Month: April 2009

Who Do We Blame?

by digby

I confess I find this disappointing after all we’ve seen these last few months :

A Gallup survey released this afternoon suggests that Republicans may have found an issue — finally — they can run on. Asked whether “big government”, “big labor” or “big business” posed the biggest threat to the future of the country, 55 percent said “big government” while 32 percent chose “big business” and 10 percent opted for “big labor”. Those numbers are basically unchanged from a December 2008 Gallup poll (53 percent government, 31 percent business, 11 percent labor) although in December 2006 more than six in ten Americans believed government was the biggest threat to the country’s future.

I suspect many people just repeat the ear worms they’ve heard for decades when asked these questions. Three decades of propaganda have so inculcated the anti “big government” theme in their minds that they just accept it without thinking. The true conservatives among those asked really believe it, of course, but the Independents and Democrats who answered that way probably don’t buy into the implications of that statement.
Nonetheless, this shows that the Democrats and liberals continue to fail to provide an alternative vision which shows government being the necessary, democratic mediator and regulator of the various interests in American society on behalf of the common good. If the economy briskly recovers perhaps that understanding will happen spontaneously. But if it doesn’t — or if the Republicans are somehow able to successfully spin the recovery as a triumph of the free market — then Democrats will regret failing to make these arguments explicitly and the Republicans will take advantage.
I guess Democrats are so gun shy at being called socialists that they can’t even bring themselves to make a philosophical argument on behalf of government and put business into its proper perspective in our democratic capitalist system. That’s a terrible weakness and a big missed opportunity. Let’s hope the Republicans continue to behave like fools and that the economy begins to recover or we will all come to regret that they failed to take it.

Urban Gardens

by digby

Those of you who are not mortally offended by Michelle Obama’s outrageous decision to grow an organic garden at the White House might find the following invitation of interest:

Safe

by digby

As I read these accounts from former Bush officials who are vociferously and angrily accusing the Obama administration of making the country vulnerable to its enemies by releasing the torture memos (and also see the entirely predictable bandwagon effect in the media) it becomes clear what the fundamental difference of opinion about this really is. Michael Hayden, once hailed as an eminently reasonable, decent man but now revealed to be a staunch torture apologist, is probably the best example of the kind of thinking that is represented by those who think torture is a positive good:

“Most of the people who oppose these techniques want to be able to say: ‘I don’t want my nation doing this’ — which is a pure honorable position — and ‘they didn’t work anyway’,” Hayden said.

“The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer, it really did,” he said.

[…]

Hayden also said Obama’s own CIA director, Leon Panetta, as well as three other former CIA chiefs had warned the White House against releasing the memos outlining US interrogation techniques.

“The definition of top secret is information which, if revealed, would cause grave harm to US security,” he said, adding that the release of the documents, by definition of their classification, was “a grave threat to national security.”

The gravest effect, Hayden said, was that agency officers may be held back in the future from acting in the best interests of the country.

Again, if agency officers “hold back” from using legal, sanctioned means to protect the country then they are unpatriotic scum who must be fired. If they “hold back” from using torture, which is illegal and immoral, they will be following the law and doing their duty. That one isn’t difficult.

What is a little bit more difficult is this idea that torture “keeps the country safe.” Setting aside the disagreement as to whether Abu Zubaydah ended up providing some useful information under torture, the underlying issue seems to be whether or not it keeps the country safe if the world believes that the US tortures its prisoners. Many of the torture apologists claim that regardless of whether or not torture works, or whether we are actually doing it, we don’t want the enemy to know that we don’t torture. (Apparently, now that we’ve revealed that we won’t be putting insects in coffins with prisoners, nobody will ever give up any information again). But the subtext of all that is that the world will think we are weak if they don’t believe that we will torture.

