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Via Larisa Alexandrovna (”atLargely”), I learn that former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer thinks the only way we’ll be safer is if many of us die. Media Matters provides this clip of newly confirmed psychopath Scheuer’s remarks to known psychopath Glenn Beck on FOX News.

SCHEUER: It’s an absurd situation, again — only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

BECK, nodding: Which is why I was thinking this weekend that if I were him that would be the *last* thing I would do right now.

That no-good bastard Osama — by failing to attack us, we grow lax and weak.

It’s almost unpatriotic to say it, I guess, but I hope we all have a happy, safe, terrorist nuke free July 4th.

The clip to the right, from a June 16 Congressional hearing, is via Christy Hardin Smith (at “firedoglake”), who joins Howard Dean and others in advocating a “public option” health care reform, and points to the “firedoglake” Public Option Whip Count Tool to help do so.

It is no doubt true that we’ve been gamed within an inch of our lives by a political process that took “single payer” off the table from the start — a tactic now regretted by one of its primary enforcers, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT). From David Herszenhorn’s NYTimes article (Baucus Grabs Pacesetter Role on Health Bill) of last week:

[Baucus] conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.

Even without details available, Obama’s “public option” notion is no silver bullet, as Harvard’s David Himmelstein* argued on the Bill Moyers Journal in May:

…most of the cost savings [Obama]’s talking about are really illusory, I think. And my research group has done most of the research work on administrative costs in health care. And the administrative costs he’s talking about saving are a tiny fraction of the potential savings under single-payer. ‘Cause hospitals have to keep their bureaucracy, if you’re dealing with hundreds of different plans. And doctors have to keep the bureaucracy in our office. You don’t actually get the streamlining that you get from having one payer that has one set of rules and can pay lump sum budgets to hospitals. But more than that, we’re worried that the public plan actually becomes a dumping ground for the unprofitable patients.

…because private insurors use tricks like second-floor or otherwise hard to get to signup locations to weed out the elderly or infirm from their lists. That said, were “public option” to become the insurance of choice, it might become a de facto single payer system, one that was able to achieve the savings in the long run that it can’t in the short run. Then again, it might not get that far. For more justifiable skepticism about Obama’s “public option” idea as compared to a “single payer” system, read Lambert or Avedon Carol (also here) and follow their links.**

But a public option might at least be free of the kinds of abuses Ms. Robin Beaton (the woman in the video) suffered through — worse even than so-called “rescission” for a nondisclosed prior condition, in that Beaton faced delay of benefits for a condition discovered after coverage began — while facing malignant breast cancer:

In May 2008, I went to the dermatologist for acne. A word was written on my chart and interpreted incorrectly as meaning pre-cancerous. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with Invasive HER-2 Genetic Breast Cancer, a very aggressive form of breast cancer. I was told I needed a double mastectomy. When the surgeons scheduled my surgery I was pre-certified for my two days hospitalization. The Friday before the Monday I was scheduled to have my double mastectomy, Blue Cross red flagged my chart due to the dermatologist report. The dermatologist called Blue Cross directly to report that I only had acne and please not hold up my coming surgery. Blue cross called me to inform me that they were launching a 5 year medical investigation into my medical History and that this would take approximately 3 months.

Naturally, it got worse: Ms. Beaton testified that Blue Cross canceled her insurance; it was only thanks to the intervention of her Congressman that her coverage was reinstated — after having to wait for 4 months for surgery, while her tumor grew from 2-3cm to 7cm in size.  If her cancer returns and cannot be cured, it won’t be an exaggeration to say her health insurance killed her.  How many other Robin Beatons are there? How many couldn’t get their coverage back?

Whatever its shortcomings, it seems possible a “public option” could be a (relatively) abuse-free, predictable, transparent alternative to monstrous situations like Ms. Beaton’s — a safe harbor, not a dumping ground, for Americans who want reliable health coverage when major illness or injury strikes.

