Dancing to Republicans' Tune on Security

Is it legal for a journalist to disclose classified information to the public? That's something of an open question, although legal opinion seems to lean heavily toward "no." After all, if you could prosecute reporters for detailing classified info, all the executive branch would need to do to censor any news story would be to direct the appropriate agency to smack that info with the "TOP SECRET" stamp. So the notion that journalists could be jailed for publishing leaked information is a very dangerous one and one that courts have not treated well.

From a historical standpoint,  publishing classified info as journalism is completely legal and any finding that said otherwise would upset years of legal opinion.

Which brings us to this:

The Guardian: The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

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Graham and McCain Exploit Boston Tragedy

After the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in connection with the Boston bomb attacks, the nation's top unrepentant neocons --  John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- are currently engaged in a high-profile demonstration of grandstanding. The purpose of this posturing seems to be to showcase how Very Important and Serious they are, why you should have them on Meet the Press, and why you should vote for Graham instead of whatever random Tea Party nutjob the far right base will try to primary him with.

Graham and McCain would very much like Tsarnaev to be charged as an enemy combatant. Slate's Emily Bazelon spells out exactly why this is all pretense -- Graham knows this can't happen because "he helped write the 2009 law [pdf] that says Tsarnaev may not be tried as an enemy combatant and thus points away from holding him as one. But that’s not stopping Graham and the others from trying to score terror points—and, of course, trying to make the president appear weak. This isn’t about actually fighting terrorists. It’s about running for election."

So far, the rightwing blogosphere is following along like a brainless puppy. Mostly because they too are more interested in embarrassing Obama than rights or justice. After all, it was just weeks ago that half of them where defending the right of suspects like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to due process in the case of drone attacks on American citizens. But that was because the Obama administration held the opposite view, not because they gave a damn. Now that an American citizen is not in the sights of a drone hitman, they're all wondering why anyone would be at all concerned about due process for terrorists. As always, consistency is not their strong point.

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Mitt's Deflated Foreign Policy

Hey look, it's giant metaphor for Mitt Romney's foreign policy positions ahead of tonight's presidential debate:

An airship promoting Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Florida drew attention for other reasons Sunday when it was forced to make an emergency landing just north of Miami.

According to WSVN-TV, the blimp, bearing the banner, “America Needs Romney,” was caught in high winds on its way back to a local airport, forcing it to the ground near a residential area in Davie, Florida.

“It was getting lower and lower,” one resident said. “It was totally going down, it was just losing altitude. The wind was just taking it and taking it.”

Team Romney took a double-whammy this weekend, as the Obama administration announced a major diplomatic breakthrough with Iran and the Republican version of the Benghazi attack collapsed under the weight of reality. Their foreign policy blimp went crashing down. Team Romney is furiously trying to spin good news into bad, but I seriously doubt anyone other than the base will bite. As is so often the case, good news for America is bad news for the GOP -- which means this weekend was a disaster for them.

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Why Romney Picked Ryan -- A Dumb Guy Told Him To

I suppose I have to write the obligatory Paul Ryan post. The good news about that is that there's a lot to talk about with Ryan. The bad news is that everyone's saying it. The worse news is that a lot of pundits are trying to come up with new, clever things to say about Ryan and down that road lies idiocy. I was resigned to repeating (and hopefully clarifying) some of the unstupid things pundits were saying -- a not very fun post to start the week.

And then I saw this:

Politico:

Once again, Bill Kristol gets his way — and once again, watch out.

For two consecutive presidential cycles now, the founding editor of the Weekly Standard has successfully led the conservative media drumbeat for a bold vice presidential pick: In 2008, he fervently supported and promoted Sarah Palin for months before the country even knew her name. In 2012, he urged Mitt Romney to “go for the gold” with Paul Ryan.

For a generation, stretching back to the 1980s, Kristol has used his influence to goad Republicans to be bolder and more ambitious — and riskier, for themselves, the Republican Party, and the nation—in their decisions. This extends beyond political calculation to policy. In 2003, Kristol was at the forefront of the lobbying effort for the Iraq war, which — however history judges it — cost far more in blood and treasure than he and his fellow neoconservatives had anticipated.

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Democrats' Nonexistent Security Message

I wrote Monday that Democrats suck at messaging. My evidence was a poll showing that 88% of respondents believed that President Obama had raised their taxes, when in truth taxes had been cut for 95% of Americans. My conclusion; Democrats never talk about those tax cuts.

How could so many people be so wrong? Because no one ever tells them otherwise. In a similar situation in the Bush White House, the answer to almost every question would've begun, "As you know, we cut taxes for 95% of Americans..." It wouldn't make any difference what the question was. The administration that began every other sentence with "On 9/11..." would never have allowed 88% of Americans to believe they didn't get a tax cut.

I'm not sure what it is about Democrats -- it's like they refuse to educate. Maybe they think it's beneath them or something. So Republicans go out and fill the void by telling outrageous lies, leaving Democrats wasting their time on crap like "death panels" and arguments over whether or not Obama's a citizen. By failing -- or refusing -- to get out in front and trumpet their achievements, Democrats wind up cleaning up the trivial crap Republicans drop all over our national dialogue and no one is the better for it.





The reason I bring all of this back up again is that Greg Sargent has found yet another area where Democrats suck at explaining how good they are -- terrorism.

...Republicans are framing the debate on these issues, and more and more Congressional Dems are breaking with the White House on them. In other words, the Dems are following the GOP script.

Worse, this is happening even as the White House is, in fact, mounting a major effort to engage the GOP on these issues. Obama counter-terror chief John Brennan and Joe Biden have aggressively engaged Dick Cheney and other Republicans in recent days, arguing that Obama’s counter-terror policies are succeeding and are superior to GOP policies.

But on this message, the White House has no meaningful support from Congressional Dems to speak of, and it’s waging this fight virtually alone.

What's especially aggravating is that Republicans are awful on security. 9/11 happened on Bush's watch and Iraq, torture, Gitmo, and warrantless wiretapping have done absolutely nothing to make us any safer. But somehow, the face of this record of failure -- Dick Cheney -- has become a thorn in the White House's side. Democrats, cowed by Republicans empty "tough talk," have given up on a fight the Obama administration is actually winning.

