Another Rescue Gone Wrong

Late Friday night, American photojournalist Luke Somers and a South African teacher Pierre Korkie, who were being held hostage in Yemen by al-Qaeda militants, were killed by their captors during a failed rescue attempt by US special forces:

It was the second U.S. attempt to free Somers in 10 days and Kerry said it had been approved because of information that Somers’ life was in imminent danger. “It was our assessment that that clock would run out on Saturday,” one U.S. official said. However, the Gift of the Givers relief group, which was trying to secure Korkie’s release, said it had negotiated for the teacher to be freed and had expected that to happen on Sunday and for him to be returned to his family.

Somers’s death, after two attempts to free him, has reignited the debate over whether the US’s policy of never paying ransoms for captives held by terrorist groups is appropriate. Joel Simon argues that it’s time to rethink that blanket prohibition:

The US government has said it will not review the prohibition on paying ransom, which I believe is a missed opportunity.

While I accept the US government’s logic that the payment of ransom increases the risk for kidnapping, there should be some flexibility built into the policy to address extenuating circumstances. The review should certainly explore ways to engage with hostage takers through other means. According to Diane Foley, her son’s kidnappers were angered by the fact that the US government refused to respond to their emails. Communication with kidnappers is not the same thing as negotiating with kidnappers. It is akin to the local police talking through a bullhorn to someone holding up a bank in order to buy time, gain intelligence, and seek a possible resolution. Talking should be a normal and natural response when lives are at stake.

But the Bloomberg View editors are still resolutely opposed to changing the policy:

Since 2008, the kidnapping-for-ransom industry has raised as much as $165 million for terrorist organizations, most of it paid by European governments. Those governments routinely deny making the payments, because they know it’s bad policy: It encourages further kidnappings, and it funds terrorist operations as well as the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East and Africa. It also contravenes multiple international commitments.

As for the U.S. and U.K. governments that ran the unsuccessful military raid, there are certainly questions as to how they failed to know that Korkie’s release was to happen on Saturday, or that he might be with Somers. But whatever the answers, they are irrelevant to the question of whether governments should ransom their citizens. That calculation remains the same: The only way to end the ransom business is to close the market.

Jonathan Tobin criticizes the South African charity that was working to ransom Korkie:

Unfortunately, the problem with ransoms is not limited to the aid the transactions give to the terrorists. By not coordinating with Western governments, the efforts of groups like the Gift of the Givers charity—the organization that was working for Korkie’s release—make it difficult, if not impossible for the U.S. military to avoid operations that might interfere with a hostage’s release. Instead of castigating the United States for a rescue operation that went wrong, those who, even for altruistic reasons, conduct negotiations that aid the terrorists are ultimately to blame.

Jazz Shaw zooms out:

I’m sure there will be some backlash since we failed to get Somers out alive, but given the circumstances it doesn’t sound like the odds were very good in the first place. A better question is what we should be doing about Yemen in the long run. The government there, such as it is, appears to be on the brink of collapse. Their leadership has been pointing their fingers at Washington and accusing the Obama administration of fomenting unrest. They lost control of their own capital, Sana, earlier this year to a group of rebels called the Houthis. Outside of a couple of major population centers, nobody is in control, which is probably what made it such an attractive destination for al Qaeda.

With no reliable governmental partner to work with, our options appear limited except for high risk military incursions such as this one. And until the larger problem of terrorist networks is dealt with, I’m afraid we can expect repeat performances of this raid in the future.

Would You Report Your Rape?

Danielle Campoamor shares her own experience:

I always thought that if I ever became a victim of sexual assault, I’d say something. I’d be the girl reporting it, sitting on a witness stand and pointing a defiant finger, just like the actresses on SVU. There wouldn’t be a second thought or a deliberate pause; I’d simply speak up because that’s, of course, what you do. And then I became a victim of sexual assault.

When the police officer was standing in front of me, a pad of paper in one hand and an overworked pen in the other, and asked me if I wanted to file charges, I paused. Tears were running down my cheeks and my legs wouldn’t stop shaking and my best friend’s hand, honorable in its intentions, failed to comfort me. The officer had already asked me how many drinks I had consumed. In fact, he asked me on three separate occasions. He had already asked what I could have possibly said or unintentionally inferred, prior to being forced onto a bed. He had already raised his eyebrows and tightened his lips and wrinkled his brow.