True, they accept this little wink and nod by Presidents Bush and Obama that “America doesn’t torture” but the whole point of that odd, and clearly incorrect, locution is to signal that we really do. The very fact that the phrase is used so rigidly and so awkwardly makes it clear that it’s a term of art rather than a simple declaration of fact. I don’t know that Obama and Bush use it that way for the same purpose — I suspect Obama has been told by lawyers that if he implies in any way that America has tortured that he could become a witness in a war crimes trial. Bush, I would guess, has convinced himself that he didn’t actually order torture — and even if he did, it was perfectly justified. Either way, the term of art serves the opposite purpose of its stated intention. It makes people believe that we do torture not that we don’t. And that’s the whole point.

The apologists indignation that the release of the memos means we will not be able to use those methods again pretty clearly says they thought it was useful for the world to believe that we would continue to torture despite the fact that Obama ordered the government to limit itself to the use of the Army Field Manual. Regardless of whether we actually torture or not, they think it is vitally important that the world believes the United States has no limits. And that is as big of a problem as the torture itself.

Aside from the moral dimension, which should be the most relevant, the premise that the world must believe the United States will stop at nothing is very, very dangerous. It confirms the world’s darkest suspicions about us and validates many of the arguments made by our enemies. I honestly can’t conceive of anything that makes the US less safe than that.

Torture is immoral. Any country that practices it (or even pretends to practice it) much less contrives an entire bureaucratic legal underpinning for it, is then, by definition, immoral. That’s the kind of “exceptionalism” that turns countries into feared pariah states, veritably begging for mistrust among allies and the creation of new enemies. Unless we are prepared to do a lot more torturing, invading and occupying — basically becoming a malevolent superpower holding on primarily by brutal force — we have to repudiate this concept. The more powerful a country is, the more it needs to be seen as operating from a moral, ethical and responsible standpoint — and the less chance it will be seen by others as a threat. Making the world recoil in disgust at their brutality is about the stupidest thing the leaders of an empire could do unless they plan to spend all their time fighting wars and fending off enemies.

A world power of our magnitude and unequaled military might naturally engenders mistrust around the globe, which our government must already go to great lengths to assuage. To add to that already delicate, difficult situation by illegally invading countries and endorsing something as barbaric, crude and indefensible as torture is criminally irresponsible. The United States is made much less safe by these actions and we will all be paying the price for that schoolyard mentality for the rest of our lives.

Far greater empires than ours have been brought low by exactly the kind of juvenile thinking that leads to the belief that unless the world is petrified of a nation’s power to commit violence it will be unsafe. It’s a self-fulilling prophesy.

Smiles: The Latest, Greatest Threat To Global Survival

by dday

The fauxtrage of the day concerns Barack Obama doing this country the terrible dishonor and shame of shaking a foreign leader’s hand. IMPEACH NOW

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tore into President Barack Obama Monday for his friendly greeting of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, saying Obama is bolstering the “enemies of America.”

Gingrich appeared on a number of morning talk shows comparing Obama to President Jimmy Carter for the smiling, hearty handshake he offered Chavez, one of the harshest critics of the United States, during the Summit of the Americas. […]

Two Republican senators, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and John Ensign of Nevada, joined in the criticism Monday, with Ensign calling Obama’s greeting of Chavez “irresponsible.”

Worse, he was smiling! Smiling!!!1!!eleventy! How dare he sell out this nation with his facial expressions! Why, it’s positively… well, Reaganesque.

Fortunately, the President was having none of this today.

Venezuela is a country whose defense budget is probably 1/600th of the United States’. They own Citgo. It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States. I don’t think anybody can find any evidence that that would do so. Even within this imaginative crowd, I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of us having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela.

I think mockery remains the only option for dealing with these people. We have hard evidence of torture at the highest levels of government, we have a broken economy, we have a crisis in health care and climate change. And the Republicans, still acting like the normative goal of political parties are to win the news cycle, throw up a “Obama didn’t wink the way I wanted him to wink” or “Obama bent his knee when you shouldn’t bend your knee and as a result we’re all going to be killed or forced into burqas” every day. I don’t know that there’s another, more reasonable response than pointing and laughing.

