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Month: April 2009

Your Eight Weeks Waiting Tables Don’t Impress Me

by dday

This New York Magazine article about the whines of the Wall Street rich officially marks a trend in journalism, wherein a writer finds a bunch of Wall Street guys and turns on the tape recorder while they speak a bunch of cringe-inducing quotes into it. It’s not very revelatory after the 5th or 6th article, since by now we know pretty well that these are a collection of Randian jerks with a massive entitlement complex who think they rule the world by selling worthless pieces of paper to one another. Sure, it’s good to know that they never gave charity out of a sense of, you know, charity, but for the tax cut and the hope of accumulating more power, and it’s telling to recognize that the same people so concerned with being personally denigrated by the White House and the public decided not to publish their names. But all in all, this story has been told, and while I guess I understand why establishment media would want to run the same “poor, poor rich people” story over and over, it’s certainly telling that you couldn’t find a story quoting all members of the middle class that live in Manhattan (the median salary in NYC is about $65,000, so you have 4 million or so making less) if you sat in front of Lexis Nexis every day for a week.

But this part, as DougJ notes, was crucial to understanding the mindset of these people, and also reveals the nexus between the financial establishment and the DC Village establishment:

Jake DeSantis, a 40-year-old commodities trader at AIG, was an unlikely face of Wall Street greed. Stocky and clean cut, with an abiding moral streak, he’d worked summers for a bricklayer in the shadow of shuttered steel mills outside Pittsburgh; he was valedictorian of his high-school class and attended college at MIT.

He laid bricks one summer as a teenager, and so he simply deserves million-dollar bonuses for a company effectively owned by the federal government. I’ll turn it over to DougJ at this point.

It’s striking how much we now see the idea that a working-class childhood justifies an adulthood of careerist whoring. Somerby’s been all over this for years, but I think the most blatant example I’ve ever seen is this bit from a chat with Howard Kurtz recently:

Reader: Much of the scalding tone many of your writers on these chats are subjected to from readers is based on this premise. We know that the Post, the Times, the networks are working to support the establishment at all cost. (In Broder’s famous and haughty dismissal of Bill Clinton “this is not his town”). But the problem is that you guys don’t like to portray yourselves as defenders of the establishment. You are the “little guy.” No you are not. Be honest with your audience.

Howard Kurtz: Talk about sweeping generalizations! Evan Thomas declares himself part of the establishment and suddenly every member of the major newspapers and networks are pillars of that establishment as well?

That would be news to Brian Williams, who was a volunteer fireman as a young man and washed out in his first job at a tiny Kansas station. And news to me, a guy who went to a state university. And news to Katie Couric, who started out on the University of Virginia’s student paper and washed out in her first national job, at CNN. And news to longtime Post editor Len Downie, who went to Ohio State University and started here as an intern. And also news to me, a kid from Brooklyn who never met a professional journalist until my junior year at a state university.

If you want to say these are big corporations, if you want to criticize what they do, be my guest. But let’s not assume that everyone in the business grew up in the bosom of the establishment.

An even more amazing example is George Bush’s claim (from a 2000 Nick Lemann piece that’s subscription only) that the biggest difference between him and Al Gore is that Bush went to San Jacinto Junior High.

How did this idea of humble, or humbler, beginnings become so important? It’s worth noting that it’s Randian as well—her heroes usually come from the working class, even if they spend their adult lives spitting on it.

It’s mixed up with the idea of virtuous selfishness, that if you “picked yourself up by your bootstraps” that it’s necessary and good to cut the bootstraps of everybody else. After all, if they can’t make it they lack character. And this imagined “rough childhood” gets used by the establishment to delude themselves into thinking they are jus’ folks, in touch with the needs and concerns of the people and just like everyone else. There was a study a while back (can’t find it now) showing that something like 80% of the public considers themselves middle class, which is functionally impossible. But these biographical data points have nothing to do with present circumstance. As far as I know, robbery remains robbery whether or not you preceded that robbery with a stint landscaping in the heat.

