“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.” [All emphases added.]
And this:
W.’s dark surrogate father is trying to pull the G.O.P. into a black hole of zealotry, just as the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother is trying to get his career back on track.
They, MoDo and her source, are talking about Jeb Bush. They are saying he is sensible and in a position to save his party. That is the same Jeb Bush who, well, let The Miami Herald explain what happened:
Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted – but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge’s order, The Miami Herald has learned.
Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.
For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called “a showdown.”
In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.
“We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,” said a source with the local police.
“The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,” said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. “When the sheriff’s department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off.”
The incident,known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday’s events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge’s order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge’s order whenever an agency appeals it.
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
Participants in the high-stakes test of wills, who spoke with The Herald on the condition of anonymity, said they believed the standoff could ultimately have led to a constitutional crisis and a confrontation between dueling lawmen.
“There were two sets of law enforcement officers facing off, waiting for the other to blink,” said one official with knowledge of Thursday morning’s activities.
In jest, one official said local police discussed “whether we had enough officers to hold off the National Guard.”
The sensible brother, the moderate. Of course, he publicly denies this showdown ever happened – but it did. And it’s not as if the rest of his behavior during Schiavo, and so much more, is, by any standard sensible, let alone party-saving. For example:
Bush’s history of politically unfortunate rhetoric goes back to 1994, when he famously answered a question on the campaign trail by saying he would do ‘probably nothing’ for blacks if elected governor. He lost the race against incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles by a hair — and many analysts believe his dismal showing among black voters (he got just 4 percent) was largely to blame…
Bush’s record on social issues isn’t exactly stellar: His nominee to head the state’s troubled child welfare agency signed onto a treatise calling for more corporal punishment of children and the consignment of women to the home.
Yet, while his tenure coincided with a sizzling economy and an overflowing treasury, Bush’s back-to-back terms were marred by frequent ethics scandals, official bungling and the inability of the government he downsized to meet growing demands for state services, including education and aid for the infirm and the elderly…
[Jeb Bush’s] administration — the Department of Children and Families, in particular — was vilified for losing track of 500 youngsters under state care and for failing to prevent the deaths of several others. A smiling Rilya Wilson became the poster child for all that was wrong with the agency and, by extension, the Bush administration’s failure to serve Floridians in need. Although her body was never found, it is believed the 5-year-old Miami girl was killed in December 2000, 15 months before the state realized she was missing.
Despite the controversy that swirled around the botched 2000 presidential election, which saw his brother win Florida and thus the White House by 537 votes, Bush failed to fully restore confidence in an electoral system that is still mired in controversy and lawsuits. He did little to counteract soaring property insurance rates or shorten waiting lists for citizens needing services.
“He led the enactment of tax cuts that will drain the state of needed revenue for health care and children and senior citizens — and we already rank at the bottom of the nation in those services,” said Karen Woodall, a lobbyist for migrant workers and the poor.
And it goes on. To say Jeb Bush’s record as governor is “mixed” is to be far kinder than Bush would ever be to anyone other than a fellow Bush. To characterize him as “sensible” is simply idiotic.
There is something seriously askew with a political party which seeks its future by looking to a Bush, any Bush, to save them – or to a Gingrich, a Cheney, or a Limbaugh. But that is how far gone the Republicans are, and, dear friends, that is not a good thing.
Furthermore, it is a stark example of how poorly the public’s interest is served by the mainstream press that a major columnist at the New York Times would call the stupid, impulsive, corrupt, and downright awful Governor Jeb Bush “sensible.” No wonder they’re going out of business.
Come on. The administration is now refusing to release the remaining Abu Ghraib pictures because they have the potential to cause harm to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? Really?
It seems to me that we should probably get them out of a war zone, then. Talk about dangerous. Why, last I heard they are getting shot at every day over there.
But this really takes the cake. In fact, I’m sorry to say that it reaches Fleischeresque levels of fatuousness:
Reporter: Was he pressured by the military?