Also, the media actually doesn’t have to follow this story. They deserve a lot of the blame as well. They don’t have to answer Newt Gingrich’s phone calls.

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Somebody’s Worried

by digby

I get the feeling that most “serious” people don’t take the move to impeach Jay “The Torture Judge” Bybee seriously. (It’s playing of the blame game and being so vengeful and all.) But what with him being accused of war crimes in Spain and people poring over his OLC memos with appalled disgust and incredulity, he does have need of a good lawyer. Anything could happen:

The Obama Administration assured CIA employees Thursday that they would not be prosecuted, but the White House has offered no cover to Bybee or other government lawyers.

So for now, Bybee is on his own. The good news, however, he’s got a nationally recognized lawyer on his side, Latham & Watkins’s Maureen Mahoney, who’s handling the case pro bono. In an e-mail Thursday, Mahoney said Bybee has recused himself from Latham cases, but offered no further comment on his case.

Of course Rahm said yesterday that Obama didn’t want to prosecute any former officials. But it’s not really Obama’s decision and it certainly isn’t Rahm’s. And the fact that they are out there saying it is — for political reasons no less (“national unity” etc) — means it behooves Holder to appoint a special prosecutor.

Bybee certainly seems to understand that he’s got some issues if he has one of the top conservative lawyers in the country as his defense lawyer. He’s smarter than he seems.

You can sign the petition to have the California Democratic Party Convention vote to impeach Bybee, here.

The Bush Torture Regime, Biased Covering Of Protests, and The Moral Dilemmas Bush Left Behind In Afghanistan

by tristero

Several articles in today’s Times and a report on NPR set my bloggy antennae all a-quiver.

No one should be surprised at the report that Abu Zabaydah and KSM were waterboarded 266 times by the Bush administration . But NPR reported this today like this, and I’m paraphrasing:

[PARAPHRASE OF ORAL REPORT] It’s one thing to be waterboarded once, quite another to be waterboarded 83 times [as Zubaydah was].

What NPR clearly meant was that while it’s debatable whether one waterboarding is torture, clearly 83 times is beyond the pale. Indeed, eighty-three waterboadings is beyond the pale, but… so is one. Waterboarding is torture, period. A little torture is still torture and as unconscionable as a lot of torture. The men and women who justified and authorized and who ordered torture simply must stand trial for their crimes.

One more point: Only Bush and his gang of thugs could thoroughly botch the treatment of al Qaeda members, including the mastermind who planned 9/11, so as to provoke pity for them. KSM is a monster; nevertheless, the state had, and has, no right to torture him or anyone else.

***

In the Business section was a column about the tea baggers. It was not complimentary, but that’s not the point: any publicity, even bad, is good publicity. Then I noticed this:

The burden being placed on the American economy and future generations is a significant issue — according to fivethirtyeight.com, more than 300,000 people attended rallies in 346 cities…

Golly. More than 300,000 people spread over 346 cities. Nearly 1,000 protestors per city. Man, that’s significant. And although I didn’t watch, I’ll bet even money the tea baggers got even more free publicity from the Sunday gasbags. So you could be forgiven, if you don’t follow politics that closely, into thinking that teabagging is an important mass movement that Serious People should carefully attend to.

Nevermind that the entire teabag protest was less than 10% of the number of Americans who protested the Bush/Iraq war in February of ’03. Nevermind that Stephanopolous, if not others, covered the international protests in ’03 but deliberately ignored the huge domestic rallies. Nevermind that there was no followup from the mainstream media of any kind on these protests except to systematically minimize the number of attendees until they shrank to what Bush described as a few guys from Berkeley. While the lunatic, hapless, teabaggers are significant, the far larger segment of the American people who opposed Bushism when it mattered (and whose opposition was intelligent and prescient) were invisible. And still are, for the most part, when it comes to the mainstream media.

***

Finally, a heartbreaking plea for the women in Afghanistan, who are the victims of repression from the increasingly virulent Islamism there, an Islamism that has gained more and more official support from the Karzai government. The moral dilemmas Bush’s failed policies left the US with are wrenching.