And a part of me already knew. So, I said no. I just wanted it over.

She did eventually report the assault, only to be met with condescension:

The detective explained to me that women get “confused” rather regularly. He explained that many a woman sat in my chair, defiantly lying until they couldn’t lie anymore. He told me that drinking and judgment and embarrassment, even boyfriends, can contribute to a woman continuing to cry wolf. He asked me if this was what I was doing. Was I confused? Was I ashamed? After all, I had been drinking.

I said no.

The detective nodded, almost annoyed that I didn’t save him the extra paperwork. He told me he would do what he could, but often times the “he said/she said” cases don’t go anywhere. He assured me that even if it didn’t, a report would be on record. I guess he thought that would be comforting.

That was almost two years ago. Nothing has happened. The evidence is backlogged and the detective is out of contact and the monster is still hiding.

McArdle tries to relate to such stories:

When I was in college, I was the victim of someone who stole a bunch of money from me. I knew who it was, and I didn’t report it to anyone except a couple of friends. Why not? Years later, I’m not sure I can say. I can cite a deeply ingrained aversion to asking for help from authorities, which is certainly a part of my character, or point out that the accusation would have been hard to prove, even though, for tedious reasons I won’t go into, I was quite certain who had committed the theft. But that could just be post-hoc rationalization; what I actually remember is that it happened, and I didn’t report it. Instead, I stopped buying food for about a week. And I wasn’t even faced with having to rehearse hours of unimaginably gruesome trauma over and over to investigators.

So I find it extremely easy to believe that a girl stumbled out of a fraternity house, bruised and humiliated, and just wanted to go home and pretend it never happened. But even if I couldn’t, that wouldn’t be evidence of much of anything, except the contours of my imagination. People do crazy, insane, unaccountable things all the time — if you found it hard to believe that fraternity brothers committed a premeditated gang rape, why was it so easy to imagine that a girl made up a rape story to recount to a national magazine, where she risked humiliating exposure? Whichever you believe, the explanation for this seemingly insane behavior is the same: Sometimes, people aren’t very good at counting the consequences of their own actions.

How Do We Fix Our Police Departments?

Bouie confronts the challenge:

Changing the culture of policing to de-emphasize violence and leave room for ordinary human behavior won’t be easy, but it’s possible. And it doesn’t have to lead to more crime. In Philadelphia this year, police have shot and killed just three people, compared with 12 by this point in 2013 and 16 by this point in 2012. What changed? The culture, and specifically, the department’s approach to the use of force. After a local news story found a spike in officer-involved shootings despite a drop in crime, the police commissioner invited federal officials to examine the department’s practices as part of a “collaborative review.”

The full report isn’t public, but the recommendations included new directives involving the use of force—in which officers state that they “hold the highest regard for the sanctity of human life” and the “application of deadly force is a measure to be employed only in the most extreme circumstances”—and intensive training designed to de-escalate confrontations before they turn deadly. “As the new policies have been phased in,” notes Philly.com, “the total number of shootings to date—fatal and nonfatal—has plummeted from 48 in 2012 to 35 in 2013 and to 18 so far this year, according to the department.”

Rosemarie Ward highlights the successes of Camden, NJ:

As the administration casts about for ways to build trust between police departments and the public, they would do well to look at what is happening in Camden, New Jersey, a poor city that once had the reputation for being America’s most dangerous. Camden disbanded its police department about 18 months ago, installing a new county unit in its place. Crime has since fallen considerably. Murders dropped by 49% to 31 between 2012 and 2014 (January 1st through November 30th). Shootings have been halved, robberies and rape are down by a third, and other violent crimes are down by a fifth. In a population of around 77,000, 35 fewer mothers are now burying their sons each year.

