Month: November 2005

The US and Torture

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–by Sebastian Holsclaw

It has become increasingly clear that the current administration has taken a disturbingly permissive attitude toward torture.  (See here or here for further exploration of the topic).

Though it is crass to quote yourself, I’m going to reprint most of my open letter to my party, the Republican Party, from here anyway.  Then I’m going to discuss more recent developments:

There has been a drip, drip, drip that we have mostly ignored.  It does us no credit to continue.  There are many sources for this information, but the New Yorker has an excellent overview.  The Bush administration has engaged in a very troubling pattern of legitimizing torture by dramatically expanding the practice of "extraordinary rendition".  This practice essentially amounts to sending people to other countries to be tortured.  An excellent blog source for information on this practice is available on a section of ObsidianWings.  It has gotten to the point where it is obvious that this is more than a bad agent or two and it has expanded to far beyond just a few of the most hardened and obvious Al Qaeda operatives. 

I wish I could just mention the program and assume that I didn’t have to argue against it.  Unfortunately I’m not entirely sure that is true.  So before I get to what Republicans should do to stop it, I’m going to briefly outline why we should act to stop it:

Torture is wrong.  The practice of extraordinary rendition began as a classic Clintonian hairsplitting exercise in the mid 1990s to avoid the clear letter of the laws which prohibit America from using torture.  This is the kind of avoidance of the law and ridiculous semantics that we decried when employed by the Clinton administration.  It has gotten no more attractive just because Bush has decided to continue the program. 

We are torturing non-terrorists.  Perhaps some people would be willing to torture Al Qaeda members.  I’m not one of them, but perhaps some are.  The problem with that mindset is that we aren’t just torturing Al Qaeda members.  It is becoming completely obvious that some of the people being tortured are innocent.  See especially the ObsidianWings link above.  That is crazy.  There isn’t any information we are getting that could possibly justify the torture of innocent people. 

Torture is ineffective.  Torture isn’t ineffective at getting information per se. It is ineffective at getting useful information.  That is because the victim either snaps completely, or starts trying to mold his story to fit what the torturer wants to hear.  There is evidence that we have relied on information obtained through torture, only to find that it was very wrong. 

Torture also opens us up to the legitimate criticism that we are acting out the very barbarism that we want to fight.  I think as Republicans we have heard that charge so many times employed against practices where the analogy was completely inappropriate, that we have become inured to the charge when properly employed.  This is a case where the charge has force.   Go watch the Nick Berg Beheading Video and then imagine the blood pouring from his neck being just like the blood oozing from the fingers of an innocent torture victim sent to his fate by the CIA.  That is the barbarism we are fighting, and that is the barbarism we must not become a part of.  I know we have heard the charge that we are acting "just like them" thrown at us over trivial concerns like suggesting that we pay a bit more attention to visa-holders from other countries.  This is NOT THAT CASE.  This is the case of saying we are acting just like them because we are torturing people–acting just like them. 

Therefore extraordinary rendition is a moral sinkhole, which is being employed on people we are not sure are guilty, and which doesn’t even get good information.  It cannot be continued.

The Republican Party has spent so many years in the minority that sometimes I think we have not adjusted to the fact that we are in power.  We are in power now.  We control both Houses of Congress and we have our people throughout the administration.  We don’t need to wait for the Democrats to raise this issue.  We can’t hide behind the worry that exploring our practices is going to get a President elected who is going to retreat from Iraq.  We are the party which leads the most powerful country in the world.  And lead it we must.  President Bush must be shown that the Republican Party is not willing to stand for the perversion of our moral standards.  The Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House can close the loophole which allows for extraordinary rendition and can loudly reaffirm that torture is not something we do.  We are the majority party, and we claim to be a party that cares about the moral health of the nation.  We are damning ourselves if we sit back and let it continue.  This practice is foolish in the proverbial sense of the word–it perverts our moral core and gains us nothing but the illusion of doing something important.

