Am I the only one who finds it fairly offensive that the TV networks are obsessing about whether or not this Mumbai terrorist attack was really an attack against America?
Yes, it appears that the targets were tourist destinations, and there is some question about western hostages, but the endless speculation about possible American deaths when they are showing pictures of dead Indians all over the place is just unseemly. A terrorist attack in India has many possible motives, so it’s a little bit arrogant to assume it’s an attack against Americans. After all, there was a large coordinated attack against Indian trains a few years back that was committed by Hindu extremists. It’s a big country with a whole lot of people.
Not everything is about the United States.
Update: I should be clear — it certainly could have been targeted at Americans and be an attack “on Americans.” But CNN is just frothing over the possibility when there’s very little information to that effect at this point.
Jack Goldsmith tells us that if there are any prosecutions or further investigations into the torture regime the lawyers who give presidents legal advice in the future will feel constrained and we’ll all be killed in our beds. This is, of course, the same thing we were told about the warrantless wiretapping: we have to allow these telcom industries to have amnesty or they won’t cooperate in the future and we’ll all be killed in our beds. Or , as Goldsmith reiterates at some length, we have to let the CIA be immunized for torture and kidnapping because if we don’t they’ll be afraid to be “aggressive” and the terrorists will kill us all in our beds. Again and again, we are told that the only way to keep us “safe” is for the government to be allowed to “take the gloves off” and break the law with impunity. This is blackmail. Allow us to do whatever we want or the country gets it.
If these lawyers advise the president to break the law they should be prosecuted like any other lawyer who advises a client to break the law. I suspect that isn’t an easy thing to prove, but the principle should always apply. And from what we know of the legal reasoning for the torture regime, it was based on the Nixon doctrine of “if the president does it must be legal” which kind of negates the necessity of legal advisors in the first place. Any of these people could have resigned — they’re not indentured servants. They didn’t. They enabled and encouraged and they are responsible. If they didn’t want that responsiblity, and all that implies, they shouldn’t have taken the job.
Goldsmith himself stood up to the administration and insisted that certain programs be changed to conform with legal norms. What do you suppose would have happened if he hadn’t? If there hadn’t been a James Comey in the department or if John Ashcroft hadn’t risen, ghostlike, from his sickbed and said that he had delegated his authority to Comey? Are we supposed to just trust that there will always be people like that around who will step up? Are we also supposed to trust that they always did step up? We still don’t know what those programs were all about, despite what Goldsmith says, and God knows how many others there are out there that haven’t been revealed. (Just saying that congress was informed is no longer something we can depend upon either. They are covering their asses too — and they are just as culpable if they knew about this and didn’t say anything. ) If this is the new governmental principle we live by, then let’s dismantle the whole justice system and depend upon the “good guys” to make sure the “bad guys” don’t go overboard when they are “keeping us safe.” We’ll call it an authoritarian democracy and save a lot of money.
These people are being deeply unpatriotic if they say they won’t keep the country safe because they are afraid of being prosecuted. In our system, if the law needs changing there’s a process for doing it and constitutional principles that guide it. If in the end, a lawyer or a CIA agent or a president breaks that law out of what they believe is patriotic duty, then a jury can assess whether or not that’s something for which they should be punished and they should be willing to face that.
I suspect that a lot of the lowly torturers and legal advisors did this sort of thing either out of career opportunism or cowardice or a blinkered willingness to follow orders and they know they are the ones likely to be prosecuted for the crimes that were devised by those above them. After all, as a smart person pointed out to me the other day, it’s not like we haven’t tried and convicted some torturers already — the Abu Ghraib bad apples are serving hard time. The Big Bosses are all busy writing their memoirs. And that’s precisely why the leadership should be subject to prosecution. In fact, prosecuting the leadership is a good argument for immunizing the rest — they do that every day in our justice system.
I do not accept this idea that in order to keep the country safe we have to allow all these people to break the law and suffer no consequences. It’s a complete inversion of the entire system. The reason we have a constitution and a bill of rights in the first place is to keep the citizens safe — from the government. If you can throw it out because some nutcase blows up a building it’s very hard to see why the police can’t throw it out when they are dealing with gang members or drug lords or common murderers. After all, their job is to “keep us safe” too. Why is that any different?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, 9/11 was a heinous crime, to be sure, but our leadership used the attack as an excuse to endow the presidency with untrammeled, unitary power. That is a crime against the constitution and it is an extreme weakness of our system that the president wasn’t impeached and then prosecuted for what he did. It’s really not too much to ask that the nation at least be fully informed of what happened, even if Bush and Cheney end up spending their elder years in comfort and safety behind the walls of their estates. That we can’t expect even that much is truly a sad comment on our so-called democracy.
