The Massive Expansion of America’s “Hard Left” May 13, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Criminal Justice, Torture.Tags: Abu Ghraib, antonio taguba, bagram, barry mccaffrey, beltway, cheney, cia interrogation, geneva conventions, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, hanoi hilton, independent investigation, International law, jesse ventura, larry wilkerson, liberal, Nancy Pelosi, navy seal, nuremburg, Philip Zelikow, roger hollander, ronald reagan, rule of law, sere, special prosecutor, survival escape resistance evasion, thomas pickering, torture, torture era, torture memos, War Crimes, warrantless spying, waterboarding, william sessions
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Jesse Ventura was on CNN with Larry King last night and this exchange occurred, illustrating how simple, clear and definitively non-partisan is the case for investigations and prosecutions for those who ordered torture (video below):
VENTURA: I don’t watch much TV. This year’s reading, I covered Bush’s life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects.
And I’m very disturbed about it.
I’m bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we’ve created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem.
I will criticize President Obama on this level; it’s a good thing I’m not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.
KING: You were a Navy SEAL.
VENTURA: That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence — every one of us was waterboarded. It is torture.
KING: What was it like?
VENTURA: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
Let’s just repeat that: ”I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.” That is the crux of the case for investigations and prosecutions. That’s it. Can anyone find a “liberal” or ideological argument anywhere in what Ventura said? It’s about as far from a partisan or “leftist” idea as one can get. Yet our establishment media has succeeded (as Digby recently argued) in converting this view into a “Hard Left,” “liberal” or “partisan” argument because that’s the only prism through which they can understand anything, and that’s their time-honored instrument for demonizing any idea that threatens their institutional prerogatives and orthodoxies (only the Hard Left favors this).
Ventura himself, like the argument he’s advocating, is also about as far from being a “leftist” or partisan as it gets. He was elected Governor of Minnesota by running as the ultimate non-partisan, as a poorly-funded independent who defeated both the GOP and Democratic establishment candidates on a largely libertarian platform and on what he called “fiscal conservatism,” including large tax rebates. Unlike the establishment-revering, prosecution-opposing pundits who are the true partisans — loyal spokespeople who fiercely defend Beltway culture and legal immunity for political elites above all else — Ventura is doing nothing more than expressing definitively independent and non-ideological political principles, ones that were quite obviously ingrained in him over the course of decades as an American and a veteran: torture is wrong in all cases; it is illegal; and those who do it should therefore be prosecuted.
Former aide to Condoleezza Rice and former 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow yesterday became the latest to join Ventura by calling for investigations into torture, telling Laura Rozen: ”When there is this kind of collective failure, we need to learn from what happened.” Gen. Barry McCaffrey two weeks ago pointed out that numerous detainees were “murdered” in U.S. custody — which is unquestionably true — and called for criminal investigations of the top-level political officials who sanctioned torture. Gen. Antonio Taguba previously stated that “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, this month endorsed both investigations and prosecutions for Bush officials who broke the law. Bush 41 ambassador Thomas Pickering and Reagan-appointed FBI Director William Sessions wrote in The Washington Post that an independent investigation was a pre-requisite to moving beyond the torture era. Ronald Reagan vehemently insisted that torture is inexcusable in all cases — no exceptions — and that those who do it must be prosecuted.
These are the people – Gen. McCaffrey, Gen. Taguba, Col. Wilkerson, Philip Zelikow, Jesse Ventura, Ambassador Pickering, Director Sessions — that our little David Ignatiuses deceitfully dismiss as “liberal score-settlers” and that our David Broders and Jon Barrys accuse of lying by masking their Hard Left thirst for partisan vengeance with false pretenses about a belief in the rule of law and contrived disgust at torture. Our media stars have a script from which they mindlessly read — anyone who believes that political leaders should be held accountable for serious crimes must be a member of the ”Hard Left” when the lawbreaking political leaders in question are Republicans — and they recite it over and over no much how evidence piles up in front of their noses proving how untrue it is.
