newsrackblog.com

1. “Predator drones“:

As digby writes, “All presidents should probably make it a rule not to yuk it up over WMD and air attacks. It’s unnecessary.”

2. “Tase him!”

(also via digby)

After all, the kid ran on to a baseball field, which jeopardized… something or other. Anyway, TASE HIM!

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EDIT, 5/6: WMD link added.
UPDATE, 5/10: Credit where credit is due — the Washington Post editorial page weighs in against what happened in Philadelphia (”Police and Tasers“): “…[T]he Philadelphia police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, who reviewed video of the incident, said his officer had acted within department guidelines. That’s the problem. While Tasers have been useful in protecting officers from dangerous and out-of-control suspects, in too many police agencies the policy on using them is so loosely defined that officers can fire the weapons more or less when they feel like it.”

Last Sunday, conservative and former Bush speechwriter David Frum had the temerity to criticize Republican strategy in the wake of the health care and insurance reforms passed on Sunday.

Last Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal lashed out at him, claiming he “now makes his living as the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role.”

Last Wednesday, David Frum was forced out of his position at the American Enterprise Institute.  Like others, I had a good time with the news, suggesting a paragraph on the AEI “About Us” page be rewritten as

“The Institute’s community of scholars is committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. AEI pursues these unchanging ideals through independent thinking, open debate, reasoned argument, and by firing anyone who disagrees with us.”

Scott Horton, in What Frum’s Firing Tells Us About Politics Today, writes that event

…tells us a good deal about AEI and the current dynamics within the Republican camp. In today’s AEI, policy experts aren’t there to do analysis and give advice—they’re there to serve as made-to-order propagandists. Differing views are not wanted.

And that’s true.  But what’s also interesting is how little Frum’s views differed from a Republican Party’s of not so terribly long ago, and how embarrassing they could and should have been for Sunday’s victors, not its vanquished.  For the centerpiece of what Frum wrote was this (emphasis added):

“This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.  Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big.“

And it’s true — even Nancy Pelosi and liberal columnist E. J. Dionne tout the Republican antecedents of the current legislation, identifying its ancestors in Heritage Foundation proposals of the early 1990s, the 1996 Dole campaign, and of course (however much he now hates to admit it) Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care bill of 2006.  And they celebrate that.

—

Imagine two spotlights illuminating a stage, one with blue light, one with red; there’s some overlap, and a small bluish dog squats there, producing small bluish dog output.  To its right, a tethered Doberman gnaws on a couple of bloody bones, with older ones gnawed clean and abandoned stage left.  When the Doberman’s occasional snarls frighten the little blue dog, it invariably wags its tale and briefly assumes a submissive posture.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday evening I listened to a panel sponsored by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) titled “Understanding U.S. Torture and Executive Accountability,” and hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The panelists
Shahid Buttar, BORDC; Jesselyn Radack, former
Department of Justice ethics attorney; Matthew
Alexander, former U.S Army interrogator.
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew

I knew the panelists — Shahid Buttar, Matthew Alexander, and Jesselyn Radack — would be interesting, having read about them or read their own writing as I’ve followed these issues.  But what also interested me was one short sentence at the end of the e-mail:“The speakers will present concrete action opportunities to promote torture accountability, with a discussion to follow.”

Here is what they said.

“File bar complaints” - Jesselyn Radack
Jesselyn Radack, a former Department of Justice ethics attorney, blew the whistle on Department of Justice efforts to conceal her objections and counsel concerning the improper use of evidence gained in interrogations of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh — and has paid for it with a long legal battle and placement on the no-fly list.*

Scott Horton’s recent Harper’s Magazine interview with her,  Justice’s Vendetta Against a Whistleblower: Six Questions for Jesselyn Radack, is a useful starting point for catching up with the story. As Radack points out there, her experience couldn’t be a starker contrast with that of Yoo and Bybee’s clean getaway from accountability for real wrongdoing:“I am now the only Justice Department attorney that OPR referred for bar disciplinary action stemming from advice I gave in a terrorism case–and my advice was to permit an American terrorism suspect to have counsel.”

Noting that “you don’t have to be a lawyer to file a bar complaint,” Ms. Radack hoped that would happen to John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and other lawyers implicated in authorizing torture. She clarified a question I had by saying you don’t have to live in the state where, say, John Yoo is admitted to the bar (Pennsylvania, as it happens), to lodge a complaint with that state bar association.