After all, despots and tyrants always do what they do in the name of “keeping the country safe.” It’s the oldest excuse in the book.
Update: Greenwald goes further into detail on Goldsmith’s absurd plea. This is supposed to be one of the heroes of the Bush administration …
Oh my goodness, the mean liberal blogs spiked John Brennens’ possible nomination to CIA or DNI. Greenwald has the details at his place.
It’s very nice to be seen as being so fearsome, but I suspect this has more to do with Obama’s foreign policy. He simply cannot be seen around the world to be backtracking on torture, Gitmo and the rest. If he insists on not investigating or prosecuting anyone for past crimes, which unfortunately seems likely, then he absolutely must make it clear through his appointments, public statements and actions that the practice has ended.
The New York Times characterizes Brennan’s withdrawal it in somewhat hysterical terms:
… the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.
There are obviously many members of the intelligence community who have “played a role”in the agency’s campaign against al Qaeda” who were not among George Tenents top lieutenants when the practice of torture was institutionalized. If there aren’t, then we have bigger problems than I realized.
In any case, I’m gratified that liberal blogs are considered critics with enough stature to sink a potential CIA chief. We’ve come a long way. If that means that anyone who had knowledge of this torture regime and failed to unequivocally denounce it in clear and unambiguous terms, simply cannot hold high office in the intelligence community, then we’ve done well.
This is just great: Sally Quinn is telling Barack and Michelle where they should worship. I hope they do as she says. If they don’t they will be subject to her waspy wrath for the next eight years.
Sally Quinn: The biggest difference is that entertaining now is so much more partisan. When I first came here, you’d go to dinner and all different political persuasions were represented. You were all working for the same country, but you differed in what you thought was best for the country.… The people who did the entertaining were women who today would have a career, and what they did for a living was to bring people together. At parties, a lot of news was made and deals were made.
Maureen Orth: When the Clintons came to town, in 1992, there was tangible excitement that these two attractive young couples, the Clintons and the Gores, would somehow revive Camelot. Instead, the Clintons got off to a shaky start, with the issue of gays in the military, Nannygate, the suicide of Vince Foster, Travelgate, the failure of Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, and Whitewater. There were so many scandals that the White House came to see the press as the enemy, and the First Couple did not venture out much, but they sent loyalists such as Mack and Donna McLarty, who were Arkansas friends, and Vernon and Ann Jordan to cover Georgetown. In the beginning, however, they also had a series of dinners in their private quarters. At one, which I attended with my husband, Bill Clinton gave a detailed tour of the Lincoln Bedroom. Later, that room would give rise to yet another scandal when it was revealed that wealthy donors were being invited to spend the night there. The Clintons did have a very lively, bipartisan engagement party early on for Bill’s adviser James Carville and his very Republican fiancée, Mary Matalin; they also entertained at informal “movie nights”; and they significantly helped the cause of peace in Northern Ireland by beginning an annual White House St. Patrick’s Day party, which both sides—who would never ordinarily venture into the same room together—attended. The Clintons, however, appeared in the end to view the White House not as a vibrant salon in which to host the best and the brightest, but as coveted real estate that could be used for fund-raising. Dee Dee Myers: The Democratic National Committee controlled who was invited. They brought in Clinton people from all over the country. They called it “political-base building” and the white-hot center was the White House. Los Angeles was huge. When the film-production company DreamWorks was being launched, I remember walking out of the grand hallway during a state dinner, and on a bench, deeply engrossed, were David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg [the founders of DreamWorks]. The Clintons expanded the size of state dinners and had them in a tent. They had two or three events and lined them up for a week in the tent. They had the Emperor of Japan in a tent. The thing about the Clintons is that more is always more. It loses intimacy and grace. Liz Stevens: If some cause needed help, the Clintons were willing to have an event. The staff was exhausted. They were constantly feeding people. Sally Quinn: In terms of entertaining being partisan, it started with Clinton. The people who were seen as “hostesses” were people who had money or were raising money.… When the stuff about Clinton and women started appearing, in the second term, things shut down. Everybody wanted to go hide in a cave. For people willing to defend him, it became intolerable for them to go out.
