Failings of Democracy

Sully (Daily Dish): "The Failings Of Our Democracy"

Scott Hinderaker believes that democracy fails when it tries to keep its executive branch from violating the rule of law by authorizing the brutal torture and abuse of thousands of prisoners, many innocent. Let that sink in. It is part of the failure of democracy, in Hinderaker's view, that it doesn't empower the government to do anything it wants to do in the name of national security.

To put it bluntly, this is the classic fascist critique of liberal democracy. Fascists have always criticized democratic restraints on executive war-power, even when that war power is specifically designed to include citizens and to apply across the territory of the homeland as well as anywhere on the globe. As for the torture techniques previously used by the Gestapo, the Communist Chinese, the Soviet Gulag, and the Vietnamese, Hinderaker believes these were all "reasonably humane." What was done to John McCain, in Hinderaker's view, was humane, and certainly not torture; and what McCain was forced to confess was as reliable as the tortured confessions we now see on Iranian television.

Understanding the current right's embrace of total state power against the individual takes time to absorb. But liberal democracy has no more dangerous enemies than these.

Appel: Spoon-Fed Morality

Jonah Goldberg claims that because TV series and movies show good guys torturing bad guys to get information these cultural products are "tapping into and reflecting the popular moral sentiments." Anonymous Liberal rightly whacks him:

When you are shown unequivocally that the person being tortured is an evil mass murderer and that the person doing the torturing is a pure-hearted hero -- and you are then shown that the torture in fact leads to the disclosure of information that saves a bunch of childrens' lives -- it is no wonder that viewers are prepared to morally absolve the torturer. That moral conclusion is being spoon-fed to them in the form of a highly-stacked utilitarian calculus. The thumb is pressing down quite hard on the scale. If, on the other hand, you were to tell a different story, say one involving a detainee of questionable guilt being brutally beaten to death with a flashlight (as described in the IG report), you would likely elicit a very different emotional response.

Benen: THE CHENEYS, THE MEDIA, AND THE LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY..

For months, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney were practically everywhere, insisting that there were documents proving the efficacy of Bush-era torture, and demanding that they be declassified and released. Yesterday we saw the materials, and not surprisingly, they don't support the Cheney claims.

Zachary Roth noted this morning, "It's hardly news that Dick Cheney is a liar. But yesterday offered yet another exhibit in the case."

But Greg Sargent does a nice job taking this a little further. Major news outlets -- not just Fox News, but actual, legitimate outlets -- hyped the Cheneys' claims, giving both of them high-profile platforms on a nearly daily basis for several weeks. Will the media be equally aggressive now?

Have the big news orgs really decided that Dick Cheney's previous claims that CIA docs proved torture worked were more newsworthy than what the documents themselves actually do prove?

So far the answer is Yes. While Cheney's original assertions that the docs would prove torture worked garnered reams of stand-alone print and TV coverage, the fact that the docs themselves don't actually prove Cheney's claims was either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language. [...]

To be fair, there was tons of news yesterday. Maybe the news orgs will get around to doing big takeouts on this. But come on, Cheney and his daughter Liz were granted tons of print space and air time to claim for weeks that these docs would prove torture worked. Seems fair to expect aggressive, stand alone stories about what they do -- and don't -- prove in the real world.

As of this morning, the only major outlet to do a stand-alone story on this was ABC News.

This afternoon, Politico ran a piece, but screwed it up by accepting Cheney's baseless spin. CNN also had an item, but ran into the exact same problem.

It's frustrating enough when bogus claims get vastly more attention than the truth, but it's even worse when the facts come out and major outlets are still getting it wrong.

Think Progress: Major Media Outlets Ignore News That CIA Documents Fail To Back-Up Cheney’s Torture Claims

In April, Vice President Cheney received extensive media coverage when he called on the Obama administration to release two CIA memos allegedly showing evidence that the Bush-era interrogation policies saved lives. His request came in response to critics who lambasted the Bush administration’s program and said it actually hurt U.S. efforts. From Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity on April 20:

HANNITY: And secondly, why is it important that those interrogations took place? I mean, the ones they were talking about were sleep deprivation, waterboarding, putting insects into small, confined areas and telling them they were deadly insects. [...]

CHENEY: It worked. It’s been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives, preventing another mass casualty attack against the United States. … And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.