Our media stars accuse everyone with any actual beliefs — and especially any beliefs that deviate from Beltway establishment orthodoxy — of being motivated by ugly “partisan” impulses because that’s the only way they are capable of seeing the world. It’s the ultimate act of projection. That’s how the most non-ideological and non-partisan principles (e.g.: government leaders who commit serious crimes should be held accountable; torture is wrong; Presidents shouldn’t eavesdrop on Americans without warrants where the law makes doing so a felony) are transformed into partisan, “ideological” views of the Hard Left, even when they are plainly nothing of the sort. As commenter DCLaw1 wrote in explaining the media’s sudden obsession this week with whether Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the CIA’s interrogation program even though that issue has been known for years:
I want to point out that the main reason, if not the only reason, for this overwhelming media view is because the only lens through which they can see this issue – like every issue – is the Republican/Democrat or conservative/liberal lens. When one’s entire point of reference for even issues of egregious lawbreaking goes no further than fixating obsessively over the identity of the people and parties to the “controversy” and the issue’s putative effect on partisan politics, whether a leader of one party was informed of the crimes of the other takes on a meaning perversely greater than the evil of the underlying conduct itself.
Our establishment media simply cannot get beyond this stultifyingly narrow framework. It is pathological. Additionally, this staunch avoidance of anything approaching a substantive assessment of the actual illegal conduct, in favor of a petty fixation on the partisan “helps or harms” game, helps only the “side” that has committed the crimes and wrongdoing. No wonder our discourse is so unbelievably misshapen.
Few things better illustrate how warped our political discourse is than the media’s claim that advocating investigations and prosecutions for political lawbreakers who commit serious crimes, who torture, who illegally spy on Americans with no warrants, is the province of partisans on the “Hard Left,” even when people who are as far away from that as possible prominently advocate exactly that.
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Beltway mavens are eager to declare that the torture controversy is ending, but these crimes are far too significant to sweep under the rug, no matter how unified the political and media establishments are in that effort. In addition to the Ventura interview and the Zelikow call for investigations yesterday, here are some headlines just from the last 24 hours:
Interrogation Probe Should Include Congressional Leaders, Hoyer Says
US lawmakers to hear from Bush ‘torture’ dissenter
Top US Democrat under fire over ‘torture’ briefings
US lawmaker: Public needs all facts on alleged torture
Ire Over a Columnist, an Author of Torture Memos
Speaker Under Fire on Torture (“With a series of torture investigations already in the works . . . the issue simply isn’t going away“).
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the President’s apparent contemplation of reversing himself on whether to release 60 new photographs showing brutal American abuse of detainees (outside of Abu Ghraib) is part of an effort to tamp down what is still, quite obviously, the growing political pressure not to simply “move beyond” the serious crimes that were committed.
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The call for prosecutions from the newest member of America’s rapidly growing Hard Left:
Media Behavior and the Torture ‘Debate’ April 24, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Criminal Justice, Media, Torture.Tags: 9/11, abc news, Abu Ghraib, adam serwer, anthony taguba, bagram, Barack Obama, barry mccafrey, barton gellman, beltway, charles kaiser, chris matthews, cliff may, dana priest, david gregory, david ignatius, democratic party, doj, eric holder, firedoglake, geneva conventions, glenn greenwald, greg sargent, Guantanamo, International law, jane mayer, journalism, justice department, Karl Rove, mainstream media, marcy wheeler, Media, media superstars, new york times, office of legal counsel, olc, peggy nonan, political journalism, republicans, robert baer, roger cohen, roger hollander, rule of law, sheperd smith, special prosecutor, ta-nehisi coates, torture, torture memos, torture prosecutions, torture techniques, wall street journal, War Crimes, washington post, waterboarding, wsj
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We could use more like I.F. (Izzy) Stone now; thank the goddess for Glenn Greenwald et. al.
Published on Friday, April 24, 2009 by Salon.com
Three Key Rules of Media Behavior Shape Their Discussions
of “the ‘Torture’ Debate”
Karl Rove on torture prosecutions:
It is now clear that the Obama White House didn’t think before it tried to appease the hard left of the Democratic Party.
When Rove speaks, the political class pays attention — usually with good reason.
Chuck Todd on Obama’s concession that the DOJ decides whether to prosecute:
There does seem to be a little bit of a reaction to how this was received on the left. . . frankly this feels like a political food fight now. . .. The hard left, the hard right, fighting over this in the blogosphere.
Chris Matthews on the same topic:
This whole torture debate is likely to tell us a lot about the kind of president Barack Obama intends to be. Will he buckle to the left, the netroots, and pursue an investigation into torture having said he didn’t want to? Or will he go post-partisan and leave the past to the historians?
