FunctionalAmbivalent

Up From Comments: The Case That Proves Torture Worked...Apparently Doesn't

Regular commenter Frank referred to this CNS report that waterboarding led to the break-up of a 9/11-style attack on the "the tallest building on the west coast", Library Tower (now the U.S. Bank building) in Los Angeles. The reports states:

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) -- including the use of waterboarding -- caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

The CIA source who confirmed the account is not named, and no further reference is made to a contemporary confirmation. Instead, confirmation seems to be taken from released Justice Department memos that are currently under fire for being little more than a papering-over of illegal acts.

CNS source-fudging aside, the piece is an echo of a Washington Post op-ed by former Bush speechwriter Marc Theissen that also referred to the just-released memos and makes an impressive case on behalf of "enhanced"  interrogation, saying:

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast.

The problem is that the timelines don't match. According to this 2007 release from the Bush White House, the plot to attack "the tallest building on the west coast" was broken up in 2002, before KSM was even in custody:

In 2002, we broke up a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast.  During a hearing at Guantanamo Bay two months ago, KSM stated that the intended target was the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

In other words, they broke up a plot to attack a west coast building, and some time later KSM "stated" that the intended target had been the Library Tower. (Timothy Noah has an excellent accounting of the contradictions here.) That's not exactly a ticking time bomb, and it certainly isn't the kind of high-value intelligence that could be used to justify torture.

There's no way to know whether the account of the sequence of events in the 2005 memo was a misunderstanding of the timing or a deliberate misstatement. At the same time, there's really no way to tell whether the account released by the White House in 2007 is the truth or a mistake. But given the importance of this argument -- given that the only conceivable justification for torture is the ticking time bomb scenario the KSM story seems to indicate -- we really ought to more closely investigate this sequence of events to get at what really happened. Perhaps we can all agree that some kind of look at the underlying evidence -- a trial, a 9/11 Commission style investigation, something -- ought to be undertaken.

The object of the investigation should not be the CIA operatives who carried out the orders. I've said before that confronted with a real ticking time bomb, I'd do the torture myself and take my chances with a jury of my peers. The CIA operatives charged with guaranteeing Never Again, and who asked for and were granted guidance from the Department of Justice, shouldn't be subject to sanction.

It is, instead, the people who granted that guidance and sanction who need to be investigated. The disturbing aspect of this is that there appears to have been no ticking time bomb, and it looks as if maybe the Executive Branch ordered or allowed illegal mistreatment of captives as a matter of course, in an abandonment of more than 200 years of American law and tradition. That's what we need to investigate, because that's the real crime.

UPDATE: It appears also that torture wasn't used just to solve security problems. Apparently. Senior  officials pressured interrogators to amp up the abuse to gain information to solve a political problem:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that (Vice President) Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

That's the problem with torture: like everything else government does, it expands.

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Up From Comments: A Rare Retrospective Edition

One year ago, almost exactly, regular commenter Frank wrote this:

How much time and energy have we all spent here debating something (waterboarding) that has been used exactly three times in this five year war? Three times.

Conservatives were quite insistent about that, reporting heroic successes from rare uses with minimal effort, information leaked from people with a significant interest in minimizing the public knowledge of illegal activity. According to the National Review:

U.S. and Pakistani authorities captured (Khalid Sheik Mohammad) on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. KSM stayed mum for months, often answering questions with Koranic chants. Interrogators eventually waterboarded him — for just 90 seconds.

KSM “didn’t resist,” one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. “He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” Another CIA official told ABC News: “KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.”

Frank implied that the only reasons anyone could object to such a quick and effective program were weakness and cynicism:

Of course Tom is then going to give the standard, "If we can believe what they report" answer.

It turns out, maybe conservatives shouldn't have been so quick to believe what they were being told. In fact, waterboarding was used hundreds of times, and the waterboarding of KSM was anything but quick and effective. KSM had not been silent before the waterboarding; he'd been fairly cooperative under conventional interrogation. And the CIA put him on the waterboard not once, but more than 180 times.

The Bush Administration and its apologists have lied repeatedly. Presumably-good-faith supporters like Frank have believed the lies, at least initially standing by their men and being made to look like schmucks time and time again.

My question to Frank and those like him is: at what point do you start to wonder if maybe they're lying for a reason?