In fact, we have a grossly unequal society, with little upward mobility, and dangerous implications from such inequality, creating the bubble-based economy which is now bursting. In the past 25 years, top salaries have increased by 256% while low-income salaries increased by 11%. In real dollars that’s an obscene difference in income. It’s also a major difference in access to media and raw power, which is why we have to endure multiple waves of articles about the persecuted overclass.

Somebody spare us.

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Reasonable Evil

by digby

Media Bloodhound caught an excellent exchange between Mark Danner, Anderson Cooper and David Gergen on CNN. In a most unusual fashion, Danner and Cooper both take on Gergen with the facts about America’s torture regime, which most of the media persists in saying was confined to a couple ‘o really bad actors who deserved what they got. Here’s a little piece of it:

GERGEN: At the same time, he [President Obama] made a very, very calibrated decision; we’re not going to prosecute those people in the CIA who undertook this. And I think he showed some respect for the argument that Mr. Hayden and Mr. Mukasey made today in The Wall Street Journal.

That, in fact, there may have been some benefit to the United States from these interrogation techniques. And very importantly, when we sort of take this broad brush and sort of paint this as sort of villainous, that, in fact, the number of people who were interrogated with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited.

It was of the thousands of people who were captured it was about some 30 or 35 whom these techniques were used. And they make the argument — and I don’t know why we should question them — that about half of what we know about Al Qaeda came out of those interrogation techniques…

GERGEN: And I also think, Anderson, there’s a temptation here to sort of lump Abu Ghraib, which was clear violations of the rules by a lot of other people with these more limited CIA techniques.

I just think that the conversations in this area have gotten so broad brush that it sort of paints a sort of villainous picture of the agency which I don’t think — I don’t think is really fair to a lot of the people who were trying very hard, as Mark Danner himself said, to figure out what was legal in these very, very difficult circumstances.

As Danner jumped on this, Cooper, once again to his credit, didn’t impede the flow of information with contrived balance nor did he bail out Gergen, his longtime CNN colleague. Rather, Cooper facilitated and contextualized Danner’s response, closing the discussion by disproving Gergen’s assertions with just the facts. read onDanner and Cooper both pointed out that many of these techniques were used at Bagram and Guantanamo as well as Abu Ghraib and there were as many as 35 cases investigated as homicides! (Imagine how many there were that weren’t investigated.) Danner rightly said that the torture of these so-called high value interrogations was even worse because it was explicitly authorized in great detail by the leadership in Washington. Gergen, being the good company man that he is, says he has no reason to doubt the Bush administration officials’ good intentions or the eficacy of the torture. After all, it’s not like they’ve ever lied before. Who are we to suspect they are now working overtime to keep from going down in history as modern Torquemadas.
I think what really makes me makes me reel about this exchange is that David Gergen, the villager who always represents the “reasonable middle” is basically endorsing torture — if you just do it a little bit and if it “works.” No word on whether you can put someone’s eye out if it “works” or if you can rape their wife in front of them if it “works.” Apparently, if you don’t go overboard and do it too often, it’s any means to an end in Gergen’s world.

I hate to tell Mr Lukewarm Bucket of Spit, but torture is NOT a subject upon which “reasonable” people can disagree. If you endorse it you are endorsing evil. Period. It looks like Gergen will be joining his pal Joe Lieberman, the erstwhile “conscience of the Senate,” in hell.

Update: These guys will be in the 9th circle — fending off insects in small cramped boxed for eternity.

Torturers In Common

by digby

Andrew Sullivan has often brought up the case of Richard Wilhelm Hermann Bruns, a Nazi war crimes prosecution over the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and revisits it today. The comparison with the Bush administration torture regime is shockingly apt.

Laboring under the constraints of Godwin’s Law in the blogosphere, I’ve not felt entirely comfortable making those arguments (although I have from time to time.) I’ve tended to argue the same point from a slightly different perspective.

