Roger Cohen has become a mostly thoughtful voice on foreign policy at the Times, but this makes next-to-no sense:
To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.
So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.
[….]That, of course, is Obama’s favorite word: responsibility. I think it demands some acknowledgment that, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
I understand being ambivalent about prosecutions. I am ambivalent myself, without knowing in advance what an investigation might unearth. But this “we all failed” stuff is just bullshit. There are plenty of dirty fucking hippies who opposed the craziness every step of the way. Words didn’t fail them.
And while I can sympathize with CIA interrogators who in some cases may have been following orders, how many of us really look at Dick Cheney, who may have in effect ordered most of this, and think “There but the grace of God, go I?”
schrodinger's cat
Yesterday it was Ignatius in Washpost making excuses today it is Cohen in NYT. What is with these pundits? Making excuses for the powerful, is that the function of the free press in democracy?
KCinDC
Wall Street? Is he saying that 9/11-triggered insanity made investment bankers engage in risky behavior that destroyed the economy, so we should just understand and move on rather than holding anyone accountable for that mess either? Apparently 9/11 is truly an all-purpose excuse. No doubt the politicizing of the DOJ was just an understandable overreaction to 9/11 as well, as was the failure to respond effectively to Katrina.
DougJ
In this democracy, that is the primary role that the press plays.
El Cid
How is “we completely abandoned the minimal professional standards of our very high paying and socially enriching jobs which helped bring great harm to our nation” a defense?
kommrade reproductive vigor
We = A small group of navel gazing tosstards who are now looking to excuse themselves for a serious bout of F.A.I.L.
Waaah! Everyone else was doin it!
Gotta love how he narrows all of the failures down to a thin slice of time. What about the other 7 years?
Dennis-SGMM
Mistakes were made.
The Grand Panjandrum
Shorter Cohen: Rudy was right. 9/11!
Warren Terra
Isn’t all this You Should Learn To Love Torture B.S. just the latest version of “I used to be a liberal Democrat but since 9/11 I’m outraged about Chappaquiddick”? I mean,these are people who think that can convince us by saying that “we were frantic after September 11, 2001, so 18 months later we could see no alternative but to waterboard a guy for a 183rd time in the hopes that our failures to learn anything the first 182 times were all flukes”
Bootlegger
I was neither afraid nor disoriented and neither were the people around me. If the Villagers were afraid and disoriented that’s their own fucking problem, it doesn’t excuse violating the law. Every person is accountable before the law, period. It’s the most basic tenet of republican government.
jenniebee
I understand that Melissa Huckaby’s lawyers considered using this argument, but decided that it was too fucking stupid to try to use in court.
Dave S.
“Retribution” makes it sound like there are personal/political motives driving this, when in fact we are talking about prosecutions for breaking the law. The problem for the establishment is that, properly done, this is going to sweep up a lot of people across the political spectrum. (I’m not a lawyer but if you know a law is being broken does that make you an accessory or some other legal term for “in trouble”?)
It’s not so much “There but for the grace of God go I” as “There but for the fact that I did not break the freakin’ law go I.”
schrodinger's cat
Well in that case they are doing it wrong, but we already knew that, didn’t we.
El Cid
‘Look — a lot of us got panicky and found it a great time to get all crazy irrational hawky and shout down everyone who didn’t lose it and call them traitors and terrorist coddlers. Why you got such a problem with that? I just said I learned lessons from my own previous hostile idiocy!!!’
Tom65
What’s the point of having laws if the highest branches of gov’t can get away with a simple mea culpa?
Comrade Jake
The latest parade of right-wing pundits on the teevee defending waterboarding someone a couple hundred times as not being torture reminds me of all the same people telling us that Alaska’s proximity to Russia gave Sarah Palin more foreign policy cred than Barack Obama. Reality clearly has a well-known liberal bias.
kay
The problem with this is there’s no recognition of what went wrong, ever, on the government side. Instead there’s “push-back”, a frantic, purely political effort to cover their asses.
I don’t know that you get to skip a step. You can’t go right from mistake to redemption. There’s that pesky in-between part, where you have to publicly acknowledge the error.
For me, the whole point of having a process, or a set of rules, is that you fall back on it when you’re completely rattled, like after September 11th. It wasn’t put in place for the times where everyone knows what to do. It was put in place for when things are falling apart. I keep coming back to the fact that no one in government trusted the process that we ostensibly revere and rely on. They actively ran from it. They looked at the rules and rejected them.
They can’t really believe that our legal and governmental process works, or they would have turned to it, rather than inventing one on the fly.
I actually believe that it (mostly) works, and that now makes me naive.
Brick Oven Bill
If waterboarding is defined as torture, then the President should prosecute himself as the Special Forces waterboard each other as a part of their training, under his direction.
As the Bush Administration is blamed for waterboarding three Arabs, and thousands of Special Forces trainees have likely been waterboarded by Commander in Chief Obama, he is in big trouble. Personally, I believe that all of Congress is culpable.
Tens of thousands over the years is a bigger number than three.
Dennis-SGMM
On June 19th, 2007, Cohen wrote:
For some sensitive souls, the trauma of 9/11 colored their actions years after the fact.
Incertus
I think if I’m going to sympathize with them, it won’t be for this reason, but rather because there were some who thought they were crossing the line and so asked for a ruling from the people who were supposed to know, and then acted on that advice. I’d like to think that in a similar circumstance, I’d still refuse to do what these people did, but I’m not there and will never know with absolute certainty, so if I’m going to give them any benefit of the doubt, it will be on those grounds–that they asked for advice and followed faulty reasoning, but relied on people they believed were experts. Yes, it’s possible that they asked for the answer they wanted, but that goes to motivation, and i’m leery about trying to determine that.
schrodinger's cat
I think the problem with most of the media in Washington DC is that they identify too closely with the establishment they cover instead of ordinary citizens, and that bias shows up in their reporting/writing.
