J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with a Prehensile Tail

A Decision the George W. Bush Administration Has Never Explained

This seemed inexplicable at the time, and is even more inexplicable now:

U.S. forces missed chance to get bin Laden: WASHINGTON, Nov 29 - The U.S. military could have captured or killed Osama bin Laden in 2001 if it had launched a concerted attack on his hideout in Afghanistan, according to a report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The report, written by staff working for the Democratic majority on the committee, said the al Qaeda leader’s escape was a lost opportunity that altered the course of the war and paved the way for insurgencies in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. ”Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the report said. ”But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”

U.S. soldiers and Afghan militia forces launched a large-scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 in pursuit of bin Laden, believed to be hiding in the region with supporters after the Taliban government was removed from power. U.S. military leaders allowed Afghan militiamen to spearhead the assault and bin Laden managed to escape. The report said U.S. commanders rejected requests for more troops to launch a rapid assault in the area, relying instead on air strikes and the Afghan militias to lead the attack and Pakistan’s Frontier Corps to seal off escape routes. ”The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines,” it said.

The report was especially critical of military leaders under former President George W. Bush, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top military commander, retired General Tommy Franks. Democratic Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the committee, has argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get bin Laden and his top lieutenants in Tora Bora just months after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States...

We Are No Longer as Ashamed of NPR as We Used to Be...

Heebee-Geebie reports:

Unfogged: I don't know when exactly it started, but NPR now uses the word "torture" without qualifications to describe the activities at Guantanamo. That is critically important in shaping the narrative we tell, as a society, about our actions post-9/11.

Donald Rumsfeld on Presidential Powers

A correspondent directs us to Mark Bernstein:

PAW October 6, 2004: Rumsfeld’s senior thesis concerned President Harry Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills in 1952 in response to a strike, and the Supreme Court’s subsequent decision striking the act down as an abuse of executive power. In his conclusion, Rumsfeld endorsed the Court’s decision to curb the president’s emergency powers. “There is much to be said for not tying the hands of the President unduly,” he wrote. “No one wishes to injure adequate defense action in the event of an enemy attack or an emergency of similar gravity. But, it must not be forgotten that the concept of emergency is elastic...”

That may have been the realist writing, but Rumsfeld went on to embrace the philosophical underpinnings of the Court’s decision, as well. Observing that, in America, almost anyone could rise to the presidency (something he saw as a mixed blessing), Rumsfeld concluded by quoting Jefferson: “With an eye ... [that] the Presidency may not always be occupied by a man intelligent enough to use his power sparingly, Jefferson had the correct answer 165 years ago, when he warned: ‘In matters of power let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.’ Let us be thankful that we live in a land where we can demand of those in authority, ‘Give us an account of thy stewardship.’”

Hoisted from Comments: More on A Jury of Prosecutors Would Hang John Yoo High

From Pete:

Hoisted from Comments: A Jury of Prosecutors Would Hang John Yoo High: Seems like a trial would likely turn up much more evidence than we have now. The bigger story is how the memos came to be written, rather than what's in them. Failing to cite and distinguish Youngstown is an obvious tell, for lawyers, but perhaps not for 12 members of the public, as Joe S observes. But there is probably a lot of good information that would be found, which could be convincing for 12 citizens, if there were a real investigation into how Yoo came to be the source of these memos. Did the AG or other of Yoo's superiors know and approve of the request for the memos? Did the VP's office go straight to Yoo knowing that he would give them the cover they wanted? (Circumstances seem to suggest so.) Did someone in VP's office go to Yoo knowing that the torture and extraordinary abuse had already started (so, at least as to whoever was in the know there - VP, Addington, folks at CIA, etc.), they can't rely in "good faith" on an opinion they also know to be tainted? Did Yoo somehow know it had already started, which may have influenced his opinion?

A trial or Congressional hearings may be too much to hope for. Berkeley, though, could do us all and itself a favor. Examining and having a public discussion about what Yoo did, and the ethics of it, would serve the purpose of an educational institution like Berkeley, far more than stretching the rationale of "academic freedom" to the point of harming it. Brad offered a good way to do this months ago, have an inquiry through the academic senate, but maybe deans are too conflict averse? I bet if it were Michael Vick whose tenure was at stake, he would have been booted long ago - who could stand to have someone like that walking their halls, sharing the faculty lounge?. But support torture of humans at the behest of powerful people...?

Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley appears to have ruled out an inquiry and public discussion on the part of the Law School on the theory that it would have an unwarranted "chilling effect" on academic freedom...

Hoisted from Comments: A Jury of Prosecutors Would Hang John Yoo High

Interesting that there would be no reasonable doubt here...

Joe S.:

What Do We Do About John Yoo?: Although I find most of Brad's arguments about Yoo's culpability persuasive, I'm not sure a jury would. But it's worth a try.

The most jury-friendly of these arguments, in my estimation, is the Youngstown Sheet & Tube argument. This argument would go that Yoo is a co-conspirator (torture and maybe murder) unless he was providing good-faith legal advice. I think that most courts would agree with this. The chief issue for the jury, then, is whether Yoo's advice was tendered in good faith. (The other issue for the jury is whether Yoo was aware of the consequences of his opinion.) The omission of Youngstown Sheet & Tube is the strongest argument against good faith, for exactly the reasons Brad adduced.

I've discussed this with my prosecutor buddies--the consensus seems to be that a jury of lawyers would hang Yoo high, but probably not 12 folk off the street. It's always hard to peek inside a person's head, especially when the external act (writing a memo, in this case) is facially innocent. And Yoo would get excellent defense counsel.

The lawyers I have talked to--let me put it this way, I have not yet found a lawyer who ever took Con Law who does not take the omission of any attempt to distinguish Youngstown from the Bush situation as a smoking gun.

Another thought: it is almost surely better for Berkeley to act against Yoo than for the Justice Department to do so--for the Justice Department to do so would be to take a step in the direction that led Caesar to lead his army across the Rubicon. To know that you may be unable to return to your tenured job if you are too corrupt in government service is a sanction that may influence behavior but will not increase the likelihood of a coup. To know that you may be sent to jail might have other consequences at some time in the future...

What Do We Do About John Yoo?

We are live at The Week:

The Week Magazine - News reviews and opinion, arts, entertainment & political cartoons: The faculty at the University of California at Berkeley does not know what to think or say or do about our colleague, Berkeley law school professor John Yoo. Universities like ours pride themselves on a commitment to academic freedom. But we also stress our devotion to the rule of law and the primacy of human rights. And therein lies the conflict that roils the Berkeley campus.

We are not altogether certain of what Yoo did as a lawyer in the Bush Justice Department. We know that he wrote the now-infamous memos providing legal justification for torture. But some suspect that what actually transpired may have been even more disreputable; otherwise, Yoo would have spilled the beans by now in order to salvage his reputation. Or so the theory goes. We will probably never know the full truth; the law school dean, Chris Edley, has ruled that any inquiry into what Yoo said, thought, and did while he worked for the Bush administration would have an unacceptable "chilling effect" on academic freedom.

Unfortunately, that does not resolve our problem with the rule of law/human rights part of the equation.

It appears that what happened is this: The Bush White House directed the U.S. armed forces and the CIA to torture people we had captured, some of whom were terrorists, some of whom saw themselves as lawfully fighting a just war against invaders, and some of whom were innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time, people whose names had been screamed out by others on the rack or had been sold to the CIA by local enemies or opportunists.

When the CIA and armed forces interrogators and lawyers resisted this demand, Vice President Richard Cheney's staff went to Yoo at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and asked him to write a memorandum stating that the tortures they envisioned were perfectly legal. Cheney and company then went back to the armed forces and the CIA: Here is a letter from the Justice Department stating that this is all perfectly legal, they said. There is no way that anything bad will happen to you if you obey the president's orders. You have a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Without John Yoo or his colleague Jay Bybee (or somebody else willing to write a similar memo) the torture would not have gone forward, and the United States would not have sustained the enormous damage that was inflicted on it.

Lawyer acquaintances have told me that Yoo's torture memos contain clues that they were not intended as serious legal opinions. One such clue is the complete disregard of legal precedent. In navigating through the law, you basically have the following options: You can say that the current circumstance is sufficiently like a previous case the Supreme Court has decided that that precedent rules. You can say that the present situation really has no precedent, so the court would reach an entirely new decision. Or you can say that, while there is a precedent for the situation, that precedent is wrong and should be overturned. There is no fourth option.

Yoo's memos concern presidential powers in a time of war. One famous precedent with which any lawyer would have to grapple is the Supreme Court's decision in Youngstown, concerning President Truman's seizure of the country's steel mills to keep them rolling during the Korean War. The Supreme Court ruled his action unconstitutional. The Youngstown case set out the Supreme Court's judgment as to how far the president's inherent powers go in a wartime emergency and to what degree those powers are subject to congressional authority.

In his memos, however, Yoo never mentioned Youngstown—either to distinguish it as sufficiently different that the decision does not control, or to argue that it was wrongly decided and should be overturned. This, the lawyers say, is compelling evidence that Yoo was acting not so much as a lawyer but as a political hatchet man.

However, most of my colleagues say that just because John Yoo did a bad thing while working for the Bush administration doesn't mean the university has cause to censure or dismiss him. We believe in academic freedom, they say, that professors have the right to say what they think and believe without fear of sanction—as long as they act in good faith.

Along similar lines, National Journal reporter Stuart Taylor writes that we should all stop harassing Yoo because we cannot prove that he did not act in good faith. And Sandy Levinson of the University of Texas Law School puts forward an alternative defense: that Yoo, like Truman administration Secretary of State Dean Acheson, was "present at the creation" of a new world in which old rules of executive power simply did not apply. Levinson, Taylor, and many others assert that Yoo merely wrote what he believed, setting out his understanding that the law affords the president untrammeled powers in his role as commander in chief of the armed forces.

But in The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton, a book published in 2000 by the libertarian Cato Institute, John Yoo took an entirely different view of "The Imperial Presidency Abroad," as his contribution was titled.

Yoo wrote: "President Clinton has exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the upmost ... [and] undermine[d] notions of democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law ... ."

It's a provocative claim, especially coming from Yoo. How does he claim that Clinton did so? By using his powers as commander in chief to place American troops under the command of British NATO generals. "War power questions to one side, President Clinton's military adventures raise a second legal and constitutional difficulty—their unprecedented reliance on multilateral cooperation," Yoo writes. "That position has serious constitutional and policy defects .... [T]he Constitution nowhere permits the president ... to delegate federal power completely outside of the national government."

Yoo's Bush-era writings support presidential powers so wide-ranging that the president can order the torture of captives regardless of what treaties the U.S. has signed or what laws the U.S. Congress has passed. Yet we are expected to accept that Yoo previously believed that the president's power as commander in chief is so puny and circumscribed that he cannot lawfully put American troops under the command of allies?

Dwight D. Eisenhower—not the commander in chief but merely the theater commander—in December 1944 placed the U.S. First Army under the command of British Field Marshal Montgomery. President Wilson put the army of Gen. Pershing under the command of French Field Marshal Foch. Commander in chief George Washington put American troops under the command of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur and Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. And let's not talk about the command authority over the Continental Army exercised by Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben at Valley Forge.

So what does John Yoo believe? In the summer of 2000, when Republicans were condemning President Clinton for overreaching his powers as commander in chief, Yoo seemed to have been very happy to cook the dish. I suspect that had Al Gore been president from 2001 to 2009, Yoo's "The Imperial President Abroad" would have been the theme of subsequent Yoo articles, each arguing that President Gore had exceeded his powers.

