Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Who the "Friends of the People" Are and Why We Bash the Neoconservatives

Matthew Yglesias explains:

Matthew Yglesias: In Defense of Neo-Con Bashing: Greg Djerejian offers up something of a mea culpa and something of a defense against Jeff Weintraub’s charge of “rather tiresome ritual ‘neocon’-bashing which is becoming too much of a reflex in some quarters.”

It’s actually true that neocon bashing is a bit on the tiresome side. That said, I think it really has to be understood as a vital social necessity. Adherents of a deranged and sociopoathic “neocon” conception of America’s role in the world continue to be tremendously influential in our society. They have columns at The Washington Post and dominate the foreign policy coverage on Fox News. They have The Weekly Standard and Commentary and a healthy slice of The New Republic. And most important, as best as anyone can tell their ideas remain utterly dominant in the Republican Party. Their intra-party critics like Colin Powell, rather than winning intra-party arguments seem to be simply drifting out of the GOP coalition.

This is a dangerous situation. In the United States, the opposition party is always one ill-timed recession or political scandal from taking power. So a set of ideas that dominates one such party is something you need to keep a watchful eye on, no matter how marginalized that party may seem at any particular moment.

In other words, if we don't bash them at every opportunity they will be back--more stupid and more destructive than ever. (If we do bash them they will probably be back too, but at least we have a chance...)

More Lies from the Heritage Foundation...

Can they speak a word of truth ever, about anything? Or is every word coming out of the mouth of Heritage a lie, even "and" and "the"?

Matthew Yglesias sends us to Benjamin Friedman, who is on the case:

Matthew Yglesias » Heritage Slams Mythical Defense Cuts: The Heritage Foundation has a blog post complete with chart claiming to demonstrate that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels”. As Benjamin Friedman lays out this is nonsense:

This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out that it’s misleading. The unfortunate truth is that Obama is increasing non-war defense spending this year and seems likely to increase it at least by inflation in the near future.

It’s true that defense spending will probably decline as a percentage of GDP, assuming the economy recovers. But that’s because GDP grows. Ours is more than six times bigger than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, we spend more on defense in real, inflation adjusted terms, than we did then, at the height of the Cold War. The denoninator has grown faster than the numerator.

By saying that defense spending needs to grow with GDP to be “level,” you are arguing for an annual increase in defense spending without saying so directly. That’s the point, of course.

Matthew piles on, detailing how Heritage is doing Al Qaeda's bidding here:

Since economic growth causes real wages to rise over time, there is some reason for thinking that a military sized appropriately to the strategic environment would need real increases in spending to maintain its level of capabilities. But one way or another, the crucial issue is that the appropriate level of defense spending is determined by the nature of the strategic environment, not by the pace of economic growth. The US economy grew rapidly during the 1990s but the level of military threats facing the country didn’t—thus, a decline in defense expenditures relative to GDP was appropriate.

One interesting trope both in the substance and rhetoric of this argument from Heritage is the idea that 9/11 ought to have touched off a large and sustained increase in defense spending. On the merits, this is a little hard to figure out. It’s difficult to make the case that the 9/11 plot succeeded because the gap in financial expenditures between the U.S. government and Osama bin Laden was not big enough. Would an extra aircraft carrier have helped? A more advanced fighter plane? A larger Marine Corps? Additional nuclear weapons? One of the most realistic ways an organization like al-Qaeda can damage the United States is to provoke us into wasting resources on a far larger scale than they could ever destroy. The mentality Heritage is expressing here is right in line with that path.

And, of course, we all remember that the Washington Post's David Broder likes the tripe that Heritage produces for its "intellectual honesty": another reason that every day the Washington Post publishes is a crime against rationality.

Tom Ricks Tells Us What He Thinks

Back in the old days, when Tom Ricks worked for the Washington Post, you never knew what he thought or how to read his stories: Did he really think Danielle Pletka had a point of view worth taking seriously? You could not tell until three years later, when his book would come out. (Answer: no.)

That is not a problem any more:

Wise words on Iran from Karim Sadjadpour: If you are as weary as I am of knee-jerk nonsense from pundits and pols who would rather tear down their president than really aid the Iranian people, then you might enjoy this commentary by Karim Sadjadpour. And unlike many in Washington, he actually knows what he is talking about. An expert on the Iranian opposition, he offers these wise words of advice:

This is extremely delicate and the situation is so dynamic. We clearly have to be on the right side of history here, but I think if we try to insert ourselves into the momentous internal Iranian drama that's unfolding we may unwittingly undermine those whom we're trying to strengthen. Historically that's often been the case in Iran.   

It goes without saying that the Obama administration should clearly not acknowledge the results of these contested elections. This would demoralize people. We should also be pushing all of our allies not to acknowledge the results of these elections until justice prevails in Tehran. I was disappointed that Turkey's Abdullah Gul and Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai did not hesitate to congratulate Ahmadinejad. 

But again, I think if we overtly take sides the regime could well react with a massive and bloody crackdown on the demonstrators using the pretext that they are acting against an American-led coup."

(HT to old Steve Coll)

Of course, if the crackdown does grow bloody, then the United States government can step up the rhetoric-but then it will be doing so alongside its allies, instead of having other countries wary of joining us. But for the moment, as my friend (and counterinsurgency expert) Terry Daly observes, the question for President Obama is, "Does he have the intestinal fortitude to continue to do the difficult right thing and keep hands off the events in Iran, or will he fold under intense domestic pressure and loudly support Moussavi and the demonstrators?"

Meanwhile, this analysis points out that in two provinces, the recorded turnout exceeded 100 percent! Also check out this nice essay by proven provider Robin Wright about the role of Ayatollah Montazeri, who has issued a fatwah dismissing the election results.

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CORRECTION: The other day this blog referred to right-wingers recklessly calling Obama weak for his careful handling of the Iranian crisis as "clowns." In fact, they should have been called "dangerous clowns." Best Defense regrets the error.

Robin Sloan's Iran News Superfilter

#IranElection tracker for the easily overwhelmed (robinsloan.com): Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed...

Via Xeni Jardin.

Reading C.V. Wedgewood's "William the Silent"...

And watching the remake starring Mir Hossein Moussavi...

Iran at the Edge...

Juan Cole writes:

Informed Comment: Mousavi Defies Khamenei;
Police Attack Protesters at Inqilab Square;
Downtown Tehran Burning: Mir Hosain Mousavi issued a powerful implicit denunciation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday, and insisting again that the results of the presidential election be annulled in favor of wholly new elections. ABC reports:

Mr Mousavi hit back at a speech by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which the Ayatollah ruled out any election fraud. In a statement posted on his newspaper website, Mr Mousavi said his demand for the annulment of the election was an undeniable right and vowed to side with the Iranian people in defending their rights. "If this huge volume of cheating and changing the votes... which has hurt people's trust, is presented as the very evidence of the lack of cheating, then it will butcher the republican aspect of the system and the idea that Islam is incompatible with a republic will be proven," Mr Mousavi said. The strong criticism headlined "the fifth statement of Mir Hossein Mousavi to the Iranian people: don't allow lies and cheaters to steal the flag of defending the Islamic system from you" was briefly pulled from the website but later reposted.'

Some reports say that Mousavi has privately told followers that if he is arrested, they should carry out a nation-wide strike.

Mousavi has thrown down a gauntlet before the Supreme Leader and a battle has been joined. By the rules of the Khomeinist regime, only one of them can now survive. And perhaps neither will...

Two thoughts:

First, Niccolo Machiavelli:

[A]ll armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed propheets have come to grief...

Second, three people:

Alessandro Farnese, Prince of Parma: He who draws his sword against his Prince needs to throw away his scabbard...

Cersei Lannister: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die...

Omar: You come at the king, you best not miss...

World War II

From Wikipedia:

WTF did the Japanese army do on Java, and why?