Gibbs: No, in fact his decision was brought up yesterday with general Odierno at the end of the meeting General Odierno and Ambassador Hill had with the president and the president informed General Odierno of his decision. Obviously, there was certianly concern throughout the process. By folks concerned about the harm that could be caused by their release.
Reporter: (gibberish)
Gibbs: I think they have. But I would also say the president believes a couple of other things. Understand that the existence of these investigations are, and I don’t know the exact address, but they on the DOD web site, the president believes that the release of these photos will also provide a disincentive for detainee abuse investigation. The photos don’t denote the existence of the investigations, they are simply part of the potential evidence in the cases that have been finished since 2004. But if in each of these instances, somebody looking into detainee abuse takes evidentiary photos in a case that’s eventually concluded, this could provide a tremendous disincentive to take those photos and investigate abuse.
Apparently, the logic is that the military will refuse to investigate criminal behavior if there is any chance that pictures of such criminal behavior could be made public. So we simply won’t make pictures of it public anymore.
I have to say that between the CIA threatening to let the country be attacked if they are punished for torture and the military threatening not to investigate war crimes if they are made public, I’m beginning to have some doubts about the honor, integrity and commitment to the rule of law by a large swathe of the American government. Perhaps someone should look into that.
Update: Gibbs keeps saying that the president believes that nothing will be added by people seeing the photos of detainee abuse that was previously investigated. I guess we’ll just have to take his word for that.
And I’m sure these pictures couldn’t possibly add to the clamor for new investigations, so there’s no need to go there.
Update II:
Inflammatory Now “The president strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the thea- ters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces …” – U.S. official, today
Inflammatory Then “[Release of photos] could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world and would endanger our military men and women …” – U.S. official, February 15, 2006
A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”
When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC ChairmanMichael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”
Which pretty much sums up the attitude some members of the RNC have toward their chairman these days.
Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”
Awesome. But they’ve missed a huge opportunity here. They could try to “rebrand” the Democrats as the National Socialist American Worker’s Party, which would have been rilly, rilly kewl cuz then they could have merged Obama’s picture with Hitler ‘n stuff. Oh wait:
Or they could just go all the way and call it the Communist Party Of America then they could say, like, Obama was all Mao-like. Ooops they’re ahead of me again:
Simply rebranding the opposition party as the Democrat Socialists of America fails to see the full scope of the possibilities.
I’m joking because it seems so absurd, but it speaks to something much more malignant lurking in the conservative id. Here’s Ed Kilgore:
Here’s how the sponsor of the resolution, Jeff Kent from Washington State, explained its rationale a few weeks ago:
There is nothing more important for our party than bringing the truth to bear on the Democrats’ march to socialism. Just like Ronald Reagan identifying the U.S.S.R. as the evil empire was the beginning of the end to Soviet domination, we believe the American people will reject socialism when they hear the truth about how the Democrats are bankrupting our country and destroying our freedom and liberties.
I don’t know what’s more offensive: the idea of identifying the Democratic Party, which the American people elected to run Congress and the executive branch just six months ago, with the Soviet Union, or the idea that Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc through a magic spell. All in all, the highly adolescent nature of Kent’s thinking is illustrated not only by this comic-book historical revisionism, but by his insistence on retaining in his version of the “Evil Empire” the little-boy-taunt of dropping the last syllable from the adjective “Democratic.”
The St. Paul of the “Democrat Socialist” rebranding, Indiana RNC member James Bopp, Jr., sent an encyclical around further explaining its purpose. Here’s a pertinent passage:
The threat to our country from the Obama administration cannot be underestimated. They are proceeding pell mell to nationalize major industries, to exponentially increase the size, power and intrusiveness of the federal government, to undermine free enterprise and free markets, to raise taxes to a confiscatory level, to strap future generations with enormous unsustainable debt, to debase our currency, to destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death, and to weaken our national defense and retreat from the war on terror. Unless stopped, we will not recognize our country in a few short years.
Maybe the Democrats should all be put in coffins with some bugs and then waterboarded for a while. That’s one way we could make sure we still recognize our country.