Yesterday, the CIA released two of those memos from 2004 and 2005, which had been secret until now. As Spencer Ackerman notes, these memos do nothing to back up Cheney’s claims:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

This finding is big news. You’d think that since the media reported so much on Cheney’s claims about the documents, they would also rush to report that Cheney was wrong. Not so. Greg Sargent notes that in the major newspapers, this fact was “either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language.”

ThinkProgress went through the coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC and found that television outlets are performing as poorly as their print counterparts. Most of the networks’ reports omitted the Cheney angle. When they did address it, they tended to give Cheney the benefit of the doubt by saying that it was “not clear” from the heavily-redacted documents. The only individuals to note Cheney’s lie were guest commentators. Watch a few of the segments here:

Cheney has since put out a carefully worded statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, the fact remains that there is still no public evidence that those techniques actually saved lives.

Appel (Daily Dish): Cheney's Special Project

Scott Horton makes seven points on the CIA report. Number four:

All trails lead to the Vice President’s office. At several points, redactions begin just when the discussion is headed toward the supervision or direction of the program and context suggests that some figure far up the Washington food chain is intervening. Moreover, as Jane Mayer recounts in Dark Side, Helgerson’s report was shut down when he was summoned, twice, to meet with Dick Cheney, who insisted that the report be stopped. Cheney had good reason to be concerned. This report shows that the vice president intervened directly in the process and ensured that the program was implemented. The OPR report likewise shows Cheney’s office commissioning the torture memos and carefully supervising the process. It is increasingly clear that torture was Dick Cheney’s special project and that he was personally and deeply involved in it.

And the CIA report has some amazing nuggets that show Cheney’s hand. In 2003, after Jay Bybee departed OLC, Cheney struggled to have John Yoo installed as his successor, but ultimately John Ashcroft’s candidate, Jack Goldsmith, prevailed. Goldsmith quickly backtracked on the torture authorizations that Yoo and Bybee gave. The result? The CIA stopped taking its cue from OLC and instead turned to the White House for guidance. It is remarkably vague on the particulars, and blackouts emerge just as passages seem to be getting interesting. But there’s little doubt that Dick Cheney and his staff were pushing the process from behind the scenes.

Benen: HOUSE REPUBLICAN QUESTIONS AG'S PATRIOTISM..

Attorney General Eric Holder was confronted with evidence of criminal wrongdoing from CIA interrogators who went beyond the legal guidance provided by the Bush administration. Any hopes that conservatives might be pleased by the limited scope of the probe appear to be dashed.

Take, for example, Rep. Peter King (R) of New York, who appears to be in the midst of a wild-eyed, hair-on-fire temper tantrum.

"It's bulls***. It's disgraceful. You wonder which side they're on," he said of the Attorney General's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

"It's a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he's lost control of his administration," said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. [...]

"You will have thousands of lives that will be lost and the blood will be on Eric Holder's hands," he said.

Asked about officials who allegedly broke the law, King said it doesn't matter because he doesn't think the Geneva Convention "applies to terrorists," and that the line between permissible and impermissible interrogation tactics was "a distinction without a difference" in the Bush era.

Obviously, King isn't especially coherent on the matter. I've read through his comments a few times, trying to understand what on earth he's talking about. It appears that King believes torture isn't torture, the rule of law was on hiatus from 2001 to 2008, accountability and due process are dangerous concepts, and if you disagree with him, you might be un-American.

This is, by the way, the same Peter King who believes authors of torture memos deserve "a medal," and that the United States has "too many mosques."

Remember, House Republicans want this guy to be chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Sully: The Evidence Mounts Still Further

I'll write at more length when I'm back off my summer bloggatical, but the question of torture - and the United States' embrace of inhumanity as a core American value under the presidency of George W. Bush - remains, in my view, the pre-eminent moral question in American politics. The descent of the United States - and of Americans in general - to lower standards of morality and justice than those demanded by Iranians of their regime is a sign of the polity's moral degeneracy. Compare these two stories today. Item One:

The charges of rape and torture have struck directly at the moral and religious authority the nation’s theocratic leaders claim. The government initially denied Mr. Karroubi’s charges, and the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, said a review had proved they were baseless.

