That definitely seems to characterize Wyden’s quote in the NY Times article and in his aide’s further effort to restate his views: The idea is that there might be some additional interrogation techniques that “go beyond the Field Manual” and yet are also legal, humane, and noncoercive, so that administration-proposed additions might actually be an improvement.

Since Appendix M authorizes torture, it’s hard to imagine how authorizing additional techniques could do anything other than widen the scope for torture.

I accept the idea of improvement in principle — and the specific improvement I’d support is to remove the damned torture appendix and make the result binding on all U.S. personnel. But something tells me that’s not what Feinstein and Wyden, and the CIA people who are sending them all these signals about “flexibility” are talking about.

Thanks for letting me know; that’s due to the vile new “feature” of paginated comments at ObWi, which has forced on the blog by Typepad without a corresponding adjustment to permalinks or links in the ‘recent comments’ sidebar.

I should have tested the link (just as I should always preview comments when it’s not done for me; another “feature” of Typepad is that unclosed tags bleed formatting to subsequent comments, which has resulted at times at ObWi in long streams of all-italics or, even worse, all-link comments.

Wyden’s aide’s line is that the single standard for all U.S. personnel could actually improve on the current edition of the Army Field Manual. Technically, that’s true, and the test of sincerity would by their reaction to a proposal to drop Appendix M.

In fact, I don’t believe that Obama is sending any signals that he needs the flexibility Sens F and W are offering on this issue. Feinstein and Wyden are now the two highest-ranking members of the intelligence committee, and I think they’re getting those signals from the CIA and other friends of the national security state planted inside the vast Obama organization.

It took me a while to figure out your “incorporates” link; for others, I’ll point people to your particular comment about the AFM, which developed from the comment thread than from publius’s post. (Turns out a “/page2/” is needed, no matter what the permalink says.) As ever, I feel like I haven’t been paying attention after all when I read what you’ve learned; thanks for doing that.

I’m less surprised by Feinstein, who’s never met a principle she couldn’t ditch in the morning, than by Wyden, who I’d thought more highly of. I sometimes think there’s a “lawyer’s disease,” in which bright, legally trained people tend to want to discover and make more fine distinctions allowing “some” bad things after all — when they should really be trying to make fewer of them.

The lack of awareness about post-office impeachment is a crying shame. And though we can do our best to educate (some “no time limit on impeachment” posters/stickers pointing to a website might come in handy), the people with the real platform have failed the citizenry.

I’m disgusted by the amount of sellout “pragmatism” among Democrats generally. I’m not talking about open-mindedness about what the new administration might do, given that they’re still six weeks away from the chance to do anything. I’m talking about things like Feinstein and Wyden backtracking on CIA torture (see Greenwald).

Abandoning a stance that all U.S. personnel should be bound by the Army Field Manual is particularly upsetting given that that’s already a compromised position: the new, revised version of the AFM has an appendix that incorporates the interrogation approach that’s formed the framework for U.S. “touchless” torture for decades.