Here’s my first post doing that from 2004. This was before we knew about the waterboarding:

Testimony

In case anyone’s wondering about the specific torture methods that are considered legal in the various gulags we now have around the world, there has been some work done on this by Human Rights Watch, even before Abu Ghraib. They found that at the “detention centers” in Afghanistan, torture as it was defined under the Geneva Convention was used routinely, often against innocent civilians.

According to the two men, bright lights were set up outside their cells, shining in, and U.S. military personnel took shifts, keeping the detainees awake by banging on the metal walls of their cells with batons. The detainees said they were terrified and disoriented by sleep deprivation, which they said lasted for several weeks. During interrogations, they said, they were made to stand upright for lengthy periods of time with a bright spotlight shining directly into their eyes. They were told that they would not be questioned until they remained motionless for one hour, and that they were not entitled even to turn their heads. If they did move, the interrogators said the “clock was reset.” U.S. personnel, through interpreters, yelled at the detainees from behind the light, asking questions.

Two more detainees held at Bagram in late 2002 told a New York Times reporter of being painfully shackled in standing positions, naked, for weeks at a time, forcibly deprived of sleep and occasionally beaten.

A reporter with the Associated Press interviewed two detainees who were held in Bagram in late 2002 and early 2003: Saif-ur Rahman and Abdul Qayyum.86 Qayyum was arrested in August 2002; Rahman in December 2002. Both were held for more than two months. Interviewed separately, they described similar experiences in detention: sleep deprivation, being forced to stand for long periods of time, and humiliating taunts from women soldiers. Rahman said that on his first night of detention he was kept in a freezing cell for part of his detention, stripped naked, and doused with cold water. He believes he was at a military base in Jalalabad at this point. Later, at Bagram, he said U.S. troops made him lie on the ground at one point, naked, and pinned him down with a chair. He also said he was shackled continuously, even when sleeping, and forbidden from talking with other detainees. Qayyum and Rahman were linked with a local commander in Kunar province, Rohullah Wakil, a local and national leader who was elected to the 2002 loya jirga in Kabul, and who was arrested in August 2002 and remains in custody.

According to detainees who have been released, U.S. personnel punish detainees at Bagram when they break rules for instance, talking to another prisoner or yelling at guards. Detainees are taken, in shackles, and made to hold their arms over their heads; their shackles are then draped over the top of a door, so that they can not lower their arms. They are ordered to stand with their hands up, in this manner, for two-hour intervals. According to one detainee interviewed who was punished in this manner, the punishment caused pain in the arms.

In March 2003, Roger King, a U.S. military spokesman at Bagram, denied that mistreatment had occurred, but admitted the following:

“We do force people to stand for an extended period of time. . . . Disruption of sleep has been reported as an effective way of reducing people’s inhibition about talking or their resistance to questioning. . . . They are not allowed to speak to each other. If they do, they can plan together or rely on the comfort of one another. If they’re caught speaking out of turn, they can be forced to do things, like stand for a period of time — as payment for speaking out.”

King also said that a “common technique” for disrupting sleep was to keep the lights on constantly or to wake detainees every fifteen minutes to disorient them.

Several U.S. officials, speaking anonymously to the media, have admitted that U.S. military and CIA interrogators use sleep deprivation as a technique, and that detainees are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, and held in awkward, painful positions.

Here is some direct testimony of men who have been interrogated under rules that allow torture short of the pain accompanying “organ failure or death”

“stress positions”

Many men were handcuffed or tied to a stool as a means of slow torture. The [detainee] sat in one position, day and night. Each time he would fall over, the guards would sit him upright. He was not allowed to sleep or rest. Exhaustion and pain take their toll. When the [detainee] agreed to cooperate with his captors and acquiesced to their demands, he would be removed. Here, I have pictured a guard named “Mouse,” who liked to throw buckets of cold water on a man on cold winter nights.

You’re always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that’s covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he’s always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don’t know. You really don’t know. But he doesn’t — he’s going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the — the torture. And he’s a — he’s a big guy that knows what he’s doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.