But Mr. Karroubi has refused to back down even as clerics and military leaders aligned with the government have called for his arrest. Faced with public disgust and outrage, the Parliament agreed to review his evidence. A parliamentary committee met with Mr. Karroubi on Monday. One member, Kazem Jalili, told Iranian news agencies that Mr. Karroubi had said that four people told him they had been raped.

You will notice once again that the New York Times is able to use the word "torture" to describe torture - but only when it is committed by governments other than that of the US. The NYT under the editorial guidance of Bill Keller has, by cowardice and weakness, abetted the degeneracy that Cheney accomplished. Every time the NYT uses a different standard to judge foreign and American torture, it undermines the core moral basis of liberal democracy. And if the NYT cannot stand firm, what chance someone like Pete King? Here he is, responding to acts that included murder, rape, sexual abuse and torture conducted by the CIA under the command of George W. Bush:

"When Holder was talking about being 'shocked' [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys' fingers off or something – or that they actually used the power drill," he said. Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn't think the Geneva Convention "applies to terrorists," and that the line between permitted and outlawed interrogation policies in the Bush years was "a distinction without a difference."

"Why is it OK to waterboard someone, which causes physical pain, but not threaten someone and not cause pain?" he asked, warning of a "chilling" effect on future CIA behavior.

King is right, of course, that the difference between what Bush authorized and the new revelations is non-existent. There is no moral or legal distinction between subjecting someone to 960 hours of sleep deprivation (as Bush did to Qahtani), or slamming people against walls, of freezing them to near-death, or murdering them by stress position ... and threatening to murder someone's kids or stage a mock execution. But King then draws the inference that all of it is fine, as long as it cannot be portrayed in the tabloids as literally drilling through a detainee's skull. (He seems unaware that this would actually kill someone, not torture them.)

But King is not alone in believing that the US should be less restrained by moral qualms than Iranians demand of their own illegitimate regime. Indeed, much of the American people, especially evangelical Christians, expect less in terms of human rights from their own government than Iranians do of theirs'. In fact, American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims.

This is what Bush and Cheney truly achieved in their tragic response to 9/11: two terribly failed, brutally expensive wars, the revival of sectarian warfare and genocide in the Middle East, the end of America's global moral authority, the empowerment of Iran's and North Korea's dictatorships, and the nightmares of Gitmo and Bagram still haunting the new administration.

But what they did to the culture - how they systematically dismantled core American values like the prohibition on torture and respect for the rule of law - is the worst and most enduring of the legacies.

One political party in this country is now explicitly pro-torture, and wants to restore a torture regime if it regains power. Decent conservatives for the most part simply looked the other way. Unless these cultural forces in defense of violence and torture are defeated - not appeased or excused, but defeated - America will never return the way it once was. Electing a new president was the start and not the end of this. He is flawed, as every president is, but in my view, the scale of the mess he inherited demands some slack. Any new criminal investigation which scapegoats those at the bottom while protecting the guilty men and women who made it happen is a travesty of justice. If it is the end and not the beginning of accountability, it will be worse than nothing.

But it need not be the end of the story. Indeed, it can be the beginning if we make it so. We cannot stop this sad and minuscule attempt to restore a scintilla of accountability to some individuals low down on the totem pole. Eric Holder is doing what he can. But we can continue to lobby and argue for the extension of accountability to the truly guilty men who made all this happen and still refuse to take responsibility for war crimes on a coordinated scale never before seen in American warfare, and initiated by a presidential decision to withdraw from the Geneva Conventions and refuse to abide by their plain meaning and intent.

Our job, in other words, is to raise the core moral baseline of Americans to that of Iranians. That's the depth of the hole Cheney dug. And it's a hole the current GOP wants to dig deeper and darker.

As if in response to Sully, the Times uses the T word...

NYT: The Torture Papers

The Obama administration has taken important steps toward repairing the grievous harm that President George W. Bush did to this nation with his lawless and morally repugnant detention policies. President Obama is committed to closing the Guantánamo Bay camp and creating legitimate courts to try detainees. He has rescinded the executive orders and the legal rulings that Mr. Bush used to excuse the abuse of prisoners.

The Defense Department has taken the important step of reversing policy and notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of militants who were being held in secret at camps in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a prosecutor to investigate the interrogation of prisoners of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose inhuman treatment was detailed in a long-secret report written by the agency’s inspector general in 2004 and released on Monday.