At the risk of being accused of cutting and pasting a lot of this post, here's Spencer Ackerman on the Obama administration's record on national security and terrorism:

So over the past several weeks the Obama administration has successfully interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab without torturing him — something Dick Cheney simply can’t contemplate — and will try him in a federal court, where he’s sure to be convicted. Then it continued to launch missile strikes in Yemen (not that that’s such a good thing!) on Abdulmutallab’s overlords in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that caused a former Bushie to whine that there was too much terrorist-killing and not enough terrorist-capturing. So then the administration worked with Pakistan to capture the deputy commander of the Taliban and that was just for starters. Obama’s approval rating on national security has increased since Abdulmutallab.

Yet congressional Democrats are running scared from any discussion of national security. It's maddening. All Republicans have are empty-headed talking points and failed policies. They're as wrong on terrorism as they have been on the economy. In fact, Barack Obama won big after taking on those very hollow talking points and policies -- yet Democrats are acting as if the Republicans won in 2008.

Idiocy.

Lunacy.

[Insert especially foul curse word here]

No wonder Democrats are in trouble in this cycle -- they refuse to defend themselves. They're so afraid of losing that they won't fight any fight at all -- even when it's a gimme. Which, in turn makes every fight a gimme... For the GOP, anyway.

"The Republican leadership even sent House GOPers back to their districts this week with a very specific set of talking points, sent over by a source, telling them precisely what to say to constituents about [national security and terrorism]," Sargent writes. "There’s no sign whatsoever that Congressional Dems were given anything similar, or even that Dem leaders have spent any time developing a strategy of their own. Are you hearing any concerted pushback, or any message at all, on these issues from Dems?"

No, I haven't. Democrats have conceded ground there was absolutely no reason to concede. Just as they've conceded taxes, healthcare, and are in the process of conceding the economy. If Democrats even come close to losing either chamber in November, it's because they didn't care enough about their ideas to fight for them.

Which kind of makes you wonder why the hell they thought they should run for office in the first place.

-Wisco


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The Media Double Standard

Back during the '08 presidential campaign, my take was that then-President Bush had set the bar so low that anyone who took the White House and managed not to put out the sun would be considered a great success. It was sort of tongue-in-cheek, but also somewhat serious. After all, the media cut Bush a lot of slack, reporting obvious crimes as "controversies" and treating the completely unnecessary invasion of Iraq with zero skepticism and 100% orgasmic glee. You'd think that a media so fawning toward the previous president would measure the current one by the same yardstick.

But this hasn't been the case. All the excitement that had previously been reserved for the bombing of innocent people for no good reason has now been applied to Obama's approval ratings and a special election in Massachusetts that didn't go the way the pressident's party would've liked. A mere one year in, cable news has all but declared the Obama presidency a failure.

To be fair, I would've liked to see the previous president get the level of scrutiny the current one receives. CNN, for example, has a special project tracking stimulus money. OK, good. But the Bush administration literally shipped pallet loads of money -- 363 tons of bills, totaling $12 billion -- into Iraq, where $8.8 billion of it just disappeared.





"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman at the time. Other wastes and abuses were spending on contractors who delivered shoddy construction work, fed soldiers rotten food, exposed military personnel to toxic fumes from open burn pits, and electrocuted soldiers in their showers. "They were handing out tons of cash from the back of pick up truck," Rep. Peter Welch said. Given all this, was there a special project to track money in Iraq?

No.

At this point, anyone still complaining about the "liberal media" is just ignoring the obvious. Or they're crazy or dumb or all of the above. We've got President Obama under a microscope, but Bush was viewed through the wrong end of a binoculars. Here's a crazy idea, how about we put every president under that microscope?

To give you an idea of just how bad things got under the Bush administration and just how much the media missed, we turn to Justin Elliot at Talking Points Memo and a story that is, sadly, no surprise at all:

When the Pentagon's internal think tank decided in 2004 it needed a better understanding of Al Qaeda, it turned to an unlikely source: the terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, who was known as the chief purveyor of the discredited idea that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11 and many other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda.

Mylroie was paid roughly $75,000 to produce a 300-page study, "The History of Al Qaida," for the Defense Department think tank, known as the Office of Net Assessment, a DOD spokesman tells us. The study, which is dated September 2005, was posted on an intelligence blog last month.

It documents the development of Al Qaeda and spends many pages dancing around the theory that has defined Mylroie's career -- that key Qaeda leaders acted at the behest of the Iraqi regime. She also argues that group-think among U.S. analysts has obscured the true nature of the terrorist group.

Also not surprisingly, Mylroie is widely considered a "crackpot" by the intelligence community. "I think that she has zero credibility on these issues," says terrorism expert Peter Bergen. When we learned that Sarah Palin couldn't get it out of her head that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, this was proof of what a ridiculous boob she is. Yet here's someone working for the Pentagon who makes the same mistake in intelligence reports.

It might be easy to blame this on the Pentagon themselves, but the evidence shows that Mylroie was hired at the administration's behest:

Mylroie's allies in the Bush Administration included Iraq hawks Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others. "The elaborate conspiracy theories she had propounded--dismissed as bizarre and implausible by the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities--would have enormous influence within the administration," reported David Corn and Michael Isikoff in their book Hubris.

That's right, someone wrote a book that showed the Bush administration relying on a lunatic to make the case for invading Iraq. Remember what a big deal that was?

Yeah, that's because it wasn't. Gossipy books about what a lightweight Sarah Palin is and how the Edwards fought on the campaign trail -- now that's news.

I really can't complain that Obama's getting the scrutiny he's getting. But I'd hope that they'd do the same to the next president and the next. George W. Bush wouldn't have gotten away with half the stuff he did if the media didn't let him. Stick everyone under that microscope and we'd all be better off.

But somehow I doubt that'll happen. Despite all the Republican whining about a "liberal media," recent history shows that it's not. What we've got is a TV-driven culture and a media obsessed with ratings. War is good for ratings, so the "war president" gets cut some slack. Which, of course, gives presidents an incentive to go to war.

I don't see that changing any time soon.

-Wisco


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The Mad Neocon

If you ask Dick Cheney, changes in counter-terrorism tactics by the Obama administration mean we're all going to die in a big terrorist attack. And that's what CNN's John King did this weekend; ask Dick Cheney. As always, he was less than convincing. I don't think Dick's capable of excitement and this makes him a pretty bad liar -- his warning of the inevitable destruction of the world's first modern democracy was delivered in the same tone of voice he might use to talk about a flat tire. The destruction of America's unfortunate, of course, but that's just the way things are. No use getting all riled up about it.

