Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Why Don’t They Like Us, Heinrich?

David Low

A veteran interrogator at Guantánamo told The New York Times in a recent interview that it became clear over time that most of the detainees had little useful to say and that “they were just swept up” during the Afghanistan war with little evidence they played any significant role.

“These people had technical knowledge that expired very quickly after they were brought here,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“Most of the emphasis was on quantity, not quality,” the interrogator said, adding that the number of pages generated from an interrogation was an important standard.

Well, say hallelujah! The truth shall set us free. This has been known for at least a year, but who’s counting? In January of 2004, David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair:

According to General Miller, Gitmo’s importance is growing with amazing rapidity:”Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I’m talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world.”

Unsurprisingly, the same nonsense took place at Abu Ghraib

“…they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors – Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast – to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. “It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up,” he said. Pappas was seen as demanding – waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information – but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes.”

I wrote back in June about this absurdity.

Daily success or failure in guerilla wars is notoriously difficult to assess. Unlike a war for territory you cannot say that you took a certain hill or town. Political types are always looking for some measurement, some sign that they are succeeding (or failing.)

Billmon noted this back in October in an interesting post on Rumsfeld’s angst at being unable to assess success or failure in the WOT:

Above all, Rumsfeld cries out for “metrics” that can be used to measure progress in such a war:

“Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he wrote. “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”

Billmon makes the obvious comparison between Rummy and the most recent war criminal sec-def, Robert McNamara, concluding:

The same mindset also spawned McNamara’s preferred metric: the infamous “body count.” In that earlier, more naive, era, it hadn’t yet occurred to management theorists that numeric targets can quickly become bureaucratic substitutes for real objectives, such as winning wars. So McNamara (and the military) had to learn it the hard way, as industrious field officers dispatched soldiers to count graves in Vietnamese civilian cemetaries in order to hit their weekly numbers.

Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they [Rumsfeld et al] decided that they would guage success or failure — certainly they would report to the White House success or failure — based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.

This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, “look at how much intelligence we’re getting. We’re really getting somewhere.”

McNamara quotes TS Eliot at the end of “The Fog Of War”:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

Well, not everybody apparently. Thirty years after the hell of Vietnam, it’s the same shit, different fools. Lyndon Johnson is laughing his ass off in hell.

Actually, Johnson is probably only in the 8th circle. The 9th will be reserved for the Bush administration because they wilfully ignored the experience of their own lives.

Now we find that in addition to a bunch of false intelligence gained through torture and other means, we are going to lock up a lot of these guys at Gitmo forever. Sadly, we can’t give them any kind of due process because we don’t have enough evidence. And that’s because many of them were innocent of any affiliation with the Taliban or al Qaeda and many others were very low level grunts. But they’ve known this for years. From the January 2004 VF article:

In late summer 2002, a senior C.I.A. analyst with extensive experience in the Middle East spent about a week at the prison camp observing and interviewing dozens of detainees, said officials who read his detailed memorandum.

While the survey was anecdotal, those officials said the document, which contained about 15 pages, concluded that a substantial number of the detainees appeared to be low-level militants, aspiring holy warriors who had rushed to Afghanistan to defend the Taliban, or simply innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Senior military officials now readily acknowledge that many members of the intelligence team initially sent to Guantánamo were poorly prepared to sort through the captives. During the first half of 2002, they said, almost none of the Army interrogators had any substantial background in terrorism, Al Qaeda or other relevant subjects.

It gets worse, though. Since we kidnapped these innocent men and threw them into a hellish gulag they have, unsurprisingly, become radicalized.

American and foreign officials have also grown increasingly concerned about the prospect that detainees who arrived at Guantánamo representing little threat to the United States may have since been radicalized by the conditions of their imprisonment and others held with them.

”Guantánamo is a huge problem for Americans,” a senior Arab intelligence official familiar with its operations said. ”Even those who were not hard-core extremists have now been indoctrinated by the true believers. Like any other prison, they have been taught to hate. If they let these people go, these people will make trouble.”