Obama seems to have learned a lot from Clinton’s mistakes. Let’s hope he learned this too. The Village tabbies will not be ignooored. Word to the wise. One simply doesn’t invite the riff raff to the white house and one pays attention when one is told how to behave. Or else. Oh, and by the way, our current, allegedly born-again president didn’t attend church at all for eight years unless there was a funeral. I don’t remember Quinn weighing in on that. But you can bet that if Barack and Michelle aren’t on their knees at “the Cathedral” in front of the villagers every Sunday there will be hell to pay.
I noticed in all the local news coverage of the Prop 8 protests that Mormons being interviewed were often furiously denouncing the idea that they were bigots. They seemed a bit puzzled and hurt by the accusation and very upset that anyone would accuse them of such a thing..
And you can see why. They have been part of an oppressed religion in this country, subject to all kinds of bigotry themselves. The irony of Mormons defending “traditional marriage” is so rich, it always struck me as somewhat unbelievable. Indeed, I thought this was some sort of campaign to cleanse themselves of the taint of being the Americans previously most likely to be discriminated against for their marriage practices.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The church is downplaying its involvement now:
Michael Otterson, a church spokesman, recently told the Associated Press that he was “puzzled” by the protesters’ targeting of Mormons. “This was a very broad-based coalition that defended traditional marriage in a free and democratic election,” he said. “It’s a little disturbing to see these protesters singling out the Mormon Church.”There are Mormons who fought hard against the measure, drawing attention to the extent of Mormon involvement by outing fellow members on donor lists. There are Mormons so upset they’re thinking of renouncing their church membership as well as Mormons who wholeheartedly supported the initiative. And then there are those who gave money out of obedience to their leaders, without much thought to the policy it was being used to support. Regardless of where they fall on this spectrum, many probably feel a bit like Otterson: uneasy with all the attention.
I have no pity for them. they spent many millions defending bigotry and they can’t expect that there will be no pushback. If they don’t like being called bigots, they shouldn’t be bigots.
The article points out that the Mormons are in a position to become huge players in the culture wars, with lots of money and growing political influence. And their signal achievement on Prop 8 has not gone unnoticed by the religious right who may be persuaded to forgive some of their more eccentric theology in return for their cooperation in more political activity. They are, after all, rich as Croesus.
We are hearing more and more about those incredibly overpaid, cushy 70 dollar an hour autoworker jobs and if it sound fishy, it’s because it is. I know all of you remember that the UAW very recently had a big brouhaha with the auto companies (that’s what the Jim Cramer meltdown was all about) and guess what they created a whole new regime for pensions and health care — which are part of that 70 dollar an hour figure. It was only a year ago, but you’d think it never happened.
Anyway, here’s a great little piece By Jonathan Cohn on the real story, which points out something that is very inconvenient for the “right-to-work” politicians who are flogging the idea of bankruptcy: when the new UAW contract kicks in, the union members will actually be making less than non-union autoworkers.
In 2007, the Big Three signed a breakthrough contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW) designed, once and for all, to eliminate the compensation gap between domestic and foreign automakers in the U.S.The agreement sought to do so, first, by creating a private trust for financing future retiree benefits–effectively removing that burden from the companies’ books. The auto companies agreed to deposit start-up money in the fund; after that, however, it would be up to the unions to manage the money. And it was widely understood that, given the realities of investment returns and health care economics, over time retiree health benefits would likely become less generous.In addition, management and labor agreed to change health benefits for all workers, active or retired, so that the coverage looked more like the policies most people have today, complete with co-payments and deductibles. The new UAW agreement also changed the salary structure, by creating a two-tiered wage system. Under this new arrangement, the salary scale for newly hired workers would be lower than the salary scale for existing workers.One can debate the propriety and wisdom of these steps; two-tiered wage structures, in particular, raise various ethical concerns. But one thing is certain: It was a radical change that promised to make Detroit far more competitive. If carried out as planned, by 2010–the final year of this existing contract–total compensation for the average UAW worker would actually be less than total compensation for the average non-unionized worker at a transplant factory. The only problem is that it will be several years before these gains show up on the bottom line–years the industry probably won’t have if it doesn’t get financial assistance from the government.
At this point it’s up to all those really smart guys in suits and ties (who are naturally worth every penny of their salaries because they’re such superior humans) to figure out how to keep the companies going. The unions did their part already.