David Gregory on what he calls (with scare quotes) “the politics of the ‘torture’ debate”:
What [Obama officials] got on their hands is a highly politicized and very partisan issue about the treatment of 9/11 prisoners. . . . At a time when the administration and the President will already be under scrutiny for being tough enough, is this a fight they really want to have? I would also point you to, if you haven’t see this already, the Wall St. Journal Editorial Page today, which I think raises some really tough points about not only what signal you’re sending to the rest of the world, but also to potential Terrorists out there, about just what it is that U.S. interrogators would do and not do, but also the point that’s raised there is: did the Bush administration go out of its way to make sure they were adhering to the law and not crossing over that bridge when it came to getting into torture?
(By the way: can someone tell me what a “9/11 prisoner” is?; and is there anything less surprising than the fact that Gregory looks to The Wall St. Journal Editorial Page for guidance on such questions?)
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For years, media stars ignored the fact that our Government was chronically breaking the law and systematically torturing detainees (look at this extremely detailed exposé by The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest and Barton Gellman from December, 2002 to get a sense for how much we’ve known about all of this and for how long we’ve known it). Now that the sheer criminality of this conduct, really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates as a result of the OLC memos, media stars are forced to address it. Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses — things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions, and accountability when they abuse their power.
The rules for how media stars behave are vividly evident as they finally take part in what they are calling The ‘Torture’ Debate. Here are three key rules for Beltway media behavior that, as always, are shaping what they say and do:
(1) Any policy that Beltway elites dislike is demonized as coming from “the Left” or — in this case (following Karl Rove) – the “hard Left.” Media stars recite that claim regardless of how widely accepted the belief is in American public opinion and regardless of whether there is anything “leftist” about the view in question. For years, withdrawing from Iraq was demonized as the view of the “left” even though large majorities of Americans favored it.
Identically, roughly 40% of Americans favor criminal prosecutions for Bush officials — even before release of the OLC memos — and large majorities favor investigations generally. The premise of those who advocate prosecutions is the definitively non-ideological view that political elites should be treated exactly like ordinary Americans when they break the law and commit serious crimes. Individuals such as Gen. Antonio Taguba, Gen. Barry McCaffrey and former CIA officer Robert Baer advocate investigations and/or prosecutions of Bush officials. But no matter: the Beltway opposes the idea, and it is therefore dismissed by media stars as coming from the “Hard Left.”
(2) Nobody is more opposed to transparency and disclosure of government secrets than establishment “journalists.” Richard Cohen wrote of the Lewis Libby prosecution: “it is often best to keep the lights off.” ABC News’ Peggy Noonan said this week of torture investigations: ”Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking.” The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, condemning Obama for releasing the OLC memos, warned: ”the country is fighting a war, and it needs to take care that the sunlight of exposure doesn’t blind its shadow warriors.” And the favorite mantra of media stars and Beltway mavens everywhere — Look Forward, Not Backwards — is nothing but a plea that extreme government crimes remain concealed and unexamined.
This remains the single most notable and revealing fact of American political life: that (with some very important exceptions) those most devoted to maintaining and advocating government secrecy is our journalist class, of all people. It would be as if the leading proponents of cigarette smoking were physicians, or those most vocally touting the virtues of illiteracy were school teachers. Nothing proves the true function of these media stars as government spokespeople more than their eagerness to shield government actions from examination and demand that government criminality not be punished.
(3) The single most sacred Beltway belief is that elites are exempt from the rule of law. Amidst all the talk about how prosecutions would destroy post-partisan harmony and whether torture “works,” it is virtually impossible to find any media star discussions about the fact that torture is illegal and that those who order, authorize or engage in torture are committing felonies. That is because — other than for fun sex scandals and other Blagojevich-like sensationalistic acts — the overriding belief of the political class is that elites (such as themselves) have the right to break the law and not be held accountable.
Amazingly, when it comes to crimes by ordinary Americans, being ”tough on crime” is a virtually nonnegotiable prerequisite to being Serious, but when it comes to political officials who commit crimes in the exercise of their power, absolute leniency is the mandated belief upon pain of being dismissed as “shrill” and extremist. Can anyone find an establishment media pundit anywhere — just one — who is advocating that Bush officials who broke the law be held accountable under our laws? That view seems actively excluded from establishment media discussions.