They now hate our fucking guts and will work until their last breaths to kill as many of us as they can. Perhaps this is one good reason why:

During late 2002, FBI Special Agent [blank] was present in an observation room at Gtmo and observed [blank] conducting an interrogation of an unknown detainee, [blank] was present to observe the interrogation occurring in a different interrogation room)[blank] entered the observation and complained that curtain movement at the observation window was distracting the detainee, although no movement had occirred. She directed a marine to duct tape a curtain over the two-way mirror between the interrogation room and the observation room [blank] characterized this action as an attempt to probinit those in the observation room from witnessing her interaction with the detainee. Through the surveillance camera monitor [blank] then observed [blank] position herself between the detainee and the surveillance camera. the detaiunee was shackled and his hands were cuffed to his waist. [blank] observed [blank] apparently whispering in the detainee’s ear and caressing and appluying lotion to his arms (this was during Ramadan when physical contact with a woman would have been particularly offensive to a moslem male.) On more than one occasion the detainees appeared to be grimacing in pain and [blank] hands appeared to be making some contact with the detainee. Although [blank] could not see her hands at all times. He saw them moving toward the detainee’s lap. He also observed the detainee pulling away and against the restraints. Subsequently, the marine who previously taped the curtain and had been in the interrogation room with [blank] during the interrogartion re-entered the observation room. [blank] asked what had happened to cause the detainee to grimace in pain. The marine said [blank] had grabbed the detainee’s thumbs and bent them backwards and indicated that she also grabbed his genitals. The marine also implied that her treatment of the detainee was less harsh than her treatment of others by indicating that he had seen her treatment of other detainees result in detainees curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain.

One wonders if they had become “dehydrated” and had been forced to have one of those therapeutic enemas against their will.

Yes, they hate us. The ones who have been locked up and the ones who haven’t. And it’s you and me and your kids who they hate now, not just the leadership or the troops. They hate us personally. And they hate us because we don’t seem too worked up about this disgusting breach of human rights. In fact, a majority apparently think it’s just dandy, including the most powerful leaders in the land who continue to support the war criminals who concieved this disasterous blunder, even this week elevating one of them to the highest law enforcement office in the land.

So let’s have another lecture on morality and values. I really need to hear one. Let’s hear some more talk about how liberals are leading this country down the path to perdition with our lack of restraint and our inability to draw lines between right and wrong and good and evil. I need to bask in the glow of republican righteousness and beg for forgiveness for sinfully indulging gays in their quest to form families and cleanse myself of the shame of forgiving a man for committing adultery. God help me, I need some moral clarity and I need it damned quickly because I’m really wondering just who in the hell is evil in this war on terror and who isn’t. It’s getting hard to tell the difference here. It’s getting really hard.

Doomsday For The Democrats

Via DAOU I see that Adam Yoshida is prognisticating about 2008:

If I were going to guess, the Republican primaries in 2008 may well end up looking a great deal like the Democratic ones in 2004. We’ll have a slew of major establishment players running simply because it’s ‘their time to run.’ One of them (early guess: Bill Frist) will emerge as a shallow front-runner, holding 20% in the polls versus 10% or so for other candidates. The race will be thrown into disarray when a candidate who connects to the Republican Party’s conservative base catches on fire. I’ve also got a suggestion as to who that candidate may be: former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.

Oh, I fervently hope not. Why, if Judge Roy Moore emerges as a powerful spokesman for the Christian Right (who feel betrayed by the rampant liberalism of George W. Bush) it will be just terrible for us. I get scared just thinking about it. We should publicly beg the Republicans every chance we get not to let Moore run for president. Maybe they will listen to us. They so often do.

Shameless

If anyone in history has ever emitted a bigger pile of oozing, sanctimonious, unctuous, fetid, perfidious, malodorous offal than this, I’d like to know what it could possibly be:

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — HOUSE H121

January 6, 2005

Mr. DELAY. Mr. Speaker, I rise to

claim the remainder of the time.