Some Yoo defenders no doubt believe that 9/11 changed everything. I don't think it did. But if 9/11 altered the landscape so thoroughly that our old laws are no longer adequate for the new era, then we need to change our laws. We can revoke our adherence to the Geneva Conventions. We can withdraw from the U.N. Convention Against Torture. We can amend Article I so the president can suspend habeas corpus whenever he wishes. And we can remove the requirement that the federal government detain suspects only with probable cause.

Yoo didn't argue that we needed to change our laws and Constitution—he just argued that the old ones meant something completely different than what the Supreme Court held in Youngstown.

As for the argument that what Yoo authorized was not really a regime of torture, the last I heard, more than 50 detainees died under it. It may no longer matter to the deceased whether or not John Yoo acted in good faith. But here at Berkeley, we'd still like to know.

Presidents Should Take Organizartional Advice from Bruce Bartlett

George W. Bush is Mr. What-Not-to-Do...

Bruce Bartlett says: don't treat your speechwriters like c---:

Bush from the Inside: how different the Bush White House was from the Reagan White House where I worked. Reagan's WH was a model of thoroughness, adherence to proper procedure, and respect for the office of the president.  Bush's WH seems amazingly slipshod, showing total disregard for all of the things that were important to Reagan in terms of how his administration functioned. On the first point, I was struck by this paragraph as the author discusses his first session with Bush reviewing a draft speech he had written:

The president's editing sessions went like this: he talked, you listened and scribbled furiously whatever he said. On occasion, he might ask a question. But usually he wasn't too interested in the answer. Sometimes in the middle of your explaining something, if he felt he wasn't getting what he wanted, he'd interrupt and say, 'Okay, here's what we need to do.' This wasn't a process that encouraged dialogue or pushback on an important point. This was George W. decisively telling you what he wanted to say, and you writing it down. Got it?"

The problem with such a bullying method is that the president isn't just some guy expressing a personal opinion when he speaks. If he were, then it would be perfectly appropriate for him to demand that his speechwriters wrote whatever he damn well told them to say.  But the president of the United States speaks not just for himself, not just for his administration, but for the country as a whole. His words carry weight. Consequently, it is appalling to see him treating those words in such a cavalier manner.

Ronald Reagan, of course, was a trained actor, accustomed to reading dialogue written for him by others. Consequently, he had respect for those who wrote the words he spoke. Reagan was a great writer himself and would often edit his speeches. But he did it privately with an editing pen and usually for style, not substance.  I think every Reagan speechwriter had enormous respect for Reagan's contributions to his own speeches and, in turn, he respected his speechwriters and didn't treat them like manual laborers, as Bush seems to have done...

Bruce Bartlett says: let your president say what he means:

More Latimer on Bush: When I worked at the White House when we would run into resistance... from the bureaucracy... [and] from Reagan's own appointees, not all of whom shared his ideology.... [I] was extremely valuable to point to a clear statement by the president--not a press release or a government report--stating his position on some issue. It allowed those of us trying to implement his agenda to speak with authority.... It's too bad that Bush pissed away this resource by treating the radio addresses as chores rather than opportunities.

Those interested in the issue of cap-and-trade may be interested to know that Bush endorsed this policy in a speech (p. 198). But no one knows this because the speechwriters intentionally obfuscated Bush's endorsement by refusing to use the words cap-and-trade....

Bruce Bartlett says: don't hire kiss-up kick-down subordinates:

On page 212 we learn that Dan Bartlett (no relation) a senior White House staffer took credit with the president for an idea Latimer had come up with. The picture of Bartlett Latimer presents confirms what I have heard from other White House staffers--he was utterly incompetent but had a knack for getting along with Bush, which was enough to relentlessly push him up the ladder of success from Bush go-fer to one of the most important officials in government. Latimer says there was a whole group of such people in the White House: "These were mostly well-meaning people who rose to the very top because they were likable, not supremely qualified." That's an understatement.... In the end, Latimer concludes that Bush was never the conservative Latimer thought he was. Bush was just going through the motions to get conservative support and get elected...

Bruce Bartlett says: if you don't want to make policy, don't become president--play peanuckle instead:

Remembering the DiIulio Memo: In my earlier post I referenced a memo written by John DiIulio... http://www.esquire.com/features/dilulio Here are a couple of quotes....

Besides the tax cut, which was cut-and-dried during the campaign, and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations.... There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism....

They [the White House staff] could stand to find ways of inserting more serious policy fiber into the West Wing diet.... They are almost to an individual nice people, and there are among them several extremely gifted persons who do indeed know--and care--a great deal about actual policy-making, administrative reform, and so forth. But they have been, for whatever reasons, organized in ways that make it hard for policy-minded staff, including colleagues (even secretaries) of cabinet agencies, to get much West Wing traction, or even get a nontrivial hearing.

In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, nonstop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis — staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.

The Torture Memos: A Very Good Catch by Marc Ambinder

Marc writes:

Another Justification For Holder's Torture Re-Examination: One of the main lines of argument cited by the seven former CIA directors in urging President Obama to reverse his attorney general's decision to review CIA interrogations is that career lawyers at the Department of Justice had already reviewed those same files.... But the Justice Department's response to these claims contains a buried piece of information: "Given the recommendation from the Office of Professional Responsibility as well as other available information, he believed the appropriate course of action was to ask John Durham to conduct a preliminary review..."

For the uninitiated, this means that the preliminary report sent to Holder by the Office of Professional Responsibility on the torture-related lawyering of the Bush-era DOJ political appointees--a report prepared by career prosecutors--recommended that the cases deemed closed during the Bush administration be re-examined.

Holder is following the advice of his in-house 'internal affairs' shop... and didn't simply make the decision after reviewing the files himself.

George W. Bush on Sarah Palin and John McCain

Matt Latimer http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_10957&pageNum=7:

On Sarah Palin:

[T]he president [George W. Bush], ever the skilled politician, had concerns about the choice of Palin, which he called “interesting.” That was the equivalent of calling a fireworks display “satisfactory.” “I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?” Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment. “This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party...

On John McCain:

I was once in the Oval Office when the president was told a campaign event in Phoenix he was to attend with McCain suddenly had to be closed to the press. The president didn’t understand why when the whole purpose of holding the event had been to show Bush and McCain together so the press would stop asking why the two wouldn’t be seen together. If the event was closed to the press, the whole thing didn’t make sense. “If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” the president said. “I’ve got better things to do.” Eventually, someone informed the president that the reason the event was closed was that McCain was having trouble getting a crowd. Bush was incredulous—and to the point. “He can’t get 500 people to show up for an event in his hometown?” he asked. No one said anything, and we went on to another topic. But the president couldn’t let the matter drop. “He couldn’t get 500 people? I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford.” He shook his head. “This is a five-spiral crash, boys.” We tried to move on to something else. But the president wouldn’t let go. He was stuck on the Phoenix event. At one point, he looked off into space and said to no one in particular, “What is this--a cruel hoax?”

The Bipartisan Center Looks on the Republican Party with Dismay...

Andrew Samwick:

Tea Parties: A First Step to What?: I have not been part of the "Tea Party" movement that has emerged this year.  I don't feel like that movement provides the basis for a way forward in governing this country until it comes to grips with its recent past; namely, its nonexistent or muted protests to the fiscal policies of the Bush administration when taxes were cut ahead of any concrete plans for spending reductions to maintain budget balance.  As I quoted in the spring, referring to the passage of Medicare Part D in 2003, "Where were the Medicare tea parties?" 

Finally, this weekend, we had protests in Washington against the expansion of government participation in health care markets.  As I have argued, we should more plainly describe the so-called "public option" as a buy-in to Medicare for all.  And it would be ridiculous for people who envision a smaller government than we currently have to think that the so-called public option is anything other than the first step toward a new health care entitlement.  There is just too clear a history of growth in entitlement programs after their inception and to little specificity in the President's speech about reforms like the risk adjustment mechanism for exchange-participating plans that are essential to preventing the public option from being the only option once it is established.  If that is the motivation for the protests, then count me in.  That the train is six years late in leaving the station is no reason not to get on board now that it is heading in the right direction.  Health care reform ought to be proceeding at a more deliberate pace with a better case being made by its proponents.

But that train... only stops the other side from making things worse.  It does nothing to build the foundations of good governance beyond the first election where it may be exhibited next year.  Andrew Sullivan says it very well in response to his "Dissent of the Day" post:

Sure, Obama isn't ideal. I'd like a carbon tax rather than cap and trade, drastic 1986-style tax reform, and an end to the government subsidizing employer-based insurance plans. I'd also like marriage equality in every state and a flat tax and an immediate end to the military's gay ban. But unlike so many of these tea-partiers, I also realize that in real politics, you have to construct a solid coalition for all this and make arguments for it consistently (as Reagan did for decades) and have some credibility. But the GOP has been doing he opposite, fighting wars - cultural and military - instead of attending to basic fiscal responsibility and limited government. You cannot just pivot on a dime without some accounting of the recent past. Well, you can, but you look so partisan and so two-faced you'll only persuade people by ratcheting up fear and hysteria to drown out the actual issues.

His whole post is worth a read.  See also this post from Diane Lim Rogers at EconomistMom, "What Exactly Are They Protesting?"

Diane Lim Rogers:

What Exactly Are They Protesting?: On Saturday the “Tea Party” movement’s “Taxpayer March on Washington” was held.  According to the Washington Post....

Saturday’s throng appeared to number in the many tens of thousands. A sea of people surrounded the Capitol reflecting pool, spilling across Third Street and along the Mall. The sound system did not reach far enough for people at the edges of the rally to hear the speakers onstage. “You will not spend the money of our children and our grandchildren to feed an overstuffed government,” Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) said of the Obama administration, drawing raucous applause. “Our history is decorated by those who endured the burden of defending freedom,” Price said. “Now a new generation of patriots has emerged. You are those patriots.”

The group’s sponsors included FreedomWorks, a Washington-based group headed by former House majority leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.), and the groups Tea Party Patriots and ResistNet. They and others involved in the rally comprise a loose coalition of conservative groups that helped organize the health-care and anti-tax demonstrations in the spring and summer…

Which leads me to wonder if most of these protesters really understand what they’re protesting.  I doubt these folks would object to expanded health care coverage if they didn’t have to pay higher taxes (which the Obama Administration is proposing as at least part of the way they’ll accomplish deficit-neutral health-care reform).  And if these protesters are not willing to pay higher taxes and yet don’t want their existing health benefits cut, then how can they possibly argue that they’re the “fiscal conservatives” and that it’s the other side who is spending “the money of our children and our grandchildren”?... What’s really troubling to me is that these protesters seem especially delusional when it comes to what their “no new taxes” and (yet) “no cutting my (government) benefits” position means for the burden that’s passed on to future generations.  And when you use a child as a “prop” to argue the anti-tax position that’s exactly the mentality that jeopardizes that child’s economic future–well, I think that probably qualifies as child abuse.

Bush 36,000?! Nay! Bush 36,000,000!!!!

Matthew Yglesias:

Bush 36,000: I, for one, cannot think of a better man to serve as custodian of the Bush legacy:

Former President George W. Bush took a step closer Thursday to establishing an “action-oriented think tank” alongside his future presidential library by naming James K. Glassman, the longtime journalist and former administration official, as its founding executive director. Mr. Glassman, who served in the Bush administration as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and later undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, will be charged with building a public policy institute intended to advance some of the issues that Mr. Bush embraced as president.

Glassman is, of course, better known to bloggers who like to make fun of know-nothing conservatives as the author of the late nineties bestseller Dow 36,000. I think that’s the kind of detachment from reality you need to dedicate your life to bolstering the reputation of the Bush administration.