Yet despite these commendable individual steps, Mr. Obama and his political advisers continue to shrink from the broad investigation of the full range of his predecessor’s trampling on human rights, civil liberties and judicial safeguards that would allow this country to make sure this sordid history is behind it for good.

Indeed, the administration seemed reluctant to make public the C.I.A. report, which was released under a court order and was heavily censored, with whole pages blacked out — including the four pages of recommendations. Before Mr. Holder announced his investigation, the White House made it clear that it was unhappy with his decision — repeating its sadly familiar line about “looking forward, not backward.”

Mr. Holder displayed real courage and integrity in ordering the investigation. But he stressed that it was limited to the specific interrogations outlined in the C.I.A. report, and did not amount to a full-blown criminal investigation of the Bush-era detention policies.

The interrogations are certainly worthy of criminal investigation. The report describes objectionable and cruel practices well beyond waterboarding. They included threatening a detainee’s family members with sexual assault and threatening to kill another’s children; the staging of mock executions; and repeatedly blocking a prisoner’s carotid artery until he began to faint.

The report said the interrogations generally followed guidelines approved by Mr. Bush’s Justice Department, which dedicated itself to finding ways to authorize abuse and evade legal accountability. But it offered a scathing condemnation of those guidelines, which it said diverged “sharply” from the practices of military and police interrogators, and the positions of pretty much everyone else, including the State Department, Congress, other Western governments and human rights groups.

The inspector general said that, in some cases, interrogations exceeded even the Bush Justice Department’s shockingly lax standards.

The report offers one more compelling reason for a far broader inquiry into Mr. Bush’s lawless behavior. It is possible to sympathize with Mr. Obama’s desire to avoid a politically fraught investigation. But the need to set this nation back under the rule of law is no less urgent than it was when he promised to do so in his campaign.

That will not be accomplished by investigating individual interrogators. It will require a fearless airing of how the orders were issued to those men, and who gave them. Only by making public officials accountable under the law can Americans be confident that future presidents will not feel free to break it the way Mr. Bush did.

C&L: Gun-toting Arizona protester belongs to hate-mongering pastor's flock

By David Neiwert Tuesday Aug 25, 2009 5:00pm

So it turns out that Contessa Brewer had good reason to see a connection between the rabidly hateful rhetoric spewed by the likes of Pastor Steven Anderson and the angry, gun-toting protesters turning out for presidential events: One of the most prominent of these, an African-American man named "Chris", is in fact a member of Pastor Anderson's congregation.

"Chris" was on Alex Jones' "Prison Planet" radio show late last week and discussed how "my pastor was beaten up" at a Border Patrol checkpoint.

Yes, that pastor is indeed Steven Anderson, who was arrested in April by the Border Patrol for being uncooperative at a patrol checkpoint. Anderson attempted to make himself something of a national martyr to the conspiracists out there by posting a video to YouTube about it that quickly went viral.

Jones took note of the Anderson connection:

Jones: Now I'm starting to get a clearer picture. You go to Pastor Anderson's church, I see.

Chris: Yeah, yes I do. Proudly. I think it's the best church in the world.

The funny thing about these gun-toting protesters is that they like to portray themselves as being simple, honest defenders of their gun rights when they show up for public events, especially those featuring the president, packing heat publicly.

They adamantly deny that they're bringing their guns to intimidate their fellow citizens from speaking out with a contrary view. But this is beyond disingenuous; it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the vast majority of the people who attend a public debate will perceive someone with a gun as someone they should fear -- particularly if they have an opposing view. Most people will see someone with a gun at an event that does not deal with guns as a potential threat. And you can't tell me that most of these gun-toters are not perfectly aware of the intimidation factor they carry with them and are not in fact packing heat for just that reason.

Moreover, these gun-toters want to assure us they pose no threat whatsoever to either the president or his supporters by bringing these guns. They're just ordinary citizens standing up for their rights, right? The Secret Service need have no fear about their motives.

But then we find out that at least one of them ardently admires a pastor who preaches how much he hates Obama and wishes him dead, in order "to save this country."

And we're supposed to tell these "innocent" gun nuts from the people who might actually aim their weapons at the president how?