Maybe Dick's like Cassandra, who was able to predict the future, but cursed in that no one would believe her. Why knock yourself out with histrionics if no one's going to buy it?

Another possibility is that Dick's not especially worked up over our oncoming doom because he knows it's a bunch of crap. That'd put him in the same boat as most of us, who also aren't extremely concerned about Cheney's doomsaying either. Other than the wingnut right who'll believe anything, we're all pretty sure that Dick's a BS dispenser and we don't lose a lot of sleep over his warnings.

There's a third possibility; that Dick believes what he says because he's a dangerous lunatic prone to paranoia. Cheney's not especially animated at the thought of another 9/11 because he's used to living in a world where disaster is always right around the corner. His lack of excitement doesn't indicate a lack of earnestness, it's just the consequence of living in constant fear.





After all, this is the man who wouldn't let Google Earth display his residence. If you're a paranoiac, the knowledge that satellites really are looking down and watching you must be unbearable. His obsession with secrecy was taken to absurd lengths, when he argued that the Office of the Vice President was actually a fourth branch of government.

Dick Cheney may have said and done crazy things as VP because Dick Cheney's crazy. Take his Vice Presidential Hit Squad. The White House had an "executive assassination ring" that answered to Cheney's office. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving," says investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "That’s been going on, in the name of all of us." It's this sort of that Cheney argues is the only thing standing between us and destruction. He must believe it -- otherwise, why would this hit squad have existed?

"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth ... they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," Cheney told King in the interview.

It's an unfortunate coincidence for Dick that the things he thought had to be done to keep us all safe were revealed that same weekend. In an op-ed for the New York Times, journalist Mark Danner revealed details of a 2006 Red Cross investigation of US treatment of detainees. Not surprisingly, the methods used by US personnel indicate a desperation born of paranoia. These are the sorts of things you'd do if you really did believe the world was going to end tomorrow.

A few accounts from the detainees themselves tell us all we need to know:

– “I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

– “Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

– “A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall..."

Unfortunately for the mental health of the nation, there's no shortage of cowardly "patriots" who are willing to argue that waterboarding isn't torture. Let's see them defend these practices; in what lunatic world is physical beating not torture?

"What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact," writes Danner. "We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away."

Torture didn't make us safer, it just proved the terrorist propaganda right. We were evil and unjust.

And how does this keep you safe? I'd point out that all of these people were suspects. None of them had been convicted of a crime. If the US government can grab you off the street, stick you in prison, and torture you without having to prove you did anything at all, how safe are you from the government? 3,000 people out of a population of some 300,000,000 died on 9/11 -- that's one in every 100,000 people. One million are on the terrorist watch list -- that's one in every 300 people. Which set of odds do you like better?

Maybe the time has come to admit the truth; there's a good chance that Dick Cheney -- who many believe was the real power in the Bush White House -- is pretty much completely insane. Keep that in mind the next time some media type seeks out his opinion.

-Wisco


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Planet America

Things are looking good for former Bush administration officials. You wouldn't think this would be the case, looking at some of the news stories that have come out after they'd packed up their stuff and left the White House. But that'd be because you think rationally; that doesn't fly in DC anymore. Post-Bush, the nation's capital is still dominated by denial.

Sure, Bush was an abuser of the law and -- under the paranoiac Dick Cheney's guidance -- played a little fast and loose with legalities. But that doesn't mean he actually broke the law and, since we don't know for sure, we should probably forget the whole thing. When it comes to anti-Constitutional behavior, human rights abuses, and war crimes, it's probably best to ignore things -- no one wants to open up that whole can of worms. We used to say that no one was above the law, now we worry that upholding the law might be inconvenient or embarrassing. As it is now, some people are above the law -- but only if those people are members of the Bush administration.

Outside the US, people don't get this. They insist on bringing this stuff up over and over. Out in the big, wide world, they just don't get that the Bush administration gets a pass for anything and everything, because to do otherwise would be bad politics. Forgive and forget. Look forward, not backward. Let's move on. Some people don't get the simplicity of solving a problem by pretending it never happened.

Take David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University. As a former UN prosecutor, Crane is a citizen of that big, wide world and doesn't see things through the lens of political expediency and an insular American media. For Crane, the United States is not a separate planet in its own orbit and things that happen in one nation inform and set precedent for things that could -- and sometimes should -- happen in other nations.

In Crane's world -- which, admittedly, is that part of the world that isn't the US -- a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir means that other leaders could be held accountable for their crimes.

Crane says that the Bashir warrant "may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture." Turns out that when something's a war crime for one leader, it's a war crime for all leaders.

Crazy, huh?





But has the US actually tortured? We've called what we did "enhanced interrogation techniques." So it can't be torture, because we didn't call it that. Of course, the fact that we've "enhanced interrogation techniqued" people to death kind of puts a ding in that argument.

Griper News:

"[Prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake," reads the [Church report]. "Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of 'compliance blows' which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma."

When you've got people dying because of your interrogation techniques, "enhanced" is an understatement. I'd also point out that interrogations are approached from a position of ignorance -- there are things you want to know, which is the entire purpose of the interrogation, and this means there are things you don't know. Among those things, you might reasonably include whether or not the subject knows anything more than you do and whether or not they're actually a terrorist. While many would argue that a terrorist deserves anything they get, not many would argue that we should punish a crime with torture or that we should punish a prisoner for a crime we don't know they committed. The assumption of guilt isn't justice.

But that's all logic and logic is a tool of that big, wide world. It's been banished from the separate planet that is the United States. Our government can do anything to anyone, because that's how they've kept us safe. Logic would dictate that if your government can do anything to anyone, then it can do anything to you, and this doesn't exactly make you safe from your government. Luckily for Bush and Cheney, logic doesn't fly here.

If it did, they might worry about a report on a UN probe of "secret" CIA prisons. I put "secret" in quotes because they're the worst-kept secret the US has -- everyone knows about them.

Of the prisons, Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said, "We call on all governments to cooperate, not just in clarifying the facts, but in ensuring that such secret detention centres will no longer be used in the future." His colleague Martin Scheinin, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, went further, calling them "one of the most horrendous practices" that the Bush administration instituted after 9/11.

I'm guessing that Scheinin didn't know about this:

Raw Story:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," he continued. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

I think the word you're looking for is "murder." When we weren't enhanced interrogating people to death, we were doing it the easy way -- with an assassin's bullet in their head. Hersh says he's collecting enough evidence to convince "even the most skeptical."