The SPEAKER. In the tradition of

the House, the gentleman from Texas

is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. DELAY. Mr. Speaker, what is happening here today is amazing but not surprising. Mr. Speaker, what we are witnessing here today is a shame. A shame. The issues at stake in this petition are gravely, gravely serious. This is not just having a debate. But the specific charges, as any objective observer must acknowledge, are not.

That is because the purpose of this petition is not justice but noise.

It is a warning to Democrats across the country, now in the midst of soul searching after their historic losses in November, not to moderate their party’s message.

It is just the second day of the 109th Congress and the first chance of the Democrat congressional leadership to show the American people what they have learned since President Bush’s historic reelection, and they can show that, but they have turned to what might be called the ‘‘X-Files Wing’’ of the Democrat Party to make their first

impression.

Rather than substantive debate, Democrat leaders are still adhering to a failed strategy of spite, obstruction, and conspiracy theories. They accuse the President, who we are told is apparently a closet computer nerd, of personally overseeing the development of vote-stealing software.

We are told, without any evidence, that unknown Republican agents stole the Ohio election and that its electoral votes should be awarded to the winner of an exit poll instead.

Many observers will discard today’s petition as a partisan waste of time, but it is much worse than that. It is an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy. It is a threat to the very ideals it ostensibly defends. No one is served by this petition, not in the long run. And in the short term, its only beneficiaries are its proponents themselves.

Democrats around the country have asked since Election Day, and will no doubt ask again today, how it came to this. The Democrat Party, the party that was once an idealistic, forward- looking, policy colossus. The New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Great Society, the space program, civil rights. And yet today one is hard pressed to find a single positive substantive idea coming from the left.

Instead, the Democrats have replaced statecraft with stagecraft, substance with style, and not a very fashionable style at that. The petitioners claim that they act on behalf of disenfranchised voters, but no such voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004 and for that matter the election of 2000.

Everybody knows it. The voters know it, the candidates know it, the courts know it, and the evidence proves it.

We are not here to debate evidence, but to act our roles in some scripted, insincere morality play.

Now, just remember: pre-election memos revealed that Democrat campaign operatives around the country were encouraged by their high command in Washington to charge voter fraud and intimidation regardless of whether any of it occurred.

Remember,neither of the Democrat candidates supposedly robbed in Ohio endorse this petition. It is a crime against the dignity of American democracy, and that crime is not victimless.

The Democrat leadership came down to the floor and said this is a good debate;we ought to be having a debate on this issue.

This is not a normal debate. This is a direct attack to undermine our democracy by using a procedure to undermine the constitutional election that was just held.

If, as now appears likely, Democrats cry fraud and corruption every election regardless of the evidence, what will happen when one day voters are routinely intimidated, rights are denied, or, God forbid, an election is robbed?

What will happen? What will happen when, God forbid, this quadrennial crying wolf so poisons our democratic processes that a similarly frivolous petition in a close election in the future is actually successful, and the American people are denied their constitutional right to choose their own President?

Mr. Speaker, Democrats must find a way to rise above this self-destructive and, yes, plain destructive theory of politics for its own sake. A dangerous precedent is being set here today, and it needs to be curbed, because Democrat leaders are not just hurting themselves.

By their irresponsible tactics, they hurt the House, they hurt the Nation, and they hurt rank-and-file Democrats at kitchen tables all around this country.

The American people, and their ancestors who invented our miraculous system of government, deserve better than this. This petition is beneath us, Mr. Speaker; but, more importantly, it is beneath the men and women that we serve.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues, both Democrat and Republican, to do the right thing. Vote ‘‘no,’’ and let us get back to the real work that the American people hired us to do.

Yes, by all means, let the House get back to the work the American people hired it to do — payoffs, character assassination, political intimidation, stealing elections and impeaching for blowjobs.