Since I wrote this, we have more proof that torture isn’t effective at getting good intelligence, and can in fact obtain dramatically misleading misinformation.  This is especially true because we have been copying the torture techniques of Communist countries:

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Habeas and Guantanamo: Breaking News

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All right. There are two new amendments:

Graham has proposed an amendment to his own amendment, which is co-sponsored by Carl Levin and John Kyl. Here is a PDF of it. It still cuts off habeas but it allows more judicial review than the version that Graham stuck into the appropriations bill last Friday. Bingaman has also proposed a new amendment. Here’s a PDF of that. It allows habeas, but it cuts off lawsuits challenging the conditions of confinement.

I know Graham’s new amendment is an improvement over his Friday amendment, while Bingaman’s amendment is, in an effort to garner votes, worse than his earlier amendment. I don’t really know how much better and worse in either case. Of the four cosponsors of those amendments, I trust Levin and Bingaman quite a lot and Graham (after this episode) and Kyl (as always) not at all. And Levin has stated that he prefers Bingaman’s amendment to the one he co-wrote with Graham and Kyl, but that one is still far preferable to the one that passed Friday.

The AP, Reuters, and the Washington Post have all written articles on these provisions. The Post article says the Levin/Kyl/Graham Amendment might be linked to the McCain amendment in an effort to get both of them through conference. I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t know if it’s a good deal or a bad deal if it is true. At this point I don’t trust Graham at all, and I don’t trust McCain much. The only advice I can give is to name a few of the Congressmen in Washington who I think are the most trustworthy and dedicated on this issue: Levin, Durbin, Bingaman, Leahy, Feingold, Kennedy. Markey and I think also Murtha in the House. If you don’t know what’s going on, find out what they’re doing and ask your own reps. to do the same.

I apologize for leaving everyone hanging like this. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have done as much as possible to research this issue, which has such a huge effect on hundreds of people’s lives and on what kind of country the United States will be, and to not even really understand what these bills mean on the day before the Senate votes on them. I went to law school, and have very smart people who know a lot about this issue trying to explain this to me, and I still feel like  I’ve wandered into this scene. As Judge Joyce Hens Green said of Moustafa Idr’s trial, it would be funny if the stakes weren’t so horribly high.

Unfortunately I don’t think I can update this tomorrow, so hopefully some of our commenters can fill the gaps.

I should say, despite the negative tone of this post: the situation looks a lot better now than it looked Friday or last night. Thanks to everyone who linked or called their Senators.

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Closing Statement

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by Katherine

Unless the Bingaman amendment is introduced Tuesday instead of Monday, or hilzoy has something up her sleeve, I think this is the last post we are going to be able to do on this subject. It will also be the shortest.

First, I wanted to provide links to all the posts about the Graham/Bingaman Amendment in one place: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

[UPDATE: Also 14, 15, 16, 17.]

Second: you may be saying "you make some good points, but this is complicated and I’m not sure I completely agree." Or maybe even: "are you nuts?!!? You think I have time to read thirteen posts on this?" Well. If there is not enough time for you to even read all these posts–how in the hell is one hour on Thursday, and maybe a few more hours tomorrow, enough time for the Senate to deliberate on this bill? Why on earth is this being pushed through on an appropriations bill, with no hearings, no debate, on the strength of arguments that are (deliberately or inadvertantly) quite misleading?  When the Senators providing the margin of victory seem unaware of some key facts and of the legal implications of what they’re doing? We’re talking about habeas corpus here. We’re talking about indefinite detention under conditions that have prompted a large number of suicide attempts. We’re talking about serious charges of abuse. We’re talking about human beings, some of whom are terrorists and some of whom aren’t–some of whom even the pathetic CSRT process has determined are innocent. Could we maybe wait a few weeks, hold a hearing or two, have some real negotiations?

Third: if you agree, if not with our conclusions, than at least that this is maybe important and complicated enough that we could stand to wait a few weeks, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman’s S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042. And please consider asking other people to do the same.

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The Key to the Courthouse Door, Part II

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(or, "Why the McCain Amendment is No Substitute")

(Eleventh in a series arguing against the Graham Amendment/for the Bingaman Amendment regarding habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay. If you agree, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman’s S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042.  Senator Graham’s full floor speech is here.)