It's true, we have had fun with James Glassman and his coauthor Kevin Hassett for quite a while--so much so that the last time I was supposed to be in the same room as Hassett (at Stanford), he said he would flee the jurisdiction if I showed up.

I cannot think of a president save perhaps James Buchanan for whom James K. Glassman would be a more fitting executive director. And I cannot think of a job for which James K. Glassman is better suited:

• Dow 36000 Once Again: I see that James Glassman and Kevin Hassett are writing in the Wall Street Journal today, lying about what their Dow 36000 book says. There are two different Dow 36000 books that they could have written.... The second book would say: "THE DOW SHOULD BE WORTH 36000 NOW!! THE DOW WILL BE WORTH 36000 SOON!! IF YOU DON'T BUY STOCKS NOW, YOU ARE MISSING THE ALMOST-CERTAIN OPPORTUNITY TO TRIPLE YOUR MONEY OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS!!" Which book did they write?...

• I'll Stop Calling This Crew "Orwellian" When They Stop Using 1984 as an Operations Manual: James Glassman? Back in 1998, 1999, and 2000--as the dot-com bubble approached, reached, and receded from its peak--James Glassman and Kevin Hassett were telling the investors of America to buy, buy, buy more, more, more stocks in their book Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market.... [Glassman and Hassett predict] stock returns [will in the long run be] the same 2.9% above inflation as Treasury bond returns. That forecast of stock returns all by itself makes it impossible for Glassman to [truthfully] support Bush's plan for Social Security privatization.... [T]he Bush administration says that under its plan you only win from private accounts if the stocks and bonds in your private account make more than 3% per year...

• More Glassman and Hassett Blogging: Ah. I had forgotten that the Atlantic Monthly--failing to consult with anybody knowledgeable... or half knowledgeable... or quarter knowledgeable...--gave James Glassman and Kevin Hassett their first platform for "Dow 36000".... J.E. emails: "Although he seems to regret it now, Glassman got fairly specific with a stock market prediction back in 2000. He pledged to donate $1000 to charity if the Dow was less than 23,000 in January 2010, and said that his coauthor Hassett would do the same..."

• And Today's Winners of the Mendacity Sweepstakes Are...: The authors of Dow 36000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market pretend, once again, that their book did not say what it said: "TCS: Tech Central Station - DOW 36,000: Five years ago, economist Kevin Hassett and I wrote a book called Dow 36,000. Maybe you have heard of it. The book made the bestseller lists and won accolades from, among others, the current chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors. For some, however, the book became an object of derision because -- just in case you haven't noticed -- the Dow hasn't actually risen to 36,000 yet.... Dow 36,000 was not a prognostication. Sure, the Dow will hit 36,000 and probably, eventually, 360,000. But I don't know exactly when, and I don't believe investing is a game of forecasting what's going to happen tomorrow or next year..." However, those of us unlucky enough to own Dow 36000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market can go to our bookshelves, pull it down, and read that "the Dow should rise to 36000 immediately"--i.e., in October, 1999. But Hassett and Glassman say, they are going to be cautious and conservative. They are not going to forecast that the Dow will rise to 36000 tomorrow, but instead they "believe the rise will take some time, perhaps three to five years..." (p. 18). However, they acknowledge that they might be wrong: the rise might come much quicker. As they go on to say later on the book, the fact that Glassman and Hassett "conservatively" don't expect the rise of the Dow to 36000 to occur for three to five years--i.e., until 2002 or 2004--does not mean that investors should delay. Investors should "seize the opportunity now [i.e., in 1999] to profit from the rise in the Dow to 36000 (p. 125)." On pages 18 and 19 of the book they go so far as to sneer at one of their American Enterprise Institute colleagues--someone who told them back in 1998 what Glassman is saying now. For when one AEI colleague heard their title, he gave a cynical laugh and said, "As long as you don't say when [the Dow will reach 36000], I suppose it is all right." Glassman and Hassett's response was: "we aren't laughing. The case is compelling.... 36000 is a fair value for the Dow today... stocks should rise to such heights very quickly. As you read on, you will... learn to invest in ways that take advantage of a remarkable time in financial history...." [And] we haven't even gotten into the fact that Glassman and Hassett got their math wrong. As the Economist's Clive Crook told them in May 1998, the 36000 number was "wrong, plain wrong.... Your reasons for believing that the Dow should be at 36,000 are wrong in the same way that it's wrong to say two plus two equals five.... Using your own method, provided only that you put the right variable into the formula, the market is about fairly valued." Note how they don't mention the subtitle--it would make the falsity of the claim that "Dow 36000 was not a prognostication" too obvious.

And the Economist, March 6, 2009:

How's that working out for you?: THE Washington Post has an interview with James Glassman, co-author of Dow 36,000 (with Kevin Hassett), up on its website today. In 1999, the year of the book's publication, the Dow's lowest point was just north of 9,100 points. For those who aren't aware, the Dow's current price is just north of 6,700. A snippet:

[B]ased on our calculations, we believed that stocks would rise to roughly 36,000. We said in the book that it is impossible to predict how long it will take for the market to recognize that Dow 36,000 is perfectly reasonable, but then, of course, we did take a guess.

You said three to five years.

Obviously that hasn't happened. I think the question investors are facing now is, "is history a guide?" In "Dow 36,000" we looked at history in, I think, a completely reasonable way and said a) you ought to be in the stock market b) stocks are very much undervalued...

Do you still think it will hit 36,000?

I have no doubt about that. I think that is absolutely true. But I'm not going to tell you what date.

Aw, c'mon. Tell us the date!

Henry Paulson Says That the Democratic Legislators Are Class Acts

And that the Bush White House staff and the Republican legislators were not.

Kevin Drum writes:

Quote of the Day | Mother Jones: From former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, describing his favorite congressman:

This is a guy that’s got the intellect, he’s got the energy, he cares, and he wants to legislate, knows how to legislate. He’s interested in getting across the finish line.

The congressman in question is Barney Frank, as described in a series of interviews given to Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair.  Paulson, who comes across in these interviews as almost astonishingly naive about how Washington works, basically says that Frank was the only honest, straightforward guy on the entire Hill.  "I just wish he were a Republican," he said.

Paulson has nice things to say about Nancy Pelosi too (“She was engaged, she was decisive, and she was really willing to just get involved with all of her people on a hands-on basis”).  And Tim Geithner (“He understands Treasury. He’s an internationalist....He’s smooth, but there’s ... inside, he’s tough as steel”).  But his fellow Republicans?  Not so nice:

“It’s not enough to just sit there and say, ‘I’m right, the other guys are wrong,’ ” he told me at one point, explaining why it was often so difficult working with some of the more doctrinaire members of the White House staff. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with ideology. I’ve got my ideology and my philosophy. But those that say, ‘I won’t compromise,’ to prove a point, and then ‘I’m going to point a finger afterwards and say, See, I was right ... ’ ”

Sounds like he and John DiIulio could have a very simpatico conversation about the Bush White House if they ever got together for a beer or three.

As I have said before, I don't think anyone who cares about America has any business voting for any Republican until the Republican Party reforms itself, and overcomes the Curse of Richard Nixon.

Seems like Henry Paulson agrees...,

The Latest OLC Memo from John Yoo...

On April 1, 2002, John Yoo wrote in an official OLC opinion memo:

The powers of the U.S. President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces are those that have traditionally been exercised, in common international law, by previous Commanders-in-Chief of other countries. The President of the United States's powers cannot, by logic, be less than those of, say, the Commander-in-Chief of the navy of the Cretan Imperial Thalassocracy of the second millennium BC.

It is well established in the historical record that the then-Commander-in-Chief, Minos, (a) used genetic engineering to breed a human-animal hybrid, the man-bull called the Minotaur; (b) imprisoned detainees who were not lawful combattants in a maze underneath the Palace at Knossos; and (c) had the Minotaur chase, gore, kill, and eat detainees.

I will not opine on whether it is wise or moral for the President of the United States to breed human-animal hybrid monsters, imprison detainees in an underground maze, and have them gored to death. It may be, it may not be. I am just an expert legal technocrat. And it is indisputably true that the plain words of the Constitution give the President the power to order that such deeds be done, and that it is unlawful for any member of the military to (a) refuse to breed monstrous human-animal hybrids, (b) contruct a maze, or (c) unleash the minotaur if the President or a friend of the President's like Richard Cheney orders that it be done.

ONN discusses:

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Scott Horton on the CIA Report

He writes:

Seven Points on the CIA Report—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine): The Inspector General’s review was launched by complaints coming from valued senior employees who felt that the Bush Program (as John Yoo has dubbed it) was wrong. One of them actually expresses his worry that those involved will be hauled before the World Court at some point because of [and that’s redacted!] This makes clear that good employees of the agency opposed the Bush Program, were vocal in their opposition, and focused concern on the program’s illegality. The OLC memos were intended to silence these complaints, but they only accentuated the agency’s morale problems by enmeshing it in obviously illegal and immoral conduct. By contrast, the number of CIA personnel involved in pushing it through and supporting it is tiny—probably not many more than two dozen—though their voices are heard very loudly. It’s interesting that in a stream of appearances by CIA personnel on TV yesterday—Tyler Drumheller, Jack Rice, Bob Baer and others—all said that a criminal investigation was a good idea. The official spokesman of the CIA torture team remains, as for the last seven years, David Ignatius.

Edward Moore Kennedy

(Thanks to Spencer Ackerman)

The 2004 CIA Inspector General Report on Torture

Spencer Ackerman:

The Washington Independent » The 2004 CIA Inspector General Report on Torture.

Against the Anti-Nuremburg Defense...

From Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Torture Prosecutions Coming?: Certainly looks that way:

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.'s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general's findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder's associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

Let me, for one, say that it would be a very bad thing if George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley, John Ashcroft, Jay Bybee, John Yoo and company were never held accountable in any way in any forum at all, while CIA interrogators who used two extra gallons of water in a waterboarding or accidently killed their victims are prosecuted.

"I was only giving orders" is the Bushies defense. It is considerably less valid than the Nuremburg defense.

Thoreau on Marc Ambinder and Company

Thoreau writes:

Wrong to be right, right to be wrong, redux § Unqualified Offerings: Greenwald has a post up about the fact that those of us who were right for 8 years are still considered “not serious”, even when information comes out vindicating us (like, say, a former Homeland Security Secretary saying that terror alerts were based on politics rather than serious intelligence).  The basic charge seems to be that although we were right, we were merely guessing the worst based on blind, partisan hatred.

Let’s start by taking the charge at face value:  If the basic assertion is that you could get it right for 8 years simply by guessing the worst, what does that say about the Bush administration?  What does that say about its defenders?  If the “serious people” were consistently less accurate than a stereotypical Democratic Underground poster whose magic 8 ball always says “Chimpy will do evil!” then perhaps the allegedly “serious” people should hang their heads in shame, you know?...

Ezra Klein somewhere said that he did not understand why the press corps not only ignored Ron Suskind's Esquire articles and books at the time, but continues to ignore them today. I can't find it, but it is a very big question. For Ambinder and company to be maintaining today that they were right not to pay attention to Suskind (and Krugman, and company) cannot be good for their long-run career prospects, can it?

In the Matter of Berkeley Law School Professor John Yoo...

Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley asks:

Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley: [T]he crucial questions... are these: Was there clear professional misconduct--that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney--material to Professor Yoo's academic performance now?...

Dean Edley believes that this is a complicated question, to which we must never know the answer: the situation, he believes does "not warrant [Yoo's] dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry." The harm that would be done to academic freedom, Edley believes, is such that we must never take any steps to find out what the answer to Edley's question is.

I, by contrast, believe that we have already found out the answer to Edley's question.