What is Camden’s police force doing right? At the most basic level, the city has returned to old-style policing. Instead of using squad cars, officers now patrol their beats on their feet in pairs (or on bicycles). They knock on doors and introduce themselves, and learn the names of people in a neighbourhood. “Nothing builds trust like human contact,” says Scott Thomson, Camden’s police chief. Locals can be a great source of information about where the problems are, he adds, “but that’s not going to happen without trust.”’

The Alleged Blowback Over The Torture Report

CIA Report

Former CIA director Michael Hayden claims that the torture report “will be used by our enemies to motivate people to attack Americans and American facilities overseas.” Drezner doesn’t buy it:

There is no shortage of US foreign policy actions and inactions in the region to inflame enemies. The Senate report is small potatoes compared to that.

Larison seconds Drezner:

It is extremely convenient for these people to discover the possibility that a report about past U.S. abuses might inspire outrage and even violence in response. There was no such concern among hawks about the foreign policy implications of torturing people when it was being done, and they expressed no similar worries that other U.S. actions would provoke violent responses. If one raises the possibility that aggressive U.S. actions in other parts of the world could have dangerous consequences for Americans later on, that is normally denounced as “blaming” America. Strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to apply when there is a chance of exposing our government’s egregious abuses to public scrutiny and some small measure of accountability for those abuses.

And many of the people crying blowback over this report were the same ones dismissing concerns that keeping Gitmo open would stoke resentment and terrorism in the Middle East. Waldman has it right:

The cynicism necessary to attempt to blame the blowback from their torture program on those who want it exposed is truly a wonder. On one hand, they insist that they did nothing wrong and the program was humane, professional, and legal. On the other they implicitly accept that the truth is so ghastly that if it is released there will be an explosive backlash against America. Then the same officials who said “Freedom isn’t free!” as they sent other people’s children to fight in needless wars claim that the risk of violence against American embassies is too high a price to pay, so the details of what they did must be kept hidden.

On that count, Drum argues that the release of the torture report will save lives:

[O]ur conduct during the early years of the war on terror almost certainly inflamed our enemies, bolstered their recruitment, and prolonged the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This cost thousands of American lives.

President Obama may have banned torture during his administration, but is there any reason to think we’ve now given up torture for good? Not that I can tell, and it will cost many more thousands of American lives if it happens again. So for our own safety, even if for no other reason, we need to do everything we can to reduce the odds of America going on another torture spree.

(Photo by Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

Did Jackie Lie? Or Misremember?

Maya Inamura defends the alleged UVA rape victim from those who would label her a liar:

While Rolling Stone undoubtedly should not have published an article that had inconsistencies, the fact that Jackie got some details wrong is not reason for the rest of us to throw out her entire story. Victims of trauma often have trouble remembering the exact nature of their assault, including the date on which it occurred, for which my own story of sexual assault should serve as a case in point. This is the nature of trauma: It makes forgetting easy, because forgetting is exactly what a traumatized person wants to do. It’s a coping mechanism.

As I’ve said before, I think it’s highly likely that Jackie was raped – and it’s worth noting that neither Jackie nor her friends have claimed that she was not assaulted. But, to my mind, that could lead to minor inconsistencies, or a mixed up time-line, or lots of details being wrong. But remembering that you were pinned down on a pile of broken glass, referred to as “it” and repeatedly raped with quite precise details filled in leads me to scratch my head. Anne J. Jacobson stresses that Jackie’s memory of that night could have been severely warped by whatever trauma she actually endured:

Ordinary people often enough take the fact that we have memories to show that we have recording devices inside us that somehow secure most of the details of our experiences. There are several reasons why this is false. If nothing else, calling up a memory and then restoring it alters it a bit. And memory follows vision in getting the gist of things better than getting the precise details down. There was a recent NY Times OpEd by two top researcher on memory and its fallibility. Given what we know about memory, we should expect this young woman’s memory to be gappy and to have errors. And even more so considering the trauma of the experience she was reporting. Because an organization was named by her, it may be that a reporter aware of recent memory research should have checked it.