I don’t have a specific passage to quote from Graham’s speech here. Rather, I am responding to his general claim, that it is all right to take away habeas corpus from the Guantanamo detainees because of the McCain amendment.

Something that first year law students have drummed into them, but which in my experience is not at all intuitive to non-lawyers: that something is illegal doesn’t automatically mean a court can do anything about it.  There are all sorts of hoops you must jump through before a judge or jury determines what happened, and whether or not any laws have been broken, and what the remedy should be. All these terms which lawyers throw around casually, and which cause our families roll their eyes and wonder what the hell we’re talking about: Personal jurisdiction. Subject matter jurisdiction. A cause of action. Standing to sue. Ripeness. Mootness. Justiciability. A waiver of sovereign immunity, if you are suing the government. etc. etc.

Let’s not get into what those terms mean. I barely can keep track, because I stupidly didn’t take Federal Courts. Let me just reiterate: just because something is illegal doesn’t mean a court can do anything about it.

The McCain amendment is about whether torture is illegal. The Graham amendment, though the word "torture" appears nowhere in it, is highly relevant to whether a court can do anything about it.  Go back to what that Pentagon official said:

A senior Pentagon lawyer who asked not to be named said that the Graham amendment will have another consequence. The same Pentagon bill also contains a clause, sponsored by Graham and the Arizona Republican John McCain, to outlaw torture at US detention camps – a move up to now fiercely resisted by the White House. ‘If detainees can’t talk to lawyers or file cases, how will anyone ever find out if they have been abused,’ the lawyer said.

Most of the evidence of abuse at Guantanamo has emerged from lawyers’ discussions with their clients.

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The Key to the Courthouse Door, Part I

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(or, "What Habeas Corpus Is and Isn’t")

by Katherine

(Tenth in a series arguing against the Graham Amendment/for the Bingaman Amendment regarding habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay. If you agree, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman’s S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042.  Senator Graham’s full floor speech is here.

This post and the one following it delve more than the others into the legal questions involved. Before beginning, I should say that I am very, very far from an expert on either habeas corpus in general or the Guantanamo litigation in particular. I have talked to some people who know much more about these issues than me–they should get much of the credit for what I get right; I should get all of the blame for what I screw up.)

"For those who want to turn an enemy combatant into a criminal defendant in U.S. court and give that person the same rights as a U.S. citizen to go into Federal court, count me out….they are not entitled to this status. They are not criminal defendants."–Senator Lindsey Graham.

Graham is correct to state that the Guantanamo detainees are not criminal defendants and do not have the rights of criminal defendants in U.S. courts. But here is what is essential to understand: no one is arguing that they are.

The Supreme Court held in HamdI v. Rumsfeld that the President had the authority to hold a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant rather than charging him with a crime. All of the judges who disagreed with that interpretation did so only because Hamdan was a U.S. citizen. So are they going to suddenly turn around and hold that non-U.S. citizens on Guantanamo must be brought up on criminal charges or released? No. There is no possibility of that. The detainees’ lawyers are not seeking it. They know damn well that if they do, they will lose.

I don’t think Graham is genuinely confused about this point. As a JAG lawyer he must know that habeas is not synonymous with civilian criminal trials. I don’t know that he was actively trying to mislead people about it; it may only be that he thought it made good rhetoric. But whatever his intent, I think he has misled several other senators into thinking that the question is whether the Guantanamo detainees will be tried by a military trial of some sort (a court martial, a military commission, or what have you) or as civilians under U.S. criminal law.

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“Congress is going to provide oversight”

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by Katherine

(Ninth in a series arguing against the Graham Amendment/for the Bingaman Amendment regarding habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay. If you agree, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman’s S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042.  Senator Graham’s full floor speech is here.)

"Congress now is looking over the shoulder of what is going on there….

the Congress is going to watch what happens. The Congress is going to be involved, and we are going to take a stand. We are going to help straighten out this legal mess we are in….

I know what we need to fix in terms of the way we have treated prisoners. We are doing it. We are getting it right. We are making up for our past sins….