Incertus
@Brick Oven Bill: BOB, can you explain to me what pleasure you derive from being a spoof? I just don’t understand the mindset, and I never have, but I’m generally open to learning from others.
omen
washing our hands of this and simply walking away describes what somebody coined “the banality of evil.”
zmulls
@Brick Oven Bill
We could start with the obvious distinction that in a free country you can volunteer to do just about whatever you want (for instance, you can *volunteer* to be waterboarded), but it is against the law to force someone to do the same against their free will.
Redhand
Cohen can be such a flake. The people who failed us were our elected leaders, who we know are war criminals, worse than Nixon ever was. And Cohen wants to give Bush, Cheney et al a pass?
KCinDC
Similarly, BOB, all surgeons should be prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon, and everyone who has sex should be prosecuted for rape. Conservatives really do have a problem understanding the concept of consent.
omen
@Brick Oven Bill:
you didn’t see what the brigadier general, the former commander of abu ghraib, had to say on keith olbermann? why should grunts be sitting in jail for following orders while the higher ups, who issued unlawful orders, get to skate free?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyez4uBPC4I
jrg
Just because the press helped to create an environment where it was considered treasonous to question the Iraq war does not change the fact that the Bush admin lied to start a war for political purposes.
This has to be the dumbest argument I’ve heard in a long time. It’s like saying: “We should not charge this rapist with a crime, because someone up the street heard a woman scream, and did not call the cops”.
I’ll add that some in the media were questioning the Iraq war – Comedy f*cking Central. The fact that most of the press is incompetent does not give the criminals in the Bush admin a free pass for illegal activity.
Margarita
Why all the past tense? You’re still doing it. Right now!
omen
come on, you can’t compare soldiers voluntarily submitting to waterboarding for training to prisoners restrained and forced to endure the practice multiple times.
zmulls
Just to clarify for @BOB:
Scenario #1
Marital Partner A — You know what, honey? I’ve always had this fantasy of being tied down and forced to do things
Marital Partner B — OK, dear. I’ll get some rope from the garage and a knife from the kitchen and crawl in through the window. And if you want me to stop at any time, say “zebra”
Scenario #2 — Some stranger crawls in the window with rope and a knife and ties A to a bed
I *hope* it’s obvious that Scenario #2 is a crime worthy of prosecution, and Scenario #1 is…..not…..
omen
there were veteran interrogators from ww2 who testified they got more out of captured nazis by offering them a smoke and coffee and treating them with civility. decorated veteran soldiers too got brushed aside and ignored like they were hippies.
Dennis-SGMM
Cohen keeps raising the stakes to cover his earlier losses. Now it’s; “Because people like me got it wrong, no one should be held accountable.”
Cat Lady
Us DFH’s have been right about everything to do with Bush for so long, it’s virtually impossible to imagine the mental gyrations all of these pundits and reporters who get paid big bucks to form opinion are going through right now. I’m so appalled that they all failed and yet there they all still are, but I keep coming back to the fact that they’re working their way through the stages of grief – the loss of their credulity, and their complicity- and may still get to acceptance. I’d like to see them stay in the anger stage for a while, especially if it’s focused on Cheney. As long as Cheney insists on popping up everywhere, after spending 8 years in an undisclosed location, he will provide an easy target.
El Cid
This argument that something isn’t torture because our own military members volunteer to undergo it in order to prepare them for the prospect of enemy torture — well, I’ve heard flat-out stupider arguments, but this ain’t bad in the contest for most stupid.
Similarly, if you’ve ever had a lover who was into really kinky stuff, there’s really no reason you can’t go down the street to some woman who you think might have done something criminal and then kidnap her, tie her up, and do what you want, ’cause there was this one time that someone agreed to that.
Or, as Rush Limbaugh clarified (via Digby here), this is just like all them nagging, bitching women yapping their mouths about “domestic abuse” and other fake made up stuff:
Yep, somebody needs to stand up against all them damn yammerin’ bitches overcomplainin’ just ’cause some guy talks loud to ’em. That’s a real problem for a Rush Limbaugh type, and is why he may tend to find young Dominican boys such a better alternative, ’cause they’re ain’t no damn Dominican NOW or NOLB (National Organization of Little Boys) he’s got to worry about.
cleek
Rule Of Law!
Rule Of Law!
Rule Of Law!
El Cid
@cleek: Rue la flaw!
kay
President Bush had some choices, you know. He could have gone the lawful route and used the Lincoln method, and suspended the laws in effect for a time. Congress certainly wouldn’t have stopped him. At least that would have shown some deference, an acknowledgment that laws exist, and he’s within them.
He looked at the US process and rejected it. It didn’t really measure up. I just think that shows a really profound lack of faith.
Montysano
Did anyone else see retired Maj. Gen. Karpinkski on Countdown last night? If we were indeed torturing in an attempt to cobble together a Saddam/9-11 connection, then we’ve entered a new realm. As she pointed out (and she seemed almost overcome with outrage), this means we have US military that are in prison, right this second, for carrying out orders at Abu Ghraib. Cheney and Rummy knew this, and let these soldiers rot in a cell anyway. The “bad apples” argument is dead.
And… if you haven’t seen the Shep Smith video from yesterday, do so. It takes 60 seconds. It’s amazing to see cracks in the wall develop before your eyes.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Brick Oven Bill:
You better watch yourself Bill. You may be prosecuted for the way you torture logic.
Andrew
Scott Beauchamp’s wife writes about the homicidal asshole her husband served under.
Betsy
Thank you for this. I really get frustrated with the “no one could have known/predicted” crowd. No, YOU didn’t know. YOU didn’t predict. Some of us were protesting in the streets in spring of 2003. I went with the tiny 75 year old woman who volunteered at the homeless shelter where I worked. And not all of us were knee-jerk pacifists (though there were plenty of those, natch); some of us were just extremely doubtful that we were being led into war on honest terms, and were skeptical that BushCo could possibly turn it into anything other than a giant clusterfuck. Now, the effectiveness of protests as political acts is dubious, but I had no idea what else I could do.
Saying that “no one could have known” is just these assholes’ way of avoiding responsibility. They could have known if they’d done their fucking jobs.
kay
@Montysano:
She should push. Conservatives are frightened of this.