The Future Is Here, It Is Just Not Easily Distributed (Iran Edition)

Author Walter Jon Williams says that he has an unimportant problem toay:

Angel Station: Watching My Uncompleted Novel Go Down in Flames: There is a scene just like this in the novel I'm working on. My whole novel is playing itself out before my very eyes. All its specialness and wonderfulness, coolness and invention is curling up and dying in fire, as if one of the incendiaries from Fahrenheit 451 found it before I could even finish it. The Twitter Revolution in Moldova was bad enough, but at least it didn't get a lot of coverage over here, and most Americans never heard of Moldova. Iran is different. I feel like all those guys who were working on Cold War novels when the Wall fell.

The parade of demonstrators in Tehran today was nine kilometers long. It's a People Power revolution fired up by social media--- you don't get a crowd that big by sticking up posters on lamp posts. (Does the use of Twitter in Iran somehow absolve it of totally sucking?) Hackers are also proving useful, by attacking Iranian government web sites. (But be careful, script kiddies of the world--- you don't want to bring the whole system down.)

And he has a recommendation for what you can do to help the people with serious problems:

If you want to turn your computer into a proxy server to help Iranians avoid government roadblocks, "Austin Heap" provides instructions here. Be sure to read the disclaimers. I'd do this myself, but I have to admit that it's all beyond my competence.

And he notes that the usual suspects are still acting badly, as usual:

As a final note, I'm startled by the wave of support for Ahmedinejad by American neocons like Marty Peretz ("Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity.") and Martin Rubin. Maybe if there's regime change, and the Iranians liberate themselves, then the neocons won't get their holy war with Iran, and we won't get to liberate the Iranians by killing zillions of them. A great disappointment, to be sure.

UPDATE: The neocons aren't all speaking with one voice, it seems. Bill Kristol now demands that Obama immediately issue a statement of support to the protestors. Why? Because Hitler invaded Poland in 1939! (No, really! Read it yourself!) Ahmadinejad is Hitler! Obama is Chamberlain! So I guess Kristol's idea is for Obama to support the protestors, Ahmadinejad to denounce them as American puppets and kill them, and then we still get to invade Iran! Yay!

A Leak from Iran's Interior Ministry?

From heretac:

jill ian (heretec) on Twitter: Actual Iran election results-Iran's Interior Ministry leaked the following earlier today: Mousavi 48% Karroubi 28% Ahmadinejad 13%...

What Is Happening in Iran?

The leading news edge really is: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23iranelection

Nico Pitney:

Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising: 3:22 PM ET -- Foreign media crackdown intensifying. ABC's Jim Sciutto tweets: "police confiscated our camera and videotapes. We are shooting protests and police violence on our cell phones." Alex Hoder tweets: "NBC offices in Tehran raided, cameras and Equipment confiscated. BBC told to get out Iran immediately. Cell/internet shut down" BBC publishes editorial: "Stop the blocking now."

3:10 PM ET -- Local Iran protests? If there are Iran demonstrations/events happening in your area, we'd love to know about them: email ee+iran@huffingtonpost.com with a short description of what happened (300 words or so if possible) and we'll compile them for posting tomorrow. I know about several protests planned in California today, but am sure there are plenty of others out there. Let us know.

3:02 PM ET -- Taking down Ahmadinejad's website. Via emailer Nick: The anti-Ahmadinejad Twitter user @StopAhmadi, who has been posting virtually nonstop over the last few days, mounted an apparently successful effort to swarm Ahmadinejad's website and shut it down. He's now targeting Khamenei's site.

2:58 PM ET -- BBC Persia hit by "heavy electronic jamming." Via emailer Sven, AFP confirms several foreign outlets being banned from reporting, and adds: The British Broadcasting Corporation said the satellites it uses for its Persian television and radio services had been affected since Friday by "heavy electronic jamming" which had become "progressively worse." Satellite technicians had traced the interference to Iran, the BBC said. BBC Arabic television and other language services had also experienced transmission problems, the corporation said.

2:55 PM ET -- More video of violence. Whoever posted this YouTube says the man in the video was beaten to death by the police. It's unclear if that's the case, but he is certainly beaten by several officers and is left, unmoving, on the ground...

Muhammad Sahimi:

Ayatollahs Protest Election Fraud: [TEHRAN BUREAU] Mir Hossein Mousavi’s, the main reformist rival to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, letter to the important ayatollahs in the holy city of Qom, asking them to protest the fraud and declare it against Islam, has sparked protests by the ayatollahs and clerics as well.

The Association of Combatant Clerics, which consists of moderate and leftist clerics and includes such important figures as former president Mohammad Khatami, Ayatollah Mohammad Mousavi Khoiniha, and Grand Ayatollah Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardabili, issued a strongly-worded statement, calling the results of the election invalid.

Grand Ayatollah Saafi Golpaygaani, an important cleric with a large number of followers, warned about the election results and the importance that elections in Iran retain their integrity.

Grand Ayatollah Yousef Saanei, a progressive cleric and a confidante of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, has declared that Mr. Ahmadinejad is not the legitimate president and cooperation with him, as well as working for him, are haraam (against Islam and a great sin). He has also declared that any changes in the votes by unlawful means are also haraam. Several credible reports indicate that he has traveled to Tehran in order to participate in nationwide protests scheduled for Monday (June 18). It is said that he has planned a sit-in in some public place, in order to further protest election fraud. His website has been blocked.

Credible reports also indicate that security forces have surrounded the offices and homes of several other important ayatollahs who are believed to want to protest election fraud. Their websites cannot be accessed, and all communications with them have been cut off.

The nation is waiting to hear the views of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most important ayatollah living in Iran and the strongest clerical critic of the conservatives. He has been asked to issue a clear statement, explaining his views about the election fraud.

Mr. Khatami, who campaigned strongly for Mr. Mousavi, is also under house arrest.

Hard as it may be to believe, some people are trying to claim that the Iranian vote count may be honest.

Gordon Robison writes:

What Happened in Iran?: Broadly speaking, there seem to be three scenarios...

• Scenario One: Ahmedinejad and his supporters stole the election, plain and simple. The revolutionary old guard felt threatened by the reformists so it rigged the vote to guarantee a conservative victory.... This scenario sees the outcome, in effect, as a reassertion of power by the Supreme Leader and the religious old-guard. There is, however, another way of looking at things…

• Scenario Two: There has been a coup. Ahmedinejad and the security services have taken over. The Supreme Leader has been preserved as a figurehead, but the structures of clerical rule have effectively been gutted and are being replaced by a National Security State.... Ahmedinejad and the people around him represent a new generation of Iranian leadership. He and his colleagues were young revolutionaries in 1979. Now in their 50s they have built careers inside the Revolutionary Guard and the other security services. They may be committed to the Islamic Republic as a concept, but they are not part of its clerical aristocracy.... This theory in particular seems to be gaining credibility rapidly among professional Iran-watchers outside of the country...

• Scenario Three: Ahmedinejad won. Really. At moments like this it is easy to forget that Tehran is not Iran....

So was it stolen? Are we watching a coup? Or did Ahmedinejad actually win? A decent case can be made for any and all of these scenarios and it is far too soon to say how the situation on the ground is going to play out.

Robison's scenario three seems completely wrong: Robert Waldmann reports:

Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli [had] said [on] Saturday that such a[n impression of a Moussavi] lead was a misimpression based on Mr. Moussavi’s higher levels of support in the capital, and that he had less backing elsewhere,"

According to Mahsouli's ministry (same Juan Cole link) Ahmedinejad won Tehran by over 50%.

And Robert criticizes Robert Worth and Nazila Fathi of the New York Times--and Bill Keller and the others who publish them--for High Journamalism:

Robert's Stochastic thoughts: It is absolutely clear that the official vote count in the Iranian presidential election is pure fiction. However, it is official and supported by the incumbent president, the supreme leader etc. This poses a problem for reporters who risk "opinions on shape of earth differ" if they follow standard practice. How exactly does one report the demonstrable fact that someone is lying without breaking the rules of Balance ?