“dietary manipulation”

Our normal diet consisted of either rice or bread and a bowl of soup. The soup was usually made from a boiled seasonal vegetable such as cabbage, kohlrabi, pumpkin, turnips, or greens, which we very appropriately called, “sewer greens, swamp grass and weeds.

“sleep deprivation”

Some men were tied to their beds, sometimes for weeks at a time. Here, I have drawn a picture showing the handcuffs being worn in front, but the usual position was with the wrists handcuffed behind the back. A man would live this way day and night, without sleep or rest.

The guards come around the middle of the night just rattling the lock on your door. That’s a terrifying thing because they may be taking you out for a torture session. You don’t know.

“… obviously this is an emotional thing to me, was listening to the screams of other … prisoners while they were being tortured. And being locked in a cell myself sometimes uh, in handcuffs or tied up and not able to do anything about it. And that’s the way I’ve got to spend the night.”

“isolation”

The ten months that I spent in the blacked out cell I went into panic. The only thing I could do was exercise. As long as I could move, I felt like I was going to — well, it was so bad I would put a rag in my mouth and hold another one over it so I could scream. That seemed to help. It’s not that I was scared, more scared than another other time or anything. It was happening to my nerves and my mind. And uh, I had to move or die. I’d wake up at two o’clock in the morning or midnight or three or whatever and I would jump up immediately and start running in place. Side straddle hops. Maybe four hours of sit ups. But I had to exercise. And of course I prayed a lot

Oh, sorry. My mistake. Those illustrations and some of the comments are by former POW Mike Mcgrath about his time in the Hanoi Hilton. Other comments are from the transcript of Return With Honor, a documentary about the POW’s during the Vietnam War. How silly of me to compare the US torture scheme with North Vietnam’s.

It’s very interesting that all these guys survived, in their estimation, mostly because of their own code of honor requiring them to say as little as possible, fight back as they could and cling to the idea that they were not helping this heartless enemy any more than they had to.

As I read the vivid descriptions of these interrogation techniques of sleep deprivation, sensory manipulation, isolation, stress positions and dietary manipulation I had to wonder whether they would be any more likely to work on committed Islamic jihadists than they were on committed American patriots.

The American POWs admitted that they broke under torture and told the interrogators what they knew. And they told a lot of them what they didn’t know. And over time, they told them things they couldn’t possibly know. The torture continued. Many of them, just like the reports from Gitmo, attempted suicide. They remained imprisoned never knowing when or if they would ever be set free.

“unlimited detention”

We began to talk about the war. How long are we going to be there and everything and I — I was thinking well I’m only going to be there about six months or so. And then uh, Charlie says oh, we’re probably going to be here about two years. Two years? And when I — I finally came to that realization, my God, that’s going to be a long time. And when I – it just kind of hit me all at once. And I just took my blanket and kind of balled it up and I just buried my head uh, in this — in this blanket and just literally screamed with — with this anguish that it’s going to be that long. Two years. And then when I was finished, I felt oh, okay. I — I — I can do that. I can do two years. Of course, as it turned out, it was two years, and it was two years after that, and two years after that. Uh, until it was about seven years in my case. You know? But who was to know at that time.

I would imagine that our torture regime is much more hygienic than the North Vietnamese. Surely it is more bureaucratic with lots of reports and directives and findings and “exit interrogations.” We are, after all, a first world torturer. But at the end of the day it’s not much different.

“bad apples”

And he announced to me, a major policy statement. Some officers and some guards had become so angry at what the Americans were doing to their country that they had far exceeded the limits which the government had wished they would uh, observe in treatment of prisoners. That they had um, brutally tortured us. That was the first time they ever acknowledged that it was torture not punishment.

Same excuses, too.

The good news is that the mental torture that was used in North Vietnam, the isolation, the sleep deprivation etc. did not seem to create a lot of “long term” damage in the men who lived through it. Most have done well since. Therefore, all the mental torture they inflicted on our POWs is now considered perfectly legal and above board by the Bush torture regime. So that’s nice.