They’ve already added a talking point. I heard it three times this morning, and they’re raising it unasked, and preemptively.
Those soldiers “abused” the guidelines. That’s why they’re different from CIA agents.
LD50
It’s revealing that you use the fact that they were Arabs to excuse their treatment.
joe from Lowell
I’m always amazed by how little the concept of consent matters to right-wingers as they attempt to parse morality and law.
Look, if doing THAT is rape, than Barack Obama has raped his wife at least twice.
someguy
That’s right. I didn’t see at the time but my approval of the war in Afghanistan was just a childish, immature lashing out. Nobody is talking about going after the people who lied us into that war for oil (BTW, how’s that workin’ out for ya, Repukes?), but ignoring the Aug 01 national intel estimate is something Bush ought to be held personally liable for – he ought to lose his fortune in reparations to the victims of 9/11 and the Afghan people.
omen
@Montysano:
just a hunch, but i think the tragedy of katrina triggered an awakening.
wasabi gasp
Hey kids, that last song was Personal Responsibility by The Rule of Law, next up: the mushy moldy oldie that’s been taking the charts by storm with a fresh new sound by The Backpedallers. Feelings, whoa, whoa, whoa, feelings…
Church Lady
Has anyone ever been criminally prosecuted before for issuing a legal opinion? Just wondering.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
In all fairness, God didn’t make me an angel, so unlike Dick Cheney, I didn’t get to choose to align myself with Lucifer and be cast into the Inferno alongside the other Fallen Ones, becoming an unholy demon who stalks the accursed Earth wreaking anguish upon mortals in misplaced retaliation my own searing pain.
I bet if you’ve spent aeons in Hell, waterboarding doesn’t seem like torture anymore. Someone should ask Cheney what human souls taste like.
omen
@kay:
joe scumbag introduced another one. if kalik sheikh mohamed accidentally got hit with a drop of water, that got dutifully logged as an incident of waterboarding.
how he argued that with a straight face, i don’t know.
joe from Lowell
Church Lady
Has anyone ever been criminally prosecuted before for issuing a legal opinion? Just wondering.
As a matter of fact, yes. Several German lawyers who wrote legal opinions in the 1930s and 1940s were convicted of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials.
And, of course, countless lawyers have been disbarred or suspended for writing opinions so dishonest and poorly-reasoned that they rose to the level of malpractice.
Brick Oven Bill
Perhaps we should then define torture as things rational consenting adults would not choose to do to each other in the bedroom. For instance, I cannot imagine saying:
‘Honey, please shatter my knee cap with a sledge hammer’; or
‘Sweetie, please tie me up and then send a drill bit into my shoulder socket.’
I cannot even imagine Special Forces units signing up if they knew that shattered knees and drill bits were part of the deal. I have a hard time defining torture as something men regularly compete to have done to them.
But, as long as we are at the point where waterboarding is defined as torture, let’s go after all of the Congressional leadership that knew about it. This includes Nancy Pelosi and her crew, who were briefed from the beginning.
omen
@KCinDC:
accountability is for brown people.
leo
This is simple. You want an investigation and prosecutions if necessary, for the simple reason that you don’t want a repeat of this kind of lawlessness each and every time the GOP gets into power.
Jackie
My husband sent a long email to the White House Occupant (I have decided that the amish have a point with that shunning) explaining all the ways the war in Iraq would fail. We knew the invasion would go just fine, we were worried about what next. We are well educated but really have no special expertise, other than being awake and paying some attention. At the time I mentioned that those people in the WH are not amenable to reason: my husband wanted documentation for when future generations asked why no one spoke up. It was so damn obvious it felt like a nightmare that “the experts” weren’t noticing.
But no one could have predicited.
fish
I think that Cohen’s estimate of the dead is about a million Iraqis low.
El Cid
It’s really weird how quickly the implicit assumption becomes that all of the Founding Fathers were a bunch of gay pussy surrendercrats because they wanted to create a society which was not only better than the alternatives, but would allow for improvement over time.
A million years ago, people like Thomas Jefferson were opposed to things like torture and slavery (and yes, Jefferson was against that, just not perfectly so and he saw it as a profound weakness that so much of the nation was trapped in it) because you don’t want to be a society of torturers and slavers, that you wished your society to reflect the values you wished to live and emulate.
Or maybe it’s even weirder than that — maybe the hawkies think that because the founders of our nation were connected to moral wrongs (i.e., slavery and Indian-slaughtering), what this really means is that we need to emulate what the founders did wrong rather than what they tried to do right.
The same extends to basic things like fair trials and privacy from government surveillance and habeas corpus:
Since the hawk tough guys have utterly zero self-respect, they have nothing to lose from engaging in the worst, most immoral behavior.
And in their own eyes, the only reason to restrain yourself from behaving beastly and cruelly and evilly is because you’re just too weakly concerned with the evil accused or the evil victim or the evil enemy.
Fair trials? Fuck fair trials — you’re dealing with a criminal!
Fourth Amendment? Fuck the “Fourth Amendment” — we got people trying to hide shit!
No torture? Fuck that — we got terrorists out there!
And since they have zero guiding moral values (outside condemning teh gays) and zero self-respect, it turns out that it’s not only permitted but DELICIOUSLY NECESSARY to behave as beasts and to have our nation run by those enchanted by beastly behavior.
Napoleon
Marc Thiessen is on Diane Rehm’s show right now spewing totally fabricated wingnut BS on torture. He was practically spitting as he spoke.
LD50
Besides, they were all just a bunch of dirty f*cking ragheads anyway.
Napoleon
@Jackie:
The best thing to read on how some people could predict all the things that could go wrong with the war is James Fallow’s piece in The Atlantic in the run up to war.
2th&nayle
Cohen’s excuse making makes about as much sense as being in DWI court, and saying, “It wasn’t my fault, Your Honor! I was drunk!”
El Cid
How about broken fingers and cuts? That often happens with this voluntary training.
The takedown is that we don’t need stupid jackoffs like you spewing definitions of torture around.