ROBERT F. WORTH and NAZILA FATHI show how. One rule is that if one appears to favor one side in an argument (because the facts are biased against the other) then you give someone on the other side the last word. In advocacy one might present argument against the conclusion one favors, but one doesn't close with such arguments. Therefore in the rare cases in which the truth is so obvious that there is no other way to achieve Balance, one can close with an implausible denial of the facts. Or, if one really really can't stand to be Balanced, one can close with a statement from a supporter of the main benificiary of the lies such as this one:

There might be some manipulation in what the government has done,” said Maliheh Afrouz, 55, a supporter of Mr. Ahmadinejad clad in a black chador. “But the other side is exaggerating, making it seem worse than it really is.

Will the Revolution Be Twitterified?

What to Do to Help Iran: DeLong Smackdown Watch

Apropos of Time to Help the People of Iran Overthrow Their Corrupt Regime, Daniel Davies writes:

"'Help'" appears to be a verb in the "superman conditional" tense here; as in, to simply have "help the people of Iran overthrow their corrupt regime" on your "to do" list would make a lot of sense if you were Superman, or God Almighty, but anyone else probably ought to make it a bit more specific than that. Care to make any slightly more concrete suggestions?

Good question! Anyone?

Time to Help the People of Iran Overthrow Their Corrupt Regime

Juan Cole analyzes:

Informed Comment: Stealing the Iranian Election: Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers.

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud.... But... this... looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime. As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei... who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts. This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election. This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.... The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation. My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit....

I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be.

PS: Here's the data.... Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli: "Of 39,165,191 votes counted (85 percent), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 24,527,516 (62.63 percent)." He announced that Mir-Hossein Mousavi came in second with 13,216,411 votes (33.75 percent). Mohsen Rezaei got 678,240 votes (1.73 percent). Mehdi Karroubi with 333,635 votes (0.85 percent). He put the void ballots at 409,389 (1.04 percent).

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.

D-Day

Via Jim MacDonald: Making Light: D-Day:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

SIGNED: Dwight D. Eisenhower

Can Our Problems Be Resolved by Making Speeches?

"That Left Turn in ABQ" on BHO's Cairo speech:

The Speech: I was struck by the way Obama moved the Overton Window in this speech with regard to official US rhetoric in support of the Palestinians (has any US President ever described their plight as "intolerable" in a major speech, prior to today?) while... speaking very directly and forcefully against Holocaust denialism, using extreme positions on both sides against each other.... This is a theme which frequently arises in Obama's speeches. He uses extremist groups and their viewpoints as a foil, pivoting away from them back towards some sort of consensus viewpoint. In many cases this "consensus" is at the present time more hypothetical than real, but Obama's language challenges the audience to join it and to support the process of constructing it, by posing a choice between extremism and moderation.... [I]n Bush's case the opposition posited was a dualistic one between two sides only ("You are either with us or against us"), whereas in Obama's world view the opposition is ternary - a sensible middle distinguished from extremes on both sides (essentially “Are you sane, or one of the nuts?”, he asks).... This is a very effective rhetorical tactic... [that] works best for those issues on which there truly are deeply polarized views (no straw necessary) and there is already a strong sense of frustration with the status quo. It seems to me that the I/P conflict in the Middle East an issue where the first condition is strongly fulfilled, now we will find out if sentiment on the second condition is strong enough to support the construction of a middle ground consensus against everything which both extremes can throw at it.

I am pessimistic: the Israeli majority has to be willing to challenge the settler-crazies to make peace, and the Arab majority--if it is a majority--has to be willing to challenge the eliminationist crazies to make peace, and the United States and Europe have to be willing to grease the skids with money. It's not clear how many of those can by catalyzed by the words of an American president.

My brother reminds me of how Henri "Paris is worth a mass" Navarre saved France from an extra half-century of religious civil war at the end of the sixteenth century--and did so not even by making a speech, just by eating a cracker in the right place at the right time.

BHO on the Middle East

The guy can talk:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered...

Henry Farrell Reads Clive Crook, and Pounds His Head Against the Wall...

Clive Crook assumes a sensible middle position between the crazies who think we ought to torture people to induce them to make false confessions and the crazies who think we ought to obey our laws.

Henry Farrell comments:

That’s Some High-Quality Wank There — Crooked Timber: Clive Crook positions himself as a reasonable moderate between the extremes of Republican torture-and-detention-porn crazies, and people who, you know, who take civil rights seriously.

The left’s complaints make far more sense than Mr Cheney’s. Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect.

Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been.

The signature intellectual defect of the non-compromisers on each side of this debate is an inability to recognise conflicting ends. The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects. There can be no trade-off between freedom and security, because the freedoms they prioritise trump everything. To many on the other side, no trampling on the liberty of ordinary citizens, no degree of cruelty to detainees, no outright illegality is too much to contemplate in the effort to stop terrorists. On this view, security trumps everything.

The “seem to believe” is a weasel-phrase, which would (to use his own dubious phrasing) “seem” to be nicely calculated so as to allow him to make very nasty insinuations and accusations without having to prove them, and the “several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects” bit is a common-or-garden shameful and disgusting slur. If Crook has any substantial evidence that ‘several medium sized cities’ have been put at risk, or are likely to be put at risk, because of civil libertarians’ tiresome insistence on trials and such, I invite him to produce it. And no, hypothetical ticking bomb scenarios don’t do it, thank you very much.

The underlying claim of this shoddy exercise, such as it is, is three-fold. First, that the people who are insisting on civil liberties in the GWOT are wild-eyed and extremist zealots, fundamentally similar in kind to the members of the lock-em-up-and-torture-em-to-death crowd on the other side. Second, that a difficult balance has to be struck between civil liberties for terrorists on the one hand and the need to avoid the destruction of medium-sized American cities on the other. Third, that the only people capable of making these complex choices are sceptical moderates like Clive Crook who realise, as others don’t, that differing ends are incompatible, there are unavoidable trade-offs in life &c&c. In its fully fledged form, this might be described, after the example of Isaiah Berlin, as High Table Liberalism – that anguished and serious engagement with the difficulties of political choice in a world of irreconcilable and competing values which occurs somewhere between the end of the main course and the serving of the port and Stilton. But it reminds me even more of a radio comedy sketch I remember from my youth in Ireland, where a punter representing the Plain People of Ireland and a nun are discussing how best to deal with football hooligans. The punter says that they’re a pack of bastards, and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. The nun says no, we need to think too of the principles of charity and forgiveness, of Christian love etc – and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. Clive Crook is taking the part of the nun here.

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

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).

All the TV You Ever Need to Watch

Watch TPMTV:

The Day in 100 Seconds: Dueling Speeches

and you can reclaim the rest of your life from TV news. Here is today's, on Obama and Cheney:

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...

We Are Not Getting Our Money's Worth Out of NPR

Just saying. Ari Kelman::

Tortured logic. « The Edge of the American West: Did NPR ever not suck? That’s a serious question, by the way, as I’ve begun to doubt my memories of public radio’s glorious past. Anyway, I was trapped in my car yesterday and had no choice but to tune in to “Talk of the Nation”. Lucky me, I got to hear Neal Conan’s inane effort to be fair and balanced about torture (listen here — if you dare). I almost drove into incoming traffic to end the pain...

CIA Sleep Deprivation, Torture Reporting, and Journalistic Ethics

One reason that we academics tend to judge journalists harshly is because of their... excessive claims of originality. We tend to believe strongly that situating your work and your contribution in the ongoing discussion is one of the very first duties of a writer--and a duty that is absolutely essential to any attempt to inform or educate readers.

Journalists act differently. They try to make their readers as ignorant as they can about where the information is coming from. In my view, this is both unethical and ineffective: it tends to lead to great suspicion of American journalists, and a discounting of what they write:

Now comes Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times refusing to acknowledge what appear to be very substantial dependencies on Spencer Ackerman and Hilzoy.