One reason for thinking so is that the health insurance business turns out to be massively concentrated; a recent Health Care for America Now! (HCAN) report shows that “[i]n the past 13 years, more than 400 corporate mergers have involved health insurers, and a small number of companies now dominate local markets but haven’t delivered on promises of increased efficiency. According to the American Medical Association, 94 percent of insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated, and insurers are thriving in the anti-competitive marketplace, raking in enormous profits and paying out huge CEO salaries.” (Via TPM).

One of the best ways of losing clients — if there were actual competition to lose them to — would be to subject them to the kind of thing Ms. Beaton experienced. While I’d very much prefer a single payer plan, it seems to me a “public option” could have real value, too, in preventing the kind of “pseudoinsurance” issue Ms. Beaton’s case illustrates.

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* Dr. Himmelstein is author of the study referred to in the prior post, showing that over 60 percent of bankruptcies in 2007 were attributable to medical expenses.
** OTHER persuasive single-payer over public option articles or resources: AZ League of Women Voters comparison; Robert Reich, though he prefers public option to the regional coop idea that has been floating around.

This is a cheap post — just an embedded video, a bit of transcription,  and a big “thank you” to eRobin who’s working hard on this issue.

Dean is great at turning the debate around to where it needs to go: a public option offers freedom of choice and builds the American economy. He also subscribes to the notion that single payer can evolve from the “public option,” rather than insisting on going directly to “Go” and collecting the savings that would result that way. Great quotes:

This is about the future of the American economy. We’re not just losing jobs to China, we’re losing jobs to Canada because their health care system is better for business than our health care system is. [...]

You can sign up for a public plan like Medicare or you can sign up for a private plan. You get the choice. You get the choice. And that’s … why the Republicans are in trouble here. They want to keep the choice for themselves, they want to make the choice for you, but we think it’s time now that the American people get to make the choice themselves. [...]

The only way we’re going to get to a single payer is if that’s what the American people want. … Look we had some health insurance companies leave our state when we forced all the insurance companies to issue health insurance regardless of the health of the individual and when we forced them to not charge more than 20% more for their sick patients than for their healthiest patients. And the bad ones left the state. And that was a good thing! We need to get some of these health insurance companies to behave themselves, and the best way to do it — the only way we’ve discovered in 40 years — is to offer an option. Let the American people choose. That’s all the Democrats are asking: let the American people choose. [...]

I understand why the insurance companies are against this, because they would have to clean up their act. But I don’t understand why the Republicans are against it. I thought the Republicans were interested in giving *more* choices to the American people, but apparently they’re not, and that is wrong, and if we have to pass this thing with 51 votes we should do it…

They may be on the sidelines, relatively speaking, but if worthwhile health care reform happens it will also be thanks to Howard Dean, and to all the activists and organizers like Robin who’ve been working so hard and so long towards this goal.

UPDATE: It occurs to me to mention a Prosperity Agenda item by Kevin Zeese that I posted on Facebook a few days ago, via which I found  Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study (.PDF), an article by David Himmelstein, Deborath Thorne, Elizabeth Warren,  and Steffie Woolhandler in the American Journal of Medicine.  From the results section of the abstract (emphases added):

Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.

As I wrote at the time,* the outlines of this outrage were already apparent to these authors back in 2005. But despite their research and outreach at the time, a Dickensian bankruptcy bill (sponsored by Joe Biden) was passed that made no allowance for these kinds of undeserved financial disasters.  Clearly the health care and financial security of average Americans generally take a back seat to the care and feeding of financial CEOs. I hope this time will be different; perhaps the bankruptcy bill was all part of Joe Biden’s elaborate ten-dimensional chess strategy to achieve single payer health care.

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* The titles, “Bankruptcy Bill Hackery” and “Bankruptcy Bill Hackery: The Sequel,” refer to a critic of the study, not to Himmelstein et al.

“Balkinization” is a blog developed by Yale law professor Jack Balkin that, during the Bush administration, became the go-to web site without equal for analysis of the constitutional and legal issues posed by that administration’s actions and lawlessness. It is the place I once used to visit within minutes of a speech like Obama’s last week.

