More Tortured Logic Endorsing Torture Itself

"The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club."

Conservative leaders like Karl Rove claim talking about whether or not the government sanctions torture is the worst thing ever. Yeah, Mr. Rove, talking about the evil one does in life sure brings about trouble, huh?

For me, when anyone has to educate an adult in this nation who is a political leader or advisor about why torture is bad, that is a sure sign that adult just does not need to be a leader or advisor to anyone. I've written before about the problems and inherent conflicts between use of torture and the basics of American democracy.

Now we get this defense of the indefensible:

"You see, where other human beings might just tell us anything under being tortured, the exotic Muslim requires torture for disclosure. Our legal obligations are nullified by the biological imperatives of "those people." First we had "torture works." Then we had "they deserve it." Now we have "they need us to do it."

Zubayda, of course, gave up all the useful intelligence he ever would before he was tortured. Which sort of puts a crimp in this whole theory.

The torture apologist thrives on secrets, on playing on your fear of the unknown. You don't know that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times actually didn't prevent "a hole in the ground in Los Angeles." So Thiessen explains today that the redacted parts of the memos -- you know, the ones that were edited to protect the identity of CIA interrogators -- actually contain all the information that proves torture worked, which is why they were redacted.

The justifications for torture provided in the memos themselves are not a good faith evaluation of the torture program's effectiveness, since the writers of the memos are self-evidently trying to justify the use of torture. In other words, the memo writers have a reason to overplay the program's effectiveness, because they are conscious that what they are doing is illegal. There's only one way to know what happened, and that's through the release of the rest of the torture works memos. So let's do it.

But let's take a step back a moment. The Right has focused the torture debate on KSM because they are banking on the idea that KSM is so terrible that no one could possibly sympathize with him. As long as the torture debate is centered around whether or not we should torture one particular, terribly evil person, the right remains the sentimental favorite. But let's take a moment to consider what Thiessen and others are arguing in the long term: that we must torture and that for our own security, we must keep it secret. We currently live in a country where the president can detain anyone indefinitely without trial on suspicion of terrorism. Torture apologists want to add to that authority the ability to torture people that they detain without trial, without anyone actually knowing about it.

In order to try someone you've tortured, you'd have to make coerced confessions admissible in court. But of course, the reason we don't do that is because there's no way to know if a coerced confession is real, or if it's the result of being waterboarded or stuffed in a small box. So anyone you've tortured, you have to keep locked up forever, because if you release them, you risk that these methods -- which torture apologists explain must remain secret -- will get out.

You see where this is going. There's absolutely no way to reconcile the use of torture with a functioning, democratic society."

Bush OKs Appalachian Disaster

President Bush took action this week with more than 90 new laws deregulating rules put in place for public safety. He approved measures which will insure dirty drinking water, dirty air and decreased counter-terror operations.

The Washington Post reported on the story Thursday. Removing rules governing the "mountaintop removal" method of coal mining means more coal slurry will end up in drinking water in the Appalachian region. It's a haphazard approach blurred into "energy policy" actions which in reality dumps more waste, increases health problems, and destroys the Appalachian region.

The destruction has been widespread for some time and these new laws will make it worse:

"Almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below. As a result, 6,700 "valley fills" were approved in central Appalachia between 1985 and 2001. The U.S. EPA estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal and thousands more have been damaged. Where there once flowed a highly braided system of headwater streams, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble. From the air, it looks like someone had tried to plot a highway system on the moon."

Why is it OK to punish the Appalachian region?

"Urban affluence and this country's shortsighted energy policy are making Appalachia a poorer place -- poorer in beauty, poorer in health, poorer in resources, and poorer in spirit.

"This wouldn't go on in New England," Jack Spadaro told me last July, up at Larry Gibson's place. It wouldn't go on in California, nor Florida, nor along the East Coast. After the '60s, America and the mainstream media seemed to lose interest in the problems of Appalachia. Though the Martin County slurry pond disaster was 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill, The New York Times ignored it for months. But the seeming invisibility of the people in Appalachia does not make their plight any less real."