Just now the Senate filibustered their first Obama Administration nominee, David Hayes, who was bidding to be the Deputy Secretary of the Interior, because conservatives are seeking revenge for Ken Salazar’s early moves at shutting down some of the worst oil and gas leases approved by the Bush Administration. Looking at the roll call, John Kerry and Barbara Mikulski missed the vote (Kerry was at a funeral for an Iraq soldier), and so eventually this guy will get confirmed. And I don’t want to let Harry Reid off the hook – he screwed up the vote counting on this one, and his reticence to try and confirm Dawn Johnsen as head of the OLC shows an inability to count votes, twist arms, hold his caucus, and really show any kind of leadership.
However, this is an example of the mischief a Republican caucus can still cause, especially with only 99 Senators seated and Al Franken sitting out in Minnesota. Yesterday, Judd Gregg made this very clear:
But in a 99-member Senate, 40 votes are enough to keep Democrats from cutting off debate on major legislation. “Usually you need 41 votes to get anything done around here. But right now, you can do a lot with 40 votes,” said Judd Gregg.
What a pleasing coincidence for these Republicans! Fortunately, their colleague Norm Coleman, who is being bankrolled by the Republican National Committee and wealthy Republican donors, and without any coordination with Republicans in Washington, just happens to be throwing up whatever obstacle he can to keep Franken from getting seated. That just works out famously for Judd Gregg and his Senate pals.
In this sense, Norm Coleman remains a sitting Senator. Since his party just votes no anyway, his absence is as good as a vote to uphold the filibuster. You could say that Coleman is the most active inactive Senator in American history.
“Locavore” is a beautiful coinage, and for a while it meant something real, and real important, and real good. Oh, well:
When Jessica Prentice, a food writer in the San Francisco Bay area, invented the term “locavore,” she didn’t have Lay’s potato chips in mind.
But never mind. On Tuesday, five potato farmers rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange, kicking off a marketing campaign that is trying to position the nation’s best-selling brand of potato chips as local food.
This, of course, is the same kind of mentality that’s managed to re-brand the advocacy of coat-hanger abortions as “pro-life.” Or calling the stupid, immoral violence of torture “intelligent interrogation” (Cheney’s latest doublespeak). It’s a deliberate corruption of language, increasing its power to manipulate and insinuate while weakening its ability to persuade and describe.
Suppose that the federal government decided to give every newborn baby $200,000. That might seem like an extremely generous gift. However, by the peculiar accounting of those who claim to be watchdogs for future generations, this policy would be bankrupting our kids. If that is hard to understand then you haven’t been reading The Washington Post or listening to the Blue Dog Democrats or following the work of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. This crew, along with the other deficit hawks inside the beltway, has decided that the way to measure intergenerational equity is to measure the size of the national debt, and this gift to newborns will undoubtedly increase the size of the debt. With a bit more than 400,000 kids born every year, this plan would add more than $1.6 trillion dollars to the national debt over the next two decades. No doubt the Peterson-Post crew would be decrying the unfairness of handing down this huge burden to our children. In their quest to cut Social Security and Medicare they have promoted a nonsense worldview in which the metric of how well we are treating our children is the size of the national debt. In the Peterson-Post world view, programs that spend money to better the plight of our children. For example, improving the education system or rebuilding the infrastructure or developing clean energy technology all make our children worse off, since their main measure of intergenerational equity is the size of the government debt.
I’ve always wondered why spending on education, health care and retirement was considered stealing from your children. After all, that spending is an investment in them in the first two instances. And in the last, it relieves them of the burden of having their parents move in with them in their old age. Read the whole thing because it’s actually an important argument that needs to be made when the fiscal scolds start yammering on about bankrupting the babies. .
Liz Cheney ran interference for her dear old dad today on Morning Joe, pushing that “ticking time bomb” scenario talking point we’ve all come to know and love. Apparently she found somewhere in those memos the insistence that the torture techniques were only supposed to be used in the event of imminent attack, which to her dad, is all the time, so I don’t get the distinction.