The evidence of some trauma happening to Jackie is strong, as a former roommate explains:

I fully support Jackie, and I believe wholeheartedly that she went through a traumatizing sexual assault. I remember my first semester here, and I remember Jackie’s. Jackie came to UVA bright, happy and bubbly. She was kind, funny, outgoing, friendly, and a pleasant person to be around. That all notably changed by December 2012, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Our suite bonded that first semester and talked many times about the new troubles we were facing in college. Jackie never mentioned anything about her assault to us until much later. But I, as well as others, noticed Jackie becoming more and more withdrawn and depressed. …

Sometime that year I remember her letting it slip to me that she had had a terrible experience at a party. I remember her telling me that multiple men had assaulted her at this party. She didn’t say anything more. It seemed that was all she’d allow herself to say. I wish I had done something sooner. I wish I had known how to help. But I applaud Jackie for telling her story, now two years later. It was a story that needed to be told.

But if the story is not true, does it still deserve to be told? And do the people inevitably incriminated by it not have a right to respond?

“Humanely Raised”

I hope you’re able to find five minutes to watch this:

It’s extremely rare for us to see inside the factory farms where living creatures are subjected to endless torture. And it’s extremely rare to see with our own eyes what the USDA rating of “humanely raised” actually means:

Compassion in World Farming isn’t shy about placing some of the onus on the USDA. The government does have a list of labels that must meet certain requirements in order to be used by meat producers on their packaging, such as “organic,” “free range,” and “no antibiotics.” But the terms that Perdue is using, like “humanely raised” and “raised cage free” aren’t regulated by the government in the same way. Instead, they are based on The National Chicken Council’s animal welfare guidelines, an industry-created standard.

The USDA doesn’t approve the label so much as verify that it meets the standards the industry decided it should meet. Samuel Jones, a spokesperson for the USDA, confirmed the process. “Some companies pay the USDA to verify that they’re meeting specific processing points,” he said. “If it’s cage-free, and they want us to verify that they are meeting their set guidelines, that’s what we do.” A lot of this nuance can be lost on consumers, who aren’t aware that labels are often defined by the industry, not by the government.

Take “cage-free”. We think of it as a positive in buying chicken. But almost all chicken designed to be eaten are raised cage-free. It tells us nothing about the way in which they are subjected to conditions and lives no living creature should be forced to endure.

Illiberal Feminism Strikes Again, Ctd

Judith Levine has a must-read on the intellectual climate that prompted some to attack any early skepticism of the Rolling Stone story:

On Jezebel, Anna Merlan expressed her opinion with characteristic Jezebelian eloquence: “‘Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?’ Asks Idiot” And typically, readers chimed in with gender-baiting: “But never mind Erdely’s months of work. Two guys who have no idea what they’re talking about don’t believe it. Case closed.”  “Newsflash: Most libertarians are misogynist/racist white men.”

Lovely, innit? The way in which these individuals use race and gender as ipso facto damning aspects of people’s identities does not seem to jolt them into any self-awareness. These crusaders against bigotry are awfully fond of it when it can be used to dismiss critics. But what I see most acutely is the sense – prevalent on the left these days – that there are no fair-minded people out there, that all men are potential rapists or rape-denialists, that patriarchy is so powerful there’s no chance at all that someone could actually believe, say, that there is a serious rape crisis on many campuses but that the Rolling Stone story is too flawed a piece of journalism to defend:

Which is to say that these writers are not liberals in any meaningful sense of the word. Deep down, they simply don’t believe people are open to persuasion. Which is why they need to rely on graphic exaggerations, emotional blackmail or endless circles of victimology to make their case. So anyone who might question the specific details of an alleged rape are “rape-denialists” or “rape-truthers” rather than, you know, journalists. And that particularly includes women who may not tow toe the party line:

Vanquished bodies litter the blogosphere. Canadian journalist Anna Duckworth knew CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi well; he’d been her generous mentor for years. So when accusations began to surface that he had sexually brutalized numerous women, she spoke up. She stressed that she didn’t think his accusers were lying. All she asked was that her friend be assumed innocent until proven guilty.

Duckworth’s attackers “made me feel great shame for coming to Jian’s defense,” she wrote on Huffington Post. “Some went as far as to call people like me misogynists, victim blamers and perpetrators of rape culture.” In a short piece, the word “shame” appeared six times.

