The Administration’s Shifting Positions

If you are as baffled by the series of different explanations given for the destruction of tapes relating to illegal torture techniques, you haven’t been following this story for very long. Scott Horton offers the following summary:

Friday we were told, in highly implausible statements coming from General Hayden, that the CIA had acted completely according to Hoyle. The issue had been considered, reviewed and cleared. Twenty-four hours later, there is a radical shift of course. Now we learn that the White House didn’t know about the decision and certainly wouldn’t have approved it. Here’s Donna Perino at the White House giving the new line, torn from an episode of “Hogan’s Heroes”: Bush knew nothing.

And the official posture—“knew nothing about it”—spreads very quickly, down as far as people can plausibly assert it. Even CIA acting General Counsel Joe Rizzo (a known torture-advocate, whose nomination to be general counsel got a thumbs down from the Senate for that reason) asserts he knew nothing of the decision and would never have approved. Only yesterday, Rizzo’s approval was being touted as support for the destruction. Rizzo is a figure of amazing dexterity, even for a Bush Administration lawyer involved with the torture program.

What a difference a day makes. Why the dramatic shift?

Read the whole thing. If you buy the Rodriguez scapegoat meme, you’re dreaming.

Face Of The Day

Bisharaspencerplattgetty

Bishara Ibraheim (3) receives treatment for an infected and broken leg at a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders December 8, 2007 in Birao in northern Central African Republic. Central African Republic (CAR) is one of the world’s poorest and most neglected countries with an average life expectancy of 39 years old. Years of fighting various rebel factions in the north of the country have resulted in hundreds of deaths and over 200,000 internally displaced people. Outside of the capital Bangui there is no electricity or paved roads and banditry is extensive. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

The Church and AIDS

The truth is that Christians have had a very mixed response to the AIDS epidemic. Some will have a great deal on their conscience; others have forged paths of compassion and commitment that are unequaled. It’s depressing to read about Mike Huckabee’s Southern Baptist hostility, ignorance and fear toward people with HIV as late as 1992. It’s heart-breaking to have watched the black church look the other way for two decades as so many of its members needed help, candor, and compassion. But not everyone has behaved like this. I was praying about this today and Mychal Judge came into my mind, as he sometimes does. I think history will see him as a saint at some point. If you doubt that, I recommend Netflixing "Saint of 9/11", a documentary that stays with you for a long time. And in that documentary, the part that understandably gripped me most was his early response to gay men with AIDS:

We forget how terrifying HIV was in the early and mid 1980s, how patients would be quarantined in dark rooms, abandoned by their families, with their meals rolled into their rooms on trolleys. From the beginning, Mychal did as Jesus did and walked right in and kissed these frightened souls on the lips. If they recoiled from the sight of a priest – gay men at that time saw the church as an alien, hostile entity – he would persist in silence. He would simply bring holy oils, take a chair to the bottom of their hospital beds, and massage their bony, cold, pain-racked feet. He seemed to express no anger, just a kind of suspended joy in the moment, a joy he found resuscitated by the fact of the resurrection and the intercession of Our Lady.

This is the calling of the Christian in the face of a plague: engagement, love, compassion, help. Some lived up to it; some failed. But everyone can grow.

The GOP, Huckabee and the Gays

This is depressing, if not actually surprising:

In a quick check of Republican reaction after the AP story broke, some conservatives said they viewed Huckabee’s answers as a blunt statement of views held by many in his Southern Baptist flock, and an antidote to the waffling that pervades politics.

So it may turn out that his more damaging answer was not the one about his view of homosexuality but rather his foray into federal policy – quarantining AIDS patients and cutting funding for research.

Was This Photo Staged? Update

Jfkrom

The question was raised in the Dish – in slightly facetious fashion – not as a way to suggest that Getty photographer, Charles Ommanney, did anything but take a picture, but just to suggest that Romney is not beyond a little posture plagiarism. The photo was, however, taken on April 11, 2007. There’s no way this was anything but a coincidence. Just for the record.

