Blogger Aid

Maggie Jochild of Group News Blog and Meta Watershed is in the hospital for major abdominal surgery. Any donations, and all best wishes, would be appreciated. Thanks.

Update 10/17/09: The surgery went well, and Maggie is in good spirits. Great to hear.

Memo From the Dark Side

"Jack, you want to prosecute a member of the Bush administration for assaulting suspected terrorists?"

"The word is 'torturing.' And yes — it's about time somebody did."

Law and Order's season premiere a few weeks back, "Memo From the Dark Side," deals with the torture authorized by the Bush administration. I thought it was pretty impressive overall, with some powerful moments.

Scott Horton has a good "six questions" interview with the show's excutive producer and head writer, René Balcer. If you haven't seen the episode yet, the interview doesn't give too much away. This was probably my favorite interchange, about one of my favorite moments in the show:

4. In one of the most dramatic courtroom moments, you have a defense lawyer confront an interrogation expert with the famous “ticking bomb” scenario, who answers it quite simply. Are we hearing Ali Soufan combined with Matthew Alexander?

You heard what I’ve been hearing for years from a variety of professional interrogators—torture, physical abuse, and mental abuse don’t yield reliable information. I’ve been interested in the subject of interrogations for many years, principally because of my friendship with the noted forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, who has used with consistent success an empathic approach to elicit admissions and information from the most depraved and recalcitrant offenders. Putting aside for a moment whether torture is legal or ethical or consistent with our values, if we are interested in a results-based strategy to gain actionable information, the overwhelming evidence—including the recent Trinity College neuroscience study—seems to indicate that torture isn’t the way to go.

Among the guest stars, David Alan Basche was particularly effective as Kevin Franklin, a John Yoo-like figure (but much smarter and slicker).

The show does allow - or push - one unfortunate conflation. It deals with events at Abu Ghraib, yet D.A. Michael Cutter (Linus Roache, pictured above) mentions the World Trade Center and 9/11 in a conversation with Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) about vengeance. While one can only do so much in scripted TV, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 - that was a lie and deceptive implication used by the Bush administration to sell their unnecessary Iraq War. (Alan Shore in Boston Legal would have pointed this out in court, but they're different shows.) Still, "Memo from the Dark Side" was an impressive piece of work overall, gutsy, memorable and commendable.

I'm dismayed, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, to see some comment boards decrying the episode as unpatriotic. Torture is illegal. The real events behind the episode are pretty dramatic. It's a natural for the show, and they handled the issue pretty responsibly. Law and Order actually went to lengths to try to make the episode "balanced," with a few people accusing McCoy of being a traitor and Cutter conflicted about his role in the trial. Remember when opposing torture was not attacked as a "liberal" issue?

The fact is that many law and order conservatives oppose torture as well, and did so in the Bush administration, but they were overruled, bypassed, lied to, ignored or punished. It's not surprising that military personnel would oppose torture, especially if they know how it was used against American troops in WWII and Vietnam. I understand members of the general public being confused or conflicted by horrible coverage of the issue. But I just don't think any sane, honest, honorable person who studies the subject in any depth can support torture.

Anthony Romero of the ACLU and Glenn Greenwald have more on the episode.

Unfortunately, you need to pay to see the episode online (Scott Horton provies the links for that). It's worth recording it the next time it airs.

The site All Things Law and Order has a very detailed recap, if you want to read about it in the meantime. The comments include a transcription of one exchange, and All Things Law and Order has also put together these clips:



As Romero says in his piece:

Toward the end of the episode, the assistant D.A. declares, "[I]t is not disloyal to hold our officials to the highest standards of conduct."

Indeed. In fact, it is the epitome of loyalty and patriotism to do so. Now the question is, in real life, will Attorney General Holder rise to the occasion?

America Doesn't Care About Your Feelings

This is a few days old, but well worth checking out if you missed it. Grayson is spot on.



C&L has a transcript.