We have definitions of torture. They include things we used to not want enemy forces to do to our forces. No one needs morons like you supplanting all the Geneva conventions and decades of legal work in international law with your idiot “Way-ull, the wayz I’s reckonin’ it…”
Shut up — you lost this battle in WWII.
Jackie
@Brick Oven Bill: Just to be clear. Raping prisoners is ok because some people will consent to sex? And claim to enjoy it?
Rick Taylor
The question is, are we a nation that tortures. Obama says we’re not, but if no one is held accountable, then he’s wrong. He can say he doesn’t torture, or his administration won’t torture. But then it’s not like torture is something that’s forbidden by this country, it’s not something that you get in trouble for if you’re caught doing it; and while this administration may feel it’s inappropriate, future administrations may feel otherwise. This is what the debate is about. Those who are strongly oppose prosecutions feel we ought to be a nation that can use torture when we see fit, and that unconditionally dropping it as a tool will weaken us.
Will
Thankfully, Cohen did not indulge himself with what clearly would have been his next step: “we all failed.” That has become the favorite trope of the braindead Mika Brezenski at Morning Joe, when discussing the economic crisis: “Aren’t we all responsible?”
Um, no, we’re not.
El Tiburon
So it’s official.
We are debating the use of Torture.
I’m starting to lose faith and fast.
There is only one path: investigate and prosecute when necessary. If Obama then decides to pardon, well then, that’s another conversation for another day.
But to give one-inch on this is to quite literally shit on what this country is about. Or perhaps we were never about anything.
kay
You’de like ot move on, but they’re so completely full of shit, so you can’t.
Conservatives are rallying around a sitting federal judge who wrote a memo that reads like a primer on how to avoid prosecution for war crimes, while threatening to filibuster Dawn E. Johnsen, a nominee for OLC whose only “crime” is that she is a feminist, and is pro-choice, because they have to throw some red meat to the base.
Abortion is, of course, legal.
El Cid
By the way, this talk of how ‘we all have to move on since we were ‘all’ driven crazy by the times’ comes from a lot of the same people who spent months screaming at Obama for being in the same hemisphere as Bill Ayers.
Cerberus
I think it is one of the most consistently maddening things about being a “looney leftist” is that we are in most instances 100% correct about things and always every time in the buildup we are demonized and in the aftermath when we are proven 100% correct, we get to hear the demonizers whine about how no one could have known, etc…
It’s also like how when everyone finally admits that X policy was a stupid horrible idea after the left screamed themselves silly over it, they never invite the people that fought for or against it from the beginning, they always talk to the recent converts. Those who were “duped” but later on “realized” what was going on. While it’s nice to see people emotionally evolve, it does get frustrating that we have to sit idly by every time they do this song and dance.
Though, I will admit that I think most leftists got one thing wrong. I don’t think even the most cynical of us expected that the war crimes and torture wouldn’t even make it to a debate we’d lose, but that “common consensus” would wave it on and fight to the death to defend it even when revealed as the Stalinist Russia crap it was.
I am not at all prepared for our “loyal” press to be spending every ounce of their energy fighting on the wrong side of a debate that should never have occurred at this particular point. It’s truly fascinating in a “stare into the abyss” sort of way.
Ash Can
@Dave S.:
This was one of the first things I thought of too. Apart from the fact that Cohen’s sackcloth-and-ashes routine here seems off for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, his use of the word “retribution” highlights a troublesome trend in this whole torture debate. I don’t know if Cohen sees it this way or not — and it would seem that he doesn’t — but this isn’t a matter of “retribution,” i.e. reward or punishment. THIS IS A MATTER OF JUSTICE.
We’ve got any number of people running around wringing their hands about who’s on the hook for what. Even Barack Obama added to this by talking about who he doesn’t intend to prosecute (although I am of course not convinced that he’s taken his own eye off the legal ball). What we don’t have enough of are people with public megaphones standing up and saying, “There are laws that were put in place many years ago to deal with just this eventuality. They are in place for a reason and neither they nor those reasons can be ignored. They come first.”
Whatever convictions may result are up to the juries, and whatever sentences (i.e., the “retribution” part) may result are up to the judges. But there must be trials. That’s what the service of justice would truly entail, and that’s what’s most important.
Brick Oven Bill
Re: “Besides, they were all just a bunch of dirty f*cking ragheads anyway.”
LD makes a very good point, and it is a good thing that the three Arabs who were waterboarded with Congressional oversight were not of African descent.
The Obama Administration, without even a trial, blew the heads off of three Africans, most likely with 50-caliber ammunition. These three Africans, who are black, did not so much even bruise an American, while the three Arabs who were waterboarded like our Special Forces personnel, incinerated thousands of Americans, and planned to incinerate more thousands of Americans.
The reason for the double standard is because the Africans were black and the Administration is racist. They should be prosecuted.
Napoleon
The Fallow’s peice I mention above.
Rick Taylor
When did the Republican party cease having any interest in the rule of law? I would have thought the principal that we are ruled by laws not by men would be deeply conservative; it’s our principal defense against despotism. But today’s Republicans don’t seem to have the slightest interest in it.
LD50
Wow. You’re comparing recovering a ship taken by pirates with repeatedly torturing prisoners, after dismissing the torture because they were Arabs.
Are you being serious with this clownish nonsense, or is this your tacit admission that you have nothing?
scav
BoB’s already pro-pirate! Ahhhhhh, the wing-spinning is getting pretty intense now: we can actually see them revolve in real time. By the end of the month, I’d almost bet we can watch them switch positions mid-sentence! If I can just manage to keep the motion-sickness under control, I might manage to enjoy scraps of the rest of the year.
Comrade Darkness
@Rick Taylor, on this sort of point and others too numerous to list (it’s conservative to save our domestic oil while the rest of the world burns theirs, it’s conservative to force banks to adhere to paranoid strict rules about handling money, it’s conservative for the government to take in more revenue during periods of growth so it is not in the red during downturns). I’d be perfectly happy if the Democrats became the conservative party. The republicans have utterly abandoned all truly conservative positions and that ground is laying fallow for the dems to plow if they want it.