Up From Comments: In Which We See Why the Republican Party Is Out of Power

I've been writing this blog of about six years and never has anyone proved my point in arguing against me as effectively as regular commenter Pursuit did a few days ago. The subject was torture, and rather than engaging with the argument he wrote a screed that was both personally offensive and perfectly illustrative of why only a quarter of Americans currently identify themselves as Republicans.

While I've been tempted to make this reply personal, I think instead I'll be polite and point out how Pursuit's argument -- which is right down main street as Republican arguments go -- guarantees that the Republican Party will continue to lose favor and influence. Pursuit makes three key points, each of which is destructive to any hope the Republican Party might have of being anything but a rump minority.

Deny what is obvious to everyone. I'm not going to argue fine points of whether bashing someone's head against the wall or freezing them or depriving them of sleep until they either die or talk constitutes torture. It does, and anyone who argues otherwise isn't worth the effort to argue with. If they don't get it yet, they're never going to get it.

But when a political party is married to a worldview that is obviously incorrect, that party loses credibility. If the party is persistent and insistent enough in believing things that are obviously wrong, people get embarrassed to be associated with that party. That's the position the Republican Party is in right now, as regards not just torture but lots of major issues. (Seriously: I go to church every week and I don't know anyone who thinks creationism ought to be taught in the schools. Has the Republican Party never seen a fossil?)

We're talking about torture here, though, and I'd just like to say this: I urge Republicans to keep making the argument that we didn't torture. Make it loud, in the face of all evidence, rather than, for example, admitting that mistakes were made in the entirely justified post-9/11 panic. Dig in, Republicans, instead of initiating processes to learn from our mistakes. Don't give an inch and watch how many more seats you lose in Congress next year.

Accuse the other guy of hypocrisy. Pursuit, again:

All the more so because we know that key Democratic leaders knew all about these methods from virtually the very beginning of these programs and their only question was "are we doing enough".

In this case, Pursuit seems to think that I'd let Democrats off the hook for that which I'd try Republicans. Republicans argue all the time that Democrats are just as bad, and that justifies whatever vile thing Republicans are doing. It''s useful because it sidetracks the substantive argument in favor of an argument over who's the bigger hypocrite. That  argument is valuable to cable television bookers, but tedious for most of the public, which would really rather politicians spend their time figuring out what needs to be done. To most people it's like listening to little kids argue on the playground.

"He did it first!"
"Did not!"
"Did so!"

About six months ago I swore off that kind of argument, and I'm not going to get into it again. I don't have to; I have a blog. Pursuit says I'm a hypocrite, and you can verify for yourselves how hypocritically protective I am to the Reid-Pelosi regime. As I recall, I have at no point claimed admiration for the behavior of the Democratic Congressional leadership on this issue. I agree with Pursuit that they've acted entirely in craven self-interest.

That said, the juvenile Republican argument that Democrats were just as responsible as Democrats for Bush Administration torture policies ignores a number of realities about how American government works. There's a difference between the Executive Branch ordering illegal activities and members of Congress hearing about those activities in classified briefings. Had Democrats walked out of those briefings and publicly reported what they'd heard, I'm reasonably certain Pursuit and people like him would not have admired their courage. They would, instead, have accused the Democrats of treason in exposing classified information. Just as surely, since the administration was already violating existing law, introducing legislation to outlaw what was already illegal would likely not have been an effective strategy, either. The Democrats were left with two options: sit in silence or start impeachment proceedings. I think they should have done the latter; Republicans would surely have objected in less than polite terms.  

For Republicans to be consistent in this argument and restore themselves as a party of other than crackpots -- I'm talking about you, Pursuit -- they should call for an open investigation. Let's get the facts out on the table, and if it means that Democrats were criminally complicit in war crimes, let's bring the Democrats up on charges.

Make no mistake, I'm 100% in favor of letting the American system of governance deal with this the way the American system of governance deals with this: investigation, public hearings and trials. Let's figure out what was done, who approved it, who carried it out, at what cost and with what benefits. Let's judge through established legal mechanisms just whether anyone -- Republican or Democrat -- broke he law. If crimes were committed -- and there's certainly enough evidence to require an investigation -- let's bring charges and argue the cases in traditional public trials.

That is not, of course, what Pursuit and his Republican friends want. They want to bury this, and their accusations of partisan hypocrisy are nothing but an attempted distraction. That dedication to irrelevancy has cost the Republicans their identity as the rule-of-law party. Not surprisingly, this is not a winning political position for Republicans to take; most Americans are in favor of the rule of law. Insisting that the law doesn't apply to Republicans is going to leave the party tainted for a generation.