Let's pick up the trail. On April 29, Spencer Ackerman wrote in the Washington Independent:

A Torture Mystery: How Did the CIA Come to Use Stress Positions for Sleep Deprivation? Hidden in plain sight in the Office of Legal Counsel memos on the CIA interrogation is a mystery: How did the “enhanced interrogation” technique of sleep deprivation come to depend on stress positions? Somehow, between 2002 and 2005, CIA interrogators began using what the International Committee of the Red Cross called “prolonged stress standing” as a means to keep detainees from falling asleep so as to make them docile and cooperative when questioned. What isn’t clear is how that non-intuitive sense of “sleep deprivation,” which was not mentioned in the initial legal authorization for the technique, came into official CIA usage.... But by the time the OLC reevaluated the CIA’s interrogation program in 2005, it revealed that the technique was overwhelmingly physical. “The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake,” wrote Bybee’s eventual replacement, Steven Bradbury, on March 10, 2005. “In this method, the detainee is standing and is handcuffed, and the handcuffs are attached by a length of chain to the ceiling.” The detainee’s feet are shackled to a bolt in the floor, giving him a “two-to-three-foot diameter of movement.” His hands “may be raised above the level of his head, but only for a period of up to two hours.” His weight is “borne by his legs and feet during sleep deprivation,” ensuring that he had to keep awake, for if he “los[t] his balance” from exhaustion he would feel “the restraining tension of the shackles.”

Both memos gave legal approval to the use of stress positions like shackling. And both memos contemplated and blessed the use of techniques in combination with each other, finding that no conceivable permutation of combined techniques would constitute “severe pain or suffering” or “severe mental pain or suffering.” But until the release of the 2005 memo, there had been no official acknowledgment that sleep deprivation as practiced by the CIA depended on physically restraining a detainee...

Today Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times writes:

Memos shed light on CIA use of sleep deprivations: From the beginning, sleep deprivation had been one of the most important elements in the CIA's interrogation program, used to help break dozens of suspected terrorists, far more than the most violent approaches. And it is among the methods the agency fought hardest to keep.... Because of its effectiveness -- as well as the perception that it was less objectionable than waterboarding, head-slamming or forced nudity -- sleep deprivation may be seen as a tempting technique to restore.

But the Justice Department memos released last month by Obama, as well as information provided by officials familiar with the program, indicate that the method, which involves forcing chained prisoners to stand, sometimes for days on end, was more controversial within the U.S. intelligence community than was widely known. A CIA inspector general's report issued in 2004 was more critical of the agency's use of sleep deprivation than it was of any other method besides waterboarding, according to officials familiar with the document, because of how the technique was applied. The prisoners had their feet shackled to the floor and their hands cuffed close to their chins, according to the Justice Department memos....

"The position is sufficiently uncomfortable to detainees to deprive them of unbroken sleep, while allowing their lower limbs to recover from the effects of standing," it said....

The Justice Department memos also cited research that suggested sleep deprivation was not harmful. "Experience with sleep deprivation shows that 'surprisingly, little seemed to go wrong with the subjects physically,' " said the May 10, 2005, Justice Department memo -- one of many instances in which government lawyers cited scientific papers in asserting that the program was safe.

But some authors of those studies have since said that the conclusions of their research were grossly misapplied. James Horne, director of the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University in Britain, said he was never consulted by U.S. officials and didn't know how his work was being used until the memos were released. "My response was shocked concern," Horne said in an e-mail interview. Just because the pain of sleep deprivation "can't be measured in terms of physical injury or appearance . . . does not mean that the mental anguish is not as bad."... "To claim that 180 hours is safe in these respects is nonsense," Horne wrote in a separate online posting. Even if sleep deprivation succeeded in getting prisoners to talk, he said, "I would doubt whether the state of mind would be able to produce credible information, unaffected by delusion, fantasy or suggestibility."

And here is the "separate online posting":

Hilzoy:

Obsidian Wings: Prof. James Horne On The Memos: When discussing sleep deprivation, the memos released last Thursday cite the work of Dr. James Horne in support of the claim that sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours is not torture. (See here, pp. 35-40.) I wrote to Dr. Horne and asked him whether he would like to respond to this use of his work. (He had given a statement to Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker, but I thought he might like the opportunity to respond at greater length.) What follows is his response....

My book ‘Why We Sleep’ was written without any thought of ‘coercive techniques’ in mind. Nevertheless I made it very clear that pure sleep deprivation in otherwise happy healthy volunteers, as in laboratory settings without additional stresses, is not very eventful for the body, while it is much more so for our brain and behaviour. Whereas sleep helps people withstand stress, sleep loss makes us more vulnerable to other stresses, especially as the inherent sleepiness and other adverse effects on the brain confuse the mind’s ability to figure out how to deal with and avoid these stresses.  Thus I emphasise that my book’s conclusions were based on ‘pure sleep deprivation’ without additional stresses. Such findings were derived from otherwise undemanding and benign laboratory studies that do not typify the real world, whereas people are usually sleep deprived because of other stresses such as long and arduous working hours, family crises, etc. Healthy people who have volunteered for sleep deprivation experiments are usually well cosseted by their experimenters, perhaps too much so, and might have been inadvertently protected from the full effects of sleep loss.  Apart from the sleep deprivation, volunteers typically lead a tranquil existence, are fed very well and, except for having periodically to undergo various harmless tests, have plenty of time for relaxation, reading and watching TV. There have been many of these experiments with human volunteers, with the longest lasting 8-11 days.  Volunteers can pull out any time and there is full medical cover. The purpose of these studies has been to explore what sleep does for the body and brain, by removing sleep and see what happens. Under these circumstances, the ‘body’ copes well, whereas the brain and behaviour are obviously affected – not only by sleepiness but by more subtle changes whereby individuals can no longer think for themselves and become more like automatons.  

With additional stresses as in ‘coercive techniques’, the situation for the sleep deprived victim becomes deplorable, as the mind and brain under these circumstances trigger the body’s defences to create a physiological ‘alarm reaction’ whereby, for example, various stress coping hormones are mobilised and prepare the body for possible trauma, even blood loss. I emphasise that this alarm reaction is not present under ‘pure sleep loss’ as I have just described.  Prolonged stress with sleep deprivation will lead to a physiological exhaustion of the body’s defence mechanisms, physical collapse, and with the potential for various ensuing illnesses.  We don’t know at what point this latter phase would be reached with ‘coercive techniques’, but to claim that 180 hours is safe in these respects, is nonsense.  Moreover, whereas physical pain may not be particularly apparent even at this stage, the mental pain would be all too evident, and arguably worse than physical pain.

Even if one was to be pragmatic and claim that this form of sleep deprivation produced ‘desired results’, I would doubt whether the state of mind would be able to produce credible information, unaffected by delusion, fantasy or suggestibility.

Whilst Bradbury’s memo acknowledges (p36) that, “We note that there are important differences between interrogation technique used by the CIA and the controlled experiments documented in the literature” – i.e. what I wrote might not be wholly applicable to ‘coercive techniques’, this key point was understated. I had no knowledge of this memo or its contents until a few days ago, and am both saddened and appalled that my book has been used in this way.  

Jim Horne

Sleep Research Centre, Loughborough University, UK
20th April 2009

Another Edition of "What Digby Says"

What Digby says.

Obama's First 100 Days

And the four timescales on which he must act:

• The three-year time-scale: the economic crisis.
• The fifteen-year time scale: the health cost crisis.
• The seventy-five-year time scale: the global power crisis.
• The 375-year time scale: the global climate crisis.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2009_mov/20090507_100_days.m4a

Reason Needs to Take Out the Garbage...

UPDATE: Michael C. Moynihan shows up in the comments section to object.