El Cid
@Cerberus: Michael Parenti once quipped that “It’s always amazing how if you just wait a decade or so, things go from being ‘crazy leftist conspiracy theory ‘ ignored or dismissed or insulted by the press to being ‘old news we don’t need to discuss and waste time on’ without ever, ever being on the front page when it counted.”
GregB
It’s such bullshit. There were people railing against the collective mind loss that was sweeping the nation and they were fired from their jobs, mocked and ridiculed and marginalized.
As I have said many times before. Hunter S. Thompson was right, the American dream died some time back.
That a broadcaster would say on the most popular cable news network: “I’m not going to debate whether torture is right or wrong” is all we need to know.
Light a match to get rid of the smell.
-G
Tim H.
Let’s go after the guys who thought it up and did it first, then we’ll talk.
NonyNony
@Brick Oven Bill:
You do realize that your argument boils down to “It can’t be torture because it’s the same thing that our Special Forces guys do to learn what kind of torture they may be subjected to in the field” right?
Right? You do realize that don’t you? That the reason this is part of their military training is because of the Korean War and that the military figured out that they needed to show the guys what kinds of things they might be subjected to if they were captured by the Koreans? That these were the kind of tortures that the NK were using to extract propaganda from captured troops?
Because really, BOB, I’ve never been quite sure if you’re a full on spoof or just a little nuts, but there are guys out there on FOX News right now making essentially the same argument – somehow the things that were done to these guys isn’t torture, because they’re part of the torture-resistance-and-education training that our military uses to prepare our guys for torture from their enemies. That’s all kinds of fucked up.
zmulls
Society has the right to capture, arrest, seize, incarcerate someone, and to use forceful means to bring that person to bear. But once you have a person in your power, you become their warder. You have accepted responsibility for them, and you violate your own humanity to treat them with cruelty.
There is a huge difference between not treating someone *well* — and treating them as less than human. A captured person, in your power, is no longer a danger. Force is no longer appropriate. You are your brother’s keeper. This is one of the many things that makes us “better” than others — an ideal we strive to uphold, as difficult as it is sometimes.
So a pirate holding a gun to someone’s head is subject to lethal force. A handcuffed prisoner at your feet is not.
If and when that prisoner was loose, armed and/or dangerous, it would have been permissible to do what you needed to do to capture, and if necessary, kill, him/her.
kay
@scav:
Republicans never would have brought the pirate into a court. Never. Courts don’t “work” and either does our criminal process.
Courts are good for contract actions. Anything bigger than that, well, Cheney’s lawyers have some ideas.
Please. They’d make up a phrase. The pirate would be a “ocean-based enemy combatant”, and beyond the reach of old-fashioned process.
Comrade Darkness
@NonyNony: “That’s all kinds of fucked up.”
It’s just them saying “we have the logical capacity of 5 year olds” which neatly matches their emotional capacity. Otherwise they would not be on the teevee, for sure.
DanSmoot'sGhost
Unless I am missing something, the entire premise of your post rests on this assertion.
I have no idea what this means. The War Machine had almost no opposition in 2002 and 2003. Virtually none in the halls of government.
I guess I qualify as a DFH, and I opposed the craziness, but who was listening? Nobody, as near as I could tell. Certainly nobody in any position to do anything about the craziness.
I don’t think the article you cite is about Cheney being an object of empathy. It’s about all of the people whose names we don’t know, being in a situation where there seemed to be nothing standing in the way of the craziness.
It really comes down to the question I asked John yesterday and to which I have seen no answer (there might be one but I haven’t seen it): Who would you prosecute, for what crimes, and how? And unless someone can describe that scenario with a successful outcome — including a successful political outcome — then “retribution” is just about baiting the pitchfork wavers.
LD50
Hmmm. I think I can play BoB, too.
“It’s okay to shoot people since people are taught how to shoot people in the military.”
“Rape must be legal, since people have sex all the time”.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to go thru life thinking that this is what making sense looks like.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Brick Oven Bill:
Hey Bill, careful now, your bigot is showing.
Jackie
@Cerberus: I never in my wildest nightmares thought that anyone in a respected position in this country would stand up and defend our right to torture.
My heart hurts. I don’t know what to do with this.
gopher2b
Because that 200 mile strip is the United States. Nothing else matters.
scav
DanSmoot’sGhost. To insist upon a “successful political outcome” to be a necessary end result of upholding a legal process is evidence of being touched by the dark side. Fiat justicia, ruat coelum.
Corner Stone
I’m curious – if I snatched a dirty brown raghead (hat tip BoB) off the street because I suspected him of being a terrorist, then proceeded to hold him in a basement and tortured him 180 times in a month – could I then just dump him on the Mexican border and expect no charges to ever be filed?
If contacted by authroities I would stress very strongly that I was deeply affected by 9/11 and just very passionate that something like that never happen again.
Napoleon
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
Huh? Didn’t close to 1/2 the Dems vote against it?
Brick Oven Bill
The Administration is the bigoted one Rusty. Read about how light-skinned blacks treated dark-skinned blacks in the history of Haiti. I support pirate’s-rights, and the rule of law. There is no law that allows the summary execution of alleged kidnappers, who were teenagers.
The double standard is racist, and subject to prosecution. Show me the law that allowed this needless slaughter, as ordered by the Obama Administration. This is not torture, this is murder, and potentially a hate crime.
I have heard the surviving pirate’s mother’s testimony, and she said that he is a good boy. His friends were probably also good people. Now they are dead.
Comrade Darkness
@Corner Stone,
*she takes the hand lotion out of the basket and puts the hand lotion on.*
HUH?
*she puts the hand lotion on!*
Right, right, whatever you are saying. Crazy American.
Leelee for Obama
On January 20, 2009 at noon, I finally knew I’d not wake up in a country that tortured. I wish that fact was enough to let bygones be bygones, but it isn’t.