The OLC memos that were released last week reflect a deeply corrupted, criminal and morally depraved political class (see this video clip for a strangely affecting demonstration of that fact – linked fixed), but our media stars are a vital reason why that has happened. It cannot be overstated the extent to which they are nothing but appendages of, servants to, political power (as one Twitter commentator said today about this painfully vapid video from the painfully vapid David Gregory: when media stars say “my reporting,” what they usually mean is: “this is what I was told to repeat”). These three media rules repeatedly shape how they talk about government actions, and these rules are particularly pronounced as the establishment media now is finally forced to discuss what to do about the fact that our highest political leaders repeatedly broke our most serious laws.
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As a testament to the positive effect media criticisms can have, Columbia Journalism Review‘s Charles Kaiser has been tenaciously criticizing The New York Times for failing to challenge — and instead mindlessly adopting — the claim of Bush officials that torture ”worked” by producing valuable intelligence. Yesterday, a NYT Editor told Kaiser that he agreed that more attention needed to be paid to this issue, and today, the NYT published a very potent Op-Ed from an FBI interrogator at Guantanamo who aggressively disputes the claim that torture “worked.”
Also: I’ll be on Warren Onley’s To the Point program today at 2:10 p.m. EST (along with The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer and National Review‘s Cliff May) to debate the question of investigations and prosecutions. Local listings and live audio feed can be found here (the segment will be posted to their website later today).
* * * * *
UPDATE: As the recent debate-changing discovery of Marcy Wheeler demonstrated, one extremely important way to improve media coverage of these issues is to have independent journalists able to work on them. Marcy has long been one of the hardest-working and most important writers on these matters, yet has been doing it all for free, as a side hobby before and after her full-time job. FireDogLake is now attempting to raise funds to hire Marcy to enable her to work on her investigative journalism full-time. For those able to do so, contributing to that fund is something I’d highly recommend. That can be done here.
UPDATE II: The link to the video I referenced above was wrong; the correct link is here. In addition to Generals Taguba and McCaffrey, the Hard Left has another new member: Sheperd Smith (here and here). And Greg Sargent makes a key point: whether torture “worked” is, among other things, entirely irrelevant. As I pointed out more times than I can count during discussions of the warrantless eavesdropping debates, we don’t have a country where political leaders are free to commit crimes and then, afterwards, claim that their doing so produced good outcomes.
UPDATE III: The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates posts video of the Peggy Noonan comments and writes:
The job of journalists is to challenge the government and to challenge their readers and viewers. What sort of journalist tells his readers that some things must be mysterious? What sort of writer tells her readers, and viewers, essentially, to not ask too many questions? We have a fine era, when otherwise respected, intelligent, and well-read people step on a national stage and endorse national ignorance.
There’s nothing unusual about Noonan’s mentality; it’s the dominant mindset of our political and media class. The American Prospect‘s Adam Serwer notes a column from The New York Times‘ Roger Cohen today arguing against prosecutions (of course) and observes:
Cohen’s argument simply reflects the consensus among certain journalistic and political elites that the powerful simply shouldn’t be held accountable when they make mistakes, because, after all, we all make mistakes. This compassionate attitude naturally doesn’t extend beyond this small group. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fully 1 percent of the population. I’m sure there are millions of people currently incarcerated who would like it if Cohen’s policy of absolution for crimes was extended to them.
That elite-protecting consensus is the central affliction of America’s political culture. It explains not only how we continuously shield our elites from the consequences of their crimes, but also explains the reason such crimes keep happening. If you constantly announce to a small group of people that they will be able to break the law with impunity, you are rendering inevitable future rampant criminality. That’s just obvious.