“When word of torture and mistreatment began to slip out to the American press in the summer of 1969, our public-relations-minded captors began to treat us better. I’m certain we would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around.” John McCain

It’s not nice to compare the Bush torture regime to Nazis and the North Vietnamese. Or the Spanish Inquisition, for that matter. But the revolting truth is that we are not particularly “exceptional” in this way at all. I’m sorry that’s inconvenient and unpleasant to contemplate, but it doesn’t change the fact that torture has been around forever and everyone knows that those who engage in it are not, by definition, the good guys. There are no good excuses for it. Ever.

Inconsistent

by digby

The Republicans are finally seeking to lay blame for the torture regime where it belongs — with the Democrats:

If Democrats insist on probing the Bush administration’s program of detainee torture, they’d better be careful, a senior Senate Republican said Tuesday, because they might find blood on their own hands as well.

“To sit quietly and to let this happen and then to come back later and say people ought to be prosecuted criminally, not just here in the United States but perhaps internationally, to me is inconsistent, to say the least,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

Weren’t the meetings super-duper classified Top Secret? Is he suggesting that the should have publicly revealed classified briefings? Well .. uh…

“If people are going to start looking for responsibility and accountability, I think you’d also have to look at the members of Congress who were in those classified settings who approved those same interrogation techniques,” Cornyn told reporters.

[…]

Cornyn said he wasn’t necessarily suggesting that Democrats should have spoken out publicly, because the briefings were classified, but that they should have been more forceful in private meetings with the president.

“There is a certain responsibility to speak up if you object,” he said.

Oh. I guess they should have said, “I strenuously object.”)

I actually think these Democrats should be asked about this and it’s not a problem for me if they are held accountable. Jay Rockefeller handwriting a CYA memo and putting it in his safe never struck me as particularly exculpatory. If they knew, and did nothing, they are responsible too, at the very least politically. Bring it.

Tortured and Fatuous

by digby

Chuck Todd is all confused today about the “touchy situation” with the constitution and the legal opinions on torture but he knows one thing: this is now a food fight between the hard left and the hard right. Of course Andrea Mitchell agrees characterizing the issue as “some in the liberal blogosphere” forcing Obama’s hand, which may actually be true this time. (But then I thought from the beginning they may have been wanting us to “make them do it.”) However, when you even have people like Philip Zelikow from the Bush administration itself asking for investigations, this isn’t a “food fight.” It’s a deadly serious reaction to extreme misdeeds on the part of America’s leadership.

These are the people who fetishize bipartisanship and yet they are constitutionally incapable of seeing any issue in other than partisan terms. It’s infuriating.

Dday linki to Joe Klein’s Swampland post in his piece below, but I wanted to highlight a different aspect of it than he does. Klein makes an explicit call for the “clandestine” services to be allowed to break the law, pretty much defining it by the fact that it is a lawbreaking entity saying that it cannot exist without being “extra-legal” in nature.

Setting aside that larger question (for now) it seems to me that when it comes to interrogation, this is very simply addressed. The CIA simply has no business conducting them. Until the GWOT, it was always an FBI function. They have vast experience. They are used to operating within the legal framework and get very good results. The CIA should stick to what they do well which is cultivating sources and infiltrating foreign governments to gather information and then analyzing it. Their attempts at illegal and violent work to affect events is almost always counterproductive and usually ineffective.

This torture mess was the result of a bureaucratic turf war. We do not know if Cheney was the chicken or the egg, but we do know that he and his bloodthirsty henchmen were determined to “take the gloves off” and evidently felt that the FBI was too soft to get the job done. (Whether the toady Tenent was tugging on his forelock and begging for the opportunity to get tough is unknown.)

If the Bush administration had allowed the poeple who know what they are doing to do their jobs we would not be having this argument today. They empowered the CIA because they had a couple of nutballs who said they could turn the SERE training program (which was based upon old KGB techniques) on terrorists. And the insecure, one percent solution, pants wetting sadists running the show got very excited about doing that.

