Wow! Jed Lewison
dday: Building A Fact PatternAwesome:
I don't think you can debate whether or not to have an investigation on the Bush torture regime anymore, because the investigation is happening regardless. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Finn advance the ball in an article for tomorrow's paper. Little of this is new, but given the new revelations of the past week, we can set it in proper context. And though the knowledge existed, it's probably the first time a major media outlet fingers by name specific high-level Bush officials for approving torture.
... ...
This is the kind of article that results from the authors putting a bunch of index cards on the wall and moving them around. It's what Marcy Wheeler does best. And it suggests that the major news organizations are mapping this out and taking a long look at every granule of information.
Shep has clearly had it with the crazy: "We do not F%$&ing torture!!!"
Sully: An Obama Rope-A-Dope?
Olberman on fire last night. Cheney in denial about torture. April 22: Former Vice President Dick Cheney expressed his anger during a Fox News interview that the correct memos showing that torture did work weren't released. Former CIA officer Jack Rice discusses how Cheney's statement is simply untrue.A reader writes:
Reading the blog post you linked to by Jennifer Rubin in which she states "Which group — Cheney/Mukasey/Hayden or the Obama administration has more credibility now?" what jumped immediately to my mind was "Could this be another rope-a-dope by Obama?"
How would you try to bait a reluctant group into doing what they would not otherwise do? By tempting them to a fight they think they could win?
That is, by releasing partial statements by Blair that they could easily point to and say, like Rubin, "One wonders how the administration thought it was going to get away with this bit of deceit — revealing the interrogation techniques yet concealing their benefit from the American people." All the while knowing what Blair's full beliefs are, as you linked to with Greg Sargent: "Blair believes that some valuable info was collected via torture, but that torture is not essential to our security and has done far more harm than good." Finally the hypothetically "reluctant group" takes the bait, as Rubin does: "Let the truth hearings commence, if they must. Let it all come out. The first witness I would suggest: Admiral Blair." And then Obama lowers the boom by letting it all come to light.
Am I reading too much into this?
Probably. The Blair mix-up was probably just a mix-up. But the way in which Obama has been able to show that he doesn't want the division and rancor that restoring the rule of law requires, while deftly allowing the rule of law to move forward: well, that's classic Obama. And the bravado, vanity, Beltway posturing and lies of Dick Cheney? Well: remember what happened to Clinton and McCain and Palin.
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digby: Buckling Under
In case you were wondering how the village idiot sees the politics of the torture debate:Anonymous Liberal: Preserving the Illusion of Good FaithChris Matthews: In the politics fix tonight, this whole torture debate is likely to tell us a lot about the kind of president Barack Obama intends to be. Will he buckle to the left, the netroots, and pursue an investigation into torture having said he didn't want to? Or will he go post-partisan and leave the past to the historians.This is how its being framed all over the gasbags shows today. Not that I give a damn. If "buckling under to the left, the netroots" is how they need to portray having the moral backbone to be against torture and hold those who torture accountable for doing it, it's fine by me. It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.
For some reason, nobody in Washington DC seems to realize that Obama has to be against torture if he wants a successful foreign policy. If he doesn't denounce this, how much cooperation can he get from allies around the world? How ridiculous do we look to our enemies? Apparently they all still think Cheney's schoolyard tough guy bullshit actually works.
They just don't get that this isn't about partisan politics. It's not even just about morality and the constitution. It's about national security. A superpower that tortures and invades other countries for no good reason is seen by the rest of the world as a rogue nation and a threat. How that makes us safer I simply do not know.
Former State Department Legal Advisor Philip Zelikow has written an interesting post about the OLC torture memos that were released last week. Zelikow writes that when he first read the memos in 2005, he was shocked by their "grave weaknesses." Indeed, he was so shocked that he actually went to the trouble of drafting a counter-memo:At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.That's an incredibly damning allegation. The only reason to collect and destroy all copies of this memo would be in order to preserve, for as many Bush administration officials as possible, a potential defense against later prosecution. If the extent of these activities ever became public and investigations were commenced, the White House wanted to be able to argue that everyone involved relied in good faith on the advice of counsel. That defense would be severely undermined if it could be shown that these officials were warned, by a lawyer of Zelikow's caliber and rank within the administration, that the legal arguments they were relying on were poorly reasoned and unlikely to be sustained by a court.
