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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Tags: CIA, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Eric Holder, Glenn Greenwald, Obama, OLC memos, torture

Chuck Todd is the White House correspondent for NBC News. He is, frankly, one of the smartest political analysts on network TV—certainly he was among the best covering last year’s elections.

And yet… events this week make it clear that Chuck Todd has no faith in the American justice system, has no confidence in the democratic process, and doesn’t even trust mass-media journalism—his own profession—to do anything for public discourse other than debase it. Apparently even a top-level practitioner of the Beltway media establishment still can’t help but embody its worst systemic flaws.

This all arose when Chuck was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday discussing AG Eric Holder’s possible appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Bush administration war crimes (as I wrote about here). Salon’s Glenn Greenwald jumped all over Chuck’s casually dismissive remarks about the idea, and Chuck (to his credit) agreed to a detailed interview with Glenn. The results were very revealing, and very discouraging.

Here are excerpts (all emphases mine) from what Chuck said on Tuesday…

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Tags: Chuck Todd, DOJ, Eric Holder, Glenn Greenwald, John Yoo, journalism, media, torture

What have we learned this week, boys and girls? We’ve learned that every time we think we know the worst about Dick Cheney, every time we think we understand the fetid depths of the clandestine government that sick fuck and his neocon cabal were running out of the Bush White House, every time we fool ourselves into thinking some sense of closure might actually be in sight… another rock gets turned over to reveal something new and even more disgusting underneath.

Attorney General Eric Holder was already considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the details and extent of the torture regime set up by the previous administration. (Or “brutal interrogation practices,” as Newsweek put it… but let’s not mince words; torture is clearly defined in law and precedent, and the mainstream press wouldn’t hesitate to call it what it is were any government but ours involved.)

But even while that story was still developing, before any decision had been made, the news broke about a CIA “program” that had existed since 2001, kept entirely secret from Congress (and even from new agency director Leon Panetta) at the direction of Dick Cheney… and then that this mysterious program apparently involved covert assassination squads.

And the closer you look at the details, the more repulsive and arcanely interconnected it all gets.

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Tags: Congress, Constitution, death squads, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Eric Holder, international, John Yoo, torture

On the matter of worthy military traditions, and (by implication) their opposite:

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” 

– General George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775 

Tags: George Washington, military, torture

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

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Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

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.

—

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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Tags: Dick Cheney, Eric Holder, international, media, morality, Obama, OLC memos, Republicans, torture