At last we have a good reason to make some calls urging the Democrats in Congress to pass one of their craptacular health care "reform" bills. Radio ranter Rush Limbaugh has vowed to leave the US if the legislation is enacted. Although passage of meaningful and necessary reform would be delayed for years if one of these hollowed out bills becomes law, at least the country might be spared the continued presense of this despicable man.
Curious in any case that Limbaugh promises to head to Costa Rica, which has a very successful socialized health care system. The country has benefited recently from a boom in health care tourism, especially with regard to US citizens because of the high cost of private health care in America.
Until about six years ago in the US we shared a broad consensus that torture was reprehensible, unjustifiable, illegal, and un-American. Then the public learned that the Bush administration allowed, then that it ordered the cruel treatment and torture of prisoners overseas. Hundreds of years of consensus suddenly began to unravel as Bush’s supporters sought to excuse these horrors. Led by Dick Cheney, who holds that the application of water torture against suspected terrorists is “a no-brainer”, Republicans boldly advocated for increased use of prisoner abuse. Reputable pollsters now regularly ask the US public whether they support torture, something which is prohibited under federal law as well as international treaties.
Central to the new enthusiasm for torture and cruelty – aside from a culture that celebrates sadism and an utter disregard for the rule of law – is the quaint notion that such abuse will be meted out only to foreigners. Torture’s cheerleaders imagine, or would have others imagine, that an impenetrable bulwark of some sort protects Americans from suffering similar abuse at the hands of our own government. That’s historical naivete on a grand scale.
But it’s also wrong as a matter of law. We’ve known or should have realized that long ago. Furthermore, it’s wrong too as a matter of fact. It turns out that two US citizens who voluntarily acted as whistleblowers to the FBI were, for that reason, imprisoned by the government, held incommunicado and without charge, and subjected to the now standard forms of prisoner abuse.
Now that many prominent Republicans are denouncing the McCarthyite smear campaign against DOJ attorneys being orchestrated by Keep America Safe, Liz Cheney and William Kristol are scrambling to recast themselves as innocuous good-government types. Indeed. Their attacks were simply misunderstood, they say. KAS never meant to impugn the loyalty or “values” of the lawyers hired by the Obama administration, its leaders began to claim late last week. Instead they just wanted DOJ to release the lawyers names. Later, when the names had been released, it turned out that they just wanted DOJ to explain whether those attorneys were working on any issues related to Guantanamo prisoners. It’s just a call for transparency, you see, not at all a political hatchet job - as Kristol helpfully explained in his characteristically dismissive tone:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that another left-wing advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, is circulating a letter condemning what the letter describes as “a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy.” The Human Rights Watch letter mischaracterizes the “attacks” as saying “that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees.” In fact, the main issues in the debate have been whether Congress and the public are simply entitled to know who these lawyers are, and the question of whether former pro bono lawyers for terrorists should be working on detainee policy for the Justice Department.
In other words, Cheney and Kristol hope to wriggle free of the McCarthyism charge because the KAS ad smeared the DOJ attorneys with innuendo, which is after all subject to interpretation. Unfortunately for KAS, however, its campaign also dealt in deliberate lies as I pointed out last Thursday here. At the time I emailed KAS spokesman Aaron Harison asking him to explain the assertion in question. Though he’s a veteran of John McCain’s rapid-response team from the 2008 election, Harison still has not responded to my query more than three days after I sent it to him.
The knee-jerk analysis of Instapundit is generally so slipshod as to merit no notice, but this op-ed is remarkable by even his own low standards. Glenn Reynolds argues that whereas the vast majority of Americans think the federal government lacks the consent of the governed, nearly two-thirds of our political rulers imagine that they do have this consent. And the other third who don’t “presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.” He construes a revolutionary scenario from this alleged chasm in perceptions (which somehow he likens to Schlitz beer), though Reynolds holds out hope that America can be “transformed” now without violence.
The chasm into which he thinks the country’s political structure is tumbling, however, is a figment of his own illiteracy.
The proudly homophobic new Attorney General of Virginia, Kenneth Cuccinelli, didn’t waste much time in trying to force Virginia’s public colleges and universities to eliminate the protections against discrimination that they’ve extended to sexual orientation. The Washington Post has obtained a letter dated March 4, 2010 that he sent to every public institution of higher learning. In it, Cuccinelli advises them that they lack the authority to foreswear such bigotry without explicit approval from the state’s General Assembly and from him. Since the Assembly has considered and rejected attempts to extend anti-discrimination protections for sexual orientation to all state employees, says Cuccinelli, by adopting their own policies the colleges and universities are flying in the face of the Assembly’s deliberate acceptance of bigotry against homosexuals.
This week Keep America Safe released a video broadly impugning the loyalty of several lawyers hired by Obama’s Justice Department. The lawyers had represented or otherwise contributed to court filings on behalf of several prisoners held at Gitmo. Keep America Safe, led by Liz Cheney and William Kristol, demanded that DOJ release their names and dubbed them ‘the al Qaeda 7’. The video asked “Just whose side are they on?”, implying clearly that the lawyers cannot be trusted to place the interest of the US above those of the ‘terrorists’ they once advocated for. Said KAS spokesman Michael Goldfarb:
“They have propagandized on behalf of our enemies, engaging in a worldwide smear campaign against the CIA, the U.S. military and the United States itself while we are at war.”
The DOJ lawyers in question, Harison said, had chosen to defend “terrorists, many of whom killed Americans”. No matter how you look at it, that allegation is false.