I’d like to introduce dear Liz to the technique of sleep deprivation, which was cited in the memos and which we used on multiple prisoners, which multiplied the abuse of the other techniques and which research scientists have concluded causes enough severe mental anguish to constitute torture. Interrogators would have their hands and feet shackled and stripped down to diapers, and kept awake for as much as 180 hours at a time.
Now, this isn’t exactly an original thought, and I don’t remember where I read it so I can’t cite it. But a technique that takes 11 days to break a prisoner is most definitely NOT a technique used in reaction to an imminent plot, particularly not a ticking time bomb scenario. Maybe Liz can walk me through the thought process behind “Times Square’s set to blow up in an hour, quick, grab the diaper and wait 11 days!” Somehow, I think it’s sprinkled with bullshit.
Now, if there somehow is a ticking time bomb scenario that plays out over the course of two weeks, and if there is definitive evidence to that effect, then I would follow the lead of transparency advocate Dick Cheney and begin a full investigation into what specifically happened in our name. Of course, contra Richard Cohen, I don’t think it matters whether or not torture “works,” whatever “works” means, because once you put aside the law out of fear, the extension of the argument ends up being “If we murder every Australian male in the country, can we reduce obesity rates?” or “Will mass castration provide affordable health care?” or something. The moral relativism grows quickly absurd. And you give culpable monsters the ability to twist the truth. I have this crazy notion that a law remains the law no matter what day it is on the calendar.
Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard is thrilled that torture is no longer taboo and he thanks “evunthelibrul” Richard Cohen for his perspicacity in understanding that Cheney is right:
The argument against torture is slipping away from us. In fact, I’m getting the sinking feeling that it’s over. What was once taboo is now publicly acknowledged as completely acceptable by many people. Indeed, disapproval of torture is now being characterized as a strictly partisan issue, like welfare reform or taxes.
I presume that like welfare and taxes, any “strictly partisan issue” will favor Republicans, but this seems about right to me, particularly on a day that Richard Cohen takes to the Washington Post op-ed page to wonder aloud whether Dick Cheney was right — whether enhanced interrogation does work:
In some sense, this is an arcane point since the United States insists it will not torture anymore — not that, the Bush people quickly add, it ever did. Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether “enhanced interrogation techniques” actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it. Cheney, though, is adamant that the very measures that are now deemed illegal did work and that, furthermore, doing away with them has made the country less safe. Cheney said this most recently on Sunday, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Those policies were responsible for saving lives,” he told Bob Schieffer. In effect, Cheney poses a hard, hard question: Is it more immoral to torture than it is to fail to prevent the deaths of thousands?
This was always a hard moral question, but as Cohen says, for the left this was no question at all. Like Obama, they reject this as a false choice — and anyone who says otherwise is a moral cretin, a thug, a war criminal. Except these moral midgets seem to comprise some 60 percent of the voting public, maybe more. It’s one of a very few issues where the public is at odds with the current occupant of the White House and sympathetic to his predecessor. Dick Cheney, despite his 18 percent approval rating, is winning this argument against an incredibly popular president. Cohen offers one possible explanation for this the left might want to consider: he’s winning because he’s right.
Richard Cohen is a silly dolt, whose sinecure at the Washington Postis an embarrassment to liberals –Americans — everywhere. Case in point:
Cap [Weinberger], my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me. As for the other five, they are not crooks in the conventional sense but Cold Warriors who, confident in the justice of their cause, were contemptuous of Congress. Because they thought they were right, they did not think they had to be accountable. This is the damage the Cold War did to our democracy.
The Weekly Standard, on the other hand, by defending torture, is morally bankrupt and intellectually incoherent. I think this article by Andrew Sullivan from 1998, tells the tale better than anything I could write about it today:
The centrality of this moralism to the Lewinsky saga was perhaps best put by David Frum, one of the brightest of the young conservative thinkers now writing. ”What’s at stake in the Lewinsky scandal,” Frum wrote candidly in the Feb. 16, 1998, issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, ”is not the right to privacy, but the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it’s consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all.”