Many of us, myself included, went a bit insane after 911. That’s a fact we all live with everyday. However, just like we don’t allow vigilantes to extract justice for crimes, no matter how heinous, we look to our government to temper our responses to attacks such as 911. That is why we are a nation of laws and not of men. That was Bushco’s charge in the aftermath of the attacks. They failed by twisting our laws to suit themselves and for that they need to answer. If the latest info that the torture was another way to massage the intelligence on Iraq is true, then they need to go to prison.
omen
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
what’s your prescription?
the more i hear about the south africa model of truth and reconciliation, and the types of heinous crimes that got absolved, the more i doubt its validity.
isn’t there a danger that this model will only encourage more unrest in the future? who respects “rule of law” when citizens see that crimes get excused without punishment?
and why wasn’t this viewed as a racist mode of justice, when whites where allowed to escape justice? when’s the last time black dictators guilty of human rights abuses got to walk free after submitting to hearings?
gwangung
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
.
Obviously, you weren’t paying attention.
I’d correct that if I were you.
DanSmoot'sGhost
@Napoleon:
Well if by “it” you are referring to the Iraq war, I don’t find that to be very useful as an observation. Who was asking for exploration of the intel, who was mounting a viable opposition that had any legs?
The outcome is its own explanation. The don’t call it a War Machine for nothing. The anti-war community doesn’t refer to the Republicans and Democrats as just two flavors of the same War Party for nothing.
What happened is not the result of a few bad people doing bad things. It’s the result of a whole country going down a bad road, and coming along now and looking for scapegoats.
If prevention is your goal, then elect better governments. If it is not your goal, then what is the point?
In a nutshell, the American people elected a potatohead government, gave it carte blanche, demanded security at any cost, and then didn’t like the outcome.
Another aspect of this that bothers me is, if Iraq and the twisted intel had produced a happy outome … Iraq selling us cheap oil, being a congenial colony, and shipping us cheap flat screen tvs to sell at WalMart …. we’d be looking at another Republican administration right now and the complainers would still be marginalized. Don’t tell me that political outcomes don’t matter.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Brick Oven Bill:
It’s time to change your name to Brick Oven Bigot.
Krista
You DO realize that the two are mutually exclusive, right? That’s like saying that you support the rule of law, but that bank robbers should be allowed to rob banks and hold guns to tellers’ heads without the police having the unmitigated gall to shoot them if negotiations fail and the teller’s life is in immediate danger.
Bah, why do any of us bother? It’s like trying to teach a brain-damaged poodle how to drive a car — the poodle’s completely unaffected, and the human just looks like an idiot for even trying.
Phoebe
I’m as anti-retributivist as you can get, a utilitarian and a softie defense lawyer to boot. I think half the laws should go out the window and the other half should pay in community service.
And this is bullshit.
If you want to show mercy, or whatever, then first you have to determine and acknowledge guilt. We need to establish who did what, and then – and only then – do we get to the mercy question. And only then do we have a hope of fixing this horror. We have to face it with open eyes and as much information as possible.
Otherwise you’re just Peggy Noonan, and you don’t want to know. If you don’t want to know, then shut up. You don’t get an opinion column. You don’t get a position of responsibility.
sparky
@DanSmoot’sGhost: all of what you say is true, but beside the point, unless you really think that the legal system means nothing or that the US is in truth an elective dictatorship.
the people in power have an independent duty by virtue of the office they hold to perform their jobs consistent with the legal rules of the polity. while no one would dispute that those rules have both some play in them and that they are not always enforced as well as they could be, those rules are not outcome-dependent and officeholders ignore them at their peril.
if, perhaps, things had turned out differently, you might be right that there would be no prosecutions. but that’s just speculation and thus not relevant. if you like you can think of it this way: they gambled that laws don’t matter and they lost.
Brick Oven Bill
Think also about the Pakistani practitioners of the religion of peace, and their wives, and children, who are routinely bombed in their homes. Shrapnel consists of torn and twisted pieces of red-hot steel. These pieces of metal routinely tear through the flesh of human beings, including children, on the order of the Obama Administration.
None of these corpses had the opportunity to have their day in court. They were simply wiped off the face of the planet because of their interpretation of their faith. I support rights for Muslims, and the rule of law. There is no law that allows the bombing of Pakistani homes.
The double standard is based on religious hate, and is subject to prosecution. Show me the law that allows this needless slaughter, as ordered by the Obama Administration. This is not torture, this is murder, and potentially a hate crime. The killing continues to this day.
DanSmoot'sGhost
@gwangung:
I don’t agree. Just because some of us were opposed doesn’t mean that there was effective or useful opposition.
In the DougJ model of this aftermath, who goes to jail?
Rumsfeld, or Lyndie England? Are the pitchfork wavers looking to try and imprison the Rumsfelds and the Cheneys?
That is so far from a likely reality that it scarcely even qualifies as the basis for blog rhetoric, much less useful political conversation. John Cole was right about one thing yesterday, Washington would explode if that were tried.
You should be careful what you wish for. I’d sooner yell at the people like us, like me, who were opposed to the crazy but didn’t do enough about it, than try to take our anger out on Cheney. Cheney isn’t coming back to power, and we have total control over who is coming to power. That’s plenty for me.
Hyperion
Bill, STFU.
sparky
@Krista: i have to think after this sequence that BOB is pure troll. a good one, if the notion of trolling consists of putting together random notions in a fashion that will generate misdirection, emotion and wasted effort.
hmmm…maybe he’s a GOP argument testing algorithm?
unrelated but comment-double use: what Phoebe said.
El Cid
@Brick Oven Bill: Wait — bombing of innocent civilians is wrong, even when we do it, therefore it must be the case that torture is right when we do it? What?
DanSmoot'sGhost
But that’s the crux. If lawyers, who can argue anything, and do, for a living, can argue that the rules permitted their actions, then you are forced to prosecute people for having an opinion you don’t agree with, and acting on that opinion in good conscience. To do otherwise forces you to prove an evil intent. Nobody disagreed with their intent more than I did, or do now, but I can’t prove that the intent was evil, and neither can this imaginary prosecution do so.