On the face of it, we have both responsibilities and interests in Afghanistan. The latter is simple. We have a compelling national interest to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for al Qaeda ever again.

Our responsibilities also seem simple. Given that Bush gullibly swallowed bin Laden’s bait, overran the country, and installed a corrupt, ineffectual puppet while failing to capture or kill bin Laden, it seems obvious that the US owes the people of Afghanistan a working, stable, government that honors human rights.*

But at what cost? Are the rights of Afghanistan’s women worth the life of American soldiers? Are those rights worth the expenditure of tens, if not hundreds, of billions we can ill afford? What moral responsibility does Obama reasonably carry given that his corrupt and inept predecessor, not he, created the situation we now face?

I don’t think the answers to these questions are obvious but I’ll take a stab. We have no business risking American soldiers’ lives for anything other than the protection of American citizens from existential threats. To that extent, our military mission in Afghanistan and the borderlands must be constrained to one goal only: bringing bin Laden and his henchmen to justice. However, we have a moral duty to expend whatever it takes, and to help however we can (short of military involvement) to create a stable Afghan government that abuses no Afghan’s rights. The situation is fiendishly complex, and dangerously susceptible for even the best of intentions to go murderously awry. Yet, morally and strategically,I think we must try.

No doubt some of you disagree. Have at it. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

*Back in 2001, I believed that while the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable, given American politics at the time, it was a stupid thing to do. There were plenty of alternative responses to the 9/11 attacks that didn’t require invading and occupying a country the United States knew virtually nothing about (for example, surgical strikes on bin Laden and al Qaeda). Besides, an American invasion was clearly intended by bin Laden rules as a consequence of 9/11 and rule #1 of successful warfare is never, ever play by a mortal enemy’s rules. Future events have borne all this out.

Goldilocks Journalists

by digby

Greenwald took Mike Allen downtown yesterday for his absurd granting of anonymity to a former Bush administration official to blast Barack Obama. This one is so obvious that it ended up garnering a rather petulant public response from Allen, typical of the political press being oh so upset an being caught doing shoddy journalism.

But Allen’s whine was nothing compared to the sniffling Dana Milbank, complaining mightily that his ombudsman told him to read the comments but they are all written by icky partisans who don’t have a lick of sense.

He is very confused on one point. It seems he can’t figure out why “the left” is so mad since they’ve got it all:

The comments are naturally an unscientific indicator, but the impression I got is consistent with what I’ve heard from colleagues: The vitriol of last year’s presidential campaign has outlasted the election. For the right, this isn’t terribly surprising; their guys lost the White House in 2008 and control of both chambers of Congress in 2006, so lashing out in frustration is to be expected. The left, however, is more difficult to explain. It made sense for them to be angry when George W. Bush was in the White House. But now, even under Obama, the anger on the left is, if anything, more personal and vitriolic than on the right.

A reader in an online chat brought this to my attention a couple of months ago, noting the animosity in the comments following a column. “Did you torture their cats and grandmothers? Most of the truly unhinged comments appear to come from Democrats, who apparently think you’re Cindy McCain in reverse drag.”

I replied that, to keep my blood pressure under control, I don’t read the comments, and that I did, in fact, torture their cats.

Well, last week I read the comments. On April 10, I wrote a column about an Obama appearance urging Americans to refinance their mortgages — a fairly gentle piece pointing out that the president sounded like a LendingTree.com pitchman. The comments compared me to Bernard Goldberg and Glenn Beck. One complained that “I gave Bush and the Republicans a pass.”

Actually, a National Review column called me “the most anti-Bush reporter” in the White House press corps, but never mind that. “Uh oh, Milbank,” wrote commenter “farfalle44.” “Now the Obamabots have labeled you an Obama hater — watch out!”