Really, we should listen to Monsieur Delay’s deeply sincere analysis of what is wrong with our party. After all, nobody knows more (except maybe Governor Schwarzenegger) about launching “attack[s] to undermine our democracy by using a procedure to undermine the constitutional election.” And there is not an American alive who is a greater expert on employing a “strategy of spite, obstruction, and conspiracy theories” or staging a “scripted, insincere morality play”. Lord knows he virtually invented the “destructive theory of politics for its own sake.” And well, I think we already know the answer to “what will happen when one day voters are routinely intimidated, rights are denied, or, God forbid, an election is robbed” don’t we?

Most importantly, when he says, “what will happen when, God forbid, this quadrennial crying wolf so poisons our democratic processes that a similarly frivolous petition in a close election in the future is actually successful, and the American people are denied their constitutional right to choose their own President?” I think it’s pretty clear that he’s issuing a threat not a prediction.

I have said many times that Democrats have been stupid by not seriously focusing attention on Rove, Delay and Rush. This crooked triad forms the head of republican power. We should have been working much harder to decapitate it. It won’t solve the problem, but it would go a long way toward crushing its effectiveness. Support the DA’s who have the cojones to go after these crooked bastards. Gawd knows the media isn’t interested.

In other GOP megalomaniac news, it looks like Newties back!

Garlic won’t work with these people. It takes a stake to the heart.

Thanks to Pandora at BCF

What A Surprise

Some of us predicted this the minute John Negroponte was named as ambassador.

Newsweek has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported ‘nationalist’ forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success-despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

[…]

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government-the Defense department or CIA-would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In “covert” activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)

Well now, this certainly explains the ongoing need for that pesky finding that the president can ignore any laws he chooses, doesn’t it? And good old Porter is certainly unlikely to have any qualms about doing it.

The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days.

[…]

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.

Yeah, “shock and awe” just needs to be fully unleashed. Surely, if we just scare them enough they’ll learn to love us.

If there has been a worse idea, I don’t know what it is. If anyone thinks in this day and age in a country like Iraq that ongoing “covert” operations will stay covert, they are dreaming. The details of the operations will emerge replete with pictures and testimony. It will naturally make us even more hated and even more vulnerable to terrorism.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the Pentagon has run out of options. We don’t have the troops to quell this insurgency with any humanity and even if we did, it’s probably too late. The civil war that everybody from Scowcroft and Bush Sr to Joseph Cirincione predicted is already in full swing. The US is in the middle of it, universally mistrusted and widely hated with all the predictable results. It’s a cock-up of historic proportions and it gets worse with every passing day. I’m not sure we can do anything but withdraw and institute immediate energy conservation on a scale previously unheard of. It may not have been the only reason we invaded in the first place, but losing, which we are, means that Iraq’s oil fields are now a battlefield. It’s time to trade in those SUV’s folks.

Boo!

“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?” — Albert Einstein

Via Daou I see that some on the right are kind of disturbed at all the Dem activity these last few days.

Out of the Gates:DEMS GO CRAZY

OFF WITH A BANG!: It only took seconds for the Dems to set the new record for crazy…Kerry bashing the U.S. while in Iraq, Boxer and Conyers pulling the “dimented act of the year” award, and the Gonzales grilling was accompanied by the MSM’s coordinated attack in the five most recognizable daily newspapers in America. My new World Net Daily column gives you the blow by blows…as the DEMS GO NUTS.

Better keep your heads down, little wingnuts. We’re OUT OF CONTROL. Who knows what we’ll do next!

It’s quite liberating being completely out of power after hearing the right insult, browbeat and demonize us for more than 15 years. After this over the top post election end zone dance in particular, we no longer have anything to lose by making it our business to simply fuck with Republicans for the pure entertainment value. In some ways it’s a kind of political insurgency. They refuse to compromise, they insist on being demeaning and crude, so all that’s left is to make their lives unpleasant is a thousand little ways every single day.

And the really fun part is that we represent 49% of the people so there are quite a few of us around.

Help Us Understand Ourselves

This is so cool. An academic conference on Blogging, Journalism & Credibility with select journalists and bloggers discussing the issues surrounding this incredible year in political blogging. Check out the panel of experts. At least four or five of them even have blogs of their very own!