Attack the other person's patriotism. What the tailback sweep was to Vince Lombardi's Packers and the hit-and-run to Whitey Herzog's Cardinals, attacking the patriotism of those who disagree with dogma is to the Republican Party. It's the foundation upon which all else is built. Pursuit gets there, just like clockwork:

"...you're just a partisan hack who would rather attack his country to gain political advantage..."

The problem with this is my advocacy in favor of the laws and traditions of the United States constitutes an unconvincing "attack" on this country. The founders envisioned a government of laws, not men, and arguing in favor of ignoring the law while equating disagreement with the President with treason simply doesn't sit right, to most Americans. It sounds, more and more, like the "attacking" is being done by the side that advocates lawlessness and, occasionally, dissolution of the Union and violence against the duly elected government.

I'm motivated, on this issue, not by partisan advantage but by a deep belief in and love for this country. You may disagree with my concept of how to move this country forward, but by accusing me of attacking this country when I'm in reality trying to (in my utterly insignificant way) help restore it to it's deserved shining-city-on-a-hill status...well, I'm not sure that's going to win Republicans a lot of votes. Remember when Democrats accused people trying to feed their families of racism because they disagreed with affirmative action? That didn't work very well for Democrats, did it?

Now Republicans are accusing everyone who thinks laws ought to be followed of hating their country, and that's going to be every bit as big a problem for Republicans as affirmative action was for Democrats. As the accused, in this particular instance, let me put myself up as an example. I'm a middle aged, middle-class, church-going father of two. I'm a flag-flying member of the Chamber of Commerce and firm believer that the United States can right its course and be better than we've ever been before. I'm an entrepreneur who thinks capitalism is the bee's knees.

If, by Republican definition, I'm an enemy of state attacking America by insisting that legally enacted laws be followed, there are maybe 150 million more people just like me out here. Every time Republicans attack people like me, they're attacking that enormous bloc of regular, conscientious voters. We're going to vote against those who accuse us of being anti-American just as we voted against those who accused us of racism.

That's Pursuit's case, and it would be insignificant if it were the fringe position of a few right-wing crackpots. But it's not. It's the mainstream belief of today's Republican Party, which will, like the Democratic Party of the 1980s and '90s, have to spend a lot of time out in the rain before they notice  that it's the same small group of people showing up at every rally. The way back to power is not to deny reality and attack the people you're trying to court.

I'm a Democrat and, while there are plenty of Democrats who make me want to vomit, I generally prefer Democrats in power. So by all means, Pursuit, keep up the good work. The more you make yourself look like an utter jackass, the less likely it is that people like you will ever take power again. Think how much better off this country will be.

Up From Comments: Fish in the Barrel

Fish:

Barbara Boxer's push for the "UN Rights of the Child" treaty probably has something to do with this.

As much as I like you, I find your blindness to stupid democratic legislation as disturbing as I find your contempt for stupid republican legislation refreshig!

The UN Treaty is mentioned in one of the articles to which I linked. I did not feel the need to explain it because it's a long-winded-but-innocuous document whose contents I don't think are really disagreeable to much of anyone.

The difference between those who want to ratify the treaty and those who don't is national sovereignty. Republicans, in general, don't think US domestic law should be subject to international law. Democrats, in general, are more tolerant of subjecting the United States to international law.

The parent/child relationship is sacrosanct, within certain civilized boundaries. (I think we can all agree, for example, that rape of one's children is not within a parent's rights and the state should step in to stop it.) As noted by Rep. Hoekstra, American courts have upheld parental rights consistently over the last 200 years.

No reasonable person wants to take away a parent's rights, and while I will concede that most of those who do want to make spanking a capital crime are likely Democrats who spent way to long as graduate students, the rights of responsible parents to raise their children as they see fit are not under threat. Republicans who claim parental rights are under threat are either searching for a scary wedge issue with which to distract the rubes (my personal bet) or are paranoids who believe that the mainstream liberals theyr'e sitting next to in PTA meetings will support legislation that makes every parental decision the equivalent of a trip to the DMV.