Far be it for me to defend angry, vitriolic commenters. I have certainly had my share and it’s true that the commenters on the major media sites seem to be particularly turbo-charged. I suspect it’s because many of them are not particularly sophisticated political observers who are still in love with internet’s anonymity so they can say mean things with impunity. (Most blog readers are long past that point.)

However. It doesn’t seem to occur to Milbank that “the left” might just not like the snotty, juvenile, shallow kind of journalism he practices, no matter who is in office. If they’re mad at his reporting whether it’s Bush or Obama, does it not occur to him that it might be him and not them?

I’m sure there are plenty of lefties in the comments who are jackasses. The right does not have a monopoly on such people. But the media critiques of the left and the right are substantially different. The right thinks the media is filled with liberal operatives pushing the Democratic agenda. The left thinks the media is filled with insular, shallow and out of touch stenographers. If it makes Milbank and his friends think the anger at the media stems from the last election it’s just more proof that the left’s critique is correct.

Also, if you didn’t get a chance to read Jay Rosen’s latest on “he said/she said” journalism, don’t miss it. The affect on our discourse of this po-mo approach to very serious scientific controversies is severe. But I would just add that one of the important problems with the he said/she said in political coverage is that journalists commonly use the absence of official pushback as an excuse not to investigate important stories. When questioned as to why they didn’t follow up, reporters will often say “well, the Democrats/Republicans weren’t pushing it” as if the only framework within which they can possibly report political events is the partisan divide.

The he said/she said convention is extremely limiting and has caused a great deal of trouble over the past couple of decades as the Republicans developed their sophisticated noise machine and were able to create phony controversies and successful defensive actions while the Democrats desperately (and foolishly) worked to erase any partisan edge. For a long time this gave a tremendous advantage to the GOP and it’s only the abject failure of their policies and the culmination of years of abuse of the political system that’s brought them low. If the political press had been more professional and independent it would not have had to come to this point.

Florida Election Travesty 3.0

by digby

Because there are so few older voters in Florida,and its population is so stable and immobile, I suppose this doesn’t matter too much:

Republican legislative leaders have lost all sense of shame with their 11th-hour bill to roll back voting rights in Florida. The legislation is so disgraceful it is no wonder a Republican-led House committee debated the bill for all of 6 minutes Friday before silencing public comment and approving the bill along party lines. This fast-moving train needs to be stopped cold.

The legislation moving through the Senate and House is breathtaking for its naked grab for power. The Senate bill, SB 956, and its companion legislation moving through the House would make it harder for voters to have their voices heard and easier for the major political parties to manipulate the outcome of the electoral process. It would ban retirement center and neighborhood association cards from the forms of identification now acceptable to vote. So much for seniors who do not drive and whose military days are far behind them. Voters who moved 29 days before an election would be forced to cast a provisional ballot rather than a regular one. Third-party groups that register voters would have to submit new voter registration applications as soon as 48 hours after the form was completed.

There’s more. Lots more.

They may very well come to regret the provisions pertaining to the elderly since before too long the average age of their base is going to be 97. But I’m sure they’ll decry the regulations at that point and blame the Democrats.

This is the sort of thing that’s going on under the radar in states all over the country where the GOP still has some clout. As they are showing once again in Minnesota and New York as we speak, they have divorced themselves from any common understanding of what constitutes a fair election. It’s just trench warfare now.

If you haven’t already pledged a “Dollar A Day To Make Norm Go Away” now’s the time.(The NY Times wrote about it today.) We simply have to elect people to office who don’t see democracy as an obstacle.

The Chief Of Staff Of Looking Forward Not Backward

by dday

Rahm Emanuel wants us all to just forget about the people who tortured in our name, those who authorized it, the ones who created the justifications and underpinnings for it, the entire torture regime:

Never mind the moral backflips you have to make to let people off the hook for torture. Never mind the fact that the interrogators did not even follow the guidelines and meager safeguards set out in the OLC memos – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. Let’s put all of that aside for a second. Rahm Emanuel is calling on the President and the Justice Department to willingly break the law.

US President Barack Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA agents who used torture tactics is a violation of international law, a UN expert says.