I believe that this is a simple question.

A believe that this question has a very simple answer.

I believe that the answer is "yes."

In 2000, John Yoo published an article, "The Imperial Presidency Abroad" http://www.cato.org/events/000712con.html, in which he argued that President William Jefferson Clinton had unconstitutionally exceeded the bounds of his Commander-in-Chief powers:

accelerat[ing] disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law...

by placing:

American troops... under... non-American... commanders, such as British General Michael Jackson.... [This] threatens that basic principle of government accountability. International or foreign officials have no obligation to pursue American policy, nor do they take an oath to uphold the Constitution...

Note that this is a very strange thing to write. In the customary laws of war, the decision whether or not to place soldiers under the tactical, operational, or strategic command of allies is within the appropriate commander's[1] discretion whenever joint operations are underway. Thus the Duke of Wellington as theater commander placed British troops under Dutch command in the person of the Prince of Orange in the Waterloo Campaign. Thus did George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army place American troops under French command in the persons of the Marquis de Lafayette and the omte de Rochambeau during the Revolutionary War, thus did John Pershing as American field commander place American troops under French command in the person of Marshall Foch during World War I, and thus did Dwight Eisenhower as AEF commander place American troops under British command in the person of Field Marshall Montgomery during World War II. And nobody said "boo."

In striking contrast to what he had written thirty months before, on March 14, 2003 John Yoo wrote:

in the customary laws of war, the treatment of unlawful belligerents is left to the sovereign's discretion.... [T]he sovereign right of the United States on the treatment of enemy combatants is reserved to the President as Commander-in-Chief. In light of the long history of discretion given to each nation to determine its treatment of unlawful combatants, to construe these [congressional] statutes to regulate the conduct of the United States toward such combatants would interfere with a well established prerogative of the sovereign...

So we see, on the one hand, that when the President is William Jefferson Clinton, his Commander-in-Chief powers are so crabbed and restricted that Democratic President Clinton exceeded them by instructing American soldiers to obey the orders of the NATO theater commander.

And we see, on the other hand, when the President is George W. Bush, his Commander-in-Chief powers are so extensive and unconstrained that Congress's explicit authority to "make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces" can place no restrictions at all on what lawful orders Republican President George W. Bush can give to mistreat, abuse, and torture persons held by the U.S. armed forces.

These two Commander-in-Chief powers are very different indeed.

To advance as your basic principle of Constitional construction "don't worry: it's OK if you are a Republican" is a breach of professional ethics serious enough to more than pass the bar set by Dean Edley--unless, of course, all legal reasoning is just a crock of manure to mask partisan maneuvering.

Now it is plain that John Yoo does not believe both of his 2000 and 2003 statements of the legal extent of the Commander-in-Chief power. Indeed, he believes neither: if he believed the 2000 statement, he would never in his life have written what he wrote in 2003; if he believed the 2003 statement, he would never in his life have put forward what he wrote in 2000.

This has a bearing on the duty of the university to ensure and promote academic freedom. As medieval history professor Ernst Kantorowicz said, upon his resignation from the university rather than bow to the Regents' demand that he swear that he would not advocate communism:

[I] wish to emphasize the true and fundamental issue at stake: professional and human dignity. There are three professions which are entitled to wear a gown: the judge, the priest, the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer's maturity of mind, his independence of judgment, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and to his God. It signifies the inner sovereignty of those three interrelated professions: they should be the very last to allow themselves to act under duress and yield to pressure. It is a shameful and undignified action, it is an affront and a violation of both human sovereignty and professional dignity that the Regents of this University have dared to bully the bearer of this gown into a situation in which--under the pressure of a bewildering economic coercion-‑he is compelled to give up either his tenure or, together with his freedom of judgment, his human dignity and his responsible sovereignty as a scholar.

Academic freedom--like all freedoms--is thus not free: liberty is always paired with responsibility. A professor is freed from coercion by others to shape or constrain or limit what he or she decides to say. In return, a professor takes on a twofold "responsibility to his conscience and to his god": an obligation (a) to think as hard as he or she can, and (b) to then tell the world what he or she thinks. A university in which professors are freed from external constraint and pressure and in turn obey the internal constraint that is their reponsibility to think hard and tell what they believe to be the truth is one in which there is academic freedom.

What does a university's obligation to nurture and guard academic freedom entail? Clearly it means that a university has to protect its members by coercion from outsiders. And clearly it means that a university has to protect its members from coercion by insiders--those other professors who do not like where professors' responsibilities to their consciences and gods lead them. But what are a university's obligations with respect to a professor who wants the freedom from coercion but does not accept the responsibility to think hard and to say what those thoughts are? What if a professor uses freedom from coercion and constraint not to tell the world what he thinks, but rather to say at one moment that there is one set of constitutional rules for Democratic Presidents and at another moment that there is a very different set of constitutional rules for Republican Presidents?

Is academic freedom vindicated by claiming that the university has no responsibility to censure, no responsibility to correct, no responsibility to discipline, no responsibility to dismiss someone who so violates his direct responsibility to his conscience and to his god?

I leave this issue as an exercise for the dean.

---

[1] Note the difference between "commander" on the one hand and "sovereign" on the other. The American President's powers are of the "Chief Executive" class, inherited from the powers of the British King as chief executive of the United Kingdom as its constitution stood in 1776. The British King in 1775 was not the "sovereign" but rather the commander of the army: ever since 1689, sovereignty in the United Kingdom was held by the King-in-Parliament, a very different entity than the King.

What Is This "White" You Speak of, Kemosabe?

Me:

One way to look at Nixon's "Silent Majority" strategy was that it involved the redefinition of lots of people as "white"--people who wouldn't have been "white" even thirty years before, back when they were seen as not-quite-real-American ethnic immigrants living in ghettos and serving the corrupt Democratic political machines against which the Republicans fought--probably entangled in organized crime, too.

And of these the champion example is, of course, Mark Krikorian and his defenses of "white" American culture against the Hispanic Pizza Menace. Lots of Krikorians in colonial Massachusetts alongside my Bradford, Anderson, Lord, Winthrop, Sewall, Usher, etc. ancestors, I tell you. The Nixon "Silent Majority" strategy was, in a sense, that everyone who is not Black is white--and should join us in our crusade to deprive the welfare queens of their free booze. Which is why the form of the Republican attack on Sonia Sotomayor is very interesting indeed...

Rick Perlstein:

It comes out in the endless discussions [Richard Nixon] would have on the tapes to come up with an Italian or a Pole to slot for assistant deputy secretary for thus-and-such. As the memo from Buchanan I posted here a while back demonstrates, they were absolutely obsessed with affirmative action for non-WASP (and, implicitly, non-Hebrew) "whites." Obsessed. I mean, approaching 1972, and in talks about staffing up the second term, it was one of their top five topics for discussion. And that relates to something David Frum said in a big conference on the future of conservatism in '05, that the big question for political demography was whether ten years from then Hispanics would end up as Jews or Italians--which is to say, permanently in the Democratic or permanently in the Republican coalition.

In '05, to Frum, that seemed up in the air. I guess recent history suggests that the decision has been made easy for them, by the people who ended up in charge of the Republican Party. Bush II and Rove COULD have been like Nixon and Colson: i.e., appointing Hispanics to every other job, Tammany Hall style. Their party's politics prevented it.

Hoisted from the Archives: Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now

Hoisted from the Archives:

Ron Suskind:

What Bush Meant: One morning in 2001, one of President Bush's most senior economic advisors [Glenn Hubbard] walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The day before, the advisor had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy. Concerned about deficits and the dubious stimulatory effect of such rebates, he had called the president's chief of staff, Andy Card, to ask for the audience, and the meeting had been set.

As the man took his seat in the wing chair next to the president's desk, he began to explain his problem with the president's decision. The fact of the matter was that in this area of policy, this advisor was one of the experts, really top-drawer, and had been instrumental in devising some of the very language now used to discuss these concepts. He was convinced, he told Bush, that the president's position would soon enough be seen as "bad policy."

This, it seems, was the wrong thing to say to the president.

According to senior administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened, President Bush looked at the man. "I don't ever want to hear you use those words in my presence again," he said.

"What words, Mr. President?"

"Bad policy," President Bush said. "If I decide to do it, by definition it's good policy. I thought you got that."

The advisor was dismissed. The meeting was over.

It is one story among many such stories. Why, you might ask, would the president bother to have advisors who are expert in various constellations of policy-making if he then disregards utterly whatever they have to say? The answer is at the heart of the failure of this presidency.

George Walker Bush is not a stupid or a bad man. But in his conduct as president, he behaved stupidly and badly. He was constrained by neither the standards of conduct common to the average professional nor the Constitution. This was not ignorance but a willful rejection on Bush's part, in the service of streamlining White House decision-making, eliminating complexity, and shutting out dissenting voices. This insular mind-set was and is dangerous. Rigorous thinking and hard-won expertise are both very good things, and our government for the past eight years has routinely debased and mocked these virtues.

President Bush was unmoved by any arguments that challenged his assumptions. Debate was silenced, expertise was punished, and diversity of opinion was anathema, so much so that his political opponents--other earnest Americans who want the best for their country--were, to him and his men, the moral equivalent of the enemy. It is important to note just how different such conduct has been from the conduct of other presidents from both parties.

Anyone who has drawn this sad conclusion has been dismissed as a "Bush hater" by those who defend the president.

I am not a "Bush hater." I am a reporter, and it is incumbent in the enterprise to scrutinize power and follow facts.

I began chronicling this administration for Esquire in late 2001, and have been compelled to write about nothing else since. Among many other things, I learned that the bright lines typical in a White House between policy-making and political operations had been obliterated in the Bush White House, abandoned in favor of political calculations routed through Karl Rove's office. In his critique of this troubling power dynamic, one of my sources, the former director of the president's faith-based initiative, John DiIulio, called Rove's swarming operatives the "Mayberry Machiavellis." That was in 2002. DiIulio couldn't have known then just how right he was.

I also learned from another source, Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, that at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting, in January 2001, finding a rationale for overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein topped the agenda.

I learned that the president's message-makers derided the rest of us who live in the "reality-based community," as opposed to the alternate reality that they saw it in their power to create.

And most recently I learned that the White House was apprised by the Iraqi intelligence chief in January 2003--well in advance of the war--that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed no weapons of mass destruction and had no such active weapons programs. The intelligence chief, in his secret back-channel meetings, also described the mind of Saddam--his fear of the Iranians finding out he was weaponless--which explained his odd prewar behavior. When this fact was borne out after the invasion, the White House directed that a fraudulent document be created to establish a connection between the Iraqi regime and the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta. (This document miraculously materialized in Baghdad in December 2003)...

Today's Must Read: Scott Horton on the Misdeeds of John Yoo--and of Chris Edley

Scott Horton writes:

Yoo Returns to Berkeley—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine): Today, John Yoo returns to teach at Boalt Hall, the prestigious law school of the University of California at Berkeley. Alumni and students are marking the occasion with a protest. Their circular states:

As a direct result of Yoo’s legal memos thousands have been subjected to torture, tens of thousands incarcerated, tens of millions spied upon, and a million plus have died in U.S. imperialist wars. Without the provision of “legal cover,” many of these crimes would not have been possible...

But Boalt Hall Dean Chris Edley has risen once again to Yoo’s defense. In an email message to faculty sent on Saturday morning, Edley states that he intends to address the protesters and explain why he opposes any sort of action against Yoo:

I believe the University should not take any steps along the lines demanded by the protesters, because no law enforcement or even bar proceedings have been initiated, much less completed. Furthermore, UC faculty and administrators are not competent to act on their own to discover the facts at issue or make informed, formal judgments about the ultimate policy and legal claims...

