Letters to the Editor
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Dan Quayle Started This
Do you remember how David Letterman and most other Americans made fun of Vice President Dan Quayle when he spoke about Murphy Brown, a TV character played by Candice Bergen?
"Mr. Vice President, Murphy Brown is a fictional character! Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!"
Now Scalia cites Jack Bauer, and people take him seriously.
Note that fictional Jack Bauer tortures fictional evil people when he already knows those people have major evil information. Scalia's real pals, on the other hand, will torture just about anybody, anytime, for any reason or no real reason.
Jack Bauer does not exist. The world of Jack Bauer does not exist either. Nor, maybe, does the United States of America exist anymore.
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Please don't insult the Inquisition!
As a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, I have to take issue with Blumenthal's conclusion:
"Thus, for this conservative jurist, torture, dramatized through popular entertainment, remained the same obsession with "absolutes" as it had been during the Inquisition, which after all developed the enhanced coercive techniques used today."
In fact, the Inquisition was far more scrupulous in observing the rule of law than the Bush administration is. The Inquisition was required to provide access to counsel to those it imprisoned, and torture, when applied, was carried out under the strictest of guidelines, which is more than we can say for the Bush administration. Also, any testimony obtained under torture had to be ratified at a later time by the defendant, unlike the situation in the U.S.A. today in which we have no way of knowing what kind of torture was used to obtain which "confessions."
The Inquisition was a brutal and unjust institution, but it respected the legal structure in which it operated, which is more that I can say for Bush.
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Some jokes write themselves...
rants based on paranoid fears and inconsistent (irrational) theories regarding Bush’s motivation, it really makes you look ignorant.
Res ipsa loquitor
Keep on defending lawlessness. Makes you look...
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Who's the anonymous source? Probably DOD General Counsel Jim Haynes
Scott Horton says at his Harper's blog:
In fact Blumenthal is quoting remarks by a very senior Bush Administration official made at a recent off-the-record conference in response to my speech, “The Danger of Being Hated.”
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000328
Horton posted the speech on his blog on May 27, and the next day he says:
I just returned from a conference on counter-terrorism issues convened in Europe where the United States was represented by a delegation of very senior figures from the Department of Justice.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/05/hbc-90000163
It seems very likely to have been this conference in Turkey, given by the Marshall Center:
http://www.marshallcenter.org/site-graphic/lang-en/page-mc-index-1/xdocs/mc/news-newsbrief/07-11.htm
Unfortunately, they don't seem to release much information about their attendees.
But the main question is: who is still in the DOJ and "even now at the commanding heights of power" who was involved in formulating Bush's torture policy? Jay Bybee and John Yoo are gone. The Air Force's general counsel Mary Walker is a she, not a he.
The only one left in the DOJ is William James Haynes II, the DOD's general counsel. He was heavily involved in torture policy, but hasn't been as notorious as the others. There's an interesting New Yorker article about his conflict over torture policy with Navy general counsel Alberto Mora:
Haynes rarely discussed his alliance with Cheney’s office, but his colleagues, as one of them told me, noticed that “stuff moved back and forth fast” between the two power centers. Haynes was not considered to be a particularly ideological thinker, but he was seen as “pliant,” as one former Pentagon colleague put it, when it came to serving the agenda of Cheney and Addington. In October, 2002, almost three months before his meeting with Mora, Haynes gave a speech at the conservative Federalist Society, disparaging critics who accused the Pentagon of mistreating detainees. A year later, President Bush nominated him to the federal appeals court in Virginia. His nomination is one of several that have been put on hold by Senate Democrats.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fa_fact?currentPage=1
OK, so Haynes started as a torture advocate, but he's not particularly ideological. Now that he's stuck in a lame duck administration and in a dead-end job (he'll almost certainly never make it to the bench now), he's had the chance to rethink his views.
(There's probably an element of envy there too; Jay Bybee got confirmed to the 9th Circuit despite signing the infamous torture memo, but he snuck through under the Republican Senate; the Democratic Senate wouldn't confirm Haynes as dogcatcher.)
Congratulations, Jim Haynes. You're an idiot and a traitor to the American people, but I'm glad you're still aboard the Administration, if only because your replacement would probably be worse. And by the way: you owe it to the American people to speak up.
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What a joke
I love that phrase, "4th Circuit's stinging rebuke." What a joke! That decision was so tortured (to borrow a phrase) and so at odds with existing precedent (which these two judges acknowledge by going out of their way to say it doesn't apply) that this decision will surely be overturned.
But here's the gist of the 4th Circuit's reasoning: This guy was not an enemy combatant because he had never actually taken up arms against Americans on foreign soil. Think of the screwy, perverse logic of this decision: terrorists at the behest of a a foreign entity may attack us if they like so long as they do all their planning and training on our own soil. If arrested, they are to be treated merely as criminals and not the terrorist they truly are, men determined to destroy our nation and way of life.
Remember, folks, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
But silly libs, foaming at the mouth with Bush Derangement Syndrome, are willing to see our nation suffer great harm if only they can blame it on Bush.
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The Imperial Presidency
Mr Blumenthal,
Will the mainstream media ever pick up on what is happening here? As the 4th circuit court points out, Bush's policies will pretty much destroy the Constitution?