One things pretty clear. The Republicans aren’t angling for bankruptcy because they want to protect their own own non-unionized auto industry from competition. They just want to break the unions because the opportunity is there and it’s what they live for. And the result will be that wages will probably go down for their own constituents. Of course, the presumes that their constituents are people who live in their states and districts. If you look at the bigger picture it’s clear that their constituents are those who stand to make a profit from lowering wages.
I don’t know who this Republican Senator is, but he sounds drunk:
“Jeb Bush could do so much for our party, but his name is Bush,” the senator says. “Maybe he should use his middle name, Ellis — Jeb Ellis! Or I could adopt him, and he could use my name!”
Like Atrios, I wonder why in the hell Roger Simon is giving anonymity to sitting US Senators to have a stream of consciousness dialog that should have remained inside his own head. But that’s our village.
This is priceless, though:
“We have to become much more attuned to the rhetoric and issues that Hispanics care about,” the senator says. “We have to talk about education, family, and moral issues like gay marriage and abortion.”
Yes, they really should stop hiding their position on those issues. It’s killing them.
In the first two weeks after the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the last eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say. Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” last Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring. According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. “Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”
He does drop his “n’s” from time to time, so maybe they’ll let him get away with it.
I’ve written a bit about this notion of a bipartisan, 9/11 style commission to investigate the abuses of the Bush administration and for a number of reasons I’ve been fairly pessimistic that anything like it would come to pass or that it would accomplish anything. But you never know …
Here’s a fascinating article by Charles Holman from this month’s Washington Monthly called “The Last Secrets Of The Bush Administration” which tackles all these issues and makes a good argument for establishing a “9/12” Commission. He lays out all the rational political reasons why the administration and the congress won’t do this, including a fascinating bit a history about the fallout from the Church Commission in the 1970s which I was unaware of:
[T]he unfortunate fact is that such investigations, while necessary, tend to be politically poisonous for the lawmakers who run them. Frank Church had presidential aspirations in 1975, but the investigation ate up so much of his time that it kept him from campaigning (he later groused that it might have cost him a shot at being Jimmy Carter’s vice president, too). The public and Congress, who had been furious about agency abuses of power in 1975, had mostly lost interest by the time the committee delivered its report a year later. Only one of its recommendations—the surveillance court—actually made it into law, and Church lost his Senate seat in the 1980 election following spurious accusations that his investigation had led to the assassination of a CIA station chief in Greece. The chairman of the concurrent investigative committee in the House, New York Democrat Otis Pike, saw his reputation similarly battered, and left office in 1979.
You know they will …
Holman is bullish on the idea of a commission if it’s structured correctly and for some very interesting reasons. It’s my long held view that it’s a grave mistake to allow these people to go unpunished, because it inevitably leads to further (and probably worse — they always are) abuses down the road. The zombies need to be vanquished once and for all. But as he points out in the article, just as important is the fact that the agreed upon national narrative of this period is written that says the Bush administration was clearly wrong to do what it did and that it was not an acceptable response to a threat. It’s not that this country doesn’t have a long history of such abuses, it does. But normalizing the idea that suspending habeas and committing kidnapping, torture and indefinite detention to “keep us safe” leads to the inevitable expansion of that idea into our domestic legal system, which is already bad enough. (I think tasers are a part of that acceptance of “antiseptic” government sanctioned coercion.) This is important across a wide range of issues (not the least of which is that America’s reputation in the world is just slightly above Pol Pot’s at the moment.)