Unfortunately, it's not clear what he is objecting to. He appears to say that spying on Hitler is bad--or at least that my presumption that "anti-Nazism justifies espionage" is false. I, by contrast, think that spying on Hitler is a good thing to do.

Tell me what you think he is saying here:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Reason Needs to Take Out the Garbage...: This really scurrilous stuff, Brad. (I am pro-Nazi garbage????? Really???). Besides not addressing any of my criticisms, you willfully (or lazily) misread me. The "helping" the Soviets defeat fascism refers NOT--I repeat NOT--to the United States, but to I.F. Stone and 1) the presumption that this is what motivated his espionage work and 2) that anti-Nazism justifies espionage. Obviously, I reject the idea that Izzy was motivated simply by a desire to defeat Hitlerism. Besides, Stone's work for Moscow began, according to Klehr and Haynes, in 1936--five years before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Either way, I addressed most of this in the original post and if your readers decide to click the link, rather than relying on your amazingly disingenuous summary of my point, I suspect they will see what I mean.

And there is more: "Besides," he writes "[I.F.] Stone's work for Moscow began... in 1936--five years before the German invasion of the Soviet Union..."

---

Michael C. Moynihan:

Hit & Run: Reason Magazine: Since historians John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev revealed that their forthcoming volume Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press) would contain archival documentation linking journalist I.F. Stone to the Soviet intelligence apparatus (cover name: "Pancake"), many of Izzy's acolytes have intervened on behalf of their hero.... Now along comes UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong to claim that, while he might have worked with the Soviets, Stone should be considered a "premature anti-fascist," and that "helping Stalin against Hitler is a mitzvah"...

Well, helping Stalin and the Russians against Hitler and the Nazis was a mitzvah.

I really, really don't think Reason needs to print people who wish that the Nazis had conquered Moscow in 1941.

Just saying.

---

UPDATE: National Review too appears to have contributors who think we fought on the wrong side in World War II in joining Stalin rather than Hitler:

RE: More on the Left's Cultural Amnesia: Mark Hemingway: Earlier today, I noted in passing Brad DeLong's incredibly weak defense of I.F. Stone against well-documented assertions that he was a Soviet spy. I didn't have the time or energy to unpack DeLong's argument and deal with how spectacularly wrong it was, but fortunately Michael Moynihan has taken the ball from me, run with it and is now in the end zone doing the anti-communist equivalent of the Ickey Shuffle.

For Reason this is really surprising--I had thought better of them. National Review is more expected.

As I wrote before: You can sense William F. Buckley more than half-wishing he could have played his part in Franco's righteous fight against the grotesque democratic regime of Republican Spain--perhaps by piloting a Ju-87 in the Condor Legion?

October 26, 1957: General Franco is an authentic national hero... [with the] talents, the perseverance, and the sense of the righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists, and nihilists that were imposing... a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even, Spain's historical destiny. He saved the day.... The need was imperative... for a national policy [to]... make this concession to Churchill this morning, that one to Hitler this afternoon.... Franco reigns... supreme. He is not an oppressive dictator.... only as oppressive as is necessary to maintain total power...

March 9, 1957: Franco is a part, and an integral part, of Western civilization... [the] convergence of the multifarious political philosophical, religious, and cultural tendencies that have shaped Spanish history... the man to whom the Spanish people look--as the Chinese have looked to Chiang [Kaishek], for all his faults--for leadership.

There's still a chance to take out the garbage, guys!

Department of "Huh?"

Henry Farrell writes:

Clive Crook on Torture: A Second Try — Crooked Timber: my first attempt to critique Clive Crook on torture seems to have ended rather badly, here’s a second go. NB that this post is not an obviation of the apology below for my initial misunderstanding and mischaracterization of his position...

And the apology:

Torture, Schmorture — Crooked Timber: I had taken him to be arguing that waterboarding was opprobrious but not torture in the same sense as crushing of fingers or other methods of torture causing lasting bodily harm, along the lines of the administration memos which made more or less that argument. It would seem that all he was saying was that there was a colourable legal argument to this effect. Obviously, I misread him.... As I understand Crook’s position – and I am open to correction here, it is as follows. (1) That waterboarding is unequivocally torture...

I say: not so fast. I don't think Henry misread. I think that either Clive miswrote or Clive is now backpedaling.

From generally accepted knowledge I posit:

(a) Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention prohibits torture
(b) The United States has made violating Common Article 3 a crime.

And from this I deduce:

(c) If waterboarding is torture, then it is a crime.

And its contrapositive:

(d) If waterboarding is not a crime, then it is not torture.

Clive Crook wrote:

To many critics of the Bush administration, it is all so simple: waterboarding is torture, and thus both impossible to justify and illegal.... [T]his already far from simple issue gets even more complicated when you turn from the question of justification to the law. Many just take it for granted that waterboarding is torture, and hence illegal.... Not so fast. Common sense may tell you waterboarding is torture, but the law is less clear-cut. Congress should make waterboarding a crime, for the reasons I have stated, and it has had many chances before and since 9/11 to do so. The fact is, it has chosen not to...

And this seems to me to be, at least:

(e) Clive Crook doubts that waterboarding is a crime.

From which I deduce:

(f) Clive Crook doubts that waterboarding is torture.

It seems to me that if Crook's position was what Farrell now maintains it is, Crook would have written: "Congress made waterboarding a crime when it criminalized torture, but it should now criminalize waterboarding explicitly because some falsely claim it is not torture." Instead, Crook wrote: "Congress should make waterboarding a crime... it has had many chances... to do so. The fact is, it has chosen not to..."

Condi Rice and John Yoo

At Berkeley, John Yoo is in trouble for saying that the president could legally order the army and the CIA to torture--but Berkeley Dean Chris Edley says that John is safe from any form of academic process because he was staff and not line--he did not actually order anybody to torture or tell anybody that they were ordered to torture anyone.

Now Condi Rice comes forward. Cenk Uygur reports:

Cenk Uygur: Condi Rice Pulls A Nixon: When the President Does It, That Means It is Not Illegal: Condoleezza Rice was recently speaking at Stanford when students asked her an excellent question on waterboarding and torture. They have her answer on tape and it isn't pretty.... Here are the relevant quotes:

"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture."...

"I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did."...

"The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."...

[T]hese people don't understand the whole concept behind America. In our system of government, the president is not supposed to be above the law. He is not a king; his word is not the law. The president can violate the law and when he does, he is supposed to be held accountable. That is supposed to be one of the pillars of our democracy.... If someone doesn't do something about this dangerous idea it will do more damage than the torture itself...

As I understand things, Cheney and the Bush NSC--Rice and company--went hunting for someone who would tell them (a) waterboarding isn't torture, and (b) the president can legally order torture. They found John Yoo, who told them what they wanted. Then Bush told Rice to order the CIA to torture.

Now as I understand Edley's position, Berkeley cannot proceed against Yoo because he did not do any wrongful deeds--he just gave wrongful advice. And Stanford cannot proceed against Rice because even though she was in the chain of command she did not know that the deeds were wrongful.

A very nice setup indeed.

Quality Control, FT, Quality Control: You Can Do Better than This (Waterboarding-as-Torture Edition)

Clive Crook writes:

Clive Crook - Obama’s needless fight over torture: Many just take it for granted that waterboarding is torture, and hence illegal. The convoluted legal defences in the memos are so false, in their view, that they compound the crime. The bizarre care the memos prescribe to guard against lasting physical harm to suspects, for instance, is dismissed as a sham that only makes the enterprise more disgusting. Not so fast. Common sense may tell you waterboarding is torture, but the law is less clear-cut. Congress should make waterboarding a crime, for the reasons I have stated, and it has had many chances before and since 9/11 to do so. The fact is, it has chosen not to. Some of those in Congress now calling for prosecutions, including Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, were briefed about these methods in the panic-stricken aftermath of 9/11 and offered no objection. It is worth noting that the methods in question were adopted from the training US soldiers undergo to resist interrogation. This underlines the fact that using these methods lowers the US to the level of its enemies. But it also suggests that distinctions may be made between waterboarding and, say, breaking on the rack...