Over the years, Cathy Young, a Newsday columnist and contributor to Reason, has written and spoken widely on false accusations of rape and the threats to justice in a kind of overzealous feminist jurisprudence. Young is a feminist who also cherishes individual liberty (you can’t blame her; she grew up in the Soviet Union). Her reporting is meticulous. She never claims that rape is not real, though she is interested in why someone might lie. But Young’s work is repeatedly twisted and she is tarred as, among other things, an “anti-feminist victim blamer.”

I also feel that this climate subtly makes errors like the Rolling Stone story more likely. And Lizzie Crocker fears that culture of victimhood is making it more difficult to find the truth behind stories like Jackie’s:

The problem with valorizing the victim, as a “victim culture” does, is that anything that runs contrary to the victim’s narrative is cast as an attack on that person. Question them, and you are colluding in exacerbating the awful effects of their trauma. Question their actions or motives and you are “victim shaming” and “victim blaming.”

Of course, the flip-side of a victim is a bully, and it is notable that today, everyone rushes to be a victim—the right wing under attack from the left, the left under attack from the right, bigots still seeking to attack gay people, and claiming they cannot voice their bigotry. “Playing the victim” used to be a term of scorn, now it’s a daily modus operandi to score any number of political and cultural points. Question those taking on the mantle of victimhood and you are immediately cast as some kind of aggressive, unfeeling oppressor.

The sad consequence of a culture of victimhood is that it obscures real victims and obscures the genuinely felt experiences of those victims, whatever they have endured.

Couldn’t put it better myself. Previous Dish on illiberal feminism here. Update from a reader, who notes the classy apology from Merlan (which we highlighted last week) and makes some key distinctions:

I appreciate this discussion, I really do.  But as a person who has voraciously consumed everything I could find on the UVA story, I feel it important to note that once the Rolling Stone story was retracted, Anna Merlan offered a sincere apology to both Richard Bradley and Robby Soave.  I think all of us have gone off half-cocked at some point in our lives, and Merlan showed some class by owning up to her mistake and apologizing.

I will add that that while there has been some of the usual illiberal ranting and raving (see e.g. Marcotte), there has also  been a lot of great writing on the RS piece by feminists and liberals at DoubleX, TNR, Feministing, and the New Yorker, among others.  It seems that quite a few liberals, leftists, and feminists still care about the truth.   That has been an enormous relief and so gratifying to see.  I had begun to wonder if the left believed the narrative really was more important than the truth.   I’m relieved to see that many people on the left still think the facts are important, and are still dedicated to getting those facts right.

I was one of your first subscribers, and I’ll be the last one to bail. Just keep doing what you’re doing.

So Who The Heck Will The GOP Nominate?

Nicholas Confessore reports that “dozens of the Republican Party’s leading presidential donors and fund-raisers have begun privately discussing how to clear the field for a single establishment candidate to carry the party’s banner in 2016.” Kilgore is fascinated by such maneuvering:

I continue to be amazed at the confidence of GOP elites in the political strength of Bush, Christie and Romney. The first two continue to do relatively poorly in both nominating contest and general election polling; Bush in particular is saddled with problems that will never go away. And Mitt Romney would be the first defeated presidential nominee to attempt an immediate comeback since Hubert Humphrey in 1972. That’s a long time ago.

Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake consider Rand Paul as the most likely candidate:

People used to roll their eyes when we said Paul had a real chance to be the Republican nominee in 2016. No one rolls their eyes anymore.

Paul has a unique activist and fundraising base thanks to his dad’s two runs for president, and has shown considerable savvy in his outreach efforts to the establishment end of the party over the past few years. Paul still says odd things — his blaming of high cigarette taxes for Eric Garner’s death being the latest — that are going to get him in trouble in the heat of a presidential race. But, Paul is the candidate furthest along in the planning process for president and the one with the most current strength in early states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Jonathan Bernstein strongly disagrees:

I understand the math: It’s a large field and Paul is more or less guaranteed to get 20 percent of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire. All he needs then is to exceed his father’s performance by a few thousand voters and he could easily capture those early states against a splintered group of Republicans. That’s an illusion. There probably won’t be a dozen candidates in Iowa; Republicans have efficiently winnowed their field pre-Iowa for several cycles. But it doesn’t matter; even if Paul wins with 25 percent of the vote in Iowa, he’s not going to win the nomination unless he can eventually reach more than 50 percent. And as long as a substantial clot of party actors opposes his candidacy and most of the rest are indifferent at best, he’s not going to get the favorable publicity he needs to do that.

