What's in a name?

What could possibly go wrong?
Yglesias: Ohio Militia Leader Calls for “Armed Million Man March” on Washington

Dave Weigel observes that the head of the Ohio Militia has put out a YouTube video calling for a “A peaceful demonstration of at least a million — hey, if we can 10 million, even better — but at least one million armed militia men marching on Washington.” He emphasizes his desire for the protest to be peaceful, but also emphasizes his desire for the protest to be well-armed:

At any rate, I think only a crazy person would put out a report warning that right-wing extremist groups are likely entering a new phase of activism.

TPM: Just Out The Senate Armed Services Committee's "Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody" has now been posted on the Committee's website.


Hilzoy: this is astonishing and embarrassing stuff.

The NYT has a damning piece about the decision to use torture:

[The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?]

"In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved -- not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said."

In general, I wouldn't think it was a problem not to know the origins of a technique, except for political reasons. But not knowing that the SERE program was designed to help soldiers withstand interrogations that had produced false confessions is inexcusable, especially since this was our program. Not knowing that the psychologist who persuaded the CIA to go for this had never conducted an actual interrogation is similarly mind-boggling. The fact that no one knew what the actual interrogators thought of all this is standard for the Bush administration, but it should not have been.

There are all sorts of experts in our government, including experts on interrogation. There's also more than enough institutional memory to inform the administration about the origins of the SERE program. But the Bush administration, typically, did not bother with them. They preferred to make things up as they went along, because, after all, they always knew better.

This is what happens when we stop demanding minimal competence in our Presidents; when we start caring more about who we would rather have a beer with than, oh, who would be most likely to seek out the best advice and listen to all sides of an argument before making an important decision, or whose judgment we can trust. We end up with people who toss aside our most fundamental values because someone who has never conducted an interrogation before thinks it might be a good idea, and no one bothers to do the basic background research on what he proposes.

Here's a sort of ironic coda to the whole thing:

"One former senior intelligence official who played an important role in approving the interrogation methods said he had no idea of the origins and history of the SERE program when the C.I.A. started it in 2002.

"The agency was counting on the Justice Department to fully explore all the factors contributing to a judgment about legality, including the surrounding history and context," the official said."

They were counting on John Yoo. Roll that one over in your mind a few times to get the full effect. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

• read the entire, astonishing article at In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use
• Sudbay: Chuck Todd is the one who is way, way, way out of touch on the issue of investigating the torturers

  Jason Linkins obliterates Chuck Todd's oh-so-inside-the-beltway dismissive tone about investigating and prosecuting the torturers:

  I really have to object with the way Chuck Todd is characterizing the underlying public pressure that's being brought to bear on President Obama and the White House to investigate and potentially prosecute the authors and the agents of the previous administration's torture regime.
  
  The whole thing is knit up in political process tropes and infused with the pointless melodrama of the day, when a serious and substantive look at this issue is called for.

  As Jason notes, in a Gallup Poll, 62% of Americans wanted either a criminal investigation or review by an independent panel when asked about the Bush administration's "possible use of torture in terror investigations."
  
  Read the whole post. It's brilliant. And, Jason is so right. He totally disabuses Todd's rant that this is somehow the work of the "blogosphere":

  I gather that the invocation of the "blogosphere" here is meant as a further means of belittling this issue, but Todd should check himself. Those poll numbers indicate that the blogosphere is but a small part of the broad support for investigations. Furthermore, those bloggers are doing the work on the issue that the traditional press can't seem to be bothered to do. Check out this New York Times article, published over the weekend, that documents the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. All of the enterprise reporting for the article was done by blogger Marcy Wheeler, of Emptywheel. Good thing, too! It's not like the Times, in possession of the same memos, noticed the story.

  That was very excellent work from the very excellent Marcy Wheeler. Oh, but, she's just a "blogger." Chuck Todd is a "real" reporter who gets paid a lot to regurgitate the conventional wisdom from inside the D.C. bubble.
  
  It's been sad to watch, but Chuck Todd, who I used to really like, is morphing into Mark Halperin.

• Sully: The Daily Wrap Today was a heavy day of torture talk at the Dish. I mulled over: Cheney's panicked rhetoric, his former speechwriter's Orwellian op-ed, the destruction of torture evidence, the destruction of an American citizen, the tyrannical threat Yoo posed to "real America," the similarities between Peggy Noonan and the Vatican, and the similarities between the Bush-Cheney program and, yes, the Nazis. Also, the NYT dropped the ball on the torture memos and ....
  

Dissent within Bush admin on torture April 21: In an exclusive interview, Rachel is joined by Philip Zelikow, former counselor at the State Department and a trusted advisor and deputy to former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who tried to convince his colleagues in the Bush administration that the OLC torture memos were wrong.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Chatty Cheney April 21: Dick Cheney is falling all over himself to tell the American people about the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation techniques." What's up with the suddenly talkative former vice president? Rachel is joined by Lou Dubose, co-author of "Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency."

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

JedL: Why they call him a fascist

Via AMERICAblog, Saul Anuzis -- the former Michigan GOP chairman who recently joined Newt Gingrich's political machine -- explains why Republicans call President Obama a fascist:

"We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago," Mr. Anuzis said. "Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing."

As David Shuster wondered on Countdown last night, what are they going to say next, after they've used up the 'fascist' word?

Sully: What Actual Tyranny Is

While some of us were trying to absorb the full facts of the Bush-Cheney torture program, which rested on a claim of total extra-constitutional power of the president to suspend habeas corpus, detain anyone in the US without charges, and torture them, Jonah Goldberg was writing a book called "Liberal Fascism." Even now, he is conducting interesting discussions on whether taxation in a representative democracy could be described as "tyranny." After a single stimulus package and three months of Obama, Fox News is predicting fascism. I have long been at a loss to explain this. Some kind of psychological denial mechanism? Rank projection? Displaced panic? Partisanship so deep it erodes any moral faculties or critical reasoning? To Zelikow again:

The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.

In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.

But remember 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..."

But a top tax rate in line with the Clinton era is tyranny.

Sully: Waterboarding Can Be A Distraction

After covering this nightmare for many years, I can only urge you to read Philip Zelikow's take. He saw what was going on from the inside and this point is essential:

1. The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.

Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time. The plan employed the combined, cumulative use of many techniques of medically-monitored physical coercion. Before getting to water-boarding, the captive had already been stripped naked, shackled to ceiling chains keeping him standing so he cannot fall asleep for extended periods, hosed periodically with cold water, slapped around, jammed into boxes, etc. etc. Sleep deprivation is most important.