It’s good to see that they did invite at least one non-media or academic blogger — Hinderocket. (We on the left are well represented by the corporate media and liberal academia, of course, so we needn’t have any similarly popular grassroots partisan bloggers on the panels.)

They seem extremely concerned about the bloggers inconscionable lack of ethics so I’m hoping they can find some ways to correct our egregious practices. Perhaps they could convene a panel with John Ellis, Howell Raines and Judith Miller to give us some guidance.

If anyone were to ask, I might point out that there are a few blogging practices that the media might want to adopt for themselves. One is that we back up our assertions of fact through linking. The internet makes it quite easy to footnote our posts and our readers demand that we do it. (Too bad journalism doesn’t have the same requirements or the public wouldn’t be constantly misinformed by “opinion” writers who dishonestly whore for corporate interests on the op-ed pages of major newspapers.) And, as shocking as it is, most of us adhere to that “ethical guideline” without even a professional association or stylebook to guide us. Imagine that.

Not that I would ever presume that those who created and fuel the blogosphere 24/7 from cubicals and laptops in Starbucks around the country have anything useful to say on the matter. Best leave it to the experts.

Mixed Nuts

Yglesias says that the neocons may not be as triumphant as we thought since John Bolton has been eighty-sixed. I’m not so sure. Bolton, for all of his insane ramblings, wasn’t really a neocon. He was Jesse Helms’s boy — reflexively anti-international, confrontational and crude. He’s more of a paranoid John Bircher than a starry-eyed neocon intellectual and while it’s true that their interest in unilateralism and American hegemony intersect, they really come from different schools. Bolton was a loose cannon. I’m not surprised the neos would want to see him gone.

Wampum Needs Some Wampum

Stat.

These guys are hosting the Koufax Awards for us at considerable expense. If we all kick in a few bucks we can help them get over the hump.

And don’t forget to vote in the semi-finals as they roll out over the next few days. (I’m pretty sure I’m going to be nominated for Best Costumes.)

Fact Checking The Asses

Via the Poorman I see that the Columbia Journalism Review does a little fact checking on the fact checkers in the glorious blogospheric triumph of “Memogate.” The kerning sleuth’s scoops were actually inferior to the average newsflash in the Weekly World News, but in these heady days of faux internet journalism, as pioneered by our own William Paley — Drudge — it ranks right up there with “Monica’s talking points” for making utter fools of the mediawhores. That in itself is a triumph since they are so good at making fools of themselves.

…much of the bloggers’ vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers’ lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.

[…]

Would-be gumshoes typed up documents on their computers and fooled around with the images in Photoshop until their creation matched the originals. Someone remembered something his ex-military uncle told him, others recalled the quirks of an IBM typewriter not seen for twenty years. There was little new evidence and lots of pure speculation. But the speculation framed the story for the working press.

The very first post attacking the memos — nineteen minutes into the 60 Minutes II program — was on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com by an active Air Force officer, Paul Boley of Montgomery, Alabama, who went by the handle “TankerKC.” Nearly four hours later it was followed by postings from “Buckhead,” whom the Los Angeles Times later identified as Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta. (MacDougald refused to tell the Times how he was able to mount a case against the documents so quickly.) Other blogs quickly picked up the charges. One of the story’s top blogs, Rathergate.com, is registered to a firm run by Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative fund-raiser. Some were fed by the conservative Media Research Center and by Creative Response Concepts, the same p.r. firm that promoted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. CRC’s executives bragged to PR Week that they helped legitimize the documents-are-fake story by supplying quotes from document experts as early as the day after the report, September 9. The goal, said president Greg Mueller, was to create a buzz online while at the same time showing journalists “it isn’t just Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge who are raising questions.”

Doggonnit to heck. And after all those false tips during the Clinton years. Whodda thunk that liberul media would get taken again?