The people who made the bad choices were fired. All the political options for punishing them are off the table at that point.
kay
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
Except Bybee. Who got a lifetime appointment.
I don’t think he’ll be impeached. I do think he should be.
DanSmoot'sGhost
For the record, I have no real interest in mercy for the Cheneys in this kabuki.
My goal is prevention of future occurrences. The straightest line to that, IMO, is election and support of ethical governments. Anything else is a distraction and runs the risk of empowering the crazies who gave us this trainwreck in the first place.
If I’m right, and it empowers the crazies, then … retribution fails. If I am wrong, and the politics of the country is firmly on a track to keep electing ethical governments despite the prosecutions, then ….. it doesn’t matter, prevention has won out anyway. Either way, retribution ends up just being its own reward, and prevents nothing.
A lot of the public opinion for war and security at any cost was about anger and retribution. Are we sure that we want to employ those motives again in the aftermath? maybe standing back from the emotional reaction is way to get to the better result?
Just Some Fuckhead
Folks, don’t wanna rain on yer fun time here but you already said all this shit a couple threads ago. I believe at least one of you – maybe two – is just copying and pasting from the earlier thread. *stern look*
DanSmoot'sGhost
@kay:
I don’t like him, but you can’t impeach a judge for having a bad opinion. How do you impeach one for having a bad opinion before he became a judge? That goes way beyond the intent of the impeachment mechanism, doesn’t it?
When we criminalize opinion, then I think we are screwed.
This strikes me as a nose, face, spite thing.
4tehlulz
@Just Some Fuckhead: Copypasta is an Internet tradition, and there is no emoticon that can adequately express my outrage at your outrage.
omen
@Just Some Fuckhead:
to paraphrase bush:
you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of counter catapult the propaganda.
SGEW
Sigh.
10 USC Sec. 1047.7
sparky
@DanSmoot’sGhost: while it may seem like that’s the case, it’s not true. lawyers, just like the Pres and VP have an independent duty to not misrepresent the law.
Model Code of Professional Responsibility, Canon 7, n.14
Government lawyers have a higher duty than private lawyers, incidentally:
I don’t know whether a criminal violation occurred; I don’t think anyone can know without an investigation. But as to intent and motive, it’s not a good ground to argue that we don’t know what someone is thinking. We never do in any investigation or criminal case. All we can do is infer, and document if something is beyond the bounds. It seems reasonably apparent here that the crafting of the memos was beyond the bounds. It is possible that I am wrong but only an investigation into the matter would dispel that perception.
LD50
We’re seeing the emergence of a new wingnut meme: “I don’t give a fuck if I make any sense or if anyone takes me seriously”.
Expect to see more of this one in the next few years.
kay
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
I think the argument with Bybee is that he was confirmed before the memo was released. I’ve read the memo. It’s hard for me to imagine that it would not have caused problems at his confirmation.
It’s one of the smarmiest parts of this whole episode. They not only tasked him to write a primer on how to avoid prosecution for torture, they then put him on the federal bench.
And, impeachment isn’t a criminal action. I’m not “criminalizing” anything. I’m asking if he’s fit to sit there, knowing what we know now.
LD50
“There’s no emoticon for how I’m feeling right now!”
SGEW
@sparky: Which is why we’re all waiting for the DOJ’s OPR report. It’s gonna be a keeper.
I would not be surprised if Prof. Responsibility profs start using the torture memos as examples of how not to write a memo for your client.
Legalize
See e.g., Nuremberg.
sparky
@Just Some Fuckhead: dude! no way would i do that!
/checks
/finds same bee in same bonnet but different wordz so oklay :P
besides i always cite myself as my own best authoriteh!
sparky
@SGEW: that would give rise to a whole new wingnut industry–debunking the terroristic law schools. ought to keep Fox busy at least one night a week ;)
as for OPR, i dunno. may be a Bush sleeper cell in there.
mandarama, eager minion
@Brick Oven Bill:
Oh, jeezus, fine. I’ll go get the damn pie filter already.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Hey, does anyone remember Logo? Do you think that some little kid from Village of the Damned built BOB as a class project, then turned it loose?
Nah. That turtle was too damn cute to turn into anything like BOB.
Phoebe
Ok DanSmoot’sGhost, forgive me if you’ve addressed this before, but:
Are you in favor of a truth & reconciliation thingy? An investigation? That much? This is not a rhetorical question, but I think it’s a threshold question for this argument, since you can’t prosecute without an investigation. In short: You seem anti-prosecution, but what about investigation?
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Phoebe:
What she said. Nicely done.
This inability to admit any mistake or wrongdoing is, to me, one of the mysteries of the wingnut brain. Most of us in the adult world have to do it all the time: “I fucked up”, “I was wrong”. Obama gets this. What his opponents call weakness is what most of us see as Negotiation 101: disarm your adversary by accepting some responsibility. If, however, you operate at the level of a 5 year old, this is not in your repertoire.
omen
who says “retribution” has to take the form of jail? i’d be happy with licenses revoked and/or 7 figure fees for damages.
omen
@Phoebe:
i asked him that. dansmoot’sghost wouldn’t answer.
omen
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
cheney isn’t just one man. his way of thinking is represented by a bunch of federalists he empowered. some of whom are still sitting in seats of power. unless cheney’s argument is rebuked, you can count on it returning. dems will not stay in power forever.
LD50
Public beatings would be nice, too. But that’s just me.
Mike in NC
Can this be proof that B.O.B. picks up the Glenn Beck broadcasts through the fillings in his teeth?
MNPundit
As a DFH I agree: WE ALL FAILED.
We’re American Citizens, protesting struggling within the stystem to stop it, is noble but we all bear some fault. We are American citizens and what America does is our responsibility whether that be praise or blame!
justmy2
You know Doug, the is a DFH named Barack Obama who happens to be in the WH largely because he decided to stand up against DUMB WARS…
TenguPhule
Because there is no difference between SERES taken *willingly* and forcing an unwilling prisoner to experience drowning multiple times.
The BOB Fail meter hit 11.
