So says John Bolton over at Human Events, [Read more →]

And raise you a Dick Cheney as the hawkish Republican establishment candidate. Oh how teh crazy wouldst flow…

And predictably, it’s filled with distortions, half-truths and misrepresentations (full transcript here): [Read more →]

Andrew et al link to a polling graph that places my misreading of party ID numbers last week in pretty obvious context. I’ve spent the last week thinking a lot about that post and the push back I received to it.

It was a bit surprising to me just how emotionally invested I became in the contents of that post and how charged my own actions became around the ensuing discussion. I’m generally pretty sincere in my writing, but also try to consciously maintain a certain distance from anything I write. I want to be open to as much as possible, unattached to being “right”, and swayed by the best arguments that happen to come along. My thought process on that post might lend some insight into why that wasn’t the case with that particular post and leads well into where my head is at now vis-a-vis its contents. [Read more →]

Two essential reads: 1) Adam Serwer takes on the Washington Post; 2) Peter Bergen takes on Dick Cheney.

Dan Riehl kindly took the time to exchange a few emails with me on the resurfaced issue of the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques and the Bush Administration’s authorization of those techniques. I think visitors will find the back and forth, especially Dan’s adeptness at presenting an alternate perspective than that generally found on this site, makes for pretty interesting reading. [Read more →]

I wouldn’t be so quick to claim that yesterday’s document dump in any way vindicates Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (or, as the rest of the world calls them, Torture).  In fact, if I were a fan of Dick Cheney and read his purported claim of vindication, I’d be extremely disappointed in the language he used to make that claim:

The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002. The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States. The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions. President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

I usually try to avoid writing much about subjects where I’m going to be offering the exact same perspective you can get elsewhere, but my initial thought upon reading the above statement was exactly the same as Spencer Ackerman, Michael Scherer, and Chris Boddener: Cheney’s statement does nothing to actually claim that torture (or Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, if you’d prefer) actually led to a significant amount of actionable intelligence.  Instead, it simply restates what no one has ever denied – that high value detainees were, in fact, highly valuable.  As others have noted, nowhere in the memos as they were released yesterday is there any evidence or even suggestion that torture/EITs led to actionable intelligence – only that detainees who were at some point subjected to such actions provided valuable actionable intelligence. 

Although it’s certainly possible that the heavily redacted portions of the two Cheney-sought memos contain such evidence, and indeed one can plausibly (though not with any kind of certainty) infer from some of the other documents that the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed may have had some valuable effect, Cheney’s statement should make his supporters think twice about making such inferences. 

Indeed, if I were a Cheney supporter, I’d look at his statement and have a difficult time concluding that such inferencs are a wise idea.  Instead, I would wonder why, if those inferences were valid, Cheney’s own statement utterly fails to make them.  I’d wonder why a man who doesn’t have much of a history of mincing words would issue a prepared statement that so transparently avoids the central issue at hand and thus fails to make any claim of vindication on that central issue of whether torture/EITs actually made us safer. 

I would wonder why Cheney used the carefully chosen phrase “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence” instead of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence…”  I would consider that former VP Cheney has a huge personal stake in this issue and is, apparently, one of the few people with direct knowledge of how detainees were interrogated and what results those interrogations produced.  I would then ask myself whether it would be appropriate to conclude that torture/EITs worked in any meaninful sense based on speculation about the redacted portions of the memos and attenuated inferences about the unredacted portions when the man at the center of it all, the man upon whom my trust that torture/EITs worked relies has so blatantly refused to make such inferences. 

Then, finally, I would find myself with little choice but to conclude that, in fact, torture/EITs did not work and that the only real justification remaining for those actions is the justification that was there all along: naked vengeance. 

But, of course, I am not a supporter of Cheney.  And so it doesn’t much matter what I would do if I were.

“Megalomania is a hard drug to kick.”  ~ Josh Marshall, pondering Dick Cheney

“But the argument isn’t going away. It will be with us as long as the threat of terrorism endures. And where the Bush administration’s interrogation programs are concerned, we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus.” ~ Ross Douthat in his debut column for The New York Times

I enjoyed Ross’s column.  It was good – much better than anything Kristol ever churned out for the Times, and better than most of what I’ve read from Brooks.  I wonder about this paragraph however.  The column was moving right along for me until I read, in regards to the torture debate: “Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its sense….”

So Ross wants prosecution off the table so that we can instead “learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus” … ?  Isn’t that exactly what he warns against in the preceding sentence, when he claims that we’ve “heard too much to just ‘look forward’”?  What is the difference between struggling toward consensus and just looking forward?  In the end, what’s the difference between Douthat’s analysis and Peggy Noonan’s call to just keep walking, aside from rather more readable prose of the former? [Read more →]

So it looks as though Spain is opening formal criminal inquiries into alleged war crimes surrounding the use of torture by the Bush administration.  Judge Baltasar Garzón is involved in the investigation, the same guy who prosecuted Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator propped up for years by the CIA.  So perhaps there’s something “full-circle” about this.  It’s not as though the Bush Administration is alone amongst the past dozen or so Presidents who abused their authority in order to spread American power across the globe.  From Kennedy to Nixon to Bill Clinton these sorts of soft-crimes, coups, and shadowy military support of tyrants and rebels alike has been the modus operandi for the Executive Branch.  George W. Bush just took it one step further, and it’s hard to know how other Presidents would have reacted post-9/11, but there is no question in my mind that few would have taken it so far as Bush did, and the main reason I believe that is because of the insidious influence of Cheney on White House policy over the past eight years.

[Read more →]