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, says the US is bound under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute those who engage in it.

Mr Obama released four “torture memos” outlining harsh interrogation methods sanctioned by the Bush administration.
Mr Nowak has called for an independent review and compensation for victims.

“The United States, like all other states that are part of the UN convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court,” Mr Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

Maybe the President should clarify his position. According to his chief of staff, the President and the Attorney General are committed to breaking international law. Once again, we see that covering up past crimes does nothing but entangle the current executive in the crimes themselves.

Meanwhile, regarding the impeachment of Torture Judge Jay Bybee, Claire McCaskill is now on the record considering it, while sadly still holding to the rancid Village-approved rhetoric of “looking foward” with regard to other matters.

What’s scary to me, Chris, is that one of them got a lifetime appointment on a federal bench. Yikes! You know, a lawyer that’s responsible for this kind of advice that clearly went too far in terms of stretching what our law is. It worries me that he’s sitting on the federal bench right now.

She then said she doesn’t want to “look in the rearview mirror.” Asked by host Chris Wallace whether she would favor the impeachment of the judge, Jay Bybee, McCaskill responded, “I don’t know. I think we have to look at it.”

McCaskill is not a wild-eyed lefty. Like any American with a conscience, she understands the failing of having the man who signed those memos sitting judgment on the federal bench. It is time to impeach.

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CIA CYA

by digby

Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas do a decent job on implications of the torture memos, particularly their reporting on the deliberations inside the administration. But they miss the point pretty badly with this:

Someone at the CIA came up with the idea—right out of “1984,” it would seem—of putting him in a small, dark box and letting an insect crawl on him. But since this was America, and not Orwell’s fantasy police state, the CIA first had to get permission from a lawyer at the Department of Justice.

I’m pretty sure that Orwell’s fantasy police state did exactly that. In fact, the hallmark of a police state is the bureaucratizing of barbarity. The United States engaging in such a thing is hardly a sign of our “exceptional” virtue.

Still, they do report some welcome news:

Though administration officials declared that CIA interrogators who followed Justice’s legal guidance on torture would not be prosecuted, that does not mean the inquiries are over. Senior Justice Department lawyers and other advisers, who declined to be identified discussing a sensitive subject, say Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is seriously considering appointing an outside counsel to investigate whether CIA interrogators exceeded legal boundaries—and whether Bush administration officials broke the law by giving the CIA permission to torture in the first place.

At this point, I think an argument could be made that Holder has to appoint a special prosecutor because the administration has made a blanket claim that they won’t prosecute for political reasons. (You can be sure that if the torture regime had happened under a Democrat the Republicans would be screaming rending their garments over that claim for being a political cover-up.) And congress should pursue it as well, particularly with an impeachment inquiry for Torture Judge Jay Bybee, which would get to the essence of the problems with the OLC.

Isikoff and Thomas end their piece with a plaintive recitation of CIA grievances over the years about having to take the gloves off and then be left holding the bag with their naked hands. I don’t actually have any pity for them. They battled the experts at the FBI and won a turf war for the right to interrogate prisoners,something with which they had little experience and the FBI did. Far too many of their highest leadership are implicated in this, including those like CIA acting General Counsel John Rizzo who were actively engaged in creating this Orwellian legal framework to excuse torture.

Of course the Bush administration, including the president himself, are ultimately to blame for all this, but there is too much reporting out there at this point that indicates the CIA wanted to be the interrogators and didn’t know what they were doing. You win the turf war, you get the responsibility that goes along with it when it goes wrong.

Once again, we are back to the endless CIA wars, where the Republicans treat them like dirt because their analysis doesn’t validate the right’s grandiose global schemes and paranoid fantasies, while the left gets infuriated by their barbaric covert behaviors and actions that usually result in American foreign policy folly.