Huckabee and Homosexuality

The revelations of his previous statements about gay people and people with AIDS are immensely depressing but should hardly be surprising. The views Huckabee held were much more common in 1992 than now – although even then, Huckabee’s callous sentiments were irrational, outside any scientific consensus, ignorant for 1992, and clearly based on animus. I don’t doubt he will distance himself from those early statements about HIV, just as even Jesse Helms did in his later years. But I wonder if Huckabee will be able to distance himself from the statements about gay people as such. Watching every Republican debate this year, you can see how no one ever dares take a position that could be deemed in any way supportive of gay people, understanding of the challenges many gay people face in a sometimes hostile world, let alone supportive of those of us constructing stable relationships.

So this is perhaps a real opportunity for Huckabee, to express what a Christian really should express about the dignity and value of gay people, and about the moral necessity not to demonize or stigmatize those living with HIV or any illness. This culture and society has grown a lot on the issues of homosexuality and HIV in this past decade and a half. This is a chance for Huckabee to show that he has as well.

It is a crisis for his campaign. But I hope he also sees that it is an opportunity for a statement of inclusion, compassion, and regret.

Krauthammer On Fox

It’s refreshing, actually. I just listened to Charles say that the torture of terror suspects in 2002 was justified because the United States was flying blind and had no knowledge of what al Qaeda was planning. He won’t say "torture", of course, although the law is clear that it is torture. (He and Fox News keep referring to the notion of "harsh interrogation techniques". I think they realized that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" was a little too close to the Gestapo’s euphemism for comfort.) And he then Gitmomarkwilsongetty said that destroying the tapes was justified because you don’t want them coming up on YouTube, do you? So there you have it: the government has a right to torture when it feels like it and the right to destroy the evidence because it would incriminate them and hurt the image of the United States. Again, I keep pinching myself that I am actually hearing these things on the television.

I realize, of course, that that’s the actual argument that Bush and Cheney make to themselves behind closed doors. I guess it’s refreshing, if a little chilling, to hear a proud defense of lawlessness and violence at the heart of a constitutional republic on national television. But there are several critical and revealing premises behind it. The first is that the United States has effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. To say that the president can waive them at any time if he sees fit is to say that the United States is not bound by its treaty obligations. The second is that the president is not bound by any law or treaty governing the laws of warfare. Bush and Cheney won’t say this because if they did, the jig would be up. The Constitution is extremely clear that the laws of warfare are determined by the Congress, not the president. So it’s up to the Beltway Boys to defend the suspension of the rule of law and the legalization of torture as executive prerogatives, in violation of the Constitution. Hey: we’re at war. The Constitution is now optional.

Notice also that this isn’t the ticking time bomb case that Charles has previously invoked to defend torture. There was no imminent threat to hundreds of thousands of people; we had no way of knowing for sure that Zubaydah had any knowledge of such a devastating threat; and we have no independent way of knowing whether the information he allegedly gave up under torture was factually accurate. And so in the initial cases of torture under this administration, we discover it was used simply because we had no good intelligence of future threats; and we decided to use torture for a fishing expedition. So much for the rare exception to the rule.

The defenders of torture are always saying that it can be used "judiciously" and in extremely limited circumstances, that it can be controlled within the executive branch; that it need not metastasize into a Agstress broader policy, and need not trickle down to others. But from all the facts we now know, this executive decision to rescind the Geneva Conventions began with cases that were already beneath the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and within months spread like wildfire across every theater of combat, including every major branch of the armed services, leading to scores of deaths in interrogation, almost casual if brutal torture of (often innocent) suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq, secret torture sites in Eastern Europe, God knows what in outsourced torture in the grim redoubts of Uzbek, Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian police states, and, of course, the excrescence of Abu Ghraib, which Bush had the gall to say he had nothing to do with.

So when you look at what torture has done already to the United States, we see that every bad scenario that those of us who oppose torture feared has actually come about. And we have no independent evidence that it has solved anything, or saved any lives, except the self-serving statements of those who authorized it. And the truth is: we will probably never know. If they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy incriminating tapes, they are cynical and brazen enough to destroy any evidence within the executive branch that could prove that their torture policy has failed. If this isn’t a form of tyranny, annexed to torture, what is? And if the executive branch can simply get away with it, and have serious commentators defend the president’s trashing of the Constitution as necessary to fulfill his oath of office, we really have left the rule of law behind in the ditch.