At Politico, Michael Calderone is wringing his hands over journalists’ failure to properly vet presidential candidates. John Edwards, he complains, was allowed to get away with lies and indulge in a “compulsive vanity that left some people close to him questioning his judgment and even his grip on reality”. And “that failure is worrisome in a changed political world” in which politicians can quickly gain a lot of popular support without necessarily having much credibility or substance. He goes on to quote Marc Ambinder on those who helped to shield Edwards’ bizarre obsessions and manipulative behavior from scrutiny: “If you enable it, you are responsible in some ways for the fallout.”
Showing the same poor judgment that informed virtually every sentence of his perverse OLC memos, John Yoo decided to go into print with this deliciously self-pitying tribute to his own martyrdom at the hands of an unappreciative world. It turns out that Yoo has not been doing the rounds for the last several years trying to defend his shoddy legal work under the Bush administration in order to retrieve his own shattered reputation. No, his motives, he assures us, have been pure and selfless. Yoo was intent instead on saving the Obama presidency by “winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe”.
Yep, what with all those OLC memos of his that have been withdrawn, renounced and subjected to ridicule, Yoo single-handedly saved a president who nonetheless turned on him and hounded him - by viciously “letting loose” an investigation that began under Bush, and, oh yeah, allowing his Attorney General to investigate everybody else except Yoo’s complicity in torture. Don’t you just hate when that happens?
Actually, Yoo is far too modest in his claims. His legacy to America is much greater and can’t be circumscribed by the term of a single presidency. No, as I commented last month, his gift to constitutional democracy ultimately is the Justice Department’s refusal to punish Yoo and his OLC cohorts for having indemnified government officials who engaged in egregious lawlessness and human rights abuses. Yoo has worked to guarantee that every president in the future may violate clearly established law with impunity for himself and his assistants, by the simple device of hiring unscrupulous lawyers to produce the necessary advice, however preposterous, sufficient to shield the wrongdoers from future prosecution. Call it an all-out assault on the rule of law. It’s quite a legacy, and worth coming down from one’s cross to receive our thanks and plaudits.
So far Dick Cheney’s notorious former legal counsel and confidant, David Addington, has managed to maintain the pretense that he was not directly involved in authorizing the use of torture and cruel or degrading treatment of prisoners under the Bush administration. Now we have documentary evidence of his direct involvement.
The very right-wing Judicial Watch has just released a batch of CIA documents it obtained through a FOIA request. Judicial Watch is seeking to embarrass congressional Democrats by showing that the CIA briefed them under Bush about the abusive interrogation methods. Whether or not the documents actually manage to embarrass those Democrats, one of them does embarrass Addington.
Here they are (PDF). One formerly classified memo from February 4, 2003 summarizes a CIA briefing given to Sen. Roberts and the staffers for Sen. Rockefeller regarding the ongoing abusive CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects. It reads in part (my emphasis):
The enhanced [interrogation] techniques were described in considerable detail, including how the water board was used. The [CIA] General Counsel described the process by which the techniques were approved by a bevy of lawyers from the NSC, the Vice President’s office and the Justice Department, including the Criminal Division and the Attorney General, who opined that the techniques were legal under U.S. law.
The draft report(s) by the Office of Professional Responsibility had found John Yoo and Jay Bybee guilty of misconduct – rather remarkably, given that OPR investigations of wrongdoing by Justice Department officials almost always lead nowhere. However, as anticipated (see here), in its final assessment the DOJ softened the draft (OPR) findings to the point that Yoo and Bybee were found only to have exercised “poor judgment”. Absent a finding of misconduct, they will not be disbarred or in Judge Bybee’s case, face impeachment. Indeed it looks like there’ll be no penalty at all for having given the green light to the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody.
David Margolis, an associate deputy attorney general, is the man who decided to let Yoo and Bybee off with a slap on the wrist. His reasoning? Essentially he argues that “a finding of misconduct depends on application of a known, unambiguous obligation or standard to the attorney’s conduct. I am unpersuaded that OPR has identified such a standard.”
I’ll have more to say later about this final assessment and the politics behind Margolis’ decision once I’ve digested the whole thing. For now, I’ll simply note that Margolis (who is said to be extremely sensitive to which way the political winds are blowing in DC) is talking through his hat here. The memos generated by Yoo and Bybee are rife with gross inaccuracies and demonstrable falsehoods. Is it not a known and unambiguously accepted standard that attorneys are obligated to be honest and scrupulous in their representations of law and jurisprudence? At a minimum?
A law passed by the State of South Carolina now requires anyone who wishes to overthrow the government register with the state and pay a five dollar fee. Robert Mueller must be kicking himself for not being the first to think of brilliant scheme for tracking terrorists.
According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Reponsibility (OPR) is about to release an investigation that lets off the 2002 Torture Memo’s authors, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, with no more than a mild rebuke.
The OPR report originally criticized them strongly for misconduct in producing that brief for torture with reckless disregard for legal precedent. But Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, didn’t care for that finding. First he and then Eric Holder allowed the CIA to weigh in on the OPR draft report, whose criticisms of Yoo and Bybee were then toned down radically.
Reportedly the final draft will charge them only with showing “poor judgment”, a finding so flaccid that it does not even require a DOJ referral to state bar associations for disciplinary action against Yoo and Bybee. Bybee, a federal judge, could have faced impeachment.
Unbossed was founded in 1897 by poor, but honest, immigrants. It flourished during the turn of the century -- marching with the suffragists and helping organize labor unions -- only to wither during the Great Depression.