And they are still out there making their ridiculous arguments:

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, “as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, ‘brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that “Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable.” The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. This is the secret to the program’s success.

It just doesn’t get any more fatuous (and immoral) than this. The torturers were actually “helping” the prisoners “safely” do their duty. Honestly, it’s a wonder that the country survived at all under the leadership of people like this.

Apparently, this former Bush adminstration official thinks there is something unusual about this “odd” Muslim notion that one should only resist as far as one is able and then may be forgiven for breaking under torture. Evidently nobody has ever pointed out to him that many Americans like Senator John McCain also broke under torture. And just like those wacky Muslims, American POWs are also expected to resist to the extent they can and then are allowed to do whatever is necessary to survive intact. There is nothing peculiar or unique about this. It’s called being human and it certainly is not a rationale for torture.

The idea that torturing these people is a way for them to feel safe about telling what they know is so twisted, I think this person should be prosecuted for committing intellectual torture.

Bobbing And Weaving

by dday

The White House has given so many conflicting statements on prosecutions for those who directed and authorized torture that it’s clear they just don’t want to be responsible for it. Between the past 48 hours, when Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs parroted the “looking forward, not backward” viewpoint, and today, something has changed. While Obama went to Langley and defended the release of the torture memos, at the same time his senior aides were telling the New York Times that legal sanctions may go forward, due to mounting public pressure both inside and outside the Beltway.

And while Mr. Obama vowed not to prosecute C.I.A. officers for acting on legal advice, on Monday aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.

…human rights activists, Congressional Democrats and international officials pressed for a fuller accounting of what happened. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote Mr. Obama asking him not to rule out prosecutions until her panel completed an investigation over the next six to eight months.

Three Bush administration lawyers who signed memos, John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury, are the subjects of a coming report by the Justice Department’s ethics office that officials say is sharply critical of their work. The ethics office has the power to recommend disbarment or other professional penalties or, less likely, to refer cases for criminal prosecution.

The administration has also not ruled out prosecuting anyone who exceeded the legal guidelines, and officials have discussed appointing a special prosecutor. One option might be giving the job to John H. Durham, a federal prosecutor who has spent 15 months investigating the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes of harsh interrogations.

You have Dianne Feinstein calling for leaving prosecutions open. There are both the DoJ Inspector General’s report and a fuller report from the Senate Armed Services Committee set for release, to say nothing of additional secret torture memos that may come out at some point. You have MoveOn calling for investigations by a special prosecutor. All this pressure has forced the Administration into a corner. And this morning, you have Obama made a more definitive statement.

President Barack Obama is leaving the door to open to possible prosecution of Bush administration officials who devised harsh terrorism-era interrogation tactics.

He also said Tuesday that he worries about the impact of high-intensity hearings on how detainees were treated under former President George W. Bush. But Obama did say, nevertheless, he could support a Hill investigation if it were conducted in a bipartisan way.

Obama has said he doesn’t support charging CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, acting on advice from superiors that such practices were legal. But he also said that it is up to the attorney general whether to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who wrote the memos approving these tactics.

Read closely here. Obama said he could support an investigation emanating from Congress, and that the decision for prosecution is up to the Attorney General. In other words, shorter Obama: “Leave me out of this.” Nobody need rely on his support.

And the President is correct. He doesn’t get to decide who is and is not prosecuted in America. That’s the responsibility of the Attorney General. And if he wants to take it out of politics, the Attorney General ought to appoint a special prosecutor, as MoveOn and others have called for.

As for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, I have noticed that not only Democratic stalwarts like Sheldon Whitehouse, but even those Villagers disinclined to prosecute, like Joke Line, are comfortable with supporting this measure. This could be the entryway into getting a taste of accountability in Washington. My petition to get the California Democratic Party to support a resolution of impeachment now has 3,903 signatures. Sign it if you can, and let’s move forward on this front, getting the largest state Democratic Party in the country on the record to remove the torture judge from the federal bench.

