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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Speaking of, maybe you guys should just stop yapping about it. Of course Feinrock et al. sound different. Now it is their baby. Could it be that they were just saying things they really didn't mean?
no life is not good - and you and your friends are still responsible!
i never won an argument with facts, logic and rhetoric, and true - also never with rants and insults. Could you help me Kovie?
Glenn,
You did what you needed to do. You forced Wyden and Feinstein's staffs to clarify, thereby strengthen, their anti-torture positions and you made yourself (and your influential supporters')visible to them. They know, now, that we are watching.
To seize upon their possible backtracking (whether or not it was there are not, I have a hard time judging but I think politicans should never get benefit of the doubt)is the best thing you and Scherer could possibly have done to ensure it doesn't happen come bill-proposal time.
This is where journalism becomes advocacy, and I am a proponent of that beautiful intersection.
There is no way for Adnoto or anyone else to adequately answer questions like "what would you do specifically? What would you recommend others do specifically?" Any response offered will not have enough specificity to satisfy the questioner. As we've already seen. It's a gambit. A game. Not meant to be either productive or seious. It's meant solely to quash the notion ofan uprising -- that is to say, an uprising from the left.
This is absurd. It would be easy in the extreme for provide some definitional clarity to his endless calls for whatever he's calling for: through his actions.
I've repeatedly offered to link to, publicize, write about whatever it is that he's doing that he thinks is better than writing, engaging in argument, voting and all the other things for which he has such contempt.
From what I can see, the only thing he ever does is come here and say how coming here is so worthless because it drains away attention from all the things that should be done that (a) he won't ever describe and, more importantly, (b) he himself never does.
One could say the same for you, too, though you're much more passive-aggressive about your condemnation of these activities, relying on all sorts of implications and hidden digs ("the centrist bloggers who are reformed Republicans" -- never a name, never evidence, just slimy innuendo buried in your sermons about The Inadequacy of all Things Others Do Here).
I'll extend the same offer to you that I have to adnoto: anytime you're organizing something or working on something that is much better than what is done here, feel free to use this space to promote it.
I don't endorse all of Mark Schmitt's points, and heck dangit I'm getting impatient waiting for the islamocommunism I voted for.
And I reckon I'll be to the "left" of Obama and his "centrists" in 2012, so I reckon I'll be voting against him and them, then, but that won't mean that I'll regret my 2008 vote.
Meanwhile, Schmitt provides a good perspective on presidency as a marathon, not a sprint.
Mark Schmitt, November 17, 2008:
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_audacity_of_patience
happens inside
the rest follows in time
-- only used the word 'torture' once. And that was to quote GG.
Ondelette and some other letter writers here have commented on Stuart Taylor and his descent (since joining Brookings? is there a meaninful correlation there?) into fear-mongering and power-worship.
Today, Yglesias writes about Stuart Taylor, and Atrios gives the coveted "wanker-of-the-day" award to Stuart Taylor.
Yglesias:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/
Stuart Taylor: Obama Should Conduct Illegal Surveillance
[...] I, for one, don’t want to live in that country. We already saw in the middle of the twentieth century where unlimited surveillance power leads — to massive politically motivated abuse. And of course it’s true that nothing J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon ever did with their unlimited surveillance power ever “seriously harmed” anybody in the way that being killed by a terrorist harms you. But it still wasn’t a good idea to let them do that. American democracy can — and in fact has — survived a large-scale terrorist attack. But it can’t survive if the threat of terrorism is taken to mean that there should be no meaningful restrain on executive power.
- - Matthew Yglesias
"The dilemma is that sometimes you simply cannot extract meaningful information from a human subject in a short amount of time, using any method. Many people can't seem to come to grips with this, and insist that the only fault is in the physical restraint of the captors. This is an emotional response that I believe is based at least in part in a desire to see a "bad guy" suffer in some way for something that has or might occur."
Indeed. Sometimes, things are already done, even if they won't happen for another two hours. There is nothing to do but wait and minimize the damage. The Hollywood narrative has us believing that it is a common occurence, when faced with imminent attack, to find a suspect with the key information to stop everything in its tracks.
That all by itself, before we get into any of the ridiculous scenarios of torturing someone to save thousands or millions of people, is the most unlikely scenario in itself.
And gonne, I don't believe torture is morally wrong period. Like most things in my life that I would probably never do however--armed robbery, for instance--I have never heard a good argument for it in any situation.
I just don't know enough about these interrogation techniques to give an opinion whether and when they would succeed in extracting useful information.
This is not meant as mean-spirited, but it is really difficult to believe that you've lived in this country (or, really, anywhere in the Anglosphere) for the past seven years and haven't heard the many, many reports on the inefficacy of torture.
I'd strongly recommend - again, as humbly as I can - that if you're going to engage in such a long, drawn out debate on a subject, that you'd at least take the time to minimally inform yourself.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