Parental rights are, occasionally, threatened in this country. Those threats come both from left and right. You give me intrusive county-level bureaucrats; I'll give you Elian Gonzales. Those flare-ups are more a function of the processes of a free nation than they are the inevitable march of statism, and that the leading proponent of this particular Constitutional amendment acknowledges that those threats are routinely beaten back by the courts tells me that he's advocating changing the Constitution to protect us from a threat that doesn't exist.

Which was, of course, the whole point of the posting.

As for my "blindness" to stupid Democratic legislation, there are probably two things at work. One, I'm a Democrat so some of that legislation you think stupid isn't, in my opinion. And two, at this moment Democrats aren't really doing all that much that is notably stupid, at least beyond the standard bounds of Congressional behavior. They've been on their best behavior for a while in order to get elected, which they now have.

Given the Democrats' current powerful standing, this prudence will surely change. To paraphrase whoever: power makes stupid, and absolute power makes absolutely stupid. I'm thinking, personally, that President Obama's vow to eliminate nuclear weapons may be the jump-the-shark moment.

Finally, I'm impressed particularly by my conservative readers' ability to miss it when I mock Dems for their sometimes breathtaking stupidity. For some reason, it seems not to register when I make fun of animal rights protesters, hairy exhibitionists against war, slavery reparations, John Kerry or windfall profits taxes. But when I take a swipe at, say, conservatives who imagine that elected representatives enacting a 3% increase in marginal income tax rates on 5% of the population makes this country exactly like Russia under Stalin, those who comment on this blog latch on and won't let go.

A glimpse into human psychology, perhaps, and I'm sorry that my point of view disturbs you. But not real sorry.

Up From Comments: Rush Week

Pursuit:

So why engage the guy (Rush Limbaugh) and bring him back from the conservative fringe into the mainstream conversation? Limbaugh, no idiot, saw the opening and quickly made this about him and O'Bama with this challenge. In one move, he gets mainstream headlines, and sullies O'Bama with the mud O'Bama thought he'd avoid by using proxies. O'Bama's move here was plug dumb, and he should fire the guy who talked him into it.

You're correct, Pursuit, that the Democrat's Rush strategy has increased Rush's mainstream prominence. Where you're incorrect is assuming that's some kind of unintended consequence. In fact, it's exactly the object of the exercise.

Rush Limbaugh is, outside of a small subculture, reviled. He's also now thoroughly identified as the leader of the Republican Party. The last few days have vividly demonstrated that what Rush says goes, and no Republican dares to stand up to him. That alienates moderates and younger voters, key members of the Obama constituency. That, in effect, inoculates those constituencies against the Republican message of the moment, as pushed by Rush and currently bubbling up through the lesser pundits and pols, that Obama took the economy over in June of last year, eight months before he took office, and his policies are thus responsible for the drop in the value of everyone's 401(k). It will have the same inoculating effect for some period to come, perhaps months or years.

Sneer all you want. By any objective political measure, President Obama is doing just fine. He asked for a $750 billion stimulus package, and he got a $750 billion stimulus package. He said he'd end torture and he's ending torture. He said he'd end the war and he's ending the war -- a little more slowly than he said, but even that works to his advantage. His deliberation puts the lie to the Republican claim that he's dangerous radical, thus providing him even more credibility and political capital.

Step-by-step, with due diligence, he's remaking American government almost exactly as he said he would during the campaign. ( And remember: he won. You may not like it, but a majority of the American people want him to do what he's doing.) That the incident "sullies" Obama in the eyes of hard-core Republicans makes no difference; there are fewer and fewer of you every day.  To everyone who matters in the political equation, Republicans look petty and gutless.

President Obama is a smart, deliberate, skilled politician. It's fine with me if you sit smugly upon your discredited ideology, snickering about how stupid he is. Sun Tzu wrote that the greatest mistake a general can make is to underestimate his foe. Keep up the good work.

More Lame Conservative Logic

Adam:

We don't need a stimulus package yet. The situation's not nearly dire enough.

Because you don't really need to start bailing until the water level reaches your mouth.

The Heart of the Disagreement Is the Assumption that Torture Makes Us Stronger

Pursuit, expressing his point of view with admirable clarity:

I believe that when we take up arms against those who have attacked innocents without provocation we play to win.  How we play is dictated by the behavior of those who have challenged us.  If these foes choose to murder the sons, daughters and mothers and fathers who have done nothing more than go to work one fine morning, then I have no mercy for them or their fellow swine. 