Update: Jill has more Grayson goodness.

Baaba Maal - "Television"

Here's his recent live session at KCRW.

Torture Watch 10/8/09

There are several important pieces on torture from that past month or two that I haven't featured yet, so here they are.

While The New York Times news desk has been gutless in covering torture, often refusing to use the word or pretending that defining torture is some great mystery, its editorial board has been fantastic.

From 9/2/09, the short and superb "Dick Cheney’s Version":

After the C.I.A. inspector general’s report on prisoner interrogation was released last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney settled into his usual seat on Fox News to express his outrage — not at the illegal and immoral behavior laid out in the report, of course, but at the idea that anyone would object to torturing prisoners. He was especially vexed that the Obama administration was beginning an investigation.

In Mr. Cheney’s view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush’s Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.

It’s easy to understand Mr. Cheney’s aversion to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it stopping with the interrogators. He’s right.

The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.

Mr. Cheney was at the center of each of these insults to this country’s Constitution, its judicial system and its bedrock democratic values. To defend himself, he offers a twisted version of history:

• He says Mr. Bush’s Justice Department determined that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” ordered by the president were legal under American law and international treaties like the Geneva Conventions.

In reality, those opinions were based on a corrupt and widely discredited legal analysis cooked up after the White House had already decided to use long-banned practices like waterboarding. Mr. Cheney was an architect of the decision to “get tough” with prisoners, as the bureaucrats often say to soften the outrage of this policy.

• He insists the inspector general’s findings were “completely reviewed” by the Justice Department and that any follow-up investigation would be improper and unnecessary.

In reality, Mr. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, did not appoint an independent investigator after receiving the inspector general’s report, which was completed in 2004. The Justice Department decided there was only one narrow case worth pursuing, involving a civilian contractor — hardly a surprise from a thoroughly politicized department whose top officials set the very rules they were supposed to be judging. Mr. Gonzales’s team did not look into allegations that some interrogators broke those rules. Mr. Cheney may not care about that, but Mr. Holder rightly does.

• Mr. Cheney claims that waterboarding and other practices widely considered to be torture or abuse “were absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Cheney is right when he says detainees who were subject to torture and abuse gave up valuable information. But the men who did the questioning flatly dispute that it was duress that moved them to do so.

Deuce Martinez, the C.I.A. officer who interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, engineer of the 9/11 mass murders, said he used traditional interrogation methods, and not the infliction of pain and panic. And, in an article on the Times Op-Ed page, Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who oversaw the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, another high-ranking terrorist, denounced “the false claims” about harsh interrogations. Mr. Soufan said Mr. Zubaydah talked before he was subjected to waterboarding and other abuse. He also said that “using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions.”

Every week, it seems, new disclosures about this sordid history dribble out. This week, Physicians for Human Rights analyzed what the inspector general’s report said about the involvement of C.I.A. physicians and psychologists in the abuse of prisoners. It said they not only monitored torture, like waterboarding, but also kept data on the prisoners’ reaction in ways that “may amount to human experimentation.”

Getting at the truth is not going to be easy. The C.I.A. destroyed evidence — videotapes of interrogations — and is now refusing to release its records of the questioning of its prisoners. It also is asking the courts to keep secret the orders Mr. Bush gave authorizing the interrogations, and the original Justice Department memos concluding that they were legal.

Americans need much more than glimpses of the truth. They should not have to decide whether to believe former interrogators, whom they do not know, or Mr. Cheney, who did not hesitate while in office to mislead them when it suited his political aims.

I'm afraid I've quoted the whole thing, since I didn't see what I could cut. Related pieces, "The Torture Papers" (8/25/09) and "Justice Delayed" (9/12/09), are also quite good. I have to say, after all the idiocy and mendacity from most Beltway types on torture, seeing a prominent media outlet state clear facts with a clear moral position is very refreshing.