The blog Facing South has been following this problem for some time with posts you can read here. Just as residents and other concerned groups have been bringing these issues to light, the new laws provided by President Bush will bury them under tons of debris and changing the law to protect the lives of so many will now take major Congressional and Presidential efforts to repeal. In the meantime, money trumps safety and more of our region will be lost forever in this greedy struggle.

Down The Memory Hole

George W. Bush, in 2000 says:

"Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude.

''I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply,'' Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. ''Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.

Thanks to Hilzoy for that, and he adds:

"Honestly, it's not always hard to spot a bad President coming. If we had paid less attention to who we wanted to have a beer with, Al Gore's earth tones, and so on, and more to George W. Bush's total lack of any grasp of policy, we could have avoided the last eight years."

As for that 'force of personality', "the Saudis said they would pump an additional 300,000 barrels of crude next month. They also made a point that the decision had been made a week ago, and not in response to Bush's visit." But the President did promise to send the Saudis more nuclear technology. Is it even close to a good idea to help make Saudi Arabia a nuclear power? Sure they may agree to add in the technology safeguards we want them to have, and sure maybe it is simply the best we can hope for - that they will be a nuclear power allied with the U.S.

The local prize for Bad Ideas on Energy Policy once again goes to Congressman David Davis of East Tennessee. He thinks a.) OPEC sets the price of oil and b.) the government should provide tax-free bonds for oil companies so the poor, poor oil companies can build more refineries. He also urges more tax breaks for them and continues to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for high gasoline prices (article here).

Bush Lies About His Golf Sacrifice

I had to read the story a few times to make sure it wasn't a comedy skit from the Internets. Sadly, it is not.

Our fearless president claims that he gave up playing golf to show his solidarity and sacrifice due to the war in Iraq.

No word on what he gave up for the war in Afghanistan ... maybe Yahtzee?

And he lied about giving up golf ... or at best he is utterly confused about when and why he gave up the game. He told reporters:

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf," Bush said in an interview with Yahoo and Politico.com.

"I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said.

Bush said his last round of golf was in August 2003 when he was informed that a truck bomb had wrecked the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

"They pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it anymore to do," Bush said.

But as the Washington Post reports it:

"the Associated Press reported on Oct. 13, 2003, that he'd spent a "cool, breezy Columbus Day" playing "a round of golf with three long-time buddies ..."


Even the golfing blogs are appalled:

"In an insipid interview with the web site Politico that featured no less than 20 questions about his daughter’s wedding, baseball, American Idol and who does the best impersonation of him, President George W. Bush was hit with a haymaker - Has he stopped golfing?"

He's never attended a military funeral.

Perhaps he has left the game of golf behind and instead sits idly in the course clubhouse, nursing a Near-Beer and saying "yeah, yeah, I'm The Decider".

Senate Approves of Telecom Immunity

It's dismal how far the current congress has gone to allow and accept lawless governmental policy. When news first broke of the warrantless wiretap programs, there was much loud derision - but the congress has reversed course in no uncertain terms. What were once vices are now habits.

Reviewing the Senate's actions, Glenn Greenwald makes a crucial point:

"Analogously, in 1973, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its work in uncovering the Watergate abuses, and that led to what would have been the imminent bipartisan impeachment of the President until he was forced to resign in disgrace. By stark and depressing contrast, in 2006, Jim Risen, Eric Lichtblau and the NYT won Pulitzer Prizes for their work in uncovering illegal spying on Americans at the highest levels of the Government, and that led to bipartisan legislation to legalize the illegal spying programs and provide full-scale retroactive amnesty for the lawbreakers. That's the difference between a country operating under the rule of law and one that is governed by lawlessness and lawbreaking license for the politically powerful and well-connected."

The legislation now moves to the House for approval and their version of the bill currently does not include immunity. Hopefully the debate will more focused on laws and not lawlessness.

The Slipper Tongue

A mini-tempest appeared last week with talk about how President Bush has utterly misunderstood a painting of a cowboy a'ridin' up a hill, and that his skewed view of the painting tells us all much about our president.

The painting is by one W.H. D. Koerner, and while governor in Texas, Bush referred to it by the title "A Charge to Keep", even using that phrase as title of his own biography. Bush said the painting was of a Methodist minister a'ridin' hard and fast up a treacherous hill, intent on spreading his religion to all, no matter the odds. "What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves" wrote Bush.