“Practice tolerance” - Matthew Alexander
Matthew Alexander, a former Army interrogator, has written a number of articles and editorials over the past few years rebutting claims that torture is necessary or effective.  One of the latest ones I’m aware of is a devastating review in Slate of former Bush staffer and current torture apologist Marc Thiessen’s ironically titled book “Courting Disaster.”  One of the first was a 2008 op-ed for the Washington Post, “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.”**
Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
at Camp No near the base where they’re helplessly screaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars now mock all human right,
O’er the TV we watched were so emptily streaming
And the talk shows that scare, the thugs who don’t care
gave proof of our fright and our morals so bare
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er a land no longer free and the home of the knave?

From Waterboarding For Dummies (Mark Benjamin, Salon.com, 3/9/2010):

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus. [...]

The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown.

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NOTE, 03/15, at my father’s suggestion: I do intend to disturb and discomfort readers with this post, but I do not intend to impugn that vast majority of soldiers, veterans, and others who’ve served this country with honor. Nevertheless, it is as a human being, a citizen, and in fact a patriot that I believe the practice and acceptance of torture — past or present — raises unavoidable questions about what our country now stands for, and therefore what its symbols now stand for. It does not detract from honorable service at all — rather the opposite — to say that this country was better than what some of its leaders have made of it, and that I hope it will be again someday.

Click the image to
place an order for
this book with
Powell’s Books.

This post announces an ambitious and possibly quixotic effort — the attempt of a legal layperson like myself to launch and carry on a discussion about Benjamin Wittes’ “Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror,” published in 2008.

Luckily, I’ll be joined in this discussion by my friend “The Talking Dog,” whose legal acumen and training — as well as self-deprecating wit and engaging writing — are always in evidence at his blog of the same name.  “TD’s” interviews of lawyers, policy makers, human rights leaders (most recently with NYU’s Karen Greenberg), and even Guantanamo detainees have been genuine journalism, and are among the finest things the American blogosphere has produced.

Our plan is to take the book chapter by chapter, at no precise schedule other than to take the chapters in sequence.  We hope readers will check Wittes’ book out from the library, borrow it from a friend, or buy a copy for themselves, so they can read along with us and join the discussions we hope for.

We’ve tentatively decided to divide the chapters up as follows:

Announcements - here at newsrackblog and the talking dog
Introduction - discussions at both newsrackblog and the talking dog
Chapter 1.  The Law of September 10 - discussion here at newsrackblog
Chapter 2.  The Administration’s Response - discussion at talking dog
Chapter 3.  The Real Guantanamo - discussion at the talking dog
Chapter 4.  The Necessity and Impossibility of Judicial Review - discussion here at newsrackblog
Chapter 5.  The Case for Congress - discussion here at newsrackblog
Chapter 6.  The Twin Problems of Detention and Trial - discussion at the talking dog
Chapter 7.  An Honest Interrogation Law - discussion at the talking dog
Chapter 8.  Surveillance Law for a New Century - discussion here at newsrackblog
Conclusion - discussions both at newsrackblog and the talking dog

To leave some time for readers to join in (and for me, at least, to gather my thoughts), our first posts about Wittes’ introduction will be sometime around the middle of next week.  At this blog, this post will serve as one “home page” for the overall effort, and the outline above will link to each post as it is written.  We’ll also try to provide “prior chapter” and “next chapter” and other useful navigational links within each post, time permitting.

===

Why is this worth doing?  I’m tempted to simply answer: what could be more important?  Whether it’s always clear or not, our lives and our rights are both at risk.  We have to evaluate those risks, and decide what to do about them.

For my part, though, this is also partly just an attempt to become more “fluent” in the legal underpinnings of the debates about the habeas corpus and other human rights of detainees, the costs and benefits of the expansion of executive powers,  and the conduct of international relations and military force in this so-called “long war” of ours.

There are also more immediate reasons to do so: Wittes and his book have proved quite influential, perhaps especially of late.  On its publication, the book merited extended discussion at numerous legal blogs, and gained respectful and often warm reviews in the popular media and the academic press.

Read the rest of this entry »

An occasional review of further developments in stuff I’ve written about before.

Practice to deceive, 04/22/08 — This was a post about how several key figures like John Yoo, Douglas Feith, David Addington, and William Haynes II used outright deceit to advance the torture policies they favored. I argued that

“In each case, the deception was needed in order to grease the skids for an immoral and criminal policy, by either sidestepping persons or offices with inconvenient integrity, or by pretending to agree with them even as the diametrically opposite decision was taken. In each case above the deception itself answers the question, “was the torture policy advocate acting in good faith?”