UPDATE: Patrick Leahy:

“The fact is, the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee did not tell the truth. If the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee had told the truth, he never would have been confirmed,” said Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“The decent and honorable thing for him to do would be to resign. And if he is a decent and honorable person, he will resign,” he said deliberately.

Simple answers to simple statements: he’s not decent and honorable.

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See No Pulitzer, Hear No Pulitzer, Speak No Pulitzer

by dday

Yesterday, New York Times reporter David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative story about the Pentagon pundits who embed inside network and cable news as “military analysts,” and all the conflicts of interest therein. Incredibly, the victory came despite practically no mentions on television news whatsoever.

By whom were these “ties to companies” undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as “analysts”? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox — the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow’s story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs. The Pentagon’s secret collaboration with these “independent analysts” shaped multiple news stories from each of these outlets on a variety of critical topics. Most amazingly, many of them continue to employ as so-called “independent analysts” the very retired generals at the heart of Barstow’s story, yet still refuse to inform their viewers about any part of this story.

Indeed, NBC and CNN’s reporting on the Pulitzer winners carefully avoided any mention of Barstow’s story. NBC even ran a separate piece last night using one of the “military analysts” of the type in the Pentagon pundits investigation. As Glennzilla asks, “Has there ever been another Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for investigative reporting never to be mentioned on major television — let alone one that was twice featured as the lead story on the front page of The New York Times?”

Did I expect any different? No. But the parallel structure of the news these days – where the conversation in one corner bears absolutely no resemblance to the conversation in the other – is quite striking.

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Vice For Life

by digby

Uh oh, Daddy’s freaking out again:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Did someone forget to tell Dick that he has no authority anymore to formally or informally ask the CIA to do jack?
I don’t ever remember a former president, much less a former vice president, behaving like this after he’s out of office. Can’t he find some GOP hacks to do this for him? It’s embarrassing.

h/t to MH

Fundamental Causes

by digby

We really are all socialist hippies now:

JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, in a letter to shareholders, touched on a theme that critics of the Iraq war were highlighting more than a year ago: That spending on the war was damaging to the economy. Dimon cited “an expensive war in Iraq” as one of the possible triggers of the economic collapse. Spending on the war ballooned the deficit and crowded out investment in domestic priorities. Meanwhile, the trade deficit soared…Dimon also cites the 2008 energy crisis as a shock to the economy that played a part in bringing it down. The energy crisis may still have occurred without the instability in the Middle East caused by the U.S. invasion, but with Iraq’s oil supply knocked off-line for years, it didn’t help.[…]
“Many other factors may have added to this storm — an expensive war in Iraq, short-selling, high energy prices, and irrational pressure on corporations, money managers and hedge funds to show increasingly better returns,” offered Dimon.

Right, and the “irrational pressure” to personally keep collecting millions even today apparently still exists even though “we face a truly global, massive recession — and it still is not over.” There were those who tried to bring up the costs of our Big Iraq Adventure and we were shouted down as traitors, I believe. I wonder if Dimon ever brought it up with his buddies in the vari ous sectors of the ruling classes during those summers on Nantucket. Somehow I doubt it. The only people who dared to suggest that spending the country into oblivion so that insecure Republicans could feel like Real Men might just have some negative ramifications for the economy were the “unhinged left.” Everybody else was too busy treating Alan Greenspan like the Oracle of Delphi and George W. Bush like Winston Churchill to hear it. Welcome to the tribe Jamie. Don’t bogart the joint.

Deep Thought For The Day

by tristero

The fake controversies ginned up by Republicans – I’m thinking of the stupid brouhaha over Obama meeting Chavez, for one – and the more serious (but baseless) charge that releasing the torture memos makes the US less safe only make sense if one assumes that the GOP not only actively wishes for the president to fail, but in addition, that they actually hope for another devastating terror attack against the US.