Paul Begala:

Paul Begala: On November 29, 2007, Sen. McCain, while campaigning in St. Petersburg, Florida, said, "Following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding."... Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times' truth-testing project (which this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), scrutinized Sen. McCain's statement and found it to be true. Here's the money quote from Politifact:

McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as 'water cure,' 'water torture' and 'waterboarding,' according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.

Politifact went on to report:

A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps.

The folks at Politifact interviewed R. John Pritchard, the author of The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Complete Transcripts of the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. They also interviewed Yuma Totani, history professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and consulted the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, which published a law review article entitled, "Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts."

Either a retraction and correction, or a clarification by Clive Crook that he believes that the International Military Tribunal for the Far East committed miscarriages of justice when it hanged members of the Kempitai for waterboarding Americans would be appreciated. One or the other seems to be called for.

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...

This Looks to Be Very Interesting indeed...

From the WWCCWIHP:

The Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) will host a two-day scholarly conference on 20-21 May 2009 to examine the contents of the [Vassiliev] notebooks and their implications for our understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States. Conference participants will include John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, co-authors of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, contributors to a June special edition of the Journal of Cold War Studies, as well as other intelligence history specialists. For more details download the conference agenda.

Though Vassiliev's access was not unfettered, the 1,115 pages of densely handwritten notes that he was able to take shed new and important light on such critical individuals and topics as Alger Hiss, the Rosenberg case, and "Enormous," the massive Soviet effort to gather intelligence on the Anglo-American atomic bomb project.

Alexander Vassiliev has donated his original copies of the handwritten notebooks to the Library of Congress with no restriction on access. They are available to researchers in the Manuscript Division. Electronic copies of the original notebooks, transcribed Russian versions, and translated English versions are available for download free of charge from the CWIHP website.

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/article.cfm?this=CA0AEF99-AA49-4BE4-ED450C6E5BDF71FD

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...

It Looks Like Scott Beauchamp's Pieces for the New Republic Were Accurate

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: Morning Thread: Epilogue: Since the right-wing blogs likely will not revisit and the press certainly will not. The coda of the Beauchamp Affair:

A senior enlisted Army soldier was convicted on Wednesday of killing four handcuffed and blindfolded Iraqi men with pistol shots to the backs of their heads shortly after arresting them in Baghdad two years ago, The Associated Press reported. A military jury in Germany, where his unit is deployed, found the soldier, Master Sgt. John E. Hatley, guilty of premeditated murder in the deaths of the men, whom he and several other members of his unit had detained after a firefight with insurgents in Baghdad in spring 2007, according to testimony in the case...

If you cannot place the name, Master Sgt. Hatley was the direct superior of Pvt. Scott Beauchamp and the person most used to discredit (along with the gay porn star) the New Republic diary of the life of a soldier in Iraq and the ways they dealt with the pressures of Operation Clusterfuck. All of which Hatley said was absolutely not what his ever virtuous soldiers did.

In February, another military jury convicted the unit’s medic, Sgt. Michael Leahy Jr., 28, of premeditated murder and sentenced him to life in prison. On March 30, Sgt. First Class Joseph P. Mayo, 27, pleaded guilty to murder and received a 35-year sentence. Military legal experts said the soldiers’ rank showed the frustration of fighting insurgents who blended in with the locals...

Which was exactly the subject Scott Beauchamp was writing about.

Impeach John Yoo. Impeach Jay Bybee. Impeach Alberto Gonzales. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach George W. Bush. Do It Now.

Hilzoy makes The Obvious Comparison:

John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, Richard Cheney, and George W. Bush: "You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects.... As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure you are outside the predicate death requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death..."

OLC memo of August 1, 2002, signed by Jay Bybee.

George Orwell, 1984: "'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.' The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was. 'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.' He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats. 'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats...'"

What Americans Like!

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: Don't Tell The Villagers: Our most excellent pundits are generally very quick to buy into the idea that everybody hates Yurp, that "real Americans" detest San Francisco. I'm not sure how much reality is going to change for them to catch up, but so glad they imagine themselves to be stand-ins for the "reglar folks."

From Kos:

Daily Kos: Poll: Americans love France, San Francisco, Europe, and NYC: All of them feature the same dynamic as San Francisco -- Republicans have solidly favorable ratings (as do every other demographic tested), but head down South, and it's a whole different world, dramatically out of step with the rest of America. What's this mean? It means that all that France and Europe demonizing, and all that talk of "San Francisco liberals" and "San Francisco values", and all that New York bashing (like Rush leaving Manhattan), plays to a very small core of people, and specifically to the conservative's Southern base.

This is clear evidence that the GOP has become a rump regional party. Because everyone else in America is just scratching their head at all that hatred directed at these places. They like San Francisco a lot. They love France. They think Europe is fantastic. And not even the New York Yankees can get people to hate on the Big Apple. And the more the Rushes and Becks bash those places, the more out of step with the Real America conservatives appear. They might as well be bashing puppies, apple pie, and moms.

The irony? Even Southerners have a net positive favorability for San Francisco (+6), New York City (+2), and Europe (+2). In other words, even in their regional stronghold, they're just speaking to a minority.

Dan Froomkin on "State Secrets"

This is very worrisome indeed.

Dan Froomkin:

White House Watch - Obama's State Secrets Overreach: There are two things you really need to know about the "state secrets" privilege.

The first is that the government lied in the 1953 Supreme Court case that established the government's right not to disclose to the judicial branch information that would compromise national security. The widows of three civilian engineers who died in a military airplane crash sued the government for negligence. The government refused to turn over records, citing national security. But some 50 years later, when the records in question were made public, there were no national security secrets in them, just embarrassing information establishing the government's negligence. (More about the case here.)

The second thing is that the way the state secrets privilege has typically worked since then is that the government can refuse to publicly disclose a specific item of information if it explains why to the judge. The idea is not that government officials get to tell a judge to dismiss an entire case because they don't want to answer any questions at all. But it is precisely such a sweeping assertion that the Justice Department -- the Obama Justice Department -- is making in three cases that relate to torture and warrantless wiretapping. There is something utterly un-American about saying that the executive branch can simply tell the judicial branch to butt out of a matter for national security reasons -- and there's no recourse. And as for these cases, even if the government is worried about legitimate national security concerns -- rather than just afraid of embarrassment -- there is so much in the public domain already about the related issues that government officials should at least be able to talk about what they can't talk about. People who put a lot of faith in President Obama's pledges of restoring transparency to the government are having a hard time rationalizing his Justice Department's actions on the three cases in question...

Dan Froomkin on the Torture of Abu Zubaida

Dan reports on what the Washington Post now prints as front-page news--something it ould have printed three years ago:

White House Watch - Bush's Torture Rationale Debunked: Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture. That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists. Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."

Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush's Exhibit A in defense of the "enhanced interrogation" procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders. But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago -- and as The Post now confirms -- almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong. Zubaida wasn't a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn't holding back critical information. His torture didn't produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn't save lives. All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well. Indeed, the Post article raises the even further disquieting possibility that intentional cruelty was part of the White House's motive.

The most charitable interpretation at this point of the decision to torture is that it was a well-intentioned overreaction of people under enormous stress whose only interest was in protecting the people of the United States. But there's always been one big problem with that theory: While torture works on TV, knowledgeable intelligence professionals and trained interrogators know that in the real world, it's actually ineffective and even counterproductive. The only thing it's really good as it getting false confessions. So why do it? Some social psychologists (see, for instance, Kevin M. Carlsmith on NiemanWatchdog.org) have speculated that the real motivation for torture is retribution. And now someone with first-hand knowledge is suggesting that was a factor in Zubaida's case. Quoting a "former Justice Department official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida," Finn and Warwick write that the pressure on CIA interrogators "from upper levels of the government was 'tremendous,' driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates...

