SmartRemarks

The CIA Inspector General’s report on U.S. torture of detainees was released this week (under court order, thanks to a diligent ACLU lawsuit, after five years hidden from public view). The timing dovetails with Attorney General Holder’s decision to launch an investigation of that torture (albeit a tightly constrained one).

The conduct detailed in the report is barbaric and shameful, and the report moreover makes clear that it was of questionable effectiveness in gaining any useful intelligence information. Most of the media coverage has reflected this straightforward reality.

Then there’s Fox News…

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My recent posts on Star Trek brought me more readers than anything else I’ve written in months, but unfortunately I don’t have anything new to say about that right now.

My posts about politics, by contrast, usually draw markedly less traffic than the ones about pop culture. Nevertheless, I enjoy the topic, and certainly don’t intend to stop writing about it.

The problem with writing about politics, however, is perhaps the same one that leaves my readership diminished:  there’s already so much other good political analysis out there in the blogosphere. The conventional wisdom found in the corporate media punditocracy, especially on television, is seldom worth the attention of thinking people, of course… but while it’s easy enough to ignore David Broder or Chris Matthews, David Brooks or Joe Klein, there’s a lot of genuinely sharp, insightful political commentary being done online these days. It often seems that by the time I’ve informed myself sufficiently about some new development to form an opinion, Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher or Digby or any of a dozen others has already said everything I could, in pithier style and with better documentation.

(And then there are the folks spouting off from the other side, whose arguments are seldom as thorough but frequently much more infuriating. They too make demands on one’s time. Or, as one of my favorite cartoons puts it…) ->>

So it’s hard to keep on top of breaking news… but looking back later to consolidate information and analysis isn’t necessarily easier (think “drinking from a fire hose”), and still leaves me wondering whether such reflections really offer any fresh insight.

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Here’s a For Instance. For several weeks now, I’ve been meaning to write about the subject of the OLC torture memos, and the furor both before and after their release, in light of how it reflects on the Obama administration’s lamentable hesitancy to repudiate some of the worst excesses of the previous administration. Let’s review.

Way back on March 3, things were looking good. On the very same day it was revealed that the CIA, back in 2005, had deliberately destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes in violation of a court order… we also learned that Attorney General Eric Holder had not only formally denounced waterboarding but also released nine previously secret Bush-era memos, in which John Yoo and other OLC apparatchiks asserted remarkable expansions of executive power, such as (e.g.) that the president’s “power to suspend treaties is wholly discretionary,” and that the Fourth Amendment (prohibiting search and seizure without probable cause) does not apply to domestic military operations. 

The ACLU (which had filed FOIA requests on both the videotapes and the memos) hailed the release, but insisted that for a full accounting of the previous administration’s excesses, “dozens” of other even more incendiary memos still needed to be released. And less than three weeks later, it appeared that at least some of them would be forthcoming, as on March 21 Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported that

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos [from 2005] that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration…

And that’s when the shit really hit the fan.

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