It would be hard to put better what was so surprising, and so dismaying, about the Starr report and the Republican Congress’s subsequent behavior. The report was driven, as the Republican leadership seems to be, not merely to prove perjury but to expose immorality. In this universe, privacy is immaterial, hence the gratuitous release of private telephone conversations, private correspondence and even details of the most private of human feelings. For these conservatives, there is only a right, as Starr revealingly wrote, to a ”private family life” (emphasis added). A private, nonfamily life is fair game for prosecution and exposure.
No conservative thinker has done more to advance this new moralism than William Kristol, best known for his urbane appearances on ”This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts,” and about as close as Washington has to a dean of intellectual conservatism. And no journal has done more to propagate, defend and advance this version of conservatism than the magazine Kristol edits, The Weekly Standard, founded in 1995 by Rupert Murdoch. Most of this year, Kristol and The Standard have gleefully egged on Republicans in their moral crusade. As early as May — at a time when it seemed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal might dissipate — Kristol urged Republican Congressional candidates to forget other issues in the fall and campaign solely on the issue of the President’s morals. ”If [Republicans] do that,” he argued, ”they will win big in November. And their victory will be more than a rejection of Clinton. It will be a rejection of Clintonism — a rejection of defining the presidency, and our public morality, down.”
His magazine has been relentless in presenting the scandal as a moral crisis for the nation. … Perhaps no edition of The Standard captured the current state of American conservatism better than the one that came out immediately after the Starr report was made public. Its cover portrayed Starr as Mark McGwire, with the headline: ”Starr’s Home Run.” Inside, page after page of anti-Clinton coverage, anchored by an essay by Kristol advocating a full House vote for impeachment of the President within a month, was followed by a long, surreal article by a reporter attending a four-day World Pornography Conference. Six pages of explicit sex, interspersed with coy condescension, followed. (The cover teased with the headline: ”Among the Pornographers.”) One of many graphic scenes in the article occurs in a ladies restroom: ”Unprompted, [Dr. Susan Block] removes a rubber phallus from her purse and hikes up [her assistant] LaVonne’s dress, baring her derriere. Block paddles it and kisses it while LaVonne coos.” The article was so lurid that The Standard’s editors prefaced it with a note: ”Because of the subject matter, some material in this article is sexually explicit and may offend some readers.” The weird porno-puritanism of the Starr report does not exist, it seems, in a vacuum. It comes out of a degenerated conservative political and literary culture.
There you have it. I don’t think I have to spell out the utter moral vacuum that must exist in the minds of people who simultaneously leer at and moralize against pornography and presidential fellatio as a threat to the nation and now argue that torture is not only fine, it is popular and therefore to be righteously embraced.
But in reading that excerpt, you can certainly see why the Weekly Standard would claim torture as a moral value. They’ve long had an … ahem … unusual fascination in that regard. Much like Limbaugh with his vocal support for the Abu Ghraib guards “blowing off steam” and acting out something you’d see at a Madonna concert, the Standard’s puerile, psycho-sexual fascination with S&M and torture both arouses and confuses them. And the reason it confuses is them is that they consistently miss (as with so many issues) the concept of consent, of which, for all their obsession with liberty, they seem to have absolutely no comprehension. So torture, which is horrifying not only because of pain, which is bad enough, but because of the total helplessness of the person whose life is completely out of their control is something they can’t differentiate from “torture.” That combination of pain and total helplessness is what makes torture so terrible that until quite recently it was something we would taught our children was an absolute taboo. (That is also why the SERE training, which the torture apologists use to excuse their sadism, bears as little resemblance to actual torture as that Susan Block anecdote bears to a violent rape.)
As for the alleged popularity of torture being a good reason to support it, I would just point out that the vast majority of the American people were against the Lewinsky impeachment. And at that time the Weekly Standard and other conservatives insisted that the American people’s opinion on the matter was actually a reflection of how horrible the American people actually were. Sullivan noted in the piece linked above:
As public indifference to the scandal has continued, and as Clinton’s approval ratings have remained buoyant despite a pitiless series of embarrassments, the new conservatives have had little alternative but to blame Americans for their lack of judgment.