This was pure CYA. And it was being done for reasons beyond the potential for political fallout. It was done in order to preserve the illusion of good faith reliance on OLC advice in the event of future criminal prosecutions. This is yet another reason why a special prosecutor needs to be appointed. While I agree with the decision by Eric Holder not to pursue prosecutions against CIA officials who relied in good faith on OLC advice (and did not exceed the scope of that advice), it is becoming increasingly clear that there were people (likely high ranking intelligence officials and people in the White House) who were explicitly warned (likely repeatedly) of the shoddy and highly dubious nature of the OLC's advice. These folks should not be entitled to any presumption of good faith reliance. They need to be investigated. The attempt to scrub Zelikow's memo from the record looks to me like an act of criminal conspiracy intended to preserve plausible deniability about the illegal nature of various government activities.
UPDATE: The expunging of Zelikow's memo from the record is not the only thing the Bush administration has done to hinder the possibility of prosecution. Remember that all the tapes of these interrogations were destroyed or went missing at around the same time. I doubt that's a coincidence.
Sully: What Cheney Did To Conservatism
The assertion of total power through unchecked violence - outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of the law (apart from legal memos from hired hacks instructed to retroactively redefine torture into 'legality') - will be seen in retrospect as the key defining theory of Bush conservatism. It ended, as all regimes bent on total power always end, with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing "facts" from broken bodies and minds.
This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power: it provides a way for them to coerce reality into the shape they desire. This is also why it is so uniquely dangerous. Because it creates a closed circle of untruth, which is then used to justify more torture, which generates more "truth." This is the Imaginationland some of us have been so concerned about.
The Western anathema on torture began as a way to ensure the survival of truth. And that is the root of the West's entire legal and constitutional system. Remove a secure way to discover the truth - or create a system that can manufacture it or render it indistinguishable from lies - and the entire system unravels. That's why in the West suspects are innocent before being found guilty; and that's why in the West even those captured in wartime have long been accorded protection from forced confessions. Because it creates a world where truth is always the last priority and power is always the first.
This is not a policy difference. It is a foundational element of Western civilization. The way Cheney constructed it, it was not even a mere war-power. Since the war had no geographical boundaries, since an enemy combatant could be an American citizen or resident, since the enemy could never surrender, and since the war could never end, the dictatorial powers, allied with the power to torture, destroyed the balance of the American constitution. Until this is fully accounted for and the law-breakers brought to justice, that constitution remains with a massive breach below its waterline. It may not sink immediately; but its fate is sealed unless this precedent is not just moved on from, but erased.
The best one can say of president Bush is that he is a deeply ignorant man, unaware of the history of the country he was leading and the civilization he probably thought he was defending. But Cheney knew what he was doing. And he is aggressively unrepentant, accusing his successor of deliberately leaving Americans vulnerable to attack; and he and his followers would do all of it again - and more. Remember: waterboarding someone 183 times was not an agonizing choice for him. It was, in his own words, a "no-brainer." Remember also the war criminal, John Yoo:
"Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that..."
Yoo is absolutely sincere in believing that the executive branch can over-ride any domestic law, any international treaty and any moral boundary if necessary to protect national security. In a war on terror that stretches decades into the future, the new conservatism allows for a president with no checks at all on his own power as commander-in-chief. What might have once been a theoretical debate became a pressing reality.
And within weeks of this new legal doctrine being expressed, military detainees under the control of American forces were being tortured - consciously, with pre-meditation, with legal cover provided. America went from being a constitutional republic, under the law, to an imperium of one man, answerable only to an election every four years, empowered to break any law and violate any moral law if he believes it is necessary for national security. If conservatism had begun as a political philosophy designed to check power, to ensure individual liberty, to protect individuals from lawless government authority, it ended in a dark room, with a defenseless detainee strapped to a board, terrified beyond most of our imagining.
I wrote this in 2005 and published it in 2006. If I could figure this out from the outside, why was no one resisting in the White House?
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