Holman writes:
With their strong majorities, the Democrats in Congress can remedy many of the 9/11 Commission’s institutional failures from the get-go, giving the new commission enough time, money, and subpoena power to do its work. Appointing a respected bipartisan membership will be crucial, because of the simple fact that most of the people who know things we need to know are Republicans. Addington and Gonzales will probably never provide useful information about what they did, but their immediate subordinates might, if they are given the right forum in which to do so. Much of what we know now comes from the handful of them who have already come forward. James Comey, a former deputy attorney general, offered up to a Senate committee the story of the attempt by Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to get Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign an extension of the NSA’s secret wiretapping program while Ashcroft was ill and drugged in a hospital room. Jack Goldsmith, the former OLC head, has published an illuminating memoir of his time in the administration that fills in a great deal of granular detail about how Cheney, Addington, and Gonzales pursued their agenda. Both Comey and Goldsmith are staunch conservatives who agreed with the Bush administration on many principles, but not with the unconstitutional methods by which it pursued them. Comey may have been willing to volunteer his story to a Democratic Senate committee, but a bipartisan commission could be instrumental in reaching more reluctant administration veterans. Some might talk out of a sense of duty, as Comey and Goldsmith appear to have done. Others might be persuaded to testify in order to clear their names and position themselves for future appointments. The crucial thing is to define the question as what happened, not whether it was right. Now is not the time to argue with Jack Goldsmith about what constitutes a legal interrogation technique. Now is the time to get him to help explain what those techniques were. The commission can sweeten the deal by offering future immunity to anyone willing to testify, making it clear that its goal is to fill in the history of the Bush years, not to send anyone to jail. Otherwise, says Jim Dempsey, the vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology and a former House Judiciary Committee counsel, “all the people who know what you want to know come under the protection of the Fifth Amendment. They lawyer up, and the whole inquiry gets frozen.” (John Yoo did just that this summer, arriving with high-powered defense attorney Miguel Estrada at a House subcommittee hearing.) And as tempting as it is to believe otherwise, the odds of any major Bush administration figure serving time for what happened over the past eight years are pretty long under even the best of circumstances. Remember Goldsmith’s get-out-of-jail-free card: it would be difficult to convict anyone in a position of authority on charges related to interrogation or wiretapping, because those actions were legitimized with OLC memos. At most, a few CIA interrogators would go to prison, and the big fish would go free, á la Abu Ghraib; and this summer, Congress—the Democratic Congress—absolved the telecommunications companies that helped the NSA listen in on phone calls and e-mail exchanges. The U.S. attorney firings? Maybe a few tangentially related perjury convictions. Invading Iraq on false pretenses? Henry Kissinger did worse, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. And for all of the above, Bush could always borrow a page from his father, who less than a month before leaving the Oval Office preemptively pardoned half a dozen of his fellow Reagan administration officials— including the defense secretary—for their involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, sinking an independent prosecutor’s six-year investigation. Most importantly, a commission tasked with creating the be-all, end-all record of a tumultuous political era makes a powerful implicit offer to potential witnesses: the prospect of having some small influence on how they are viewed by history. This is why once-loyal administration officials talk to Bob Woodward and publish memoirs that polish their reputations at the expense of their former bosses’, and why the 9/11 Commission was ultimately able to wrestle testimony—albeit unsworn—out of two presidents and vice presidents on the subject of their own failures. It’s not crazy to think that one or two staffers from the Office of the Vice President, weighing the risk of coming off badly in another witness’s telling against the limited political rewards of loyalty to an administration whose marquee names will be out of power for quite some time, might volunteer their own accounts of the past eight years; they would be instrumental in helping to clear away the unknown unknowns and suggesting which questions to ask.
I think there’s almost no chance that the new Obama administration will pursue prosecutions and even less that the congress will do anything on its own. They can’t even find it in themselves to deny Joe Lieberman a chairmanship. What are the chances they’re going to prosecute Dick Cheney for war crimes? But there are those among Obama’s advisors and among members of congress who understand that this should not be swept under the rug and if they can come up with some sort of commission, it’s something. Will it tell the “true story?” I doubt it. But it might just be the kind of cautionary tale that ensures that a new generation of Americans don’t grow up thinking that it’s normal for their government to torture and suspend portions of the the Bill of Rights at will. I think that’s the bare minimum we should expect from this new, allegedly liberal government.
Update: Dahlia Lithwick was terrific on Maddow tonight on this issue wondering why Obama doesn’t seem to be willing to expend political capital on these issues. She claims he’s getting two pieces of irreconcilable advice —- half of his advisors are saying he has to pursue this and the other half who say we can’t be playing the blame game and observes that there are reasonable legal questions about all this that aren’t being asked; the considerations all seem to be political. (I would just point out that from a crassly political standpoint, showing these defeated Republicans testifying about their crimes, turning on each other and generally making people’s stomach’s churn at the mere sight of them is an investment in their political future — a form of aversion therapy.)
Maddow asked a good question: If you allow it to stand without a full public airing does it “legalize” it for the future. I think so. Once the precedent is set they will use it again. And the public, like the proverbial frogs in the slowly heating water, don’t even realize they are losing not just their rights, but even the idea of their constitution.
Corrente hosted a live blog event on single payer health care with Katie Robbins from Healthcare-NOW, which I missed in real time, unfortunately. But the dialog is interesting to read after the fact anyway. Check it out.