The Dish

A reader writes:

Torture really is a slippery slope.  First it was the 'ticking timebomb' where torture was OK.  Now it's an ordinary 'panty bomber'.  It's only a short hop skip and a jump to use torture on US citizens suspected of 'heinous' crimes such as multiple murders or child kidnappers. From there what about torturing those who smoke pot to find their suppliers.

Once we are used to it and accept it it will be used whenever we feel like it.

One question no one, that I've seen, has ever asked those who advocate torture.  What happens if you torture an innocent person by mistake?

Well, we have tortured people by mistake. And what happens when you do is that you are tempted to find a way to hide that mistake. And since you have the power to torture, and torture can coerce evidence of guilt, you simply torture some more to get the right answer, or you torture someone else to get corroborating evidence. This has already happened in America.

This is why the naivete in this debate is not with those of us who oppose all torture. Au contraire.

The truly naive are the Krauthammers and Thiessens and McCarthys who seem to believe – against all history and human nature – that torture can be controlled, that it can be sealed within a very tight box, used only by good people, never abused, never allowed to spread. But this has never happened. We know very well from brutal historical experience that the power to torture even one person always metastasizes. And we have seen it with our naked eyes in America. What was Abu Ghraib if it wasn't proof that orders to torture from the very top instantly spread through the system so that a handful of torture victims becomes hundreds in a matter of weeks; when torture is allowed the CIA and the military, it instantly spreads, as we have seen, to every theater of war, to every branch of the armed services, from Navy SEALS to special ops guys openly torturing mere suspects under the watch of Stanley McChrystal.

And yet the noecon response to this horror is to urge more of it, as routine, past ticking time bombs scenarios, past imminent threats … on and on to waterboarding a suspect whom even the Bush administration, in an identical setting, decided to prosecute using criminal law.

Now if only MJ were still around to dance the polka:

(Hat tip: TDW)

A reader writes:

I do wish you'd stop using the terms neo-fascism and neo-fascistic to describe the advocates of torture and an extra-legal, unaccountable national security state.  Fascism and fascistic are perfectly apt, and need no neo.  The worship of state power, the organization of politics as a fight against foreign enemies are classically fascist.  So, too, is Sarah Palin's appeal as a defender of a pure and virtuous volk, exploited by comopolitan elites.  Fascist does just fine. 

And you don't have to worry you're equating Cheney his ilk with Hitler.  Mussolini and Franco were fascists, too.

Since these advocates of fascist tactics still support at least an open political system, obey the results of elections (even while behaving as if they are illegitimate when they go against them), submit eventually to the rulings of the Supreme Court, evacuate office when voted out, I think the term neo-fascist is preferable.

The themes are indeed classic ones of the far right, and the far right has essentially gobbled up the rest of conservatism in Republican America this past decade. Under Bush and Cheney, we did live under a law-free protectorate for a while, with the executive claiming indefinite, unlimited powers to seize and torture anyone without due process, but the system slowly pushed back against it, even if full accountability for this interlude in democratic norms has yet to be fully taken.

Or why conservatism needs to

A reader writes:

Mir-Hossein Mousavi's explicit statement that he was willing to die along side other Green activists is a big deal.

Compare it to a similar historic statement in early 1960s when Mehdi Bazargan, Iran's first prime minister after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, told the Shah's military court: "We are the last people who will speak with you with words and encourage you to reform" – meaning that if you follow through the path of closing all doors to peaceful opposition and reform, the new generation will use other means to bring change: violence, revolution etc.
Mousavi's letter pretty much does the same. He propose that the leadership take 5 steps to avoid a catastrophe: restore freedom of press, release all prisoners, pass a law that guarantees fair and free elections, allows the opposition the right of peaceful protest as it's granted in the constitution and for the supreme leader to stop supporting the Ahamdi Nejad government so it's held accountable for its massive failures. He says this is the only way the country survives this turmoil. He provides the leader one last chance to undo the damage

and return to civility. 

But if they don't, which is likely the case, he has resolved any doubt that he is in this till the end and will not sell out even when his own nephew is killed. He also reminded the Greens of the importance of avoiding violence as that goes against what this movement is about. He also responded to the State TV's non-stop propaganda that the Greens are bunch of violent kids working for the West. He refers to the picture above and says: "If the state TV had a shred of honesty and sanity left in its leadership, it would air the images of those brave souls that despite being beat up by police and Basij, they still see them as their own brothers [who are also a victim of this situation] and try to protect them from being seriously harmed."

His message was loud and clear: We are still reformists, we want to bring change peacefully, we despise violence, the leader must understand that if he destroys this one last bridge behind him, then we are headed towards a collision that we did all we could to avoid.

This is a man that cares deeply for Iran's well being more than he does for his own political future.

In Washington DC, there's considerable anticipation of the medical marijuana initiative finally being allowed to take effect. DC voters backed Initiative 59 with 69 percent support in 1998, but, of course, American citizens have less self-rule in Washington than Iraqis have in Baghdad, and so a bunch of congressmen from far far away decided that we needed their rule rather than democracy and voided the whole thing. But that ended last month with an appropriations bill and a Congressional majority that believes in democracy at home as well as abroad.

Good timing. New research suggests that marijuana acts in the opposite fashion to legal and taxed alcohol and nicotine, and fr from destroying brain cells, actually helps them re-grow:

Xia Zhang, an associate professor in the U of S neuropsychiatry research unit, led the team that tested the effects of HU-210, a potent synthetic cannabinoid similar to a group of compounds found in marijuana. The synthetic version is about 100 times as powerful as THC, the compound responsible for the high experienced by recreational users.

The team found that rats treated with HU-210 on a regular basis showed neurogenesis – the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. This region of the brain is associated with learning and memory, as well as anxiety and depression.

The effect is the opposite of most legal and illicit drugs such as alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and cocaine.

“Most ‘drugs of abuse’ suppress neurogenesis,” Zhang says. “Only marijuana promotes neurogenesis.”

Of course these tests need to be done in humans. Maybe soon America will be sufficiently adult to start following reason rather than fear.

Passive-aggressive partisan tool Glenn Reynolds fires back:

Vimeo picks its favorites.

There is only one effective response to this disgusting

Aware, perhaps, that his role as Cheney spokesman last week damaged his cred, the Politico scribe (who also, it must be said, has some great reporting behind and ahead of him) pushes back against Hosenball's "scoop" of a terror-threat briefing on December 22:

Did the President have a briefing on December 22 on holiday threats? You bet he did. He demanded it. The holidays are traditionally a time of increased threat reporting and the President wanted to be sure his team was on top of that reporting — doing the fine work it had done, for example, on the Zazi and Headley cases earlier in the year. In fact, the President demands regular counterterrorism and homeland security briefings that bring together the whole team representing the heads of the government agencies charged with intell and homeland security. Did the December 22 briefing include a warning of an attack? No. It did not. And despite the provocative headline on his story, the Newsweek reporter does not report that there was one. Because he couldn't. Because there wasn't.