Kilgore thinks Bernstein goes too far:

I’d say it’s always a good idea to show some healthy respect for the unpredictable aspects of politics, especially in intraparty contests. I, too, have a hard time envisioning Rand Paul accepting the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. But his successful maneuvering on foreign policy so far makes it a lot more possible than ever, and I’m sure there were political scientists who laughed and laughed at the idea this loopy dude would beat Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked Senate candidate in 2010.

Allahpundit, meanwhile, ponders Jeb’s chances:

There are enough “somewhat conservative” voters to carry Bush to victory if conservatives are split — and if he doesn’t turn into Huntsman along the way. Huntsman’s problem, though, wasn’t that he lacked “clarity of thought,” it’s that in ways large and small he showed contempt for the base of the party whose nomination he was seeking. Remember when he introduced himself to primary voters with a profile in “Vogue”? Remember when he tweeted during the primary campaign, apropos of nothing, that unlike certain people he believed in evolution and global warming? Remember when one of his consultants, John Weaver, complained that the GOP consisted of “a bunch of cranks”? “Voters don’t necessarily need to like a candidate to vote for him,” wrote Ross Douthat in November 2011, “but they need to think that he likes them.” Jeb Bush’s difficulty right now is that he seems almost eager to run against the party’s base, which is a recipe for disaster in the general election if not the primaries: The nastier things get, the more likely it is that some conservatives will stay home in November 2016 if he’s the nominee. Maybe he can survive the primaries backing Common Core and an amnesty deal with Democrats — Romney survived RomneyCare, didn’t he? — but he can’t get elected if he’s openly disdainful of grassroots righties. It’s not a policy thing, it’s a not-wanting-to-be-represented-by-someone-who-hates-you thing.

Ramesh also analyzes Jeb’s predicament:

As I’ve argued here before, Bush can still win the nomination: Because most of his primary votes would come from the center and left of the party, he doesn’t need to win big among the conservatives most fired up about immigration and Common Core.

But Bush’s stand on Common Core won’t help him much in the general election. For the most part, it isn’t an issue of federal policy. So he has stumbled into a fight with the party base that won’t yield him any long-term political gains. And while his stand on immigration could arguably help his chances in 2016, it doesn’t solve the party’s basic economic problem. The risk is that these stances will exhaust Republicans’ tolerance for heterodoxy, and leave Bush with less room to adopt a new economic platform. A nominee who conservatives viewed as an ideological soul mate might have more leeway.

Waldman’s two cents on Jeb:

[F]aced with this argument between someone like Bush they can’t stomach on one hand, and a candidate like Ted Cruz they know would get blown out on the other hand, they’re going to look for a middle alternative. That could end up being any one of a number of people, but at the moment it’s awfully hard to see Bush building that bridge.

The Torture Defenders Fan Out

Everything the president said above is untrue – and it appears that the looming Senate Intelligence Committee report on the torture program will soon prove it. The US did torture many many people with techniques devised by Nazis and Communists, sometimes in former KGB facilities. The CIA itself admits in its internal documents that none of it worked or gave us any actionable intelligence that wasn’t discovered through legal means. The torture techniques were not implemented by highly-trained professionals, but by goonish amateurs who concealed what they were doing and lied about it to superiors. All the techniques were and are clearly illegal under US and international law.

