AP Confirms ABC News

Torture latest:

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned. The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

They knew what they were doing. The law was "fixed" to back up what was already decided. The parallel to WMD intelligence – the Downing Street memo – springs to mind.

The Red-Blue Divide

These remarks by Obama in San Francisco are, to put it gently, not the most felicitously phrased:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

You can see the point he is trying to make – it’s the Thomas Frank argument – and you can argue about its merits, back and forth. I don’t think it’s meant pejoratively about the blue collar workers Obama is trying to engage. But the context of these remarks is political gold for McCain and Clinton. Especially Clinton. You will hear these words on Fox News for a very, very long time.

Krauthammer vs Krauthammer, Ctd.

A reader challenged me to explain why this sentence in Charles Krauthammer’s column didn’t address the precise question I asked about whether Israel’s own nuclear deterrence isn’t enough:

Redundant, it will be said, because Israel could retaliate on its own. The problem is that Israel is a very small country with a small nuclear arsenal that could be destroyed in a first strike. During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. created vast and invulnerable submarine fleets to ensure a retaliatory strike and, thus, deterrence. The invulnerability and unimaginably massive size of this American nuclear arsenal would make a U.S. deterrent far more potent and reliable than any Israeli facsimile — and thus far more likely to keep the peace.

My bad. I guess I just presume that the Israeli nuclear capacity – of which we know not a huge amount for sure – is capable of devastating Iran and constructed to ensure invulnerability in any first strike. I’m not sure how Charles knows otherwise, and if there’s evidence that Israel cannot unilaterally have viable nuclear deterrence, I’d be interested in understanding that further. But how many nukes would it take to devastate Iran? I imagine that both sides would get to the MAD point pretty quickly. I also presume that if Iran passed the nuke bomb threshhold, the Israelis would be way ahead of the game in making sure their deterrence was valid, and as devastating to Iran as any exchange would be to Israel. If the Israelis need help in maintaining such deterrence, we should of course, be willing. But I see no reason why fusing America’s deterrence policy with Israel’s makes Israel any safer and some reason to fear it would play into the hands of the worst elements in Iran’s leadership.

I also think that once you have conceded that there may be any element in the Tehran leadership that is rational and is capable of responding to rational deterrence theory, the entire premise of the World War IV case implodes. The evidence of revolutionary Iran is, moreover, that it has acted as rationally as one might predict in responding to real military threats. If deterrence worked against Mao and can work against Kim Jong-Il, then a nuclear Tehran may be containable.