By now I know not to bother; the site has become increasingly bogged down in arcana, minutiae, and fantasies ranging (of late) from Supreme Court rotation schemes to familiar hobbyhorses like a new Constitutional Convention to placing California in political receivership.  (This puzzling output is leavened, to be sure, with occasional promotions of various and sundry arcane and/or oddly overconfident books authored or edited by the blog’s contributors.) The one voice at the blog who has been carrying on in the “Torture Memos” tradition is Brian Tamanaha, but he can’t and shouldn’t have to carry this kind of burden by himself.

I’m nevertheless a bit shocked that none of the dozen or so “Balkinization” bloggers have even now said anything about Obama’s (or Cheney’s) speeches, days after a President and a former Vice President essentially agreed that (1) it would be unwise to investigate and prosecute known acts of torture committed by Americans and planned by high American officials, and (2) that Bush-era notions of military commissions and preventive detention would and should become the modus operandi of the United States.

While other factors have no doubt played a role in “Balkinization’s” shockingly rapid decline into irrelevance,* I have to wonder whether the elevation of former “Balkinization” co-blogger Marty Lederman to the post of Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel has had something to do with it as well.  Not to put too fine a point on it, have Balkin, Levinson, Griffin, Graber et al been co-opted by the appointment of their friend and colleague?

If so, I’d have to wonder why any of them got into this line of writing in the first place.  If there was ever a time when a well argued, well written blog post might actually make a difference, this would appear to be it — a generally liberalish president, one who allegedly welcomes debate, one who may even read blogs and use the words he finds there, one who appoints people to high positions who read their former colleague’s postings.  Assuming they’ve meant what they’ve said for the past six or seven years when it was President Bush, Balkin and his cohort of bloggers should be pushing President Obama hard on these issues.  Instead, they’re nearly silent.

For that matter, where is Lederman on Obama’s preventive detention and military commissions scheme?  Is he drafting it or opposing it?  There’s a pixel trail suggesting that once upon a time, in principle, Mr. Lederman opposed prosecuting only those you were sure of convicting, and locking up the rest indefinitely. At this point, I’d be relieved just to learn that he’s still alive, let alone what his opinions are on ‘prolonged detention.’ Personally, I should think he’d resign from the OLC, judging by this. But who knows; he was once quite vocal that no one at OLC should be prosecuted for their egregious opinions; perhaps he was looking ahead.

Truth to tell, though, it’s not just a legal blog or one of their former colleagues who seem to be missing in action on this and other fundamental constitutional and legal debates.  The legal profession as a whole has not covered itself in glory — though the yeoman work of a few on behalf of Guantanamo detainees and their rights is a counterexample, and a few other voices like Glenn Greenwald and Scott Horton also brighten the darkness.

Consider: one president commits lawless acts — from authorizing torture to authorizing warrantless electronic surveillance to (lest we forget) authorizing a war based on lies his administration carefully nurtured.  He abridges rights enshrined in common law and the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions — and in whatever natural law simple rats obey when they refuse to torture each other for a bit of kibble.  True, he becomes a figure of scorn, and the leader of the opposition party is elected in a landslide.  But that president appears to be determined to ignore the previous one’s lawlessness — indeed, seems to take positive pride in doing so.

And yet the tens of thousands of highly trained lawyers in this country do not rise up and object to that.  In Pakistan — Pakistan, for crying out loud –  lawyers literally took to the streets and battled police when General Pervez Musharraf sacked a Supreme Court justice there.  They literally impeached Musharraf and forced him out of office.

Here… nothing. Is the law in the United States a calling, a profession, or just a way for verbally clever people to network and make up new rules as they go along?

Never mind, don’t answer that.  I imagine Obama will come out with a Bright, Shiny Supreme Court nomination this week or maybe next one.  Most Americans will understandably focus on that, though there’s of course the slight possibility that nominee will voluntarily weigh in on Obama’s National Archives speech or Cheney’s Death Star one.

But just as with impeachment, a class of professionals ostensibly trained to notice and object when fundamental rights and fundamental avenues of redress are being frittered away are — by and large — saying nothing.  Although there are honorable exceptions to the rule, the rule is silence, and the rule is therefore consent.