In this case I will do whatever is necessary to keep my fellow countrymen safe and I will show no mercy to those whose acts defiled the rules of civilized confrontation.  I am appalled by your inability to see the difference between those who torture for sport, and the honorable deeds of those who work in defense of our nation against foes who threw the rule book out with their first act of war.

The assumptions behind your statement are wrong in three ways: first, they assume that barbarism is the route to victory. I, too, think we should "play to win," though I'm not sure I'd have chosen "play" as my verb. I just think the tactics you advocate aren't tactics that will bring us victory.

Second, you and your pro-torture friends assume that everyone who has been held and mistreated is a terrorist, when in fact there is no way to know that's true.

Finally, you reject one of the bedrock principles of American governance, which is the rule of law.

Let's take these one at a time. First, the adoption of our enemies' tactics:

I know of no conflict in which the United States was the more barbarous combatant. (Maybe in the Indian Wars, but I'm not a real student of those and I believe the Indians were just as capable of barbarism as the cavalry, so let's call that a wash.) Against the British, the French, the Spanish, the Germans, and the Japanese, we fought under different, more restrictive rules than our enemies. And yet we defeated all of them.

There's a reason for that. Military theorists dating back to Sun Tzu have acknowledged "moral force" as being decisive. George Washington initiated the American tradition of treating enemies with dignity not because it made us weaker, but because it made us stronger. The German's massacre of GIs at Malmedy did not, as the Germans hoped, sow fear among the American forces, instead inspiring them to greater courage and determination. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the refusniks freed, they spoke often and eloquently about the inspiration they took from the fact that America fought the Communists without becoming like the Communists. The very behaviors that anti-Commie toughguys derided at the time as weaknesses turned out to have been decisive strengths. The Gulags the Soviets imagined would protect their government in fact contributed to its collapse.

Those are all examples of moral force, which you would surrender in favor of the type of barbarism that we defeated. You may imagine that's "playing to win," but to me it looks a lot like playing to lose.

I spent six years of my life making military documentaries, reading history and interviewing American military men and women every single day. I can tell you not a single one thought surrendering our moral force was the right -- or strong -- thing to do. The American officer corps is well educated and deeply versed in military history and philosophy, and every time I'd make some kind of macho, beer-powered statement along the lines of kill-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out, they'd disagree (politely) and explain to me the error of my ways.

Make no mistake: my abhorrence of torture has nothing to do with having mercy for terrorists. I have none. I simply  believe -- and history backs me up, I think -- that we are a stronger country when we are a better country. I welcome examples from history that contradict that; I suspect they will be few.

Second, we have no way of knowing whether the people held and abused as terrorists are, in fact, terrorists. I'm consistently appalled by the way conservatives -- self-declared cynics about the ability of government to get anything right -- suddenly imagine government infallibility when it comes to identifying terrorists and shipping them off to Gitmo. There is abundant evidence that many detainees have no meaningful ties to terrorism and no valuable information to offer. Yet you imagine it productive to continue a policy that, in effect, surrenders our moral force and makes us every bit as bad as our enemies (implausibly) claim in exchange for no measure of safety.

Finally, there is the matter of rule of law. However fond you are of torture, it is illegal under American law. What galls me most about this whole discussion is that proponents of torture will not confront the issue head-on, introducing legislation to legalize what they advocate. Instead, they attempt to redefine "torture" so they can slip war crimes under the door without having to put it to a vote. I suspect this is because most Americans would be horrified to contemplate the institutionalization of torture you advocate. So here we are, with our most avowedly pro-American, law-and-order conservatives openly advocating lawlessness, in effect giving the Executive Branch carte blanche to detain and abuse anyone they like without legal scrutiny, in the hopes that allowing that lawlessness will buy some measure of physical safety.

Talk as tough as you like, Pursuit, but what you advocate isn't strength by any definition. It's barbarism, and barbarism isn't a strategy that will bring us either victory or safety.

Did Obama Not Order an End To Torture When He Ordered an End To Torture?

Frank, reciting the conservative talking points that President Obama's anti-torture Executive Order is not, in fact, anti-torture:

They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured. Which seems to be to be exactly the same as George W.'s policy.

You know, Frank, I have moments when I wonder if maybe some of my commentors aren't fictional creations of people trying to drive me nuts. I think to myself:

Real people wouldn't be so consistently and obviously wrong; this has to be parody.