To the human rights activists out there, God bless you. You have helped us in many ways. We are going to make the statements you want us to make about treating people humanely. We are going to have standardized interrogation techniques. Congress is going to provide oversight and we are going to let the courts provide oversight."–Senator Lindsey Graham

Senator Graham may honestly believe this. It isn’t true.

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More Frivolity: Now With Human Mops!

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by hilzoy

(Eighth in a series arguing against the Graham Amendment/for the Bingaman Amendment regarding habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay. If you agree, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman’s S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042.  Senator Graham’s full floor speech is here.)

“A Canadian detainee who threw a grenade that killed an army medic in a firefight and who came from a family of longstanding al-Qaida ties moved for preliminary injunction forbidding interrogation of him or engaging in cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of him. It was a motion to a Federal judge to regulate his interrogation in military prison.”

A lot of the cases we have dicussed earlier involve detainees who have been found to be innocent. This one (pdf) is different: it involves a detainee (known as O.K.) who has been charged with murder for allegedly throwing the grenade Graham mentioned. You might not think that it’s a mitigating factor that he was with his family in a compound when it came under attack, and that he seems to have thrown the grenade in an attempt to defend himself. (He was the only survivor of the attack on the compound.) What, you might ask, was he doing at what seems to have been an al Qaeda compound to begin with? The answer is that he was fifteen years old at the time, and that’s where his family was living.

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Family Videos

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by hilzoy

(Seventh in a series arguing against the Graham Amendment/for the Bingaman Amendment regarding habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay. If you agree, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman’s S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042.  Senator Graham’s full floor speech is here.)

Having checked out the medical malpractice motions that Lindsey Graham referred to, and discovered that they were a lot more serious than he let on, I decided to investigate another of the motions he cites as examples of frivolous claims by detainees. I purposely picked the one that seemed the most frivolous to me, namely this:

“Here is another great one. There was an emergency motion seeking a court order requiring Gitmo to set aside its normal security policies and show detainees DVDs that are purported to be family videos.“

What, I wondered, could possibly explain a motion like this? How could a prisoner’s access to DVDs possibly be important? After a certain amount of wrestling with my brand new PACER account, I found the motion in question (pdf). And this is the story:

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Competent Tribunals

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by Katherine

(sixth in a series arguing against the Graham Amendment/for the Bingaman Amendment regarding habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay. If you agree, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman’s S. AMDT 2517 to bill # S. 1042.  Senator Graham’s full floor speech is here.)

"What we have done at Guantanamo is we have set up a procedure that will allow every suspected enemy combatant to be brought to Guantanamo Bay and given due process in terms of whether they should be classified as an enemy combatant….

What is going on at Guantanamo Bay is called the Combat Status Review Tribunal, which is the Geneva Conventions protections on steroids. It is a process of determining who an enemy combatant is that not only applies with the Geneva Conventions and then some, it also is being modeled based on the O’Connor opinion in Hamdi, a Supreme Court case, where she suggested that Army regulation 190-8, sections 1 through 6, of 1997, would be the proper guide in detaining people as enemy prisoners, enemy combatants. That regulation is “Enemy Prisoners of War, Retained Personnel, Civilian Internees, and other Detainees.” We have taken her guidance. We have the Army regulation 190-8, and we have created an enemy combat status review that goes well beyond the Geneva Conventions requirements to detain someone as an enemy combatant."–Senator Lindsey Graham

How do these CSRTs, which Senator Graham describes as "the Geneva Convention Protections on Steroids" and which the administration argues are enough to justify detention until the end of a war that may never end, actually work in practice?

Let’s look at some examples.

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Caught On The Battlefield

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by Katherine

(fifth in a series arguing against the Graham Amendment/for the Bingaman Amendment. When you call your senators, tell them that you’re asking to vote for the Bingaman Amendment, S. AMDT 2517to bill # S. 1042.)

“not as criminal defendants but as enemy combatants, people detained on the battlefield”

“Guantanamo Bay is a place we have designated to take people off the battlefield and hold them”

“an enemy combatant–someone caught on the battlefield, engaged in hostilities against this country”

“These are people caught on the battlefield as the Nazis were caught on the battlefield.”