I've heard several people point out that destruction of the video tapes would normally be taken as an admission of guilt by the Justice Department or a judge, and an investigation and possible prosecution would follow accordingly. It's ridiculous no one's been called to account for their destruction (at least yet). Of course, the Beltway twits don't care.

Next up is the stellar "Fear was no excuse to condone torture" by Charles C. Krulak (commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999) and Joseph P. Hoar (commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994).

In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.

But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.

We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America's disastrous trip to ``the dark side'' continue to assert -- against all evidence -- that torture ``worked'' and that our country is better off for having gone there.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Cheney applauded the ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' -- what we used to call ``war crimes'' because they violated the Geneva Conventions, which the United States instigated and has followed for 60 years. Cheney insisted the abusive techniques were ``absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.'' He claimed they were ``directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy . . . It worked very, very well.''

Repeating these assertions doesn't make them true. We now see that the best intelligence, which led to the capture of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was produced by professional interrogations using non-coercive techniques. When the abuse began, prisoners told interrogators whatever they thought would make it stop.

Torture is as likely to produce lies as the truth. And it did.

What leaders say matters. So when it comes to light, as it did recently, that U.S. interrogators staged mock executions and held a whirling electric drill close to the body of a naked, hooded detainee, and the former vice president winks and nods, it matters.

The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked the conscience of the world. Now Cheney has publicly condoned the abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a slippery slope of lawlessness. Rules about the humane treatment of prisoners exist precisely to deter those in the field from taking matters into their own hands. They protect our nation's honor.

To argue that honorable conduct is only required against an honorable enemy degrades the Americans who must carry out the orders. As military professionals, we know that complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed...

Do read the rest. I've featured one of their other op-eds before, "It's Our Cage, Too: Torture Betrays Us and Breeds New Enemies" (5/17/07). These pieces are extremely important because many career military personnel oppose torture and human rights abuses for moral and practical reasons, and directly contradict the bullshit Dick Cheney and the gang are trying to sell. (It was nice to see some retired generals take on the Cheneys' scaremongering on Gitmo, too.)

On 9/10/09, Andy Worthington published a lengthy interview with Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell's former chief of staff) that offers useful perspective on the climate in the Bush administration before the Iraq War. According to Wilkerson, they knew pretty early on that many of the men captured in Afghanistan were innocent or had little information (as we've covered here many times before). Remember that Senate report that found that abusive techniques were used to find an Iraq-al Qaeda link? Apparently, it's helped bring some matters into focus for Wilkerson:

[T]he regular meetings were one of my sources of knowing how chaotic the vetting was, and how chaotic the imprisonment was, and how adamant Rumsfeld was — and I’ve come to find now that Donald would not have been adamant without the Vice President’s cover — about not letting any of these guys go, for any reason whatsoever. I also know that one of the motivations for this was not just his obstreperousness, or his arrogance, which was manifested most of the time, but it was the fact that they wanted all of these people questioned vigorously, and they wanted to put together a pattern, a map, a body of evidence, if you will, from all these people, that they thought was going to tell them more and more about al-Qaeda, and increasingly more and more about the connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.

I even think that probably, in the summer of 2002, well before Powell gave his presentation at the UN in February 2003, their priority had shifted, as their expectation of another attack went down, and that happened, I think, rather rapidly. I’ve just stumbled on this. I thought before that it had persisted all the way through 2002, but I’m convinced now, from talking to hundreds of people, literally, that that’s not the case, that their fear of another attack subsided rather rapidly after their attention turned to Iraq, and after Tommy Franks, in late November as I recall, was directed to begin planning for Iraq and to take his focus off Afghanistan...