It may be too early to conclude this, but it’s not too early to suspect it: the American legal profession has, as a class, forfeited its moral authority to protecting our civil liberties, our civil rights, and our human rights.  In this, they would merely join our media and political classes.  If so, Americans who care about these rights must look elsewhere for guidance.  I don’t know where that should be, but we should probably not look back.

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* Notably several of the writers recently shutting down comments –the very best way not to notice your commenters are less interested in what you’re writing than they used to be.  (Admittedly, it’s also the best way not to have to read yet another comment by Bart DePalma.)
UPDATE, 5/25: “Balkinization” co-blogger Sandy Levinson posts “Further notes on constitutional dictatorship,” touching on the issues above in his first point.

Word cloud of Obama’s speech, via Aziz
Poonawalla. Originally uploaded by abde,
used here by permission.

President Obama and former Vice Torturer Cheney gave much-anticipated speeches in Washington on Thursday. I tend to agree with critics who are a little weary of Obama’s trademark eloquent lip service to constitutional values and rule of law, while belittling those who actually insist on defending it as “finger pointers.” For me, Obama’s most telling lines were these:

…the recent debate has been obscured by two opposite and absolutist ends.

On one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: “anything goes.” Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants - provided that it is a President with whom they agree. Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right.

That first part sounds like a bit of payback for a reportedly testy meeting between Obama, high level staff, and leading civil liberties advocates in the White House on Wednesday, in which “one of the attendees warned the President he was letting George Bush’s policies become his own [...] Obama was not pleased by that characterization.” Thanks a bunch for using weasel words like “little allowance” and “almost never” while balancing off the ACLU, CCR, HRW, and HRF against a miscreant like Cheney — a tired “if they’re all mad at me, I’m doing something right” approach.  Yet it’s been groups like these — far more than Obama’s own party — who have been plinking away at U.S. government excesses these last 8 years; it’s an open question whether Obama would be president at all without their work.

Of course, Obama looks and sounds great compared to Cheney:

Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense, and political opponents as criminals. It’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors.

No, it’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration shrink from prosecuting the crimes of its predecessors for the sake of expediency.

Trouble is, Obama sees that as some kind of unseemly food fight:

I understand that it is no secret that there is a tendency in Washington to spend our time pointing fingers at one another. And our media culture feeds the impulses that lead to a good fight. Nothing will contribute more to that than an extended re-litigation of the last eight years. Already, we have seen how that kind of effort only leads those in Washington to different sides laying blame, and can distract us from focusing our time, our effort, and our politics on the challenges of the future.

With that, here are some reactions from other respected writers in the blogosphere and among activists.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous post, I took up some of Aziz Poonawalla’s defense of Obama’s decision to resist the release of photos showing past detainee abuse — principally the notion that the risks posed by the release were particularly great, or outweighed the benefits. As noted there, my original comment didn’t fully address the arguments Aziz made in his second post, “release the prisoner abuse photos - but not right now“;  I attempt to do so here. OK, just release them later When exactly? Aziz (emphasis his own):

These photos will need to be released someday, and there will indeed need to be a full accounting and formal congressional invetigation, backed by force of law, regarding American policy towards detainees during the Bush Administration. However, with the resurgent Taliban in Pakistan (incidentally increasing its nuclear stockpile), the utter helplessness of Mayor Karzai against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the increasing power of Al Shabab in Somalia, total transparency can wait.

It is not altogether unfair to reply to this, “That is, never.”  It is quite fair to reply, “that’s not what Obama said”:

…the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken. It’s therefore my belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.