–Senator Lindsey Graham.

Were they all really caught on the battlefield? That depends on what the definition of “battlefield” is.

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Medical Malpractice 3

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by hilzoy (This is the fourth in a series of posts addressing specific arguments and statements that Senator Lindsey Graham made in the floor speech in support of his amendment ending habeas for Guantanamo detainees. A Word doc of Graham’s speech is here.) Two medical malpractice claims have come out of this…. Never in the … Read more

Medical Malpractice 2

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by hilzoy and Katherine (This is the third in a series of posts addressing specific arguments and statements that Senator Lindsey Graham made in the floor speech in support of his amendment ending habeas for Guantanamo detainees. A Word doc of Graham’s speech is here.) Two medical malpractice claims have come out of this…. Never … Read more

Medical Malpractice

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by hilzoy and Katherine

(This is the second in a series of posts addressing specific arguments and statements that Senator Lindsey Graham made in the floor speech in support of his amendment ending habeas for Guantanamo detainees.)

“Can you imagine Nazi prisoners suing us about their reading material? Two medical malpractice claims have come out of this…. Never in the history of the rule of law of armed conflict has an enemy combatant, POW, person who is trying to kill U.S. troops, been given the right to sue those same troops for their medical care”—Senator Lindsey Graham.

Senator Graham seems to imply here that these are garden variety, probably frivolous, malpractice claims.

I don’t know what legal claims or cases he’s referring to, so I can’t speak to that—there may be frivolous claims. If so I doubt the courts will have much trouble throwing them out.

But there may have been real reasons for detainees at Guantanamo to complain about their medical care to the courts. There have been credible reports of medical care for severe injuries being withheld as an interrogation technique, and of doctors and psychologists assisting with abusive interrogations.

Jane Mayer has reported in the New Yorker that “a number of medical and scientific personnel working at Guantánamo—including psychologists and psychiatrists—are not providing care for detainees. Rather, these ‘non-treating’ professionals have been using their skills to ‘assist the interrogators.’”

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About “Them”

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by hilzoy, with Katherine

(hi everybody. This is the first in a series of posts that reply directly to the arguments, assertions, and claims that Senator Lindsey Graham has made in support of his amendment suspending habeas corpus for noncitizens at Guantanamo, which I’ll be working on with hilzoy. –K)

(I deserve no credit on this one. Also, about Graham’s speech: I’ve transformed it into a Word doc; it’s here, for your amusement and delectation. — h.)

"How we treat detainees in our charge once they are captured is about us, but their legal status is about them. Once they choose to become part of a terrorist organization in an irregular force that blows up people at a wedding, then their legal status is about them and their conduct."—Sen. Lindsey Graham

There are two problems with this statement. One is the crazily-wrong assumption that people’s legal status has no effect at all on whether they’re abused. More on that later.

But let’s say it’s not about us at all, and only about them. What do we actually know about them?

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The Bush Legacy: America’s Human-Rights Record Is Now A Subject of Legitimate Debate

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by Edward The Economist has published an editorial (with such a strong title it bears repeating: "How to lose friends and alienate people: The Bush administration’s approach to torture beggars belief") denouncing the Bush administration’s nebulous-at-best stance on torure. It should be required reading in the ethics classes the President recently ordered his staff to … Read more

Happy Veterans Day

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Soldiers do not pick their cause; they go where they’re told, and sometimes they die.  So, today we remember: 1.  Those who went to fight for us; 2.  Those who still fight for us; 3.  And those who can no longer fight for us, for they are dead. This is your thank-a-veteran open thread.