It seems to me that Chris Edley has made two big mistakes:

• I was unaware that there was any dispute about the facts; indeed, I believe that there is no such dispute. If Dean Edley believes that there is reasonable doubt about what John Yoo's actions were, he owes his school a statement detailing what his reasonable doubts are. He provides none.

• If U.C. Berkeley deans and professors are not competent to judge policy and legal claims, then what business do they have pretending to teach people about the law? In judging his own faculty to be not competent, he raises the question of why he remains dean of a school where he judges that the faculty are not competent or able to make informed judgments.

Dean Edley would, I think, have been much better advised to present a neutral recitation of the facts of the case--facts that are not in dispute. But as Horton points out, Edley does not do that:

Dean Edley’s remarks--brief as they are--reflect a refusal to grapple with some serious issues. Edley states that “no law enforcement or even bar proceedings have been initiated,” which is flatly false. In fact, Yoo is the subject of a pending criminal investigation in Spain’s Audiencia Nacional, where investigators are probing his role in a process that led to the torture of five Spanish subjects. In a preliminary ruling, the court found that culpability for these crimes lies principally with the “intellectual authors” of the torture program, and particularly the lawyers who gave permission for it.... Attorney General Eric Holder is now widely expected to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture.... The Pennsylvania Bar has received complaints about Yoo, but bar disciplinary measures involving Justice Department employees start in the Justice Department... a report of the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility... five years in the making... has been finished since last October and has been held up largely by Yoo’s maneuvers....

And Horton concludes that grave questions about just what Berkeley is teaching its young lawyers-to-be are raised by Yoo's presence in the classroom:

Assume... that there is a process to run.... The university has to address what to do with John Yoo in the interim.... [I]s [it] appropriate for Yoo to be teaching international law, international humanitarian law, and constitutional law[?] Even John Yoo’s colleagues in the Bush Administration considered his scholarship to be unacceptable; his torture memoranda were repudiated by Jack Goldsmith and Stephen G. Bradbury, before the Obama Administration came to office. If the Justice Department formed the conclusion that Yoo’s work on constitutional and international law issues was shockingly substandard--indeed incompetent--why should he be teaching those exact subjects at Boalt Hall?... Protecting the integrity of the academy requires the recognition of more interests than John Yoo’s. The rights of students and the reputation of the university should count for something, too.

I agree with Scott: a professional school has an obligation to have its faculty be members of the profession whose deeds and ethics are worthy of emulation. Yoo's memos while he worked at the Office of Legal Counsel failed to provide his clients with a complete and truthful statement of the law. His clients could so and would win if they alleged that Yoo's flatly ignoring controlling precedent had led them, in reliance on his legal advice, to commit crimes caused substantial and difficult to repair harm to the national security of the United States.

Of course, his clients didn't bring a complaint against Yoo for violations of his duties as a lawyer: the point of the exercise was for Yoo to give them a "get out of jail free card" so that they could undertake illegal actions under some legal cover.

Students learning to be lawyers need to be taught that such behavior is not an acceptable part of lawyering. And each day Dean Edley allows Yoo to teach he breaks his contract with the law students who are paying him his salary.

A Republic--If You Can Keep It

Zachary Roth on the transformation of the Justice Department into an arm of the Republican Party:

Email: Rich Lowry Offered To Help White House Spin Firings: Here's a fun nugget from the U.S. attorney documents (h/t reader B.M.): It looks like Rick Lowry of National Review offered the White House his services in doing some positive P.R. on behalf of Rove protege Tim Griffin, who the administration had sought to sought to muscle into the U.S. attorney job in Arkansas as a replacement for the fired Bud Cummins. In a January 2007 email, White House political director Sara Taylor wrote:

Prior is going after Griffin. He's made this his cause.... We need to find some folks to defend Tim and his credentials, not to mention our policy.

Your thoughts? Rich Lowry offered to help Tim...

The best part? Taylor went on to ask: "Anyone better?"

Ouch.

Lowry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he felt dissed.

Can we please have another, very different opposition party--and another, very different media?

The Revelation of St. John the Divine 20 Blogging...

Mark Frauenfeder: Former French President says Bush invaded Iraq to thwart Gog and Magog's apocalyptic mission picks up:

James Haught: Chirac recounts that [George W. Bush] appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him [at the start of 2003]:

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins...

Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”... [Chirac's] staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that... Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report. Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon...

Revelations 20:

And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.

I confess I don't know what is more amazing:

1. That "Bush Gog Magog Chirac" gets only five hits on Google News--all of them in the past 48 hours.
2. That George W. Bush gets Revelations so wrong--you see, Gog and Magog do not arise until 1000 years after the "first resurrection." It won't be time for Gog and Magog to show until 1000 years after an angel comes down from heaven and binds the Devil and casts him into the bottomless pit, and those who were beheaded for their witness of Jesus are resurrected and reign with Christ for a millennium.

Republicans: The Party for People Who Think Evidence of Global Warming Threatens the National Security of the United States

Brad Johnson:

Think Progress: Obama administration reveals evidence of global warming kept secret under Bush: The Obama administration has “released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice,” following a declassification request by the National Academy of Sciences. These high-resolution spy photos of rapid sea ice loss off the northern coast of Alaska, kept classified by the Bush administration, show “the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic”. The newly-declassified images also reveal the retreat of glaciers in Washington and Alaska. USGS scientist John Crowe tells ThinkProgress that “security issues” prevented the U.S. Geological Survey from launching the Global Fiducials Library website until now, saying he had been “working for some time to get this data to the public.” The same day the images were made public, NOAA anounced that the world’s ocean surface temperature in June 2009 was the warmest on record.

In a Good World, There Would Simply Be No Such Thing as the Washington Post

Glenn Greenwald:

The Washington Post endorses Abu Ghraib scapegoating for torture: The Washington Post Editorial Page -- keeper of all establishment Washington wisdom -- today advocates that low-level CIA interrogators who went beyond John Yoo's torture guidelines, and only them, be criminally investigated and prosecuted by the Justice Department.

We reject the distorted interpretations that underpin the OLC memos and that serve as legal justification for harsh interrogation techniques that either border on or constitute torture. But those who relied on the memos and shaped their behavior in the good-faith belief that they were following the law should not be subject to prosecution. It is an entirely different story for those who went well beyond the often-extreme measures authorized by the memos.

In 2004, the Pentagon reported that 34 deaths had occurred in detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan; at that time, nine deaths were classified by military medical examiners as homicides. . . .

We continue to believe that an independent commission would best be able to shed light on a wide range of questions regarding detainee detention and treatment policy. It would help to ensure that such mistakes are never repeated. But some acts, including the violent deaths of detainees at the hands of U.S. personnel, must be investigated and addressed by law enforcement.

That, in a nutshell, is the twisted Washington mentality when it comes to lawbreaking: when political crimes become so blatant and extreme that they can no longer be safely excused (Watergate, Iran-contra, Abu Ghraib), then it's necessary to sacrifice some underlings who carried out the crimes by prosecuting them, but -- no matter what else happens -- the high-level political officials responsible for the crimes must be shielded from all accountability. In ordinary criminal justice, what typically guides prosecutions is the opposite mindset.... Note the distortions on which the Post Editors rely in order to justify their two-tiered justice system. DOJ torture-authorizing memos should shield those who acted in accordance with them because they were created and followed in "good faith." That assertion is groundless and false. The Post itself this morning reports what has long been known: that a DOJ ethics reports due in the next several weeks will not only "renounce Yoo's approval of harsh CIA interrogation practices [but also] recommend that he and Jay S. Bybee, a former colleague, be referred to their state bar associations for discipline." The necessary conclusion of that DOJ recommendation is that the torture-authorizing memos were written in bad faith (i.e., not merely wrong, but entirely groundless and produced with bad intent), since only a finding of "bad faith" (not mere error) could justify ethics proceedings against these lawyers.

A recently released report from five Inspectors General makes clear that Dick Cheney and David Addington selected Yoo to write these memos because they knew in advance that he'd approve of whatever they wanted to do. This process was the opposite of "good faith": what happened was that the highest-level political officials wanted to break the law, and so they found a hardened ideologue at the DOJ willing to write memos to classify those crimes as legal. To describe that process as "good faith" is to twist that phrase beyond recognition. It was blatant criminality accompanied by advanced bureaucratic cover from John Yoo -- the same person who wrote memos advising the President that not even the Bill of Rights could constrain his actions....

[T]he "principle"... that the Post Editorial Page today expressly endorses... [is] that Presidents are free to break the law as long as they can find a low-level DOJ functionary to write a memo justifying that conduct in advance. It's impossible to imagine any President -- occupying the most powerful political office in the country and commanding blind loyalty from all sorts of operatives -- who would be unable to find a lawyer-underling willing to endorse whatever he wants to do. Richard Nixon had lawyers defending what he did in Watergate.... Presidents are literally no longer bound by the rule of law. If the crimes are embarrassing enough, we'll find a Lynndie England -- or some obscure, easily demonizable, extra-sadistic CIA interrogator -- to scapegoat and punish in order to pacify the citizenry and create the illusion that the rule of law still prevails. But the one thing that remains off-limits in Washington culture above all else is subjecting high-level political officials to the rule of law when they commit crimes. The low-level scapegoating which the Post today endorses is the approach which, by all accounts, Eric Holder is likely to pursue.

The most ironic aspect of the Post's Editorial is its oh-so-solemn plea that we do what's necessary "to ensure that such mistakes are never repeated." Leaving aside the perversity of referring to a formal torture regime as a "mistake," what the Post advocates -- enabling Presidents to break the law as long as they have a low-level DOJ permission slip -- is to ensure that these sorts of things will happen over and over. We have rampant lawlessness in our political class precisely because the consequences for high-level lawbreaking no longer exist.

In a good world, there would simply not be a Washington Post.

In a fair world, every employee of the Washington Post would resign today.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Donald Rumsfeld Uses the Passive Voice

Justin Eliot:

Justin Eliot: Rumsfeld On Abandoning Geneva: 'All Of A Sudden, It Was Just All Happening': "All of a sudden, it was just all happening, and the general counsel's office in the Pentagon had the lead," Rumsfeld told former Washington Post journalist Bradley Graham, as quoted in By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld. "It never registered in my mind in this particular instance--it did in almost every other case--that these issues ought to be in a policy development or management posture. Looking back at it now, I have a feeling that was a mistake. In retrospect, it would have been better to take all of those issues and put them in the hands of policy or management."

[Rumsfeld is talking about] the Bush Administration's decision -- in which Rumsfeld played a key role -- to not grant prisoner-of-war designation to detainees from Afghanistan. In the Department of Defense, which had authority for Gitmo, the policy initially took the form of a since-declassified January 2002 memo, written by Rumsfeld, that said Al Qaida and Taliban detainees "are not entitled to prisoner of war status" under the Geneva Convention. This memo, as Graham puts it, "effectively nullified half a century of U.S. military adherence to the [Geneva] conventions"...

Preschool-age children will resort to the passive voice like this: "the chair got broken." Grownups do so more rarely.

Forensic Table Reading: Bush CEA Forecast Edition

In email, lurkers are questioning my claim that:

Forecasting the Obama Economy: ...what happened to the Mankiw CEA over the winter of 2003-2004, when high politics appears to have reached down into the forecast, changed the table for payroll employment (and only payroll employment: the rest of the forecast is not out of line with contemporary professional forecasts), and produced an estimate for December 2004 (a) inconsistent with the rest of the forecast, and (b) high by 2.3 million in its estimate of payroll employment--all because Karl Rove and company thought it important to avoid headlines like "Bush administration forecasts 2004 payroll employment to be less than when Bush took office." White House Media Affairs would have a much harder time pressuring the forecasters to produce a "rosy scenario" if the pressure has to be kept on month after month [as the Troika forecast is revised, updated, and released at a monthly frequency].