From later on:

[T]he problem is that this is a national security issue, and there are so many more challenging issues — as one official put it to me the other day — on which the President has already shown some ankle, whether it’s about talking to Iran or whether it’s his rather pronounced silence vis-à-vis North Korea, or whether it’s something as minuscule as lifting some travel restrictions on Cuban Americans for Cuba. They don’t believe they can show another square centimeter of ankle on national security, because the Republicans will eat their lunch, and every time I’m told this I die laughing. I say, your guys are captured by the Sith Lord, Dick Cheney, you’re captured by Rush Limbaugh, whose real radio audience is about 2.2 million, and whose employer, Clear Channel, lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter of this year. I said, when are you gonna wake up? These are kooks. And Cheney is the kook leader. But [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid are such feckless leaders they haven’t got any spine. We have no leadership in the legislative branch on either side of the aisle… I become exasperated. There’s just no courage, there’s no moral courage whatsoever in the Democratic Party.

I disagree with Andrew Sullivan on some other matters, but he's done some great work on the torture beat. He wrote an Atlantic cover piece that's a letter to George W. Bush on the subject:

I have come to accept that it would be too damaging and polarizing to the American polity to launch legal prosecutions against you, and deeply unfair to solely prosecute those acting on your orders or in your name. President Obama’s decision thus far to avoid such prosecutions is a pragmatic and bipartisan one in a time of war, as is your principled refusal to criticize him publicly in his first months. But moving on without actually confronting or addressing the very grave evidence of systematic abuse and torture under your administration poses profound future dangers. It gives the impression that nothing immoral or illegal took place. Indeed, since leaving office, your own vice president has even bragged of these interrogation techniques; and many in your own party threaten to reinstate such policies in the future. Their extreme rhetoric seems likely to shape—to contaminate—history’s view of your presidency, indeed of the Bush name, and the world’s view of America. But my biggest fear is this: in the event of a future attack on the United States, another president will feel tempted, or even politically compelled, to resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the same polarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you now because it is within your power—and only within your power—to prevent that from happening...

I believe that if you review the facts of your two terms of office, you will be forced to realize that, whatever your intentions, you undermined this fundamental American principle. You may not have intended that to occur. But you were the commander in chief and president, and these were presidential-level decisions. The responsibility for all of this is yours—before the American people and before the court of history. And you need finally to own these decisions, to take full responsibility for them, to account for them, to explain them, and, yes, to apologize for their scope and brutality.

I don't think this will happen, and think that Bush's vanity - the idea of him doing something great, of taking responsibility - is more likely to produce results than any 'sense of honor.' But Bush may not recognize the difference, and credit Sullivan for trying. If you haven't followed the torture story too closely, his piece, while long, provides a good overview.

Scott Horton continues to be a valuable resource, with "Seven Points on the CIA Report" (8/25/09) and "Six Questions for David Cole, Author of The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable" (8/28/09) particularly useful. Meanwhile, Torture Team Trading Cards may prove a good way to keep the spirits up for weary human rights activists.

Finally, Marcy Wheeler and Spencer Ackerman continue to track day to day developments and add to the overall picture. Bless 'em.

The McCarthyist Style in Glenn Beck's "White Culture"

Imagine if Glenn Beck were forced to defend some of his most irresponsible statements. Katie Couric gives it a go:



She could have pushed him harder, but still, it's good that she raised the question – what did you mean by "white culture"? ThinkProgress has a partial transcript. Crooks and Liars links some of the good recent articles on Beck (and their Beck category is pretty extensive).

I'd particularly recommend the Media Matters and Sidney Hillman Foundation pieces on the Time fluff piece on Beck (also this Balloon Juice commentary). Salon's series on The Making of Glenn Beck is good as well. Meanwhile, Evil Slutopia has a great roundup (from April) of Beck's most loathsome statements.

Beck's gutless dodging reminded me of that queen of political grifters, Ann Coulter. As I wrote in a long post on her, she simultaneously wants credit for being "outrageous" yet want to take no responsibility for her statements. It's a cowardly, dishonest display. Beck's doing the same thing here, and all of the new McCarthy gang have this tendency. Without irony, both Beck and Coulter have invoked McCarthy in a positive way. But their resistance to saying outright what they want to gives away the game. Beck's happy to call Obama a racist and inflame racial tensions – it's good for business – but acknowledging that what he's saying is racist is not good for business. The boycott against him might win him further fans from the lunatic fringe, but it puts off the mainstream. Some Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Beck as a result (see the C&L links above). But this is a further scam, because Beck works for conservative propaganda outlet Fox News, and he's spouting mostly standard issue, far right bullshit – even if it comes with his unique brand of crazy performance art on top.