And we’re told there is some exculpatory evidence in the report, suggesting that Bush and Cheney and even Addington were misled as well – giving the former president some lee-way to explain how he came to create a torture program that will forever taint this country and has already done so much to damage its soft power. Maybe he could tell the truth and say that the extent and nature of the torture was kept from him and that he can now see what went so horribly wrong. But nah:

Some former administration officials privately encouraged the president and his top advisers to use the report to disclaim responsibility for the interrogation program on the grounds that they were not kept fully informed. But Mr. Bush and his inner circle rejected that suggestion. “Even if some officials privately believe they were not given all the facts, they feel it would be immoral and disloyal to throw the C.I.A. to the wolves at this point,” said one former official, who like others did not want to be identified speaking about the report before its release.

The question I posed publicly to the president back in 2009 – whether he could come to terms with the reality of torture and explain how it occurred – has therefore been answered a second time. In his own book, Bush owned the torture and took full responsibility for it. Now, he has decided he will not allow a sliver of daylight to come between him and war crimes. You can chalk this up to admirable loyalty, even to those who lied to him. Or you can simply reflect on a president who cannot admit to being the first in that office to authorize such an assault on core American values and decency. Which means to say he does not have the fortitude or character to deal with reality.

And now, we’re seeing a full-court press for those Bush loyalists who want to permanently suppress the evidence of war crimes under the program. If you want to get a clue about how devastating the forthcoming report might be, just observe the pre-emptive strikes:

The defense of the program has been organized by former C.I.A. leaders like George J. Tenet and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, two former directors, and John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy C.I.A. director who also served as acting director … General Hayden added that the former C.I.A. team objected to the Senate’s characterization of their efforts. “We’re not here to defend torture,” he said by email on Sunday. “We’re here to defend history.” General Hayden appeared earlier on Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS News to say that any assertion that the C.I.A. “lied to everyone about a program that wasn’t doing any good, that beggars the imagination.”

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who ran the C.I.A. interrogation program, said Sunday that critics now assailing the agency were pressing it after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to do whatever it took to prevent a recurrence. “We did what we were asked to do, we did what we were assured was legal, and we know our actions were effective,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote in The Washington Post.

Rodriguez was so sure that he did nothing wrong that he destroyed the tapes recording the torture sessions! Nothing to see here … so move long. A reader writes:

I just watched the CBS Morning News report on the SSCI report, featuring two persons: Michael Hayden was featured in excerpts from Sunday’s Face the Nation, then “CBS News terrorism consultant” Juan Zarate. Both offered an identical analysis: the release of the report would “fan the flames of violence against America.”

On CNN, Candy Crowley still could not say the t-word, and let Mike Rogers argue that evidence of the gravest crimes by government officials should be suppressed because … they will inflame opinion abroad, and possibly lead to demonstrations and violence. Notice that for Rogers, the fact that the US government committed barbarisms more commonly associated with Nazi Germany or Communist China is of no concern. No one should be prosecuted, because, well, because American officials cannot be subject to the Geneva Conventions, which must be observed by every state actor – except the US. And no evidence of crimes by government officials should be released, for fear of undermining faith in said government. Those arguments belong in a dictatorship, not a democracy.

Then this detail from this morning:

Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that “we’re going to want to stand behind these guys,” as one former official put it. Mr. Bush made that clear in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the C.I.A. serving on our behalf,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base.” These are “really good people and we’re lucky as a nation to have them,” he said.

“Whatever the report says …”

Denial doesn’t get much clearer than that – and it is of a piece with the reckless disengagement, sickening indifference and grotesque negligence that marked his catastrophic time in the Oval Office. In the wake of the shock of Abu Ghraib, Bush disavowed the atrocities, insisting that they did not represent America, that they were counter to American values, and that he was shocked and disgusted by them. And yet, when a report is imminent outlining acts of torture and abuse far worse than Abu Ghraib, and directly under his own authority, he insists that whatever is detailed in the report, the culprits are heroes and patriots, and “we’re lucky as a nation to have them.”

How does one begin to square that cognitive dissonance? How to explain how a believing Christian can describe brutal torture sessions as things to defend and be proud of? And how can the torture of human beings – and the cover-up of the same – be part of American “patriotism”? This is a man not just without a conscience, but a man proud of it. He had a chance to reflect on what his fateful decision to waive the Geneva Conventions after 9/11 produced; and he has decided to own all of it. And we shall soon see what exactly that is.