But, as I said, we don't live in the big, wide world where any of this is a problem. We live on Planet America, where the severity of a crime depends on the political convenience of that crime's prosecution. And prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and other former White House officials would be extremely inconvenient -- especially for a Democratic congress that refused to lift a finger while all of this was going on. There were no investigations into these international crimes and talk of impeachment was positively taboo. As a result, many of the Democratic congressional leadership are complicit. They may not have liked this stuff, but they allowed it and blocked every attempt to stop it.

And that's why we aren't going to see Bush or Cheney tried. Guilty of war crimes, guilty of murder, they'll make bundles of money speaking to right wing audiences about just how freakin' great they were. There's a truth commission building, but to be absolutely honest, that won't do a damned thing to keep a future group of White House lunatics and paranoiacs from doing exactly the same thing. Nothing short of arrest and trial would do that.

But that's not going to happen here on Planet America, because we want to pretend that the neocons acted alone. A complicit congress of enablers can't be shown for what they were.

-Wisco


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A Trickle When We Need a Flood

It's one of those good news/bad news things. Yesterday, the Justice Department released nine of the Bush administration's secret memos [all PDF] detailing legal opinions on the president's "War on Terror." What they reveal is a frightening disregard for American principles. Knowing that some of these memos would eventually come out, the Bush administration renounced the arguments put forward in them -- days before the new president took office.

McClatchy Newspapers:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, the Justice Department renounced some of its own sweeping legal justifications, which were enacted after the 9/11 attacks, for spying on Americans and for harsh interrogations of terror suspects.

In a memo written five days before President Barack Obama took office, Steven Bradbury, the then-principal deputy assistant attorney general, warned that a series of opinions issued secretly by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel "should not be treated as authoritative for any purpose."

Bradbury said he wrote the 11-page document to confirm that "certain propositions" in memos issued by the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 "do not reflect the current views of this office."

They were just spitballin', throwing ideas at the wall to see which stuck, running them up the flag pole to see who saluted. Never mind that, from 2001 to 2003, those legal opinions remained unopposed by the Bush administration -- unused bullets in their arsenal of legal defense.

And, believe it or not, this is the good news part -- that these memos saw the light of day at all. The bad news is that the Obama administration is sitting on "dozens" more.





"We welcome the Justice Department's decision to release these memos, some of which provided the basis for the Bush administration's unlawful national security policies," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, in a statement. "These memos essentially argue that the president has a blank check to disregard the Constitution during wartime, not only on foreign battlefields, but also inside the United States. We hope today's release is a first step, because dozens of other OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] memos, including memos that provided the basis for the Bush administration's torture and warrantless wiretapping policies, are still being withheld. In order to truly turn the page on a lawless era, these memos should be released immediately."

Among the unreleased documents are legal arguments detailing "Legal standards for intelligence methods," "Laws and treaties regarding treatment of prisoners," "Criminal charges against American terrorists," and "Options for interpreting the Geneva Conventions."

And the released memos are bad enough. One argues that the president has king-like power to take away a person's rights. "The power to dispose of the liberty of individuals captured ... remain in the hands of the president alone," it reads.

Another stated that the First Amendment was basically a privilege, not a right. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," it said.

"[White House legal counsels John Yoo and Robert Delahunty] said that in addition, the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the military from domestic law enforcement operations, would pose no obstacle to the use of troops in a domestic fight against terrorism suspects," the New York Times reports. "They reasoned that the troops would be acting in a national security function, not as law enforcers." In other words, the president could use troops as police without declaring martial law.

"One of the central facts that we, collectively, have not yet come to terms with is how extremist and radical were the people running the country for the last eight years," writes constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald. "That condition, by itself, made it virtually inevitable that the resulting damage would be severe and fundamental, even irreversible in some sense. It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect."

These memos came out as a result of an ACLU request under the Freedom of Information Act. However, while the ACLU requested "dozens" of these documents, the Obama administration has released nine. You'd hope more are on the way and that this isn't just the administration throwing the ACLU a bone.

But it very well may be the latter. The Obama administration has been surprisingly helpful to the previous administration's policy of secrecy. While it may be that these remaining documents are still under review -- they've been declared state secrets, after all, and it would be foolish to release them without being sure you're not giving anything away -- it may also be that Obama's unwilling to give up all the power Bush and Cheney centralized in the Oval Office.

"[E]ven a quick review of these newly disclosed documents leaves no doubt about their historical significance," writes Greenwald, calling them a "grotesque blueprint for what the U.S. Government became" under Bush. Greenwald says these aren't just memos (they're all very large files, not just notes), but rather "the official and formal position of the U.S. Government -- at least of the omnipotent Executive Branch -- from the time it was issued until just several days before George Bush left office..."

So that's the bad news. There are more of these things still secret than those that have been revealed. If these are the only memos that will be released, then it'll be hard to argue that Obama's not protecting Bush and, by extension, the expanded executive powers Bush claimed.

Those powers are a legal fiction and applying them is an abuse by default. Hanging on to Bush's legal arguments can't possibly serve any purpose helpful to you or me. It can only help a president abuse his office.

-Wisco

Shooting Down Missile Defense

Long, long ago, shrouded in the mists of ancient history (i.e., December 2006), I wrote a post I titled "The Only Purpose of Missile Defense is to Waste Money." At that point in time, we had blown $95 billion on missile defense systems since Ronald Reagan jotted his "Star Wars" notion on the back of a matchbook. What we got out of all this spending and research was nothing. We still have no working missile defense system. Worse, after the fall of the Soviet Union, missile defense became a solution in search of a problem -- its reason for being is to counter a threat that no longer exists.

In that post, I wrote:

So why is the Bush administration pushing this? Did I mention that we've spent $95 billion on it? Throwing pots of cash at defense contractors is what Bush does. It doesn't make any difference whether or not it works -- a failed test is exactly as expensive as a successful one -- the only thing that matters is that it allows people who are already unbelievably rich to reach into your wallet and grab your tax dollars. Who cares if it works?

Oddly, with all the Republican complaining about wasteful spending, missile defense hasn't really made an appearance. Obama has signaled that he might be open to placing a missile defense system in Poland, so it's not like the subject hasn't come up. For the GOP, wasteful spending means monitoring volcanoes so we're prepared for eruptions, not throwing money at stupid-expensive missile systems that may not actually work and have never been adequately tested. Bailing you out because you got suckered into a crap mortgage is "pork," while throwing billions at defense contractors for what amounts to a lucky charm is sound fiscal policy.