"'They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new,' the official said. 'They'd say, "You aren't working hard enough." There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't talk, we'll do whatever.'"' The Post story also makes it clear that some people with great reality-denying skills remain at the upper levels of the government: "Some U.S. officials remain steadfast in their conclusion that Abu Zubaida possessed, and gave up, plenty of useful information about al-Qaeda," Finn and Warwick write. "'It's simply wrong to suggest that Abu Zubaida wasn't intimately involved with al-Qaeda,' said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much about Abu Zubaida remains classified. 'He was one of the terrorist organization's key facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated, provided critical information on senior al-Qaeda figures...and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members. How anyone can minimize that information -- some of the best we had at the time on al-Qaeda -- is beyond me.'" But who are these people? How can they still possibly believe this given all the evidence to the contrary? What are they doing still in government?

Author and investigative reporter Suskind first exposed the rampant fallacies of the administration's Zubaida narrative in his explosive June 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine. See my June 20, 2006 column for a summary. But mainstream news organizations, unable to match Suskind's sources, largely refused to acknowledge his reporting. Indeed, in September 2006, when the White House for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA detention and interrogation program, Bush had no qualms about putting Zubaida front and center. In a major speech, he proudly described how Zubaida -- "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden" -- was questioned using the CIA's new "alternative set of procedures" and then "'began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives."

All lies and euphemisms. But all reported pretty much straight at the time by a mainstream media that, if it noted Suskind's reporting at all, did so as an afterthought...

The Good Guys Win One

Thoreau:

It was a pleasure to lose this bet § Unqualified Offerings: Accused enemy combatant Ali Al-Marri is being transferred to civilian custody to stand trial in a regular court of law.  A few months ago I made a bet that Obama would assert the power to detain enemy combatants without trial.  I am delighted to be proven wrong here, and I am also delighted to have sent $50 to Habitat for Humanity, as per the terms of the bet with commenter BubbaDave.

I Never Thought I Would Grow Up to Be the Kind of Crank Who Wrote Letters to the Chancellor Trying to Get My Colleagues Fired...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12561194/null

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Fiction & Literature Health & Medicine null

Scott Horton Keeps Us Up-to-Date on Some of the Bush Administration's Crimes

Yoo for the Defense:

Yoo for the Defense—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine): Obama, Yoo says, has put the safety of Americans on the line: his torture ban will “seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks.” Never mind, of course, that no evidence has been advanced of a single instance in which the use of torture produced intelligence that prevented a future terrorist attack, while detailed and specific evidence has now been put forward that torture produced bad intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Those are irritating details that detract from a nice narrative. So what’s all this about? Is Yoo suffering from withdrawal pangs coming off an addiction to torture?... I’ve followed John Yoo and his writings with some care for a while now, and I think I finally understand what this is about. Namely, a pending probe by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is looking at serious ethical issues surrounding the issuance of Yoo’s legal opinions.

But the OPR probe is far from Yoo’s only or even most pressing worry. The likelihood that he will face a criminal probe and then possibly prosecution is growing. Susan J. Crawford, the Cheney protege tapped as the senior Bush Administration official to oversee the Guantánamo military commissions, publicly admitted in an interview with Bob Woodward, that at least one of the detainees had been tortured through the application of an interrogation regime that had been approved by the White House. In their exit interviews, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were emphatic that in authorizing torture, they relied on the advice of their lawyers, meaning John Yoo. But in the ultimate act of ingratitude, Bush left office without issuing the anticipated blanket pardons to his torture team. NATO allies and United Nations officials are reminding the new Obama Administration that it has a solemn obligation under article 4 of the Convention Against Torture to begin a criminal investigation....

Yoo cannot be oblivious to all of this. And indeed, his column in the Wall Street Journal and his presentations elsewhere tell us exactly what the defense will be. At its core is the argument that, no matter how mistaken, John Yoo acted in good faith when he issued the torture memoranda. He truly, sincerely believes the analysis.... That’s why from April 2004 forward, Yoo has been unwavering in his adherence to the views put forth in those memos.... [W]e see in his current column and other recent statements tale-tell signs that suggest this defense is dishonest....

Immediately after reading Yoo’s memos it struck me that they were the product of reverse-engineering. The way they drifted through issues, the bizarre choice of precedent, the curious misreading of the Constitution in which the clause granting to Congress the authority to address questions surrounding detainees simply disappears--and the equally tendentious and absurd readings of international conventions and precedents--could be explained if you imagined that Yoo had been approached and told to craft a memorandum that legalized practices already in place. If that were the case, those asking for the memo were looking for a get-out-of-jail-free pass from the Department of Justice, and Yoo’s memos were supposed to provide it. Viewed in this light, what Yoo crafted makes perfect sense; otherwise they strike me as impossible to explain....

[I]f Yoo did craft the memos for the explicit purpose of covering the torture project with impunity and pushing it forward by overriding the judgment of serious lawyers at the Pentagon and CIA, then Yoo made himself a part of the torture conspiracy; that he was an accessory after the fact goes without saying.... Considering that Yoo has been excoriated by his academic colleagues for the sloppiness of his reasoning and for his mischaracterization of the authorities he cites, why does he persist? The only explanation I can put forth is that he needs to preserve his good-faith defense–that he may be wrong, but his error is held in good faith....

Does John Yoo recognize that he has blood on his hands? Certainly not. Maybe he sleeps as comfortably as George W. Bush. Or maybe his consuming interest right now is in protecting himself from prison time. And he’ll have to do a much more convincing job if he wants to succeed at that.

Former Gitmo Guard Tells All:

Former Gitmo Guard Tells All—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine): Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo.... Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading....

Neely and other guards had been trained to the U.S. military’s traditional application of the Geneva Convention rules. They were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned.... Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued.... Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison.

Second, there is a good deal of discussion of displays of contempt for Islam by the camp authorities.... Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

Michael Isikoff: Yoo Disbarment Proceedings Now Visible on the Horizon

Ah. Here it is. Michael Isikoff:

Torture Report Could Be Trouble For Bush Lawyers: An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department's ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

But then–Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip, strongly objected to the draft, according to the sources. Filip wanted the report to include responses from all three principals, said one of the sources, a former top Bush administration lawyer. (Mukasey could not be reached; his former chief of staff did not respond to requests for comment. Filip also did not return a phone message.) OPR is now seeking to include the responses before a final version is presented to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. "The matter is under review," said Justice spokesman Matthew Miller.

If Holder accepts the OPR findings, the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action. But some former Bush officials are furious about the OPR's initial findings and question the premise of the probe. "OPR is not competent to judge [the opinions by Justice attorneys]. They're not constitutional scholars," said the former Bush lawyer. Mukasey, in speeches before he left, decried the second-guessing of Justice lawyers who, acting under "almost unimaginable pressure" after 9/11, offered "their best judgment of what the law required."

But the OPR probe began after Jack Goldsmith, a Bush appointee who took over OLC in 2003, protested the legal arguments made in the memos. Goldsmith resigned the following year after withdrawing the memos, and later wrote that he was "astonished" by the "deeply flawed" and "sloppily reasoned" legal analysis in the memos by Yoo and Bybee, including their assertion (challenged by many scholars) that the president could unilaterally disregard a law passed by Congress banning torture.

OPR investigators focused on whether the memo's authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted, according to three former Bush lawyers who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe. One of the lawyers said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted. In a departure from the norm, Jarrett also told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he would inform them of his findings and would "consider" releasing a public version. If he does, it could be the most revealing public glimpse yet at how some of the major decisions of Bush-era counterterrorism policy were made.