Laura W
@Just Some Fuckhead: Are you new here?
Slide
You know if everyone agreed that this was a terrible chapter in our History and that we made a huge mistake letting the fears of 911 skew our thinking, I might agree with Roger. But that is NOT what is going on. Cheney is on every TV show he can get on saying that they were right to torture and that if Obama doesn’t torture as well we are all going to be attacked.
How can we not investigate and prosecute under such circumstances? If we don’t, isn’t that giving tacit approval to torture?
This has nothing to do with “retribution”. The players involved are secondary. This is about America. What we stand for. What our values are. This is about being able to look in the mirror at ourselves and like what we see. And if it takes an admittedly rough and difficult patch to get there it is worth it.
SGEW
More awfulness, from the Senate Armed Forces report, found by Jane Mayer at the New Yorker (and via Sully, natch):
(emphasis added)
As hilzoy said, this again raises the obvious comparison:
I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to go and look at CuteOverload for the rest of the afternoon.
Shawn in ShowMe
An administration can’t investigate the criminal actions of the previous administration and avoid the witch hunting label. Folks like to hold up Nuremberg as precedent, but Nuremberg wasn’t Hitler’s successor prosecuting Hitler’s administration. It was the world prosecuting Hitler’s administration.
If you want a rerun of Nuremberg, then the World Court should be trying this case, not the Obama administration. That ain’t gonna happen either because the U.S. government has never allowed its foreign policy to be subject to the law. This didn’t start with the Bush administration. That was just peak wingnut.
Slide
I don’t quite remember what Peggy Noonan:
or Roger Cohen:
or David Ignatius:
had to say about looking ahead.. or keep on walking… when the republicans were shouting about the “rule of law” when it came to Bill Clinton and his testimony is a minor civil matter?
Slide
Thats why we need a special prosecutor. Politics should play no role… and I want to see the culpability of any Dems that were briefed on this in the Intelligence Committees as well
TenguPhule
and I want to see the culpability of any Dems that were briefed on this in the Intelligence Committees as well
Briefed and unable to reveal anything on pain of prosecution from a Bush regime itching to take down any democrat on any excuse.
Blue Raven
@Brick Oven Bill:
Bill, now, please. Sit down. Relax. Everything is going to be all right. I’ve made a few phone calls, and there is someone coming over who can help you. Right. That chair. Perfect. Right next to the open window. And I promise that the tranquilizer dart that’s going to hit your neck will only feel like a bee sting. You’ll be right as rain as soon as they figure out the medication dosage you need.
omen
@El Cid:
makes sense if you’re schizophrenic.
omen
@Just Some Fuckhead:
yes you do.
Roq
Mr. Cohen’s bought into this ridiculous notion that people went so crazy after 9/11 that NO ONE should be held accountable for bad judgment. Baloney. Plenty of people kept their heads, like the head of the FBI and many of our military leaders. Not to mention the fact that this practice went on long after the initial shock.
Furthermore, they were torturing for a reason. This isn’t just bad judgment. This program was a RADICAL departure from precedent – the policy AND the people charged with carrying it out. The CIA doesn’t do interrogations. This practice wasn’t someone pushing the envelope a little too far. They didn’t fall into on accident. They weren’t just angry and/or scared and over-reacting. This was premeditated. They needed a reason to invade Iraq, and real evidence didn’t exist. So they turned to torture to get them what they really wanted: false intelligence. Which is what torture is good for.
DougJ
I don’t know. I don’t even know that anyone does. I’m just saying that the argument against prosecution can’t be “there but for the grace of God go I”.
If that constituted a defense, not many criminals would ever get convicted.
Tax Analyst
Only those of us who are truly and irreversibly mad.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Tax Analyst:
That’s at least two of you, maybe more.
poopsybythebay
@Brick Oven Bill:
You my dear sir, are an idiot.
JWW
Dougj,
When you take your medication tonight, triple the dose and down them with as much whiskey as possible without puking.
America would be a better place without you.
Wolfdaughter
Just some fuckhead:
Is copypasta a rite in the religion of those who worship the FSM? Inquiring minds want to know.
I was one of the DFHs who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, and indeed wrote to all 7 Arizona congressmen & senators (all men at that point), protesting the buildup to the war, begging them not to vote for it, and citing reasons, all of which proved correct, to oppose it. It seriously frosts my butt to read the argument that “everyone” was misled. I also knew, just from reading Hans Blix’s reports, Scott Ritter, and IARC Committee, etc., that Saddam no longer had any significant amounts of WMDs.
Moreover, as a retired medical librarian (still working at the time), I had some familiarity with how the CDC handles highly dangerous organisms such as anthrax, and knew that mobile, canvas-sided bioweapons labs were ridiculous, and part of the overheated imaginations of the Bush cabal and the war supporters. You just don’t handle deadly organisms that way–you kill yourself first. DUH.
Like many of you, I have also been right about other issues. Another example is SUVs. I looked at those when they first started appearing on the market in the late 80s and thought, are people out of their fucking minds? Gas prices WILL go up and SUVs, being larger vehicles, use a disproportionate amount of irreplaceable metals and other resources. I drive a small Kia which gets almost 30 around town and ca. 35 on the highway. If I can afford it, my next vehicle will be a hybrid.
I could cite other examples but this message is getting too long. Sigh.
TenguPhule
Irony of the Day.
Also DIAF
Batocchio
Funny, in both cases, 9/11 and torture:
1) The Bush administration failed.
2) The media failed (not everyone, but close).
That’s without getting into the press’ ridiculous double standard on Republicans and Democrats.
The only thing that will prevent this type of abuse of power in the future is if at least some of the officials and lawyers who pushed it are punished. That’s it. That is the solution, and is looking forward – to the consequences of doing nothing. What, do we think that Congress or the press will protect us from abuses in the executive branch? If not over war crimes, then what? We need a special prosecutor, and an excellent one at that. We also need a ton of public pressure.
(See also: Watergate, Nixon not going on trial, Haig’s deal with Ford to pardon Nixon, Iran-Contra…)