There was actually a big story of blogospheric triumph this year that the mediawhores have conveniently ignored since they weren’t spoonfed the delicious details by their trusted RNC sources.(They’re very busy.) It was the story of a big media player being forced to back off a plan to air partisan propaganda as news in the waning days of the presidential campaign when the internet organized a boycott that made it’s way to institutional Wall Street investors and snowballed into a precipitous stock dive. But that’s a very dull story that didn’t feature even one adorable tale of an intrepid blogger cracking the DaVinci Code in his pyjamas. Who cares?

The Poorman notes another real blogospheric reportorial triumph with serious real life consequences. Not that it matters.

Stand Up

Ezra says:

Unfogged is right; barring a miracle of competence and media responsibility, opposing torture will end up making the Democrats look like we get the vapors whenever the menfolk whip out the cigars and talk terrorism. Our press flacks are are ineffective, our caucus can’t stick to a message, and we don’t have a party leader charged with articulating our position to the public.

Doesn’t matter. Torture just isn’t something you compromise on. I’m as coldly political as the next guy, but not torture. That’s not part of the country I grew up believing in.

But, you see, the mere act of finally drawing that line in the sand, of saying “No More” is the very thing that refutes the charge. It’s hemming and hawing and splitting the difference and “meeting halfway” and offering compromises on matters of principle that makes the charge of Democratic splinelessness believable. This isn’t about a special interest giving money or bending to the will of a powerful constituency. People can feel the difference. There is nothing weak about simply and forcefully standing up for what is right.

A number of the commenters to the post below are convinced that the American people actually approve of torture so this will not be a very salient issue for the Democrats. I disagree. I think it may just be a defining issue for Democrats.

It’s not that I believe that all Americans are horrified, or even a majority of Americans are horrified. Clearly, the dittoheads think it is just ducky. But that isn’t the point. Just because they aren’t horrified or even endorse it on some level doesn’t mean that they don’t know that it’s wrong. They do. And it is very uncomfortable to be put in the position of defending yourself when you know you are wrong. Even good people find ways, but it cuts a little piece out of their self respect every time they do it.

Every person alive in America today grew up with the belief that torture is wrong. Popular culture, religion, folklore and every other form of cultural instruction for decades in this country has taught that it is wrong, from sermons and lectures to films about slavery to photographs of Auschwitz to crime shows about serial killers. It is embedded in our consciousness. We teach our children that it is wrong to torture animals and other kids. We don’t say that there are exceptions for when the animals or kids are really, really bad. We have laws on the books that outright outlaw it. The words “cruel and unusual” are written into our constitution.

The problem is not that there isn’t a widely accepted admonition not to conduct torture, it’s that many people, as with all crimes, will choose to ignore the admonition under certain circumstances. However, that does not mean that they do not know that what they are doing is wrong. There is nothing surprising in that. It’s why we have laws.

The arguments for torture being raised by the right are rationalizations for what they know is immoral and illegal conduct. Their discomfort with the subject clearly indicates that they don’t really want to defend it. (Witness the pathetic dance that even that S&M freak Rush Limbaugh had to do after his comments were widely disseminated.) Will they admit that they know it’s wrong? Of course not. But when they take up their manly jihad and accuse the Democrats of being swooning schoolgirls they will also be forced to positively defend something that many of them know very well is indefensible. And every time they do that their credibility on values and morals is chipped away a little bit.

I don’t expect them to change their tune. Way too much of this comes from a defect in temperament and garden variety racism and that’s not going to go away. But Democrats have to thicken their skins and be prepared for the usual attacks and insist over and over again that it is against the values and principles of the United States to torture people, period. It is not only right, it is smart.

As I wrote below, the opposition will bluster and fidget and scream bloody murder. But listen to the tenor of their arguments. The WSJ article below rails against the “glib abuse of the word” as if they can run away from the issue by engaging in a game of semantics. They are reduced to claiming that unless we torture it will be unilateral disarmament. We, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, will be defeated by a bunch of third world religious misfits if we don’t engage in torturing suspects. Just who sounds weak?