Torture: John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury Chatter

Straws in the wind: Echelon Intercept #3489DE38A9:

[T]he [Justice Department's] O[office of] P[rofessional] R[esponsibility]... came to "very harsh conclusions" about the professional competence of a number of the [Yoo and Bradbury] memos, making "recommendations for further action" with respect to both John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury. Attorney General Mukasey and Deputy AG Filip were reported to be apoplectic about the report and to have attempted to squelch it. Their concern is... for the defense of reliance on advice of counsel that Mukasey put forward in a series of speeches, and that the OPR reports will make, I understand, something of an absurdity...

What We Owe Afghanistan

Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Wardak:

WARDAK: I think I will go to Vice President Biden, saying that the U.S. have not spent in seven years in Afghanistan what they have spent one month in Iraq. So, from the beginning, the threat was anticipated very low. And based on that, all the aid and the structure of the Afghan national security forces and other institution was founded on a very wrong assumption....

I hope that with the success of our Iraqi brothers, and a surge of the U.S. forces, as President Obama promised during the election, Afghanistan will become a focal point to win this global war against terror. And that will require all different elements of proper governance, economic development, building of the infrastructure....

In the '80s, I think we, Afghans, we have shattered the myth of invincibility of the Red Army. We have helped to the liberations of two (ph) dozens of countries, to the unification of Germany, to the end of Cold War. And the result was that the whole world prospered because of that. Only the misery and suffering of my people have continued. And we -- what we got out of it, about two million killed and hundreds, thousands of orphans, widows and handicapped, and $300 billion worth of destruction, based on the estimates of the World Bank and IMF.

So now, if there is any morality, if these words of equality, fairness, justice for all are not just hollow, hollow and empty words, and we all believe that this world is a global village, and what happens in Afghanistan affects us all, then I think -- as it has been repeatedly mentioned by all of our friends and allies in these last seven years -- that Afghanistan should never be allowed to become a failed state or an ungoverned area where the terrorists can plan and hide and operate from, and Afghanistan becomes an instrument of instability or harm to the rest of the region or international community.

"Buy American": A Very Bad Move in the Stimulus Package

In addition to being bad economics, demonstrating in his first month that the Obama Administration's word is not good--that it will keep treaties only when it feels like doing so--would be a very bad start for the foreign policy of the Obama administration. Pacta sunt servanda.

John Ibbitson:

Global trade wars or voter revolt? Let Obama's difficult decisions begin: he toxic "buy American" provisions in the economic stimulus package currently before the Senate pose a crucial test for Barack Obama's young administration. To prevent a cascade of tariff protection that would ultimately hurt his own workers and his own country's economy, Mr. Obama must find some way to strip the protectionist clauses that infect the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Yet, politically, that might be impossible....

"Buy American" violates the North American free-trade agreement, but Mr. Obama has vowed to renegotiate or, failing that, rip up NAFTA, so has little stake in coming to its defence. And he would be overriding protectionist provisions put in the bill by his own Democratic Party.

The President has said the time has come to make "difficult decisions." This is one of them. Even economists who strongly support the stimulus package are dismayed by the protectionist measures contained within it. "It looks like a very bad thing in the bill," said economist Brad DeLong, who worked on trade issues in the Clinton administration and teaches at University of California, Berkeley. "Pressure from the Canadian government saying, 'Do you really want to do this?' is important." Canadian officials have, in fact, been working behind the scenes to keep protectionist measures out of the economic stimulus package. But they failed to stop the House version of the bill from including a provision banning the use of anything other than American-made iron and steel in projects funded by the stimulus package...

If there's little excess capacity in the U.S. steel industry--so that the price of steel is high enough to induce people to look outside for suppliers--then a stimulus won't be much needed. If there's a lot of excess capacity so that a stimulus is needed, then steel customers should be able to bargain prices down to marginal cost--in which case foreign producers will have an extremely difficult time competing on price given that steel is heavy and distances are great. "Buy American" seems mostly designed to allow the steel producers to collude and push their profits up--at the expense of American taxpayers.

Could Obama add a signing statement to the stimulus bill stating that the "Buy American" provisions conflict with our NAFTA and WTO treaty obligations and hence are void? I am not a trade lawyer, but my suspicion is no: neither NAFTA nor the WTO are self-executing, so any actions they call for or block are supposed to be implemented through duly passed acts of congress. Of course, NAFTA and the WTO are also treaties that are supposed to be kept.

If Obama did declare the "Buy America" provisions null and void in a signing statement, people could sue in U.S. courts to carry them out--and IMHO likely win. Then foreign governments could take the case to the NAFTA and WTO dispute-resolution forums--and IMHO certainly win. Better to strip the provisions from the bill now, or in conference.

In Praise of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov

Charlie Stross:

Charlie's Diary: 25 years ago today, this man saved my life. And yours.:

On 26th September, 1983, at the nadir of the Cold War, this man — Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov — made a judgement call that saved my life. (I was then living five miles from the Vickers Tank Factory in Leeds and about ten miles from the M1/M62 intersection — both major strategic targets.) If you're over 25 years old and live in the UK, he saved your life, too. If you're over 25 years old and lived in the USA, there's about a 70% probability that he saved you. And so on. Iterate for everyone in every NATO and Warsaw Pact country, all 750 million of us.

He lost his job for it, and suffered a nervous breakdown. He doesn't consider himself to be a hero. Nevertheless, he bent the regulations and risked punishment to prevent a disaster from overwhelming us all.

I'm going to raise a glass to him tonight. How about you?

Colin Powell on the End of George W. Bush's Term and the Beginning of Barack Obama's

Colin Powell:

Colin Powell: The America we remember is back again.

How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture. - By Dahlia Lithwick and Phillipe Sands - Slate Magazine

Dahlia Lithwick and Philippe Sands:

How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture: When Vice President Dick Cheney told the Weekly Standard last week, "I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured," he probably wasn't thinking about Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.... And that's why everything changed this morning when the Washington Post published a front-page interview by Bob Woodward, in which Crawford stated without equivocation that the treatment of alleged 20th Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani at Guantanamo Bay was "torture."

[T]he Senate armed services committee issued a report just last month pointing the finger of responsibility for the military interrogations at then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his general counsel Jim Haynes. The committee did not use the T-word, however.... Alberto J. Mora, former general counsel of the U.S. Navy, wrote in a letter to the Navy's inspector general: "The interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary [of Defense] should not have been authorized because some (but not all) of them, whether applied singly or in combination, could produce effects reaching the level of torture." The 84-page log of al-Qahtani's interrogation has long been a matter of public record, and there is now little dispute that the treatment it describes rose to the level of torture....

What changes as a result of Crawford expressly using the word torture? First, the administration can no longer hide behind parsing the language of the Geneva Conventions and the torture statute.... Crawford has... repudiated the formalistic (and perennially shifting) definitions of torture as whatever-it-is-we-don't-do. She has admitted that there is a medical and legal definition for torture and also that we have crossed the line into it.

The consequences go further. Crawford also told Woodward that the charges against al-Qahtani were dropped because he was tortured. This has devastating consequences for the Bush administration's entire rationale for the new techniques of interrogation: that they would make the United States safer by producing intelligence and keeping dangerous individuals off the streets. We now know they do neither....

Whether torture occurred and who was responsible will no longer be issues behind which senior members of the administration and their lawyers and policymakers can hide. The only real issue now is: What happens next? The answer to that question takes you to a very different place when the act is torture.... Under the 1984 Torture Convention, its 146 state parties (including the United States) are under an obligation to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law." These states must take any person alleged to have committed torture (or been complicit or participated in an act of torture) who is present in their territories into custody. The convention allows no exceptions, as Sen. Pinochet discovered in 1998. The state party to the Torture Convention must then submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution or extradition for prosecution in another country.

The former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and general counsel for the Department of the Army has spoken. Her clear words have been picked up around the world. And that takes the prospects of accountability and criminal investigation onto another level. For the Obama administration, the door to the do-nothing option is now closed. That is why today may come to be seen as the turning point.