I think that the smoking gun is provided by a little forensic table reading--going through the Bush administration's economic forecasts year-by-year as they were published in the successive versions of the Bush-era CEA's Economic Report of the President, the ERP:

• In the 2002 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.2% growth expected for the next two years gives you 2.9 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 2.1% per year...
• In the 2003 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.5% growth expected for the next two years gives you 4.4 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.8% per year...
• In the 2004 ERP, Table 3.1 shows 3.7% growth expected for the next two years gives you 6.2 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.3% per year...
• In the 2005 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.4% growth expected for the next two years gives you 4.1 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.8% per year...
• In the 2006 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.3% growth expected for the next two years gives you 3.8 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.9% per year...
• In the 2007 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.0% growth expected for the next two years gives you 3.3 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.8% per year...

The forecast rate of labor productivity growth over the next two years or so is a relatively stable variable. It starts at an annual rate of 2.1% in the first Glenn Hubbard ERP, and then Glenn and company drop it to 1.8% the next year as they become less optimistic about productivity growth in the aftermath of the collapse of the high tech bubble. Thereafter the Bush CEA forecast assumes a labor productivity growth rate of 1.8% - 1.9% in every year save one: the 2004 ERP, issued at the start of 2004, drops the labor productivity growth rate to 1.3% (and the 2005 ERP raises it back up to 1.8%).

Was there anything in the economic data that would make one much more pessimistic about labor productivity growth in early 2004 and only early 2004? No.

But assuming a 1.8% labor productivity growth rate at the start of 2004 would have meant that the forecast average level of employment in Tqble 3.1 for 2004 would have been lower than the level of employment when Bush took office, and that would have created a point of political vulnerability. There were two ways to fix this that would have satisfied White House Media Affairs: (i) reformat the table so that it no longer reports an annual average payroll employment number, or (ii) push assumed labor productivity growth down because if you keep GDP the same but reduce labor productivity arithmetic forces your forecast to produce higher employment.

Why the Bush CEA didn't pick option (i) is something I have never understood...

---

How Damnable Is Mark Sanford?

In email, maureendowdsfriendwhodoesntwantanycredit@gmail.com writes, contra those who say, "At least Mark Sanford is sincere!":

It's hard for me to find anything decent or honest about a politician who rejects stimulus money for a state with the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the country out of some misguided loyalty to an uncompromising political ideology. I understand the point you're trying to make here, but there is nothing even remotely admirable or honest about putting ones narrow and misguided beliefs ahead of the livelihoods of the voters who you are nominally elected to serve.

Just because Sanford isn't as hypocritical as your average Republican doesn't mean he's not a jerk. In fact, I'll gladly take the hypocrite over the ideologue; at least people dont get hurt as badly when the hypocrite is around. (The contrast btw Reagan and [George W.] Bush comes to mind here).

Also, its hard for me to believe that currying favor with the mindless and knee jerk enemies of government in South Carolina, not to mention New Hampshire and Iowa, didn't also play a role in Sanford's thinking...

Mitch Daniels Did Not Do His Job

Oh dear. Only 52 hours in working for National Review, and the brainrot has gotten to Reihan Salam:

The Agenda on National Review Online: Daniels for Rushmore: Like NR's Mark Hemingway, I'm a slightly fanatical admirer of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels...

One of the threads of Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty is that Mitch Daniels simply did not do his job as Bush's OMB Director. The OMB Director is the principal--indeed, the only--voice inside the White House for fiscal prudence, for trying to ensure that the money the government spends is spent well and that the resources the government raises are adequate for the spending plans the White House evolves. While he was Bush OMB Director, Daniels simply did not do his job.

Page 219:

Mitch Daniels became agitated. He blurted out, "Well, yes, but if you can't do the right thing when you're at 85 percent approval, then when can you do the right thing? I think it's time to say no." Everyone looked with surprise at Daniels--he has a way of expressing what others are thinking but don't say. Often, he'd find himself doubling back when he got an arched brow from Cheney or Rove...

And page 296:

The Commerce Secretary echoed much of what had been said.... As usual, not a real discussion, O'Neill thought as he looked over at [Mitch] Daniels.... He knew Daniels was focused on the perils of rising deficits, but it would take gumption to air those concerns in a room full of tax cut ideologues. "I think we need to balance concerns," Daniels said.... "You need to be out front on the economy, but I am concerned that this package may not do it. The budget hole is getting deeper... we are projecting deficits all the way to the end of your second term." From across the table came glares from the entire Bush political team. Daniels paused.... "Ummmm. On balance, then, I think we need to do a [tax cut] package... accelerate the rate cuts and the double taxsation of dividends..." O'Neill looked with astonishment at Daniels... turn 180 degrees in midsentence...

Surely we can do better? Surely we can find a Republican who has (a) held high federal office and (b) actually done his job?

Demagoguery and the Responsibility of a Bureaucrat

Todd Gitlin asks a question of Council on Foreign Relations head Richard Haass:

Demagoguery of Choice | TPMCafe: I was present at a conference in Maryland sponsored by the NewsHour in November 2002 when Mr. Haass, then head of policy planning at the State Department, issued a ringing defense of the impending war, which evidently he now maintains that he already opposed as a war of choice, not necessity. At the time, he stirred together, in Cheneyesque fashion, claims about Saddam and al-Qaeda, about Iraqi WMD, and the rest. I arose to argue with him and called his presentation "demagogic," but my protest did not attract his interest or sympathy. I'm curious to know if Mr. Haass believed what he was saying to this audience of foreign policy influentials at the time; if his presentation was a presentation of necessity or of choice; if he agrees that he was demagogic; and if he has any regrets.

There are hard questions as to how one should act when one works for an administration that is making a mistake on matters of policy. One could resign--and see one's place taken by somebody who will make the mistakes even better. One can be a good soldier and argue publicly for the mistaken policies while arguing privately for the right thing, in the belief that:

But it has always seemed to me that the minimal requirement imposed on the "good soldiers" is this: you don't tell lies in public.

From what Todd Gitlin reports, it looks as though Richard Haass--a man whom I have never heard praised in his role at the head at CFR--told things that he knew to be lies or that he could easily have determined to be lies in public.

David Brooks Joins Those Trying to Unseat Rush Limbaugh and Richard Cheney from Their Positions at the Head of the Republican Party

However if Brooks wants to get anywhere he is going to have to work much harder and to find a different frame for his anti-Cheney and anti-Limbaugh columns than Obama is a liar":

Cheney Lost to Bush: [A]fter Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy.... The Bush people...did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive. The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years.... But that period ended long ago.

By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear....

Throughout the second Bush term, officials were trying to close Guantánamo, pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners, begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil.... [T]he practice of waterboarding... [was halted by] a succession of C.I.A. directors starting in March 2003, even before a devastating report by the C.I.A. inspector general in 2004....

When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he is... attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public... the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way...

Colin Powell Tries to Expiate His Sins by Reforming the Republican Party

Laura Rozen:

War and Piece:: WP: Powell urges Republican party to become more inclusive.

Not sure if we should salute him yet--his sins are mighty--but he is less condemnable and contemptible than was the case yesterday.

Republicans: The Stupid *and* Immoral Party

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

OK, I'm No Longer Surprised: It's just who they are:

[Andie Collier:] She's the 69-year-old speaker of the House of Representatives, second in the line of succession and the most powerful woman in U.S. history. But when you see Nancy Pelosi, the Republican National Committee wants you to think "Pussy Galore." At least that's the takeaway from a video released by the committee this week - a video that puts Pelosi side-by-side with the aforementioned villainess from the 1964 James Bond film "Goldfinger...."

"It's an attempt to demean your opponent, rather than debate them. If they're serious that this is an issue of national security, then you'd think that one would want to debate it on the merits," [Ann Lewis] says. "It's almost as if they can't help themselves." 

That's because they can't.

For some time now I have been responding to Daniel Klein's whimpers about the low numbers of Republicans in academia as evidence of some sort of bias by pointing out that the existence of any academics who are Republicans is evidence of an opposite kind of bias--that nobody dedicated to education and truth-telling could stomach being a Republican today, and nobody who isn't dedicated to education and truth-telling had any business being a Republican.

Now I think it is time to expand that list of professions in which having professional ethics is simply inconsistent with being a Republican...

Firedoglake » Including every mumbled “and” & “the”

From Attaturk:

Firedoglake » Including every mumbled “and” & “the”: Well, here's something everyone could have anticipated, but as usual, other than bloggers it seems only Warren Strobel and John Landay of McClatchy reported:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

Well, this column is apparently going to be as long as a Leon Uris novel, but here is a selection.... Oh, you damn dirty hippies -- being all right and not serious like Dick Cheney. Because David Broder and his ilk know serious, and only serious can be appreciated. Especially in the form of needlessly dead soldiers and civilians in a third-world country (no pictures though).

Andrew Samwick on Republicans and Taxes

Andrew writes:

Libertarians and Taxes: From David Boaz of the Cato Institute, who visited Dartmouth yesterday:

Too many advocates of small government still have this lingering attachment to the Republican party,” Boaz said. “It’s like being a battered wife — how long do you wait to leave?

Perhaps the more interesting part of the analogy is, Where do you go when you leave?  Typically, it is not to another partner, but to a period in which you are not in a relationship until you can recover from what just happened and make the changes that are needed so it never happens again. Are the Libertarians doing that?  I'm not so sure.  Consider more of what Boaz said: Boaz described the recent Republican tea parties in protest of tax day as “the revival of a freedom movement.” He also referenced a recent advertisement run by the Cato Institute in several major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times. The advertisement discussed perceived flaws in the economic stimulus package. “Someday, this ad is going to be remembered as the revival of the free market movement,” Boaz said.

At moments like this, we go back to Milton Friedman's adage, "To spend is to tax."  I cannot really come up with a better word than juvenile for the tea parties -- don't protest the taxes unless you can identify the specific cuts in expenditures that you would make to bring the budget into balance.  If you think taxes are bad, then you should think deficits are worse, because they raise the taxes of people who were not represented in the decisions to spend the money. That's the real lesson from the Revolutionary War period that should be drawn.  And the danger for the Libertarians is that if they don't put the reduction in expenditures ahead of the reduction in taxes on their agenda, they are destined for another abusive relationship down the road.  This title of an Economix post [by David Leonhardt] had it right, "Where Were the Medicare Tea Parties?" 

Cheney vs. the Asteroid

Bruce Reed of "Sadly, No!" has the story:

Sadly, No! » Dick vs. the Asteroid: Peter “The Mustache of Enhanced Interrogation” Kirsanow tells us all how super cool Dick Cheney’s torture defense was yesterday:

Cheney: Adult Peter Kirsanow: A serious, important speech. Politicians and the media seem unduly impressed by favorability polls, often drawing unwarranted conclusions from them. Since Cheney has relatively high unfavorables, it’s assumed that the public dismisses his statements. It would be interesting to see the results of a more finely calibrated poll, one that compares how well-respected, competent, and effective the subject is perceived to be relative to similarly situated individuals. As a friend succinctly puts it, “When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who’s the person you’d most want to be in charge?” I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top....

Here at Sadly, No! Research Laboratories, we recently detonated a hydrogen bomb near a massive pocket of electromagnetic energy, thus creating a parallel timeline.... Read on, if you dare, to see how this counterfactual history played itself out...