But according to a new book, and as reported too by Sydney Blumenthal in 2007, the interpretation was not exactly the intent of the artist. The painting originated as a depiction of a horse thief trying to escape from a posse. (see the painting in the link)

"Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

Now as part of this tempest has been the incredulous shock of some, who say "look at how Bush's mistaken interpretation of a work of art tells us so much about him!"

However - none of us need rely on Bush's views on art to "tell us" about the man and the president.

We have nearly 8 years of his interpretation of the Constitution, the rule of law, the balance of governmental powers, his choices for governmental appointments, and so many more of his actions tell us all about the man and the president.

The History Mash-Up, or Bush's Vietnam Redux

Five days ago I attempted to corral and correlate my thoughts and those of a few others in response to a brain-twisting speech on warfare and history from President Bush, and ultimately I found my efforts, though accurate, fell short of the mark I was hoping to make.

The overwhelming collision of factual errors, misconstructions and misrepresentations of history itself were not simple to catalog and comment upon.

Thank goodness for the insightful overview and spot-on analysis from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. I'll include some quotes from the post below, but I do hope you find the time to read the entire post:


"Before getting to the details, let's consider the overarching premise: that the choice we now face is whether to keep fighting and ultimately prevail, or to withdraw and abandon the Iraqis to their fate. As I see it, this premise is completely false. If we keep fighting, there is no reason whatsoever to think that we will "prevail", and every reason to think that we will simply sacrifice a lot of American and Iraqi lives for nothing. If we withdraw, we will abandon the Iraqis to their fate, and that is a horrible thing. But a lot turns on whether you think that there is anything we can do to avoid the bloodshed that will follow our withdrawal. I do not think that there is. If I'm right, then unless we are prepared to remain in Iraq until the end of time, we will, at some point, have to leave, and that bloodshed will probably follow.

If staying in Iraq will not lead us to "victory", but will only postpone the consequences of our withdrawing at a terrible cost both to us and to the Iraqis, then the decision before us looks very, very different. But Bush does not stop to consider this possibility. He frames the question in a way that ensures that the only possible answer is the one that he wants, and then, surprise, he gets it.

But Bush's fundamental assumption about the nature of our choice is not just false; it's a profound evasion of his own responsibility. I think it would have been very difficult to create a functioning, legitimate government in Iraq, difficult enough to make invading a bad idea even without all the other reasons to oppose it. However, I also think that success was not impossible. That it is impossible now is largely this administration's doing. They never, ever appreciated the magnitude of the task they had taken upon themselves, the care and concentration and resources that it would require, or the consequences of getting it wrong. They dismissed the plans of others, and forbade their own people to plan. They allowed an insurgency to develop and to arm itself from stores of weapons that they never bothered to secure. They did not send in enough troops to ensure basic security to the people of Iraq, and ridiculed those who suggested that this might cause problems down the line. They made catastrophic decisions -- disbanding the Iraqi army that our soldiers are now risking their lives trying to reconstitute, imposing a de-Baathification regime that the Iraqi parliament is now trying and failing to undo -- and they made them in a careless, thoughtless way that still takes my breath away.

And now, when all this carelessness and stupidity is having its inevitable effect, Bush pretends it doesn't exist. The only way we can fail, he says, is if the American people and their representatives withdraw their support -- ignoring completely his own role in making failure inevitable. And he adds that if we withdraw our support, that will constitute a failure of will and an abandonment of the Iraqi people -- ignoring completely both the extent to which his administration abandoned them from the outset, and the extent to which Americans' support of withdrawal reflects a loss of confidence in his administration and its basic competence."

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"If he had any shame, he'd be hiding under a table right now, wishing the earth would swallow him."

And Now, President Nancy Pelosi

I see little real chance that Congress would instigate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney, despite a public willing to see such a thing happen. And nothing in the behavior of either man has shown a desire to resign the powers they control.

But just for argument's sake, let us say that on some sweltering hot August night in 2007 both men decide to tender resignations and go back to the private sector. The law says in such a case, the Speaker of the House would then take the office of President. That person today is Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

What might happen next?