Were it not for the fact that I actually know a couple of you, and that I've heard the entirely fictional and easily disprovable arguments face-to-face, delivered in all seriousness, I think I'd just assume you guys were a running joke. Instead, I try to actually reason with people who believe things that plainly aren't true. I need to learn not to do that.

Still, I try.

Frank, I didn't have a lot to do this afternoon, so I've spent the last few hours reading the applicable Executive Orders and underlying laws and the legal briefs and memos, and while I'm not a lawyer what's clear is that President Obama's Executive Order Ensuring Lawful Interrogations is not, as you assert, "exactly the same" as President Bush's policy. It is, in fact, a clear and unambiguous repudiation of Bush Administration policy. The differences aren't subtle.

President Obama's Executive Order revokes President Bush's Executive Order 13440, which President Bush signed and which affirmed "the authority of the President to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions."

What that meant, following down through the various laws and memos, is that President Bush reserved for himself the sole power to interpret what the law says, even when his interpretation contradicted long established law. This seems, to me, to be the justification for the whole cobbled-together, torture-is-legal framework. Follow the memos and legal interpretations and you'll find an interesting thing; they all fold back onto each other. Bush Administration policy is dependent on the President having absolute authority that exists only in Executive Order 13440 -- and in the fevered minds of Unitary Executive enthusiasts. Revoke that Executive Order, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

There is not, as a matter of fact, a lot of disagreement or ambiguity about what constitutes torture. Torture, under U.S. Law, is clearly defined:

torture means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control

Clearly, what the Bush Administration authorized meets this standard. The Bush Administration's "enhanced interrogations techniques" consisted entirely of the infliction of severe physical and mental pain and suffering in order to elicit information. There is no legal requirement for organ failure or any of the other thresholds the Bushies made up to justify the legally unjustifiable, and the authorization of those extra-legal standards by the authority vested in the President by Executive Order 13440 seems to lack any of the checks and balances upon which American governance is based.

The Bush Administration, for the first five years after 9/11, also asserted that "illegal combatants" were not covered by treaty or law. They eventually abandoned that ridiculous position after the Supreme Court weighed in and Democrats took control of Congress and its investigative mechanisms, but for half a decade they utterly ignored what was obvious in Geneva Common Article 3, which applies to:

Noncombatants, combatants who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat(out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause...

By nullifying Executive Order 13440, President Obama has clearly discarded the entire legal house of cards the Bush Administration constructed to justify what is clearly illegal activity. And just in case a few vestiges of the Bush Administration's legal fictions might persist deep in the bureaucracy, President Obama's executive order digs down deep:

Executive Order 13440 of July 20, 2007, is revoked.  All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order.  Heads of departments and agencies shall take all necessary steps to ensure that all directives, orders, and regulations of their respective departments or agencies are consistent with this order.

In other words, every bit of the cancerous legalism that the Bush Administration constructed to justify war crimes is excised from American law, and we're back to the way things were before vicious morons like Cheney, Gonzales and Yoo started pissing on 225 years of American law and military tradition.

The New York Times article you use as sole justification for your fascinating assertion of President Obama's duplicity -- misleading easily duped liberal fat heads like, for example, me -- says this:

They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top leader of Al Qaeda were captured.

I know of no law or Executive order that is irreversible, with the possible exception of Supreme Court rulings, so it seems to me the significance of the above paragraph is minor. But seriously: do you really believe for one minutes that President Obama is laying in wait for his opportunity to re-instate the Bush Administration's torture policy? And if you do, can you somehow gee that up with the conservative's basic campaign premise that Obama is a dangerous radical determined to weaken the nation?

Clearly, there is nothing in reality that supports your assertion that President Obama is President Bush redux. I can only speculate why you chose to believe something so obviously untrue. I'm guessing it's a way of making President Bush seem less odious -- or, perhaps, of painting people like me as dupes.

But still, Frank: You're killing me with all this made-up stuff. Are you sure you're not some kind of practical joke?

Stimulate This

Pursuit, again:

It's charming how you refer to this bill as "stimulus". No more than 10% will be spent in 2009 which makes it approximately half of 2008's stimulus which worked out so well.

Um, no.

This afternoon, the CBO released its official scoring of the overall stimulus package. And, wouldn't you know, the agency says slightly north of 78 percent of it will pay out over the first two fiscal years.