Starting to see how we got into this economic mess in the first place?





Since Obama's election, Bush loyalists have been quietly freaking out that he may not really be willing to waste money hand over fist on missile defense anymore. The military has never been very excited about missile defense (Pentagon officials refer to civilian MD advocates as "missile defense moonies"), so it's not like they see any worth to the systems. But those Bush loyalists sure do. And they've made repeated attempts to get you to panic at the thought of abandoning it.

Wall Street Journal, "Obama and Missile Defense," former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, Nov. 2008:

Freeing America from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty's antiquated constraints is rightly regarded as one of President Bush's most significant achievements. In 2001, we believed that the Russian strategic threat had eased. But the emerging threats from rogue states possessing a few nuclear-capable ballistic missiles required that we develop adequate defenses -- especially because many emerging nuclear-weapons states do not accept the same calculus of deterrence that maintained the Cold War's uneasy nuclear standoff. The demise of the ABM Treaty allows America to defend itself from these threats.

For a new Obama administration to retreat from this achievement, as many in the arms-control "community" have advocated, would be a significant step backward. His campaign position about deployment after the technology is "proved" is an excuse never to deploy missile defenses -- because nothing in the military field is ever conclusively proven for all time. Rebuffing [Polish President] Kaczynski is also precisely the wrong response to [Russian President] Medvedev's provocation. It will surely be read as weakness, and not only in Moscow. In fact, Moscow announced yesterday there would be no more missile-defense negotiations before Jan. 20.

Missile defense is only unproven because it can't be proven. It seems that firing a missile and knocking it down isn't proof -- mostly because our missile defense system can't do it. If it won't work in controlled situations, why assume it'll work in the field? The word for that is "faith." I'm not convinced we should be spending billions on faith-based weapons systems. And many in the know think Obama isn't either.

"I think it's on the back burner," James F. Collins, director of Russia studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to Moscow, told FOX News earlier this month. "I read the Obama and other statements more or less as tentative about this system in the sense that they aren't going to put huge investment in it unless they can figure out it's going to work."

More recently, Obama himself gave missile defense moonies reason to worry. "In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them," the president said in his address to a joint session of congress this week. "We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use." That budget comes out today. Whether or not MD takes a hit remains to be seen.

But you'd hope that sanity will finally prevail. Missile defense is an idea that should be allowed to die. It's never worked, no one can explain how it's ever going to work, and it answers a threat that doesn't actually exist. What I said in 2006 is just as true today -- the only purpose of missile defense is to waste money.

-Wisco

What if Bush was the Peanut Guy?

The Peanut Corporation of America is responsible for hundreds of cases of salmonella in the United States. Investigators found "dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers" in its Plainview, Texas processing plant, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to recall every product ever made from peanuts shipped from the facility. In Blakely, Georgia, the story is the same -- Peanut Corporation of America ran an astonishingly unclean operation. All told, 600 people have suffered food poisoning. Nine have died. Calls to the company's telephone number "elicited a recording that said it was no longer in service." For all intents and purposes, Peanut Corporation of America no longer exists.

But the man ultimately responsible for his company's operations still exists. PCA owner Stewart Parnell was subpoenaed to testify to congress. He pleaded the fifth and refused to testify.

Clearly, congress has hit a dead end. Parnell can't possibly be prosecuted, his company is in no danger of ever returning to poison people, and it's time to let bygones be bygones. What we need to do is find out what happened, so we can avoid it ever happening again. And the best way to do that is to put together a blue ribbon panel and hold a third world style truth and reconciliation commission. No one will be charged, no one will go to jail, no one will pay any price, Parnell can get on with his life and we can get on with ours. But we'll get the truth and that's what really counts.

You might've noticed that my little synopsis veered off into crazy town around the third paragraph. Of course Stewart Parnell should be prosecuted -- along with those managers and executives who helped him sell garbage to unsuspecting families. So what if his company is shut down and will never sell poison again? So what if he won't testify? So what if all this has happened in the past?

Parnell lacks one quality that would apparently put him above or beyond the law -- he's not a former President of the United States. Stewart Parnell is just a former Poison Peanut King. When anyone else has committed a crime, they have to face the legal system. When a former President has committed a crime, we have to have a truth commission -- without prosecutions -- to get to the bottom of the crime and let the criminals walk away. There will be no jail time, there would only be embarrassment for the accused -- that is, if he weren't shameless. But the accused is shameless, so there wouldn't even be that. He would face the wagging finger of justice and retire to Dallas a rich, rich man. Maybe hire a ghost-writer and put out a memoir. And his example would do absolutely nothing to prevent future executives from committing similar crimes. After all, the crime without any real consequence might as well be legal -- without punishment, there is no crime.





But this is Sen. Patrick Leahy's solution -- not to the garbage vendor's crimes, of course, just to Bush's. What we need is a truth and reconciliation commission that, in any practical sense, would be a panel put together to write history. They'd have subpoena power and the ability to prosecute perjury, but no power to prosecute the underlying crimes. We'd get the truth, while criminals in the Bush administration get off scott free.

"People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts," Leahy said. "If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth."

Some find Leahy's suggestion a frustratingly wrongheaded. "There's no question that torture occurred here," constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann tuesday. "There's no question that it was a war crime. And so the only reason to have a commission of this kind is to avoid doing what we're obligated to do under a treaty."

"It is shameful that we would be calling for this type of commission..." Turley continued. "We're obligated to investigate. This whole discussion in front of the whole world is basically saying that we are not going to comply with the promise we made, not to ourselves, but to the world." Not surprisingly, law professor Turley is absolutely correct about our obligations under international law. Prosecuting torture is not optional. In other words, Leahy's solution is most likely illegal.

"At the end of the day, no one believes that people will be prosecuted for a known war crime -- and when we do that then we will become accessories," Turley said. "Those crimes of President Bush will become our crimes. His shame will become our collective shame."

Even worries that prosecutions would be politically unfeasible are misplaced. A USA Today/Gallup poll finds that about two thirds support investigations and, of those who want probes into Bush crimes, about 61% want to see prosecutions. In fact, more people (34%) would rather do nothing than those who'd like to see Leahy's proposal (24%). And it's hard to imagine that many who preferred Leahy's idea would be heartbroken if there were prosecutions. I think if you polled people and asked them which solutions they opposed most, you'd probably wind up with very different numbers.

If Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission is the best we get, I'll take it. But it's not the best we can do. We can hold criminals accountable for their crimes, no matter who they are or what position they used to hold. It doesn't matter if they were the president of a peanut company or President of the United States, the law is for everyone and applies to everyone. We shouldn't let crimes go unpunished unless we've got a damned good reason to do so.

In the case of George W. Bush and his administration, that "damned good reason" just isn't there. As I said, if you don't punish a crime, then it might as well be legal. With Leahy's proposal, some future president considering crime could look back in history and say, "Let's go ahead and do it, the worst that could happen is that we wind up like Bush."

No one fears the wagging finger of justice.

-Wisco

The Man in the Iron Bubble

Maybe if we all take up a collection, we can raise enough money to bribe Dick Cheney to just go away. He may be the most politically tone deaf politician in recent history, acting as if everyone agrees that the Bush administration's policies have been dazzling in their genius. You wonder if Dick actually checks any news sources or if he just relies on a circle of fawning sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear. If Bush was the boy in the bubble, Cheney's may be the model that bubble was based on.

Or maybe "bubble" is the wrong word. More like "armored iron sphere." Not only doesn't truth seem to reach Dick, but it seems to be actively repelled. Nothing sinks in, because no truth ever gets close enough to touch him. There's a certain segment of the population who seem to believe that you can force your beliefs to become fact. All it takes is a sincere and fervent faith that your view of the universe is correct and it magically becomes true, true, true. You see it with creationists, Holocaust-deniers, global warming naysayers, free market moonies, and other various and assorted species of flatearthers. No fact can get in, because facts are the enemy of faith. Every bit of evidence that your position is wrong -- no matter how damning or conclusive -- is rejected immediately. The logic of this illogical thinking is simple; you're right, therefore, any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. That's all the proof you need to keep believing that the Earth is in the thrall of UFO overlords or that Vladimir Putin is really a robot or that Dick Cheney is right.

Of course, it may just be that the former-VP is just slinging propaganda when he pretends to be as ignorant and stupid as he often seems to be. It may just be that Dick's familiar with reality, but uses lies and fearmongering to try to change our perception of it. It may just be that he's not wrapped in a cocoon of yes men.

But, as always when we're talking about neocons, I'll go ahead and take them at their word on what they believe and don't believe. I'll assume that Dick Cheney's not a lying sack, but just a stupid and ignorant man. Honestly, you can't be generous with these people -- it's completely impossible. Your choices are always "they're lying" or "they're stupid." Somewhere along the line, we've established that it's a terrible, terrible thing to call these guys liars, so we're left with stupid. And that's being charitable.





While it's both fun and easy to throw rocks at Dick like this, I do have a reason to revisit the bad old days of a couple of weeks ago, when Dick Cheney and his sidekick (some guy named Bob Shrub or Jimmie Tree or Lennie Asparagus... something like that) worked in the White House, desperately trying to rewrite history in their favor. It was called the "Legacy Project" and the idea was to make a last, Hail-Mary attempt to rehab the neoconservative image after eight long years of nearly uninterrupted disaster.

But there's no reason that the attempt has to stop after the Bush administration (that's the name! Bush) left the White House. As former administration officials, they can still get a reporter or two to come a'runnin' whenever they feel the need drop some whoppers and try to get everyone to wet their pants just one more time.

In this case, it was three reporters; Mike Allen, Jim Vanderhei, and John Harris of Politico. I guess dealing with the sheer volume of horse crap here is a big job that takes many hands.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

That's right, one more pitch for torture. I won't say "one last pitch," because I'm sure it's not. If Dick's as much of a psycho- or sociopath as he seems to be, I'd imagine that it's hard to get him to shut the hell up about torture. I so don't want to know what sites the bookmarks on his laptop link to.

I could go through and point out the problems with Dick's view, but that'd just mean rewriting older posts. Suffice it to say that Dick only knows one song -- "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FREAKIN' DIE!!!" We all know how it goes, it's been stuck in our heads for the last eight years. Dick can come up with nothing new, despite the fact that the mojo wore off this particular spell a long time ago. We're tired of being terrified. It's probably time to give courage a spin.

But Dick's in his iron bubble and it doesn't make any difference whether the bubble is real or he's just pretending it is. Either way, he can't stop behaving as if we're all on the same page, 100% behind the path the mastermind Bush administration laid out for us.

It's almost sad, really. This tired, sick old mental patient babbling away as if anything he said made any sense and as if every word hadn't worn out its welcome a long, long time ago. Like a lunatic on street corner, Dick yells out "The end is near!" to anyone who comes within shouting distance.

Maybe it's time everyone started avoiding that street.

-Wisco

Gitmo's Closing, Everybody Panic!

Now that Barack Obama has signed an executive order to close the detention facility (read "prison camp") at Guantánamo Bay, one thing is becoming clear -- we're all going to freakin' die. Depending on which right wing nut you ask, the president will have no choice but to move at least one deadly terrorist into either your bedroom or your closet. We are doomed.

Writing for the Center for American Progress, blogger Matthew Yglesias helpfully lays out the arguments being advanced by talking heads in the media. Unfortunately for those same talking heads, he translates the arguments from BS into English:

-The fact that the Bush administration has let dangerous terrorists go free means Obama should keep innocent people detained.

-The fact that the Bush administration screwed up the paperwork on detainees shows that there was more wisdom to Bush’s policies than Obama acknowledged on the campaign trail.

-Obama’s promise of change was empty and hypocritical because it will take time to implement his executive orders.

-The “Guantánamo” issue is primarily about the physical location of the facility rather than the legal status or treatment of the detainees.

-Since many liberals live in San Francisco, anyone who thinks it would be ill-advised to transfer prisoners to a museum in the San Francisco Bay that hasn’t been a prison for decades is a hypocrite.

When you put it that way -- i.e., in plain English -- the arguments don't look so good. No fair using logic, because reality has a liberal bias.





But the argument that's being thrown around the most is that released detainees are "returning to the battlefield." This isn't so much true. The Pentagon has claimed that 61 detainees have "returned to the fight," but can't confirm that number. In fact, of those 61, 43 are "suspected" of terrorist activities.

"[T]hey’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers," wrote Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School. "They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there. They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning—except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men."

