Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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.

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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