She does not strike me as a politician of uncanny wisdom and strength, and I hardly think she would (or could) bring the nation to some political nightmare landscape. For the most part, the functions of the federal government are carried out daily by non-elected workers and even a radical shift of power would likely be accommodated and all would precede as it does now.

I do think you'd see a definite and steady drawdown of troops in Iraq, which is going to be happening by early next year anyway. Concerns about a civil war in Iraq would be answered with the fact that it is a nation mired in civil war today.

In other words, the fate of Iraq is on a course now which must play itself out before additional steps can take place. It certainly seems little will be done from a US perspective anyway until after the 2008 elections are done.

However, with a major shakeup in the Oval Office and the burdens of decisions placed on other shoulders, some one (and I have no idea who at this point) or some group in Washington could emerge with some workable, practical and effective ideas for how to resolve the problems in the Middle East. And I know full well, whatever decisions the US makes, it is ultimately the people in that region who must decide what happens next.

And truly, short of some new, heinous catastrophe I see no changes in the Oval Office until after the elections. But Americans are a hardy and tough bunch, who have been through huge changes in the Oval Office for many decades, so fears it might crumble under Pelosi are unmerited. We've been here before and will likely he here again.

In pondering this idea, I was reading about Oklahoma Congressman Carl Albert, "the little man from Little Dixie", who was House Speaker from 1971 through 1976. With the roiling turmoil of the Nixon presidency, he could have easily become President, though he remarked then and in his autobiography he thought it would be hazardous for a Democrat to replace a Republican.

This page has a brief history of Albert, who, more than anyone else, shaped the modern office of Speaker of the House and helped solidify and concentrate Democrat power in Congress.

Albert could have moved to take the office of President, but seemed reluctant, as mentioned. Still, it could have been.

And while I see no Oval Office shake-up ahead, I wonder how many in Washington are currently weighing options now about the costs of massive change and the costs of sitting back and doing nothing. As it stands now, Congress seems poised (finally) to challenge Bush and Cheney at every step from here on out -- which is precisely the intention of our system of checks and balances. Many arguments could be made that when this system is out of balance the nation is poorly served.

Libby, The Law and The Bush Decision

Is there a fixed and certain standard within the Bush administration regarding the rule of law or is it a hodge-podge pattern of using the law to accomplish some nefarious mission?

Supporters and Critics alike have their own answers, yet so will the public and so far the overwhelming response to the President's decision to derail Scooter Libby's jail sentence is yet more reason to provide lower and lower approval for the 2-term president. I have to think that since the commutation order came within 5 hours of an appeals court ruling which said Libby must begin the jail term while the appeal process continued, then the decision and accompanying press release was made weeks if not months ago.

I do have great trouble in reconciling the Bush edicts that allow for people to be held in secret and non-secret jails without being charged or tried, and the notion that 2 and a half years in jail for obstructing justice and perjury in a national security case is "excessive."

"Excessive" is also the minimum sentence for such cases, and minimum sentencing has been constantly championed by Bush. Going from "excessive" jail time to none?

Clemency, pardons and commutations have never been a part of the Bush technique:

"Bush has granted fewer pardons -- 113 -- than any president in the past 100 years, while denying more than 1,000 requests, said Margaret Colgate Love, the Justice Department's pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997.

In addition, Bush has denied more than 4,000 commutation requests, and hundreds of requests for pardons and commutations are still pending, Love said."

There is also the infamous case of Karla Faye Tucker, whose request for a life sentence instead of the death penalty fell on deaf ears -- and included this response from Bush during an interview with Tucker Carlson in 1999:

"In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them", he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?'" "What was her answer?" I wonder. "'Please,'" Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "'don't kill me.'" I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking."

Your complaints (or your praise) for this action can be sent to your congressional reps, but they have left town for vacation. The media will move on to report about 4th of July cookouts, toy robot movies, the war, the random attack, on to a commercial and back with more on the wrestler who had some steroid rage and a new Harry Potter movie!!!

History (or those who write it, I should say) may find some favor for Bush - no matter the reaction or response to his decisions, he never looked back (or ahead) with a different mind.

Some say the case against Libby should never have reached the courts -- however, what is certain is that the criminal investigation of a national security breach was stopped dead just outside the doors of the Oval Office by Libby's interference.