mistake was in letting anyone find out about it – and, without those photographs, you can be sure that torture advocates, like Charles Krauthammer, would be denying anything of this sort took place at all. The torture bill last year gave legal impunity to Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Yoo, Cambone and Gonzales. A full independent inquiry is still necessary. The next president should demand one.