[A] small asteroid crashed into a rural area of Wyoming, killing 2,000 people in a small town and leaving a massive crater 60 miles wide in the ground. President Richard Cheney, who was just awakening from a nap in his underground White House lair, was informed of the crash by Chief of Staff Alberto Gonzales, who the day before had handed him a memo from NASA with the headline “Asteroid hurtling toward the United States.” “That damned space rock has just assaulted my home state!” Cheney snarled. “Nobody could have predicted this would happen!” Cheney called a press conference later in the day and urged Americans to show strength and resolve in the face of this unprecedented assault on the Heartland. “Asteroids are evil rocks,” said the president. “We do not negotiate with evil rocks; we defeat them.”...

An enraged Cheney was determined to never let another asteroid crash into the United States again and had decided to use any means necessary in order to achieve that end. Cheney reasoned that it was not enough to merely respond to asteroids after they crashed. For America to be truly secure, the government needed to attack asteroids long before they reached orbit. To this end, he decided that the United States needed to set an example to other asteroids in the galaxy by launching a preemptive strike on the large asteroid that was menacingly hovering over the Earth: namely, the moon. In order to build his case for war against the moon, Cheney worked to strong-arm NASA into proclaiming that the moon could come unhinged from its orbit to the Earth at any moment and that the military needed to destroy the sinister heavenly body in order to safeguard the homeland. When NASA officials balked at his request, Cheney hired George C. Deutsch, a disgraced former NASA press aide, to go through the agency and make lists of all scientists who displayed signs of disloyalty. Once the list had been completed, the scientists were then rendered to Cheney’s underground White House lair for interrogation. The following transcript was taken from a video of an interrogation session under the White House...

[An unknown NASA scientist is tied down to a waterboard in President Cheney's underground lair. Cheney and NASA Grand Inquisitor George C. Deutsch enter the chamber to start the interrogation.]

DEUTSCH: My liege! I have brought forth the Unbeliever to receive your judgment!

CHENEY: Fine work, my young apprentice. And what are his crimes?

DEUTSCH: My liege! He refused to sign a loyalty oath proclaiming that our solar system has been scientifically proven to have been created by an Intelligent Designer!

CHENEY: Bah! The heretic will rue the day he defied my will! Tell me, heretic, do you not regret your lack of faith?

[Cheney pours water over the scientist's head, causing him to gasp and writhe in pain.]

SCIENTIST: GLAAAAAAAAARBB!!! ACK! Please, yes! I repent! Just stop it with the water!

CHENEY: You are wise to confess, heretic! You may achieve penance for your actions by doing one simple task: signing your name to this official policy document that proclaims the moon to be a mortal danger to the security of the United States that must be eliminated!

SCIENTIST: Buh, buh, but sir? You’re talking about destroying the moon? Thu, thu, that would be extremely unwise because…

[Cheney pours more water on the scientist.]

SCIENTIST: GLARRRRRRB!!! OK, OK, I’ll sign it! I’ll sign it, I’ll sign it!

CHENEY: That’s good. Now here’s the pen. Let’s…

[A knock at the door interrupts Cheney. Deutsch opens the door and a hunched-over Alberto Gonzales shuffles in carry a basket of dead rabbits.]

GONZALES: Master, I have brought you your daily basket of fresh uncooked bunny rabbits to devour!

CHENEY: That is excellent, Alberto! Bring them to me!...

After obtaining all the necessary intelligence from NASA officials, Cheney went on the Sunday morning talk shows and began to build his case for war. In addition to the signed statements of top NASA officials attesting to the moon’s nefarious intentions, Cheney produced an alleged picture of terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta walking on the moon just days before the asteroid struck Wyoming. Cheney called this the smoking gun that proved that the moon posed a threat too grave to ignore.

Although McClatchy later reported that the supposed picture of Atta that Cheney showed on Meet the Press was actually a photograph of Neil Armstrong, the media in general did not question the premises of the president’s claims. The British tabloids in particular ran wild with the claim that the moon could crash into Earth a mere 45 minutes after being knocked out of its orbit. On May 21, 2010, Cheney went on national television and said that he was giving the moon 48 hours to surrender before he would launch a nuclear strike to destroy it. Senate Democrats, alarmed that the president would declare war on the moon without their consultation, tried to draft a nonbinding resolution telling the president that they might be displeased if he were to launch his preemptive lunar assault. The measure was scuttled, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that they wouldn’t have the 95 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.

Two days after his ultimatum to the moon was met with eerie silence, Cheney ordered to sinister rock destroyed...

John Roberts, Wingnut

Jeff Toobin:

Annals of Law: No More Mr. Nice Guy: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker: Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party...

Bush Administration Officials Let Off the Hook Because They Were Only Giving Orders...

Eric Martin:

Obsidian Wings: Quote of the Day: Satan's Editors edition:

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.  I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.

The Editors wins round two of The Internet.  That is, until his plagiarism of Maureen Dowd surfaces, and the blogger ethics panel strips him of his blogofascist credentials.

Very nice line...

David Leonhard and Bruce Bartlett on Fiscal Policy

David Leonhardt:

Where Were the Medicare Tea Parties?/a>: Bruce Bartlett, the economist and former Reagan administration official, has been pounding the drum to get people to be more realistic about taxes. His case, in short, is that taxes will have to go up to cover the cost of government that Americans want. Referring to this week’s tea parties — the protests against taxes — Mr. Bartlett writes on Forbes.com:

[P]protesters... assume that the deficit has increased solely as a result of Barack Obama’s policies. But... the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a deficit of more than $1 trillion this year back in January, before any of Obama’s policies had been enacted, and a cumulative deficit of $4.3 trillion through 2019.... [P]rojected deficits have gotten larger since January. But much of this resulted from deteriorating economic conditions.... [M]any of those that loudly denounced the Obama stimulus package for its impact on the deficit would have cheered the McCain stimulus package even though it would have increased the deficit by about the same amount.

Proof of this proposition is that there were no tea parties during the years when George W. Bush was turning the surpluses of the Clinton years into massive deficits. Indeed, if concerns about deficits are the primary motivation for this week’s tax protests, then these same people should have been holding demonstrations of support for Bill Clinton in 2000 when the federal government ran a budget surplus of 2.4% of the gross domestic product–equivalent to a surplus of $336 billion this year.... [T]he greatest addition to national indebtedness occurred in 2003 when Bush rammed through the Republican Congress a massive expansion of Medicare to provide drug benefits even though the system was already broke...

Questions of Fact

The corrupt and mendacious Charles Krauthmmer writes:

Charles Krauthammer : This month, I wrote a column outlining two exceptions to the no-torture rule: the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant.... The column elicited protest and opposition that were, shall we say, spirited. And occasionally stupid. Dan Froomkin... asserted that "the ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians."... On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held"...

I had thought that Yasir Arafat had told the Israelis where Waxman was being held. Anybody know anything?

And, of course, the most interesting thing is how narrow Krauthammer's defense of Cheney, Bush, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Tenet is. As I understand things, we imprisoned 15,000 people at black sites around the world, tortured 5,000 of them, and killed 100 under torture--and our principal aim in torturing people was "for the hell of it" while our secondary aim was "to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."

A half-competent and half-moral editor would pull Krauthammer's column and replace it with something informing his readers. But Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post is neither half-competent nor half-moral.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

And His Nobel Prize!

Josh Marshall:

Just Thinking | TPM: If, as Dick Cheney's daughter says, Cheney's torture crusade is like Al Gore global warming activism, can't he hurry up and form his pro-torture organization and shoot his movie?

Gene Healy Is a National Treasure...

Every time I get fed up with the Cato Institute and decide to dump everything that spews out of it automatically to /dev/null, Gene Healy writes something to pull him back.

I think that the Republican Party needs to die because it does not believe that "adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy"--it adheres to no values whatsoever. I hope that it will, and that Gene Healy will be at the core of its replacement:

Of Course It Was Torture: Thursday, the Obama administration released previously classified memos detailing interrogation techniques used against enemy prisoners.... Bush administration lawyers assured the CIA that waterboarding detainees and keeping them awake for a week or more was perfectly legal.... Conservative legal analyst David Rivkin, one of Bush's most reliable defenders, insists that "any fair-minded observer" would conclude that the documents prove that "the Bush administration did not torture." But... Rivkin's assertion is on a par with left-wing diehards' claim that President Clinton didn't commit perjury.

Let's start with waterboarding. If it's not torture, then maybe we owe an apology to the Japanese soldiers we prosecuted for it after WWII. It felt "like I was drowning," Lieutenant Chase Nielsen testified in a 1946 war crimes trial, "just gasping between life and death."... [T]he policy was, at the very least, criminally stupid.... Bush administration defenders prefer to describe each technique in isolation, glossing over the fact that it was the relentless combination of such tactics for extended periods that made them rise to the level of torture.... Read the descriptions military personnel provided of prisoners' reactions to "enhanced interrogation": "Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning.... Yelled for Allah. Urinated on himself.... Trembled uncontrollably." Does that meet the statutory definition? Gosh yes, that's a tough legal question.

The point here isn't to make you shed a tear for Al Qaeda prisoners; mass murderers (actual or aspiring) are pretty hard to feel sorry for. But anyone who understands the issue ought to feel some remorse over the damage our policy did to the rule of law and American interests abroad....

Imagine if, shortly after 9/11, someone had told you that the US government would adopt an interrogation policy based on Chinese Communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. You'd have thought that person was pretty cynical. But he'd turn out to be exactly right.... SERE was adopted in the wake of the Korean War to train American soldiers to resist abuse by rogue regimes. After 9/11, we put those techniques to work to interrogate terrorist suspects. It's hardly surprising, then, that... "We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms." Beaten savagely by Egyptian torturers, one victim of our "extraordinary rendition" program concocted a story about Saddam Hussein giving Al Qaeda WMD training. That story made it into Colin Powell's UN Security Council speech selling the Iraq War.

In his ill-fated presidential campaign, Republican congressman Tom Tancredo got his biggest applause line when he cheered for torture in a May 2007 debate: "I'm lookin' for Jack Bauer!" The real thing is a lot less glamorous—and a lot less effective—than what you see on TV. Around the same time Tancredo was mugging for the cameras, General David Petraeus issued an open letter to his troops warning against the use of torture: "Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy." That's a principle we should keep in mind going forward.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach Donald Rumsfeld. Impeech Condi Rice. Impeach Them Now

Yes, they did torture people to elicit false confessions that would give them an excuse to attack Iraq.

Jonathan Landay should not say "find" evidence. He should say "manufacture" evidence. Otherwise the story s good:

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link: The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.... A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there." It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document. "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued. "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies." Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq. "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney's statement "very significant." "I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist." Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

A senior Guantanamo Bay interrogator, David Becker, told the committee that only "a couple of nebulous links" between al Qaida and Iraq were uncovered during interrogations of unidentified detainees, the report said. Others in the interrogation operation "agreed there was pressure to produce intelligence, but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaida," the report said. The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan...

The Bush Administration: Malevolent, Not Ignorant

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti put an improper frame around the torture issue. Not to do the staffwork on a policy--and not to check the staffwork that others have done--is making a decision to be deceived. But Shane and Mazzetti hide their eyes from that fact:

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use: 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?... [W]ithout 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.... [N]o 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.... 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... 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 [i.e., John Yoo] 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.... Today... Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House. Philip D. Zelikow, who worked on interrogation issues as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 and 2006, said the flawed decision-making badly served Mr. Bush and the country.

"Competent staff work could have quickly canvassed relevant history, insights from the best law enforcement and military interrogators, and lessons from the painful British and Israeli experience,” Mr. Zelikow said. “Especially in a time of great stress, walking into this minefield, the president was entitled to get the most thoughtful and searching analysis our government could muster.”...