So writing for the New York Times or being interviewed for a documentary is terrorism. Someone arrest William Kristol immediately. He obviously plans to kill us all.

Also ignored is the unfortunate fact that the Guantánamo prison has done nothing to reduce terrorism in the world. In fact, it's had the opposite effect.

Agence France-Presse:

A US closure of Guantánamo Bay could deprive militants of a major propaganda tool and help Pakistan in the fight against extremism, analysts said Sunday.

Opened in January 2002 after the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime for sheltering Al-Qaeda, the prison detained hundreds of alleged militants without judicial review.

As the United States sought to fend off accusations that tactics at Guantánamo amounted to torture, the prison became fodder for militants who used its imagery to capture young minds and recruit volunteers to drive extremist attacks.

[...]

Pictures of open-air cages, inmates wearing orange jumpsuits with black bags over their heads and testimony from ex-prisoners about ill-treatment made Guantánamo a symbol of the worst excesses in the US-led "war on terror".

Worse, many of the people we put there weren't terrorists. These people developed an understandably poor opinion of the United States while they were in our torture camp. Far from keeping us safer, Gitmo has been a terrorist recruitment center.

"A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantánamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists," Wrote McClatchy Newspapers' Tom Lasseter in June of 2008. "The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system."

How many of these terrorists "returning to the battlefield" are actually fighting for the first time? It may be impossible to know. But we do know that more terrorists have come out of Gitmo than have gone in. Lasseter calls it a "school for Jihad." Guantánamo is having exactly the opposite of its intended effect. It doesn't reduce terrorism, it increases it -- either by giving terrorist organizations a propaganda tool or by radicalizing non-terrorist detainees.

In the end, there is no good reason to keep Guantánamo open. None of the arguments in favor of it are any good and all of the arguments in favor of closure are sound and reality-based.

If you still feel the need for something to freak out about, then freak out about the fact that Gitmo's still operating. Every day it exists increases terrorism in the world.

-Wisco

The Disaster Movie

Yesterday, I compared the election of Barack Obama to a movie, saying that the inauguration -- after such a long election campaign -- seems like the time the credits would roll. But, of course, that long campaign was just the opening credits. This movie is just beginning.

The last movie to play in this theater has just wrapped up and the reviews are coming in. Not surprisingly, they aren't very good. As movies go, this Bush flick was a dog.

Editorials worldwide say Bush was a "failure," "worst president ever," and "a buffoon and a warmonger." His two terms were marked by a "singular lack of curiosity in international matters," "a 'friend-or-foe' mentality," and a "web of manipulation has cost America $900 billion and the lives of 4,000 soldiers -- along with at least 500,000 Iraqis."

This movie really, really blew.





President Bush leaves the White House the least respected of any president that we know of. A CBS News/NY Times poll finds that his final approval rating is 22%, with 73% disapproving. "Mr. Bush's final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago," we're told.

Contrasted with Bush's numbers are Barack Obama's. Today, 79% are optimistic about Obama. A stunning 83% approve of his transition. None of this should come as a surprise; just turn on your TV. The flag and banner waving in Washington looks like the celebrations after a successful revolution. It reminds me of the Berlin Wall coming down.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com compares these numbers with other inaugural numbers:

The two highest initial, post-inauguration approval ratings as measured by Gallup belong to presidents who took over for others whose terms ended prematurely. About 86 percent of Americans approved of Harry Truman when he took over for FDR. And 77 percent approved Lyndon Johnson when he took over for JFK. The highest initial approval rating for a newly elected president, on the other hand, appears to belong to Kennedy, whom Gallup pegged at 72 percent approval shortly after his inauguration in 1961.

No one's died here, so the safe bet is that Barack Obama is the new John F. Kennedy in terms of popularity. It's a comparison that's been made often enough. But Bush himself holds the record for highest approval rating a 90% rating in a show of solidarity after 9/11. In the wake of disaster, everyone was ready for leadership. In Bush's case, we didn't get it.

My take on these numbers is that George W. Bush is the disaster Barack Obama is benefitting from. Something terrible has happened to our nation and we look to Obama to lead us in picking up the pieces. When you're going down in quicksand, you tend to have a good opinion of the guy with the rope.

As a result, I'm less concerned with Bush's attempt to rewrite history in his favor than I have been. Columnist Leonard Pitts jr. writes, "It occurs to me that, as patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, so history is the last refuge of the failed president." Try as he might, history will remember Bush exactly as he is -- a trainwreck of a presidency. Attempts at historical revisionism are doomed to fail.

It hasn't happened yet as I write, but the odds are that as you read this, a new president will have been sworn in. Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States of America. To 43, we'll have said a less than fond farewell. The worst president ever ends his movie not by riding off into the sunset, but by slinking off into the shadows, where he'll spend the rest of his life in a bootless effort to convince everyone that his movie wasn't as bad as all the reviewers said it was.

Yeah, good luck with that.

-Wisco

Farewell Address from President Suck

Presidential addresses always begin with what I think of as frosting. A bunch of inconsequential fluff, shout outs, and thanks. Bush's farewell address last night was no different. It was three paragraphs of "a final opportunity to share some thoughts," "best wishes to President-Elect Obama," and "I am filled with gratitude" came before we got through the vanilla cream flowers and our fork hit cake. And the flavor of the cake the president served last night was "OHMYFREAKIN'GOD!"

Bush went straight to 9/11 -- which should, in any sane world, be seen as his worst failure. The response to Hurricane Katrina would be a close second, but 9/11 would have to be the crowning screw up of his presidential career. Make that domestic screw up. The prize for foreign policy screw up goes to Iraq.

This evening, my thoughts return to the first night I addressed you from this house -- September the 11th, 2001. That morning, terrorists took nearly 3,000 lives in the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor. I remember standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center three days later, surrounded by rescuers who had been working around the clock. I remember talking to brave souls who charged through smoke-filled corridors at the Pentagon, and to husbands and wives whose loved ones became heroes aboard Flight 93. I remember Arlene Howard, who gave me her fallen son's police shield as a reminder of all that was lost. And I still carry his badge.

As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.

I'm not much of a historian, but off the top of my head, I can't remember a farewell address that reads so much like a defense of the speechgiver's presidency. With polling showing the occupation of Iraq as less popular than measles, Bush actually decided that now would be a good time to brag about it. "Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States," he said. He wasn't entirely stupid, however; this was the only mention of the event the largest percentage of Americans believe he'll be remembered for. One sentence for the biggest foreign policy blunder in American history.