Let's recall, we saw much of the same game from the McCain-Palin campaign, with their camp stoking bigotry, denying it only when forced to, and often blaming their own crap on the Obama camp. It was utterly despicable and shameless. Yet most media outlets hesitated to call it out, and even worse, some made excuses for it.

TBogg catches a right-wing furor over Janeane Garofalo making a similar point about the teabag crowd:



She's pretty accurate here.

These dynamics are central to coverage of Beck, from the whitewashing of his bigotry to the game of false equivalencies. From that Jamison Foser Media Matters piece (emphasis his):

Time continued:

The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style" - the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country - is aflame again, fanned from both right and left. Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you'd think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.

What in the world is Time talking about? This is a grotesque false equivalence. Conservatives have been yelling about President Obama being a secret Kenyan bent on sending granny to the Death Panel, comparing him to Hitler and Mao and Stalin and who-knows-who-else -- and that, apparently, is matched in intensity and paranoia by liberals pointing out this unhinged behavior? Insane.

Sadly, this is typical from the media. It's especially irresponsible because Beck is the "It" Boy of Paranoid Hatred for the moment, and it's dangerous to help sell "The Return of McCarthyism":



We know the damage these scoundrels do if they're not confronted.

Edited for typos and clarity. The final video doesn't seem to load in some browsers. If you find that's the case, you can view it here or here.

Grayson Remix

Brave New Films has a nice new short cross-cutting Grayson's floor speech with other clips:



This comes via Digby, who has more on this, including Grayson being criticized for using the word "holocaust."

Update: Here's Grayson on Hardball. C&L has a partial transcript, but I agree that the best line is "I can’t decide on health care, on energy independence, on jobs, on the economy based upon dirty looks from people who throw hissy fits all the time and expect that we’re supposed to decide America’s policy on that basis."

David Gray - "Fugitive"

It's slightly out of synch, but this is the official version from David Gray's channel. What I've heard so far of the new album is quite good.

Why Baucus' Bill is Dangerous

DDay passes on a great piece, "Everything You Need To Know About The Baucus Bill In Two Minutes":



Wendell Potter at Salon and Maggie Mahar in The Boston Globe have more on the Baucus bill.

DDay also has a piece on the ridiculous decision to give millions to abstinence-only sex ed programs that don't work (as Judy Berman notes, even Texas is moving away from them because they've been disastrous). Oh, and he also offers up my favorite title of the day: "If You Take Out The People Who Die, Americans Live Forever." Vile hack Betsy McCaughey continues to be influential!

Grayson Unleashed

Republicans are outraged over this presentation by Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL):



It's pointed, but it's pretty accurate. Digby has much more on this, including video of Republican representatives lying about death panels and Democrats attacking seniors (yes, after the GOP has tried to cut Medicare for years, and opposed its creation – they have no shame).

Grayson then went on CNN:



For the most part, the CNN crew just say they're shocked, shocked! The big issue for them is that Grayson was rude. Only Republican hack Alex Castellanos really tries to challenge Grayson's accuracy. Castellanos is full of it, of course, since the Republicans don't have any sort of comprehensive plan, just a few sound bites. That plan to shop for insurance across state lines? It won't save much money and could easily lead to increased consumer costs (via Digby).

DDay and John Amato have more on Grayson's CNN performance. I found Grayson's candor very refreshing. More like this, please.

Grayson did offer an "apology" of sorts (alas, the sound drifts out of synch):



Act Blue has set up a new page to donate to Grayson and show appreciation.