One year and two years are different, I understand, but the basic argument is that it's just regular spending dressed up as stimulus, and clearly it's not, and the 10% figure is clearly crap so let's stop using it.

That said, there's enough just-regular-spending packed into the House version of the bill that I think House Dems are due a shout-out: thanks, boneheads, for getting greedy and screwing up the whole process. If you're going to make the case that stimulus is important, don't pack the bill with a bunch of un-stimulating wish-list crap you're too embarrassed to argue for in public. From a purely tactical standpoint, it gave neo-Hooverite Republicans the ammunition they needed to demagogue. More importantly, as a matter of civilized behavior, it isn't right to try to slip controversial spending (e.g., birth control) into a much larger bill on the hope that no one will notice. While I understand that none of you wants to take a public stand on anything, in a healthy republic controversial issues should be debated in public and voted on by elected representatives.

The irony is that when it comes to the types of spending that social conservatives demagogue, Democrats score way more political points in a public debate than they do trying to sneak it through the back door. And if they get caught being sneaky -- and ham-fisted beasts that they are, Democrats always get caught -- they look exactly like the caricature of big-spending Democrats that Republicans use to make highly effective attack ads.

The end result of this little escapade: Democrats have undermined their own President, given their opponents ammunition and still aren't going to get the spending they're after. On top of everything else -- and I didn't even think this was possible -- they've managed to make Mitch McConnell look reasonable.

Slavery reparations, anyone?

I've Been Waiting For Someone To Bring Up Katrina

Pursuit on the Kentucky ice storm:

For the most part your fellow citizens are showing themselves well; Minimal complaining, no New Orleans style "where's the government" bleaters.

There are a couple of reasons for that, not least of which is that government has been Johnny-on-the-spot during the whole event. At every level, responsibilities have been defined and fulfilled. The Mayor and Governor have left not a single moment of doubt about who's in charge, and the federal government has offered and delivered resources quickly and adeptly. Government help was readily available before, during and after the event for every need greater than an insurance report on a non-injury accident. When the shelters got within 10% of being filled, other safe sites were opened.

More importantly, the nature of the disaster is completely different. My power was out, but I was never more than ten blocks from stores and restaurants that were open, and the roads between here and there were never impassable even to my low-slung Honda. The buses never stopped running. What we experienced, in our household, was an inconvenience, not a catastrophe, and for those relatively few people whose lives really were in danger, help was literally a phone call away.

I find it interesting that you're still unable to grasp why Katrina was a government failure, but being a hopeful soul I'll try to explain one more time.

New Orleans, as a functioning city, was destroyed by the storm and the flooding that followed. The scale of the event was such that city government, even had it been well managed, would have been largely impotent to do much at all in response. State government was in better shape, and you can argue that the state response could have been stronger, but it was still not large enough to get the aid where the aid was needed. The situation required a federal response.  That response was slow and inept.

Let's be honest about one other thing: There was an element of racism in the public response to Katrina. When rumors circulated of human predators in the streets of the city, I remember well the Republicans I know advocating that the federal government to keep the Army and National Guard out of the city until "those people" stopped shooting at helicopters -- something that may never have happened, but that made a lot of headlines at the time and had an influence on the federal response. It was as if, somehow, Katrina was a moral failure on the part of the citizens of New Orleans and until they demonstrated themselves deserving no aid would be provided.

Do a thought experiment: imagine it was a hundred thousand white suburbanites huddling in shelters, without food or water and under the control of a handful of black gangsters and thugs and rapists. Do you think anyone would urge the federal government to hold back the Army -- the Army! -- until it was safe for it to go in? Of course not; a reaction like that is impossible to imagine. The feds would have sent the first three Humvees to show up at the staging area in with flags flying high and, if necessary, guns a-blazing. Nothing would have held them back -- and if something had, the outrage among conservatives would have been enormous.

In New Orleans, the federal response was delayed until it was pathetic, and conservatives -- you, just for example -- to this day blame the victims of the storm. The feds preened for the cameras while leaving to the fates good people who were following the rules. You can claim that wasn't racist, but I think the thought experiment above puts the lie to that. What you can't claim is that it was sufficient, or laudable, or has any reasonable similarity to the federal response to the relatively small Kentucky ice storm.

It may seem gratuitous to say this, but the conservative inability to understand what was wrong with the government response to Katrina is one of the reasons you guys can't get elected to public office these days. You may hate and scorn government, but most people prefer government that works.