But then, this was Bush's last big chance to rehab his place in history. He wasn't going to dwell on the arguments he's lost to the public. Better to get into territory where the debate still has some spark of life. In speaking -- indirectly, of course -- about warrantless wiretapping, torture, the invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and other constitutional abuses, Bush repeated his often repeated lie. "There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results," he said. "America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil."

That is, only if you don't count the terrorist attacks that happened since 9/11. The Beltway Snipers and the anthrax mailings happened in there. The only reason these two post-9/11 terrorist attacks aren't counted as terrorist attacks is because that would spoil Bush's supposed "perfect record" after the worst terrorist attack in American history. It's like bragging that you rolled a perfect game -- so long as you don't count all the gutterballs.

It's always been especially galling to me that Bush waves 9/11 around like a trophy. It marks his greatest failure as a president. The only real success Bush has ever enjoyed was in getting people to see his very worst moment as his very best. Pretty much the moment the attacks happened, Bush climbed onto Air Force One and flew off -- after famously freezing up in a school classroom. Bush remembers "standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center three days later" because it was three days before he came back. For three days, the nation was leaderless. Since then, it's been rudderless.

I could go through this speech point by point and shoot down almost all of it, but that would be an extremely long post. "Every taxpayer pays lower income taxes" is one example. Nearly every taxpayer has a lower income. "Funding for our veterans has nearly doubled" is another. Actually, funding per veteran is down. The only reason Bush can make this claim is because his wars have created so many new vets. And nearly doubled since when?

It's fitting that Bush's last address to the nation is as big a load as every other address he's made. It's also fitting that it's as self-serving. George W. Bush has always been all about George W. Bush. For President George, all the world's a stage and all the men and women other than him are merely the audience. Bush's presidency has been eight years of "look at me!" It's never been about you or me.

So it makes sense that Bush's last address would be all about George. As big a hypocrite as ever ("As we address these challenges -- and others we cannot foresee tonight -- America must maintain our moral clarity."), Bush urges everyone to be just like him in his ideology -- despite the fact that his ideology has just been rejected by voters.

I'm so glad it's finally over. Bush, like every outgoing president seems to, believes he still has some part to play in American life. But his headline days are over, other than celebrity sightings on Entertainment Tonight and the seemingly unknowable odds that he'll earn headlines with his trial. He's got a think tank in the works, but I doubt it'll prove influential. Tack "Bush loyalist" in front of anyone's name and they'll be laughed off any venue other than talk radio and FOX.

That's it George. Time's up. You had your time and you failed. The economy is in the tank, we're stuck in a completely pointless war, we've lost thousands of lives and taken tens of thousands more, a major American city is still being rebuilt, the World Trade Center towers are gone, our reputation in the world is ruined, we've become a nation of paranoiacs who torture and eavesdrop and intercept emails, and the name George W. Bush has become synonymous with "sucks."

It's over, go back to that country mansion you laughably call a "ranch." That brush isn't going to clear itself.

-Wisco

It's Torture. We Tortured. There was Torture.

Let's start out with a few quotes.

I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured.
--Dick Cheney

It's torture. It's a means of extracting information that I didn't even believe these people probably had. It's a means of making their lives more miserable.
--Chris Arendt, formerly stationed at Guantanamo

We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case [for prosecution].
--Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions

Some on the left may think "we really tortured" Dick, but those in the know do too. We've gotten to the point where simple denial isn't going to be good enough. "We don't torture" doesn't wash when everyone knows we do. When cases are thrown out of court because the accused was tortured, then there was torture. When people who work in the prisons say they saw torture, then there was torture. When people coming out of those prisons say they were tortured, then there was torture.

At this point, denial isn't just useless, but it's insulting to everyone's intelligence -- the denier's included. There was torture.





Front page on the Washington Post yesterday was the article "Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official." It kind of gives the impression that someone was tortured -- namely, accused would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani. The finding was made by Bush-appointee Susan J. Crawford, who oversees the trials -- such as they are -- of Guantanamo detainees. According to the report, "Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured."

Hey Dick, that doesn't sound much like "the left wing of the Democratic Party," does it? Sounds more like a principled conservative with respect for the rule of law. The Post piece lays out the specifics.

"For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators," said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani's interrogation records and other military documents. "Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows.

The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including the Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

When your interrogation is so harmful to you that you need to be hospitalized, you kind of think that this might qualify as torture. Asked for comment, the White House took Dick's lead -- deny the obvious. "Let me just make sure it's clear -- and I'll say it on the record one more time -- that it has never been the policy of this president or this administration to torture," spokesperson Dana Perino told the Associated Press.

AP also got a comment from the Pentagon:

"We have always taken allegations of abuse seriously," [Pentagon spokesman Bryan] Whitman said. "We investigate all allegations, all credible allegations, of abuse," and have done some dozen investigations of interrogation methods, Whitman said.

And the Pentagon did investigate Qahtani's case in 2005. US generals Randall Schmidt and John Furlow looked into it. The Schmidt-Furlow report documented everything that Crawford mentions in the WaPo piece, as well as "twice reducing his body temperature to 92-97 degrees Fahrenheit." The dog tricks, the insults, the humiliations were all laid out, yet Schmidt-Furlow found it was all "legally permissible under the existing guidance," that it didn't "rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment," but warned that if overdone, it would be abusive -- "the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment," the two fine generals wrote.

Wait a second, making a guy where women's underwear and forcing him to perform dog tricks is only degrading if you do it too often? Really? What's the number of times that goes too far? How often can you humiliate someone before it becomes degrading? And aren't "humiliating" and "degrading" pretty much synonymous? Schmidt and Furlow apparently left logic to reach conclusions they wanted to reach.

But someone out there is reading this and thinking, "Qahtani deserved it." Here's a question for you, what other crimes do you think people should be punished for before they're tried? What if you had to pay a fine first, then go to court to see if you got your money back? Would that seem fair or just to you?

Somehow, I doubt it. If it had turned out that Qahtani was innocent, how would you pay him back for nearly killing him twice anyway? When punishment precedes trial, justice is impossible.

Yes, there may be some people out there who believe we really did torture, Vice President Cheney. And those people may actually believe that torture isn't just wrong, but un-American, unjust, and illogical.

Those people are what you call "realists."

-Wisco