End of story.  However generous Aziz’s timetable for the release of the photos may be, there’s no discernible timetable whatsoever in Obama’s remarks.  The photos, so Obama would have us believe, are at most Appendix C material in some dusty military history book thirty years from now.  He has no plans to release them.  Ever. But Obama’s critical argument — and one that Aziz repeatedly echoes — is that only a “small number of individuals” were involved.  Aziz formulates the distinction as criminality versus official, explict policy:

…we must draw a clean and clear distinction between what happened at Abu Ghraib and the official, explicitly sanctioned policy of waterboarding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The former were criminal actions that were not sanctioned by any military or government official, though of course the sheer sadistic brutality of the abuse gave rise to typical conspiracy theories.  [...] To attempt to force the issue now, by drawing a false equivalence between torture policy and criminal abuse, is to undermine the very real war going on, one in which ordinary muslims are still the primary victims, at the hands of those who do far worse than anything we have done.

Abu Ghraib was the fruit of the Bush/Cheney torture tree But that equivalence is not false.   The connections between what happened in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and the torture, humiliation, and abuse at Guantanamo are manifold, direct and undeniable.  Officers like Major General Geoffrey Miller and Captain Carolyn Wood who oversaw the torture and abuse at Guantanamo and Bagram, respectively, were in leadership roles for Iraqi detainee operations (including Abu Ghraib) before the abuses there took place, and relied on guidance from the highest levels of the Pentagon to authorize their deeds.  As early as 2004, Miller confirmed the use of abusive techniques including

hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food. The US commander in charge of military jails in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has confirmed that a battery of 50-odd special “coercive techniques” can be used against enemy detainees. The general, who previously ran the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, said his main role was to extract as much intelligence as possible.

As a summary (by Brian Knowlton of the New York Times) of a Senate Armed Services Report declassified in April puts it:

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, my friend Aziz Poonawalla published a couple of posts — “Obama is right not to release the prisoner abuse photos” and “release the prisoner abuse photos - but not right now” — on his “City of Brass” blog.  I disagreed and posted a somewhat lengthy comment to that effect at Aziz’s second post.

While I stand by that comment, on review it didn’t fully engage the arguments of the post it was attached to (”release later”) as well as it (perhaps) did those of Aziz’s initial post (”right not to release”).  Since Aziz has graciously asked me to make a post out of my comment and engage in a fuller dialogue about the issue, I’ll try to correct that here, in a couple of posts.

Right not to release the prisoner photos?
In his first article, Aziz echoes Obama’s statement to the press that the photos are “not particularly sensational” when he argues that

…If these photos had new information in them - for example, abuse of children, as alleged by Seymour Hersh, then in the interest of justice they should be released. But Obama says he has personally reviewed the photos, and I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says that they contain nothing significantly new.

Publishing these photos would ensure the next day they are plastered across newspapers throughout the middle east. I have argued in support of a ban on aerial bombardment in Pakistan and a disavowal of collateral damage as acceptable military doctrine on the grounds that these policies harm our cause by providing recruitment for our enemies and turning the muslim public against us; release of these photos would have much the same effect.

…and draws essentially the same puzzling conclusion Obama does; in Obama’s words, a release “would not add any additional benefit to our understanding” ; rather, “…the most direct consequence would be to further inflame anti-American opinion.”

Both Aziz and (more importantly, of course) President Obama make arguments here that seem narrowly crafted to the situation at hand, but carry disturbing implications for future decisions.  Based on Obama’s statements, are we truly to believe that Obama would not oppose the publication of photos that did contain “significantly new” elements, let alone “sensational” ones?  Viewed through the prism of Obama’s own description — again, “not particularly sensational,” “[no] additional benefit to our understanding” — these photos are among the revelations least likely to inflame anything .  As I argued in my comment:

By these arguments — trust the President, we elected him to make these decisions, it might harm the troops — you would or should have agreed that Abu Ghraib photos shouldn’t have been released. The combat situation was far more explosive then than it is now, plus the photos revealed something qualitatively new. Neither is the case now; I therefore strongly dispute whether American soldiers would be additionally disadvantaged by their release.

Obama’s arguments are far more important than the question of these particular photos, for they all but slam the door on his administration being forthcoming about any misdeeds on its own watch in anything resembling “real time.”*

Just as troublingly, Aziz’s support (and that of other committed Obama supporters) suggests that’s OK with elements of Obama’s base.  Now, Aziz is by no means a knee jerk Obama supporter — as his call for a ban on aerial bombardment shows.  (Nor — needless to say for those who’ve read him over the years — does he support torture or abuse in any way.)  Nevertheless, the trouble is that in this case, his position strongly resembles — indeed, is effectively indistinguishable from — those of died-in-the-wool Bush administration supporters when the first inklings of torture and abuse were reaching us in 2003 and 2004.