The Evil Amendment: Bad News; Still Hope

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by hilzoy The Senate passed a modified version of the amendment I wrote about last night. (Roll call here.) The modified version (text here (pdf)) still strips detainees of any right to a petition of habeas corpus, but allows the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to hear claims from them. The problem, though, is that … Read more

Geek Appeal

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In a most inappropriate place, faithful commentor Bruce Baugh and I somehow traipsed from media war all the way to cellphone technology.  In order to avoid a threadjack, we’re going to discuss that a bit more here. Now, I know a bit about cellphone communications technology, but some number epsilon (not much different from zero) … Read more

Jordan

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by hilzoy WaPo: “Three nearly simultaneous bomb blasts tore through hotels here Wednesday night, killing more than 50 people, wounding at least 110 and sending fear and panic through the streets of the normally tranquil city. Jordanian authorities immediately shut down many of the capital’s main roads and deployed dozens of ambulances, police cars and … Read more

Stop This Amendment.

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by hilzoy From the AP: “A Senate Republican wants to bar suspected foreign terrorists held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from challenging their detentions in U.S. courts, a proposal that is drawing protest from human rights groups. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he also faces some resistance from Senate colleagues and the … Read more

The Arm of Decision

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by Charles I haven’t read much Stephen Green lately, but this piece caught my eye.  A teaser: Previously, I wrote that in order to win the Terror War, we must "prove the enemy ideology to be ineffective," just as we did in the Cold War. In that conflict, we did so in three ways: by … Read more

Not a Quiet Riot (or a Short One)

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by Charles

With riots in France (mostly by Muslims) in their eleventh day twelfth night, more than several have wondered who is to blame.  Obviously, the rioters themselves are responsible for breaking the law.  But what about the many rioters protesters who didn’t and don’t?  The deaths of two teenagers aren’t the only reason for this now-daily event, especially now that it’s taken on a weird kind of momentum of its own.  Other reasons cited have been Islamist dogma, Euro multiculturalism, poor assimilation, feckless law enforcement, bad architecture, and welfare state living conditions.  It’s surely a combination of the above, but Shannon Love writes persuasively that the French welfare state is the root cause:

The short answer is that human beings are not cows. Cows are quite content if their material needs are met but people have hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is precisely these psychological benefits that the welfare state ultimately cannot provide. People are rioting not because they are deprived of material benefits but because they are wholly dependent on the whims of others for the benefits they do receive. They have no status and no control. It is these social, psychological and spiritual deprivations that they are ultimately striking out against.

Advocates of the welfare state are driven by an overwhelming need to provide economic security and stability. Unfortunately, they will not acknowledge the inherent inverse relationship between security and stability on one hand and economic growth, mobility and creativity on the other. Anything done to increase pay, benefits and job security for people who have jobs now makes it more difficult for people without jobs to get them. Over the course of decades, this situation creates enormous structural unemployment. High unemployment drives the expansion of the welfare state further, increasing taxes, which slows the economy which drives higher unemployment and the feedback loop is closed. By creating a stagnant economic system focused on the security and well being of those that have, it chokes off any hope for those that have not. The welfare state grants security today by sacrificing tomorrow. Sacrificing tomorrow kills hope and that is what ultimately leads to rioting.

(Updates below the fold)

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Taking Ethics Seriously

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by hilzoy Via AmericaBlog, from today’s Press Conference“ “Q Yes, sir. Back in October of 2000, this is what you said — PRESIDENT BUSH: Okay. Whew. Q “We will ask not only what is legal, but what is right; not what the lawyers allow, but what the public deserves.” In the CIA leak case, has … Read more

Presented Without Comment

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by hilzoy LATimes, via firedoglake: “An intelligence analyst temporarily lost his top-secret security clearance because he faxed his resume using a commercial machine. An employee of the Defense Department had her clearance suspended for months because a jilted boyfriend called to say she might not be reliable. An Army officer who spoke publicly about intelligence … Read more

But Wait: There’s More! (Torture, That Is…)

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by hilzoy Jane Mayer has a disturbing new piece in the New Yorker. It’s about the death of Manadel al-Jamadi, the dead prisoner whose corpse was photographed, packed in ice, at Abu Ghraib; and the difficulty of prosecuting anyone for his death. About how he died: the CIA apparently released several hundred pages about his … Read more

Someone Is Watching…

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by hilzoy Yesterday’s WaPo had a truly frightening story about the FBI’s use of National Security letters: “”National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and … Read more

Aargh!