That, in turn, arguably speaks to a so-called “consciousness of guilt“, which can be proven by showing such deceptions and which is admissible circumstantial evidence in criminal trials.

The question may well be on Attorney General Eric Holder’s mind.  A number of reports over the weekend have suggested that Holder is seriously considering a special prosecutor, at least of those actors who overstepped even the loose legal limits imposed by the flawed Yoo/Bybee and Bradbury OLC memoranda.  The memo writers themselves shouldn’t rest easy quite yet, either.  At the “Daily Beast,” human rights legal expert Scott Horton writes,

As he read through the latter two documents, my sources said, Holder came to realize the focal and instrumental role that Department of Justice lawyers had played in constructing the torture regime and in pushing it through when career lawyers raised objection. He also took note of how the entire process was orchestrated from within the Bush White House—so that more-senior lawyers in Justice, sometimes even the attorney general, did not know what was being done. And he noted the fact that the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a party, requires that a criminal inquiry be undertaken whenever credible allegations of torture are presented.

(See also Marcy Wheeler’s comments here.)

It’s by no means clear (to put it mildly) that Holder will call for a special prosecutor; while he values the independence of the Justice Department, it can’t hurt to remind him you have his back if he bucks the likes of the West Wing Weasels (TM, but please use widely) David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel on this.  Please avail yourselves of the opportunity to do so using the ACLU button to the right or the Holder “Yes We Can” button on the left.  You can also visit the “AfterDowningStreet” site linked by the orange “Torture is a war crime! Prosecute” button at the upper right; David Swanson is currently asking people to call or write the Justice Department at 202-514-2001 or AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.

Weymouth: What did I know and when did I know it?, 07/09/09 — Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander had a lengthy post-mortem of the “pay to play” Post ’salon’ proposal in the Sunday, July 12 edition. Calling it an “ethical lapse of monumental proportions,”, Alexander found that early scapegoat and Post business exec Charles Pelton had in fact tried to sound out “questions about ethics [...] with both [CEO K. Weymouth and executive editor Marcus Brauchli] months ago.” For their part, the two seem to have believed that their underlings’ silence at a June 24 meeting signalled consent, when of course it merely signaled wanting to stay employed:

Several [newsroom employees] now say they didn’t speak up because they assumed top managers would eventually ensure that traditional ethics boundaries would not be breached. [...] Neither Weymouth nor Brauchli can recall anyone raising concerns, although both say they wish someone had. [...] In an interview, Brauchli said it was his responsibility to vet the concept and that it is “understandable” that no news managers at the meeting raised a caution. “When the publisher and the editor both appear to have signed off on an idea, I think it is perhaps true that a certain complacency sets in,” he said. For that reason, lower-level managers might be less inclined “to stand up and say: ‘Whoa, this is a bad idea.’ ”

Ya think? Alexander draws on interviews with Weymouth and Brauchli for the piece. Meanwhile, in “Veteran editors offer advice to the Post,” Northwestern media ethics professor Loren Ghiglione displays a keen eye for the main chance: “The board has audit, compensation and finance committees. Why not one focused on the company’s values and ethics, headed by an ethics prof?” Oh hell, why not.

On the irrelevance of “Balkinization in particular and the legal profession in general, 05/25/09 — In an irritated post I decried the growing irrelevance of the legal blog ‘Balkinization’ to ongoing, urgent issues such as torture, the abrogation of habeas corpus at Guantanamo and elsewhere, and other abuses of executive power — all matters that the blog had once been at the forefront of covering.

Of late, though, there have been a number of posts on precisely these subjects, including ones by Jack Balkin, (”The Inspector General’s Report and The Horse that is Already Out of the Barn Door“, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated“)  Sandy Levinson (”A further disappointment from the Obama Administration“, and newcomer Deborah Pearlstein (”Post-Acquittal Detention“).

While I don’t agree with all of what they have to say, I agree with a lot of it.  Regardless, it’s all worth reading — and it’s rarely wise to generalize too much along the lines of “the dog that didn’t bark” with blogs or the busy people who are taking time out to write them.  I shall meditate on my impatience.

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NOTES: links to my posts are highlighted in gray and dated. Washington Post item via Yglesias.

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.