But this isn’t just a battle between the right and the left. It’s a battle within the CIA, which is obviously riven by its two responsibilities. They always feel under seige, because they are attacked from all sides. But the problem is that they only do one thing well — obtain and analyze information. The right goes after them because the CIA analysis are usually right and it undermines imperial plans. The left goes after them because what they do in these covert activities inevitably goes wrong. They just aren’t very good at that stuff — nobody is. In fact, nobody should do it at all because the potential for blowback from the unintended consequences and the inevitable application of Murphy’s Law makes it a losing proposition.

The CIA should be gathering information, period. They should not be running prisons, they should not be assassinating people, they should not be in charge of “enhanced interrogation.” Their analysis has proven to be good far more often than not, even if it doesn’t fulfill the dark wishes of the wingnut imperialists. That’s what they’re good at. Let them stick to it.

And the next time some wingnut in the White House tells them to “take the gloves off” they should just say no. I know 9/11 was a terrible thing and nobody says that the government shouldn’t have taken action. But many of the actions they took have been counterproductive and worse, have fulfilled the world’s worst presumptions about America. They did not make the country safer, no matter how much the bloodthirsty torturers with their schoolyard logic want to believe it.And much of the problems, from Iraq to torture, stem from top people in the CIA refusing to man up and step down. Some of them did, and they spoke out, and that very fact is enough to hold those who went along responsible. It’s not like they couldn’t have have done the right thing.

And to those who say that if the CIA isn’t excused over and over again for their proven excesses and failures they will stop doing their jobs, I can only reply that this means they should all be fired immediately. You cannot have a clandestine service that blackmails the American people into granting them immunity from the law. They are unpatriotic at best for even threatening such a thing and treasonous at worst if they actually carried it out. This kind of blackmail should not be tolerated.

In fact, I am continually gobsmacked by the common blithe assertion by far too many people that certain members of society, from bankers to spies to judges to presidents are so important and above the rest of us that they cannot be subjected to the rule of law even when their crimes are so egregious that they risked destroying the country. Apparently, there is a substantial number of citizens in this country who prefer to be subjects.

Update: Ferchrist’s sake:

Rahm on This Week:

STEPHANOPOLOUS: The President has ruled out prosecutions of CIA officials who believed they were following the law. Does he believe the officials who devised the policies should be immune from prosecution?

RAHM: Yeah, what he believes is, look, as you saw in that statement he wrote. And I think, just take a step back. That he came up with this, and he worked on this for four weeks. Wrote that statement Wednesday night, after he made his decision, and dictated what he wanted to see and then Thursday morning I saw him in the office, he was still editing it. He believes that people in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided. They shouldn’t be prosecuted.

STEPHANOPOLOUS: But what about those who devised the policies?

RAHM: But those who devised the policies –he believes that they were — should not be prosecuted either. And it’s not the place that we go — as he said in that letter, and I really recommend that people look at that full statement. Not the letter, the statement. In that second paragraph: This is not a time for retribution. It’s a time for reflection. It is not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back, and in a sense of anger and retribution. We have a lot to do to protect America. What people need to know, this practice and technique, we don’t useany more. He banned it.

Jane Hamsher writes:

Is that truly what the administration thinks? That people who want to see those who illegally led the country down the road of torture held to account are simply “looking back” in “anger” and “retribution”? Fifty percent of the country favor such investigations, including 69% of Democrats and a majority of independents. Is Rahm saying that President Obama believes they’re nothing more than an angry, vindictive mob, and that nobody could possibly have a rational basis for believing that our laws should be enforced?

Anyone who gets upset at the Republicans and fat cats who destroyed the country over the past decade are an angry pitchfork wielding mob. (Tea bagging morons with Hitler signs, however, are patriots just exercising their right to dissent.)

One thing to keep in mind here: the president does not actually have the power to decide who gets prosecuted in this country and neither does his chief of staff. We have an independent justice department that is supposed to operate outside of politics. Holder’s job is to “look back” and see if crimes were committed. Just because Bush’s Attorneys General were all toadies doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

A special prosecutor would solve this whole problem for Obama and Holder. The best way to get the hot potato off their desks is to give it to an independent, career prosecutor.