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by hilzoy My first-ever double post. (Typepad assured me it had “encountered an error”, and five minutes after that the post had not appeared. Silly me for trusting them.) Since I can’t actually delete this, I’ll just note the following stories: Larry Wilkerson on Cheney’s role in Iraq policy (NPR interview), including this quote: “”There … Read more

Manipulating Intelligence

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by hilzoy

A few days ago, David Brooks wrote what must be one of his most offensive columns ever. It’s about Harry Reid and his crazy paranoid fantasy that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to make people think that Saddam was an imminent threat who needed to be toppled by force. It begins:

“Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It’s been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Reid had heard of the secret G.O.P. cabal bent on global empire, but he had no idea that he would find a conspiracy so immense.

Reid now knows that as far back as 1998, Karl Rove was beaming microwaves into Bill Clinton’s fillings to get him to exaggerate the intelligence on Iraq. In that year, Clinton argued, “Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions … and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.”

These comments were part of the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence on Iraq. (…)

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It has been four weeks since he began investigating this conspiracy and three weeks since he sealed his windows with aluminum foil to ward off the Illuminati. Odd patterns now leap into his brain. Scooter Libby was born near a book depository but was indicted while at a theater. Karl Rove reads books from book depositories but rarely has time for the theater. What is the ratio of Bush tax cuts to the number of squares on a frozen waffle? It is none other than the Divine Proportion. This proves that Leonardo da Vinci manipulated intelligence on Iraq and that the Holy Grail is a woman! (…)

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. Odd thoughts rush through his brain. He cannot trust the letter “r,” so he must change his name to Hawwy Weed. Brian Lamb secretly rules the world by manipulating the serial numbers on milk cartons.

Reid realizes there is only one solution: “Must call a secret session of the Senate. Must expose global conspiracy to sap vital juices! Must expose Republican plot to manipulate intelligence!”

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m.”

Republicans have been quoting Clinton officials on the subject of Saddam’s WMD recently, even though, as Matt Yglesias points out, “”If a Clinton administration subcabinet official said it, it must be true” is not an epistemological principle one normally associates with conservatives.” What Clinton officials said is all beside the point, for several reasons which I’ll put below the fold:

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Ethics R Us!

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by hilzoy From the WaPo, news of an astonishing about-face: “President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe. According to a memo sent to aides … Read more

“Deficit Reduction”, Ha Ha Ha

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by hilzoy From the WaPo: “The Senate approved sweeping deficit-reduction legislation last night that would save about $35 billion over the next five years by cutting federal spending on prescription drugs, agriculture supports and student loans, while clamping down on fraud in the Medicaid program. (…) The focus now shifts to the House, where the … Read more

Remove all Doubt

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by von Charles Bird’s piece on the disgraceful attacks on Michael Steele generated a lot of debate — and that’s good. But more than one commentator has suggested that Charles somehow erred in repeating Steve Gilliard’s picture of Mr. Steele, who is black, in blackface.*  I don’t see why. The best way to refute stupidity … Read more

Paris is Burning

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There seems to be something nasty going on in Paris right now: "Order and justice will be the final word in our country," said Villepin, who met with top Cabinet ministers and mayors from the affected communities. "The return to calm and the restoration of public order are the priority, our absolute priority." But after … Read more

Are Racially Tinged Attacks on Michael Steele Fair Game?

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by Charles

The attacks are not fair, and it’s not a game. This is a war, and it’s a war that liberals and Democrats will lose if enough conservatives and Republicans stand up to it. As Paul Cella noted yesterday, Michael Steele’s political opponents have taken malice to a whole new level. When liberals believe that images such as this…

Steelesmeared_2

…are fair game, or when Steele is portrayed as a traitor to his race, then the gloves should come off.

(Update below the fold)

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Headlines From The Future…

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by hilzoy (h/t Phil, in comments) First we started torturing people in Abu Ghraib. Now we are holding them in secret Soviet-era prisons in Eastern Europe. It got me thinking: what will the next fascinating revelation about our treatment of detainees be? Some possibilities: ‘Urbanized’ al Qaeda Prisoners Held In Cambodia Many analysts have noted … Read more