Hence the title of William Bennett’s latest book, ”The Death of Outrage.” Hence the religious-right icon James Dobson’s recent statement of disappointment in the American people in a letter to his group, Focus on the Family. ”What has alarmed me throughout this episode,” Dobson wrote, ”has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior even as they suspected, and later knew, he was lying. I am left to conclude that our greatest problem is not in the Oval Office. It is with the people of this land.”
Perhaps we lefties have a career opportunity ahead of us writing angry screeds, “blaming American’s first” for torture. But right now, most of us are concentrating on a small handful of Americans — the highest levels on the Bush administration — who actually ordered it.
In my piece that Goldfarb links from yesterday, I did write:
If everyone but the “Democratic Base” has so lost all sense of decency that they think torture is a-ok, then I’m sure they won’t mind if it turns out that the torture didn’t work. They have bought into Cheney’s “one percent solution” which holds that even if there’s only a one percent chance that an America could be harmed the government must prevent it by any means necessary. It might not turn out to be real, and it could result in a terrible catastrophic blowback down the road, but nobody ever said we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. And today, we have the head of the Democratic Leadership Council endorsing the logic behind it.
One hopes this will make a difference, but I doubt it. Since polls are showing that half the country thinks torture is justified, mealy mouthed politicians everywhere will be rushing to join them. There’s nothing they hate more than being categorized with the DFHs.
In my zeal to show how the village was beginning to congeal around the idea that being against torture was a kooky, left wing notion, I mischaracterized the poll a bit and I regret it. It’s more complicated than that:
Six in 10 people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Wednesday believe that some of the procedures, such as waterboarding, were a form of torture, with 36 percent disagreeing. But half the public approves of the Bush administration’s decision to use of those techniques during the questioning of suspected terrorists, with 50 percent in approval and 46 percent opposed. “Roughly one in five Americans believe those techniques were torture but nonetheless approve of the decision to use those procedures against suspected terrorists,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
So for most people the question really revolves around whether or not they believe that what the Bush administration did was actually torture. (I would guess that a fair number of those people who think waterboarding and the rest aren’t torture are former Bush supporters who simply can’t fathom that the man could do anything so blatantly immoral, lest they implicate themselves in the immorality.) This is why you have Liz Cheney sounding like an automaton on Morning Joe today saying “we didn’t torture” over and over again and soulless hacks like Cliff May saying this on Ed Shultz this afternoon:
Here’s where we agree. You think torture is wrong, I think torture is wrong. Let me tell you, the CIA intelligence officers who conducted the intelligence interrogations and the lawyers from the justice department, they all thought torture was wrong. If you’re going to prosecute them because you disagree with their opinion, you are establishing a tyranny you will come to regret.
The point all along, with Bush and Cheney (and now, unfortunately, Obama) saying “America doesn’t torture” is to keep up the fiction that what they did was not illegal or immoral. I find it pretty depressing that only half the country can see clearly that it was. But perhaps I’m just being too much of a glass half empty kind of person. Many people don’t want to believe their country could torture and so they simply choose to take the torturers at their word — and the torturers are relying on what’s left of the conservative intelligentsia to soothe and reassure them that they should believe them instead of their own eyes:
I do believe the argument is slipping away, but mainly because of self-serving politicians like Dick Cheney and Harold Ford and the failure of the Obama administration to take an unequivocal stand. Why should the majority of the public condemn torture when the leadership of both parties are trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug? Maybe they just don’t want to know. But that doesn’t make it right … or legal. If all we had to consider was popular sentiment, we wouldn’t need a constitution or a legal system at all.
Send Blog Posts On Torture To The Philadelphia Inquirer
by tristero
In response to Dday’s post below about the fact that torture advocate John Yoo is permitted to opine in their pages, I forwarded to the Philadelphia Inquirer one of my posts on torture to consider as a possible op-ed.