Taken at face value, Obama’s arguments (and Aziz’s echoing arguments) prove too much: on these bases, there will never be enough reason to release information of this kind.  As ACLU lawyers Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh argue:

…the fundamental problem with the government’s argument is that it lacks a limiting principle.

Any photograph of prisoner abuse, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, or U.S. military operations in Iraq could be used to “inflame anti-American opinion”; indeed, the same is true of any news article that discusses (for example) torture, Guantanamo, or the CIA’s secret prisons.

To give the government the power to suppress information because it might anger an unidentified set of people in an unspecified part of the world and ultimately endanger an ill-defined group of U.S. personnel would be to invest it with a virtually unlimited censorial power.

Finally, as long as we’re weighing imponderables, it’s important to recognize that revealing such information could have benefited U.S. stature abroad, even in the Muslim world — perhaps especially now, when it was allegedly risky to do so.  As I argued in my comment (link added):

A second point, however hard to believe, is that the US stature in the world is strengthened when we show we will not shrink from confronting our own excesses. I rather think Obama has hurt himself rather than helped himself with his upcoming Cairo speech. Muslim critics will be right to say “words are fine, but when push comes to shove, Obama lets his generals push him around — he won’t even keep his promises to his own supporters, let alone to us.”

That’s enough for one post.  In the next one, I’ll take up some of Aziz’s (and other writers’) arguments that they’re for releasing the photos later — just not right now.  Aziz makes the error (in my view) that there’s an important, bright line distinction to be made between the photographed, but allegedly completely unofficial abuses documented at Abu Ghraib and the still unseen, but “explicitly sanctioned” policies like waterboarding at Guantanamo.

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CROSSPOSTED to “City of Brass.”
* It’s particularly rich in this respect that Obama fretted, in his statement to the press, about the possible impact on whistleblowers should the photos be revealed. It’s not clear to me yet whether the particular photos involved here were provided by whistleblowers or simply confiscated from perpetrators.  But getting information out is presumably the point of what whistleblowers do; on the face of it, Obama’s last minute intervention in this case mainly proves that he supports suppressing embarrassing information or images, even when the arguments for doing so are weak.

From “Judgment at Nuremberg“:

“…the charge is that of conscious participation in a nationwide, government organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of every moral and legal principle known to all civilized nations. The Tribunal has carefully studied the record and found therein abundant evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt the charges against these defendants.”

I’m put in mind of this again today, after reading the Editors’ succinct summary of the Bush-Obama era verdict (so far) on torture:

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.

Perhaps the single most important property of a “right” is that you can’t let anyone — anyone — pretend to be able to choose who gets it and who does not. Or it isn’t a right. Yes, at least some of the people who were waterboarded (or abused and tortured in other ways) were in all likelihood people who’d committed crimes and had information. But many were not, and knew nothing.  You can’t tell which is which just by their looks or where “on the battlefield” you happened to pick them up.  The rights we accord to the worst of us and the rest of us protect all of us — or should: it’s happened here, too, not “just” at Guantanamo or Bagram or some conveniently invisible site in Eastern Ruthenia or Godforsakistan.

The words (written by Abby Mann) from the verdict in “Judgment at Nuremberg” remain uncannily apt:

“…this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary — even able and extraordinary — men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. [...]

There are those in our own country too who today speak of the “protection of country” — of “survival.” A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient — to look the other way.

Well, the answer to that is “survival as what?” A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!

Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.

It is therefore deeply regrettable to me that a President I worked to elect would stand in the way of revealing even a single fact about the misdeeds of the United States government, let alone stand in the way of an organized fact finding commission and eventual prosecution of the wrongdoers.