Leaked to the news media months after they were first used, the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods would darken the country’s reputation, blur the moral distinction between terrorists and the Americans who hunted them, bring broad condemnation from Western allies and become a ready-made defense for governments accused of torture. The response has only intensified since Justice Department legal memos released last week showed that two prisoners were waterboarded 266 times and that C.I.A. interrogators were ordered to waterboard one of the captives despite their belief that he had no more information to divulge...

Michael Tomasky on How Newt Gingrich Has No Rightful Place in American Politics or Government

Michael:

Michael Tomasky: Did an Obama judicial nominee really express a preference for Allah over Jesus?: From the second I read the sentence, I knew there was something fishy about it. Many years' experience in reading and then looking into rightwing canards set off the usual alarm bells in my head. So I know how these things work. But even I was shocked after I looked into the truth of the matter. My daily readings led me to an interview with Newt Gingrich in Christianity Today. The former speaker was asked whether opposition to tax increases was an adequate "uniting message" for his party. Gingrich replied that there had to be more to the party's story. For instance, he said:

You have Obama nominating Judge Hamilton, who said in her ruling that saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK. You'll find most Republican senators voting against a judge who is confused about whether you can say Jesus Christ in a prayer, particularly one who is pro-Muslim being able to say Allah. That seemed, frankly, ridiculous. I happened to know that the "Hamilton" in question was from Indiana.... I also happened to know that "her" first name was David, so Gingrich could not get even this basic fact straight.... So I wanted to know more.... [A] search returned thousands of rabid posts from the wing-o-sphere about this judge who thinks Indianans should be allowed to pray to Allah but not to Jesus.... [E]ventually I found my way to... Hamilton's actual decision... Hinrichs v Bosma.... Naturally, it's all a lie, but as I said, even I was shocked at how rancidly despicable a lie it was....

Hamilton's decision is eminently calm and even-keeled... he relies on two decisions from the fourth judicial circuit... the country's most conservative.... Wynn v Town of Great Falls. The town council opened its meetings with a prayer that regularly mentioned Jesus Christ.... Not only did Hamilton rely on the country's most conservative federal circuit court, he specifically cited an opinion written by one of the most conservative jurists on that court. Judge J Harvie Wilkinson is always on the short list when a US supreme court seat opens up during a Republican presidency. But even Wilkinson wrote....

We cannot adopt a view of the tradition of legislative prayer that chops up American citizens on public occasions into representatives of one sect and one sect only, whether Christian, Jewish or Wiccan. In private observances, the faithful surely choose to express the unique aspects of their creeds. But in their civic faith, Americans have reached more broadly. Our civic faith seeks guidance that is not the property of any sect....

[H]ere's where the lie comes in... what did [Hamilton] say about Allah?... [T]he decision doesn't so much as mention Allah.... Read this paragraph, from page 49:

The Speaker has also suggested that such an explicit caution about Christian references "would be the first known religious viewpoint discrimination in connection with the Indiana House invocation."... The criticism is misguided. The decisive point of constitutional law is that a practice of sectarian prayer favouring any particular religion violates the establishment clause. From the evidence here, it is clear that the letters asking invited clerics to "strive for an ecumenical prayer" have not been sufficient to prevent many Christian speakers from using the prayer opportunity to advance and even to proselytise Christianity. The same strictures will apply to sectarian Jewish or Muslim prayers, for example. This record, however, shows no efforts by Jewish or Muslim clerics to use the prayer opportunity to advance their particular religions. At this juncture, there is no need to be more specific in the injunction as to what would amount to a sectarian prayer in those traditions.

The same strictures will apply!... [T]he wingers have taken the last sentence of this paragraph, yanked it completely out of context, and then taken the extra step (or two or three) of insinuating that of course, this kind of Godless heathen is exactly the sort of nominee you'd expect from a secret Muslim president....

I'd like to report that this is unusual, but this kind of slippery illogic is standard operating procedure on today's right. Find something that might inflame opinion and stoke prejudice, and pump it. Doesn't matter that it isn't really true. By the time the other side explains that it isn't true, we'll already have won. They know that no one's going to read page 49 of a legal opinion. As it happens this time someone did, but often, alas, they're right.

These are sick, sick people. May their Jesus consign them to history's ash heap.

What Happened to Richard Cheney's Reality Testing?

Josh Marshall writes:

Into the Dark | TPM: A long time reader chimes in ...

My boss spent a lot of time working with Cheney when he was Sec. of Defense REDACTED. Despite being a liberal Democrat he had a huge amount of respect for both Cheney's intellect and character before he became VP. I don't really buy it either, but he swears that Cheney underwent some sort of transformation, possibly due to a stroke.

It sort of baffles me too. I think a lot of people just fooled themselves about Cheney's politics. But I've had enough people (with sufficient proximity to speak with some authority) say things like this that I think it's possible that something characterologically changed about Cheney between 1993 and 2001.

Who Have We Become?

Or, rather, who have George W. Bush and his Republican Party turned us into?

Hilzoy is up at 2:21 AM, worrying:

The Washington Monthly: A couple of other things that are missing from the torture memos:

First, the memos cite various legal precedents for the definition of torture. They are particularly fond of Mehinovic v. Vuckovic, which involved "a course of conduct that included severe beatings to the genitals, head, and other parts of the body with metal pipes and various other items; removal of teeth with pliers; kicking in the face and ribs; breaking of bones and ribs and dislocation of fingers; cutting a figure into the victim's forehead; hanging the victim and beating him; extreme limitations of food and water; and subjection to games of 'Russian Roulette'." (p. 24; the details of this case are repeated on four separate occasions in this memo alone, like an incantation.) Isn't it strange, then, that not a single one of the cases in which the United States has prosecuted people for waterboarding turns up in these memos? You'd think they might be apposite. Oddly enough, though, Steven Bradbury didn't think to include them.

Second: As I noted last night, under the US Code, an important issue in determining whether something counts as producing "severe mental pain or suffering" is whether it produces "prolonged mental harm". In discussing this question, especially with regard to sleep deprivation and waterboarding, Steven Bradbury spends a lot of time discussing the scientific literature on these topics. And yet, once you think about it, he had a much better source of information available to him. These memos were written in May, 2005. The CIA had been using these "methods of interrogation" for nearly three years. Moreover, the memos fall all over themselves describing the repeated psychiatric evaluations that detainees are given:

"Prior to interrogation, each detainee is evaluated by medical and psychological professionals from the CIA's Office of Medical Services ("OMS") to ensure that he is not likely to suffer any severe physical or mental pain or suffering as a result of interrogation." (p. 4)

Bradbury then quotes the OMS' guidelines:

"[T]echnique-specific advance approval is required for all "enhanced" measures, and is 'conditional on on-site medical and psychological personnel confirming from direct detainee examination that the enhanced technique(s) is not expected to produce "physical or mental pain or suffering"'. As a practical matter, the detainee's physical condition must be such that these interventions will not have lasting effect, and his psychological state strong enough that no severe psychological harm will result." (p. 4)

Moreover:

"Medical and psychological personnel are on-scene throughout (and, as detailed below, physically present or otherwise observing during the application of many techniques, including all techniques involving physical contact with detainees), and "[d]aily physical and psychological evaluations are continued throughout the period of [enhanced interrogation technique] use." (p. 5; square brackets in the original.)

With all those psychological workups having been conducted on CIA detainees over a period of nearly three years, one might think that the CIA, and specifically its Office of Medical Services, would have lots of information on whether or not the techniques under discussion actually did produce any "prolonged mental harm." And yet, strange to say, the memos don't mention any evidence at all about the effects of these techniques on CIA detainees[1]. It's pretty strange that the CIA had all that data about the psychiatric effects of its interrogation techniques ready to hand, and yet no one mentions it.

Or then again, maybe not.

[1] This is particularly striking in the case of Abu Zubaydah, whose psychiatric condition is described at considerable length in the August 1, 2002 memo. As Emptywheel has noted, the description of Abu Zubaydah in the memos is completely different from the FBI sources quoted by Ron Suskind -- they called him "certifiable". But let's pretend we don't know that, and ask: given the 2002 memo's extensive description of Abu Zubaydah, and given that he was the detainee on whom these techniques had been used the longest, wouldn't it be natural for Bradbury to explain what dazzling psychological health he was enjoying several years after the CIA had begun using "enhanced techniques" on him?

On reflection, though, maybe using Abu Zubaydah as a poster child for the benignity of the CIA's methods would not have been such a good idea:

"The sadistic treatment of Abu Zubayda also seems to have affected him psychologically in bizarre ways. Two sources said that he became sexually obsessive, masturbating so much his captors feared he would injure himself. One described him as acting "like a monkey at the zoo." A physician was called in for consultation -- one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program."

Matt Duss on the Strange Case of Ahmed Chalabi

Matt writes:

Wonk Room:Chalabi: ‘Iran Benefited From Toppling Saddam’: The idea that Iran has been the main beneficiary of the Iraq war isn’t particularly controversial any more — except, of course, among the war’s neoconservative advocates, who continue to insist that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and empowering Iraqi factions with longstanding close ties to Iran was a huge defeat for Iran.... [M]any of these people — Sen. John McCain and his adviser Randy Scheunemann among them — were also Chalabi’s biggest boosters.... Given what’s known now about Chalabi’s cooperation with Iran’s intelligence services, though, it’s pretty chilling to consider how close some of Chalabi’s marks came to taking the White House last November. Unfortunately, as shown by the continuing prominence of McCain, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocon fantasists, inadvertently aiding America’s enemies is no barrier to influence in American foreign policy, as long as one is always careful to err on the side of war, and meticulous in dressing one’s belligerent strategic stupidity in patriotic drag...

Will Fox News and Rush Limbaugh Kill the Republican Party?

Perhaps they will.

Matthew Yglesias muses on the insights of DEL. DEL:

Conservatism as Entertainment: One interesting thing about how much Fox news and friends are covering these tea parties is that it’s illustrative how much conservatism has been transformed from a political movement into an entertainment demographic. Political movements, I would think, are defined by a common set of semi-coherent policies and proposals that movement sympathizers hope to see implemented by government. Entertainment demographics are defined by shared tastes or predilections that media companies can target for ratings.

The GOP has abandoned the business of coming up with and articulating a political platform, opting instead to host and promote counter-cultural parties that seem strange and foreign to the vast majority of their co-nationalists. Then, Fox, Glenn and Rush cover these events relentlessly because it’s an effective way of getting the attention of a specific demographic and boosting ratings. As for the rest of us, when we think of conservatives we no longer think “fiscal responsibility” or “national security”; rather, we see one more alternative lifestyle choice among many - and a very odd one at that.

And Matt writes:

You hear a lot these days that Republicans are “in disarray.” But they’re not, really. It’s just that the way our political institutions work, a congressional minority party doesn’t generate a high-profile leader. Now you combine this leadership vacuum with the fact that the right has developed a very robust ideological media apparatus on talk radio and on Fox News and you have a problem. In effect, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are more prominent public figures than are John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, to say nothing of legislators who might actually be appealing figure. And since only a tiny minority of Republican members of congress are willing to suffer the dread “RINO” tag, the vast majority of elected officials seem to feel the need to kowtow to the whims of conservative movement media leaders.

The problem is that the incentives facing a media figure are very different from the incentives facing a politician. A politician needs, basically, a majority. And the decisive votes are bound to come from people who don’t like politics much or really care about it. For a media figure, however, a much smaller audience than “half the people” would still constitute enormous success. But you need to appeal, intensely, to the small minority of people who care enough about politics to bother watching, reading, or listening to political commentary.