I’d like to urge all bloggers who have addressed the issue of torture to send one of their posts to the Inquirer.You can do so by following the instructions here.
Who knows? Perhaps even one of us will get published, but at least they will get the message that opposition to torture is widespread, we are articulate, and we will not remain quiet while those who justify torture are provided access to major newspapers.
The post I sent them was called Torture Is Always Immoral. Written in April, 2008, I slightly updated it.
Over the weekend, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi died in a Libyan prison. Al-Libi may be the most important contributor to the war in Iraq that nobody knows about. Seized at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001, al-Libi was rendered to Egypt and tortured by local forces there. Andy Worthington continues:
In Egypt, he came up with the false allegation about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, just days before Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the President to go to war against Iraq, in which, referring to the supposed threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Bush said, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”
Four months later, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the same claim in his notorious speech to the UN Security Council, in an attempt to drum up support for the invasion. “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda,” Powell said, adding, “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.” As a Newsweek report in 2007 explained, Powell did not identify al-Libi by name, but CIA officials — and a Senate Intelligence Committee report — later confirmed that he was referring to al-Libi.
Al-Libi recanted his story in February 2004, when he was returned to the CIA’s custody, and explained, as Newsweek described it, that he told his debriefers that “he initially told his interrogators that he ‘knew nothing’ about ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden and he ‘had difficulty even coming up with a story’ about a relationship between the two.” The Newsweek report explained that “his answers displeased his interrogators — who then apparently subjected him to the mock burial. As al-Libi recounted, he was stuffed into a box less than 20 inches high. When the box was opened 17 hours later, al-Libi said he was given one final opportunity to ‘tell the truth.’ He was knocked to the floor and ‘punched for 15 minutes.’ It was only then that, al-Libi said, he made up the story about Iraqi weapons training.”
Al-Libi’s false confession, offered for no other reason than to stop torture, mirrors exactly the claim in the Senate Armed Services Committee report that torture was employed at least in part to extract intelligence on the al Qaeda/Iraq link. The intelligence services knew by early 2002 that al-Libi was lying, but they used his information anyway, and since it worked out so well for them, they wanted more information like this. This coda to al-Libi’s life (nobody was even sure where he was being held) brings up a few new questions, but really brings back this remembrance of how torture and Iraq have been inextricably linked. As a TPM reader put it yesterday:
Several interesting things just connected in my mind. Saw Jon Stewart show a clip of Cheney saying that Bush “basically approved” of the interrogation program. His answer was as woozy as it gets. Then on the replay of Hardball, watched Lawrence O’Donnell answer Chris Matthew’s musings on a Cheney prosection by suggesting it would be for “usurping” Bush on the issue.
Really, where the torture scandal could break open is the exact nexus of who actually authorized the program and Cheney’s frantic efforts to get information linking Saddam Hussein to the Iraq war. Wherever Iraq touches the torture question is going to be the flashpoint–it undercuts the “ticking time bomb” rationale for the program. Its also where politicals are going to have their deepest interactions with the program. That’s where people need to look. Somebody needs to superimpose the timeline of the Iraq run-up over what we know about the timeline of the torture program. Anywhere Cheney, Iraq and torture meet is going to be radioactive.
Bmaz has more, and the Washington Post even manages to report on al-Libi today, specifically naming him as a “detainee who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war.” This is the great unmentioned part of the conservative project to justify torture if it saved lives. The purpose of the torture, given the al-Libi example, was to destroy lives by drumming up bogus reasoning to go to war in Iraq.
Human Right Watch researcher Heba Morayef told Reuters in London that she saw Fakhiri on April 27 during a visit to the Libyan capital’s main Abu Salim jail.
She said Fakhiri appeared for just two minutes in a prison courtyard. He look well, but was unwilling to speak to the Rights Watch team, she said. “Where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons?” she quoted him as saying.
According to Kaye, al-Libi actually said “Where were you when I was being tortured at Guantanamo?”