This really is not complicated. Laws were broken. Morality so basic even laboratory rats demonstrate it was broken. That those responsible were government officials, soldiers, and others who claim to “keep us safe” — but do the opposite, as their own unending bleats for secrecy reveal — is a reason for urgency in investigating and punishing the wrong-doers, not delay. That such action may prove controversial should be a point of pride to those in the right, not a source of concern or even a moment’s lost sleep.

Obama is the chief law enforcement official of the United States.

He has a duty.

He should do it.

I regret to say that I do not believe that he will. He must therefore be prodded, provoked, and opposed until and unless he does.

There’s obviously a lot else going on, but I’ll post this because it hardly requires further comment.  From Al Kamen’s “In the Loop” column in the Washington Post this morning:

…House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent out a “Dear Colleague” e-mail Tuesday asking for signatures “to the attached letter to President Obama regarding the Middle East peace process.”

The letter says the usual stuff, emphasizing that Washington “must be both a trusted mediator and a devoted friend to Israel” and noting: “Israel will be taking the greatest risks in any peace agreement.”

Curiously, when we opened the attachment, we noticed it was named “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”

Kamen’s title: “Now, that’s lobbying.”

You know, it’d be cheaper if we just set up a web site called, say, itsourcongress.com on an AIPAC server and populated it with 535 little avatars called “HoyerMD5,” “CantorVA7,” and so forth.  There’d be e-mail blasts, a “congressional record” blog, people could vote for their favorite avatar, the works.

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UPDATE, 5/15: Here’s the letter (posted over at itsourcongress.com); here’s what MJ Rosenberg and Yglesias have to say about it. Rosenberg: “not one word in the letter that calls on Israel to do anything, not one word about the settlements, the blockade of Gaza, the checkpoints that make it impossible for Palestinians to travel from one village to the next.”

Via Hullabaloo, here is some remarkable amateur footage of former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice being questioned (on Monday) by students in Stanford University’s Roble Hall dormitory.  The whole thing is worth watching — from between your fingers — as Rice puts on a surreal performance:

1ST QUESTIONER [3:30]: …even in World War II, as we faced Nazi Germany, probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced, even then…
RICE [3:37]: With all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.
1ST QUESTIONER [3:44]: They bombed our allies.
RICE [3:46]: Just a second. Three thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and in the Pentagon.
1ST QUESTIONER [3:52]: Five hundred thousand died in World War II, and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.
RICE [3:55] (waving finger no): …And we didn’t torture anybody here either.
1ST QUESTIONER [4:00]: We tortured them in Guantanamo Bay.
RICE [4:03]: No.  No, dear. You’re wrong. You’re wrong.  We did not. torture. anyone.  And Guantanamo Bay by the way was considered a model quote [makes air quotes] medium security prison by representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who went there to see it.  Did you know that?
1ST QUESTIONER [4:20]: Were they present for the interrogations?
RICE [4:22]: No - did you know that the Organization — just answer me — did you know that the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said Guantanamo was a *model* medium security prison?
1ST QUESTIONER [4:20]: No, but I feel that changes nothing.
RICE [4:33]: No - did you know that?
1ST QUESTIONER [4:35]: I did not know that but that…
RICE [4:36]: All right, no,, now wait a second if you didn’t know that, maybe before you make allegations about Guantanamo you should read.  All right?  Now, the ICRC also had access to Guantanamo, and they made no allegations about interrogations at Guantanamo.  What they did say is that they believed that indefinite detention — where people didn’t know whether they could come up for trial — which is why we tried through the military commissions system to let people come up for trial.  Those trials were stayed by whom?  Who kept us from holding the trials?
1ST QUESTIONER [5:17]: I can’t answer that question.
RICE [5:18]: Do your homework first.

Passing over Rice’s implication that defeating Hitler was both optional and easy, it turns out (via 2PoliticalJunkies) that the alleged OSCE “stamp of approval” came from a guy who tagged along with an OSCE delegation, but  — according to the OSCE — was “not employed or commissioned by the OSCE” and whose views should “not be taken as being made on behalf of the 55-nation body.”

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