Obama’s Latest Effort to Conceal Evidence of Bush Era Crimes May 14, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Criminal Justice, Torture.Tags: Abu Ghraib, aclu, amrit singh, anti-American sentiment, bagram, beltway, Bill Kristol, binyam mohamed, bush crimes, cia interrogation, doj, foia, freedom of information, geneva conventions, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, International law, justice department, max boot, michael goldfarb, national security, nuremburg, obama administration, obama cover-up, obama coverup, olc torture memos, rendition, roger hollander, torture, torture memos, torture photos, torture techniques, torture videos, un convention, War Crimes, warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding
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by Glenn Greenwald
It’s difficult to react much to Obama’s complete reversal today of his own prior decision to release photographs depicting extreme detainee abuse by the United States. He’s left no doubt that this is what he does: ever since he was inaugurated, Obama has taken one extreme step after the next to keep concealed both the details and the evidence of Bush’s crimes, including rendition, torture and warrantless eavesdropping. The ACLU’s Amrit Singh — who litigated the thus-far-successful FOIA lawsuit to compel disclosure of these photographs — is exactly right:
Andrew Sullivan, one of Obama’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters, wrote of today’s photograph-concealment decision and yesterday’s story of Obama’s pressuring Britain to conceal evidence of Binyam Mohamed’s torture:
John Aravosis said Obama’s logic was “a bit Bushian.” Steve Hynd observes that “Obama Trades Our Principles For Cheneyism.” TPM decalres: ”Obama falls back on Bushisms.” Dan Froomkin writes: ”Obama Joins the Cover-Up.” I’ll just note a few points for now about Obama’s efforts to keep these photographs concealed:
(1) Think about what Obama’s rationale would justify. Obama’s claim — that release of the photographs “would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger” — means we should conceal or even outright lie about all the bad things we do that might reflect poorly on us. For instance, if an Obama bombing raid slaughters civilians in Afghanistan (as has happened several times already), then, by this reasoning, we ought to lie about what happened and conceal the evidence depicting what was done — as the Bush administration did — because release of such evidence would “would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.” Indeed, evidence of our killing civilians in Afghanistan inflames anti-American sentiment far more than these photographs would. Isn’t it better to hide the evidence showing the bad things we do?
Apparently, the proper reaction to heinous acts by our political leaders is not to hold them accountable but, instead, to hide evidence of what they did. That’s the warped mentality Obama is endorsing today, and has been endorsing since January 20.
(2) How can anyone who supports what Obama is doing here complain about the CIA’s destruction of their torture videos? The torture videos, like the torture photos, would, if released, generate anti-American sentiment and make us look bad. By Obama’s reasoning, didn’t the CIA do exactly the right thing by destroying them?
(3) This is just another manifestation of the generalized Beltway religion that we should suppress and ignore the heinous acts our government committed and to which we acquiesced, because if we just agree to forget about all of it, then we can blissfully pretend that it never happened and avoid doing anything about it.
(4) Obama’s claim that he has to hide this evidence to protect our soldiers is the sort of crass, self-serving exploitation of “The Troops” which was the rancid hallmark of Bush/Cheney rhetoric. Everyone knows what the real effect of these photographs would be: they would highlight just how brutal and criminal was our treatment of detainees in our custody, and further underscore how amoral and lawless are Obama’s calls that we Look To the Future, Not the Past. Manifestly, that is why they’re being suppressed.
(5) For all of you defend-Obama-at-all-cost cheerleaders who are about to descend into my comment section and other online venues to explain how Obama did the right thing because of National Security, I have this question: if you actually want to argue that concealing these photographs is the right thing to do, then you must have been criticizing Obama when, two weeks ago, he announced that he would release them. Otherwise, it’s pretty clear that you don’t have any actual beliefs other than: ”I support what Obama does because it’s Obama who does it.” So for those arguing today that concealing these photographs is the right thing to do: were you criticizing Obama two weeks ago for announcing he would release these photographs?
Also, the OLC torture memos released several weeks ago surely increased anti-American sentiment. Indeed, those on the Right who objected to the release of those memos cited exactly that argument. How can anyone cheer on Obama’s decision today to conceal these photographs while also cheering on his decision to release the OLC memos? Those who have any intellectual coherence would have to oppose both or support both. Those two decisions only have one fact in common: Obama made them. Thus, the only way to cheer on both decisions is to be guided by the modified Nixonian mantra: what Obama does is right because Obama does it.
Also, during the Bush years, were you — along with Bill Kristol and National Review — attacking the ACLU and Congressional Democrats for demanding that the Bush administration stop concealing evidence of its torture, on the ground that disclosure of such evidence would harm America’s national security? Were you defending Bush then for doing what Obama is doing now?
(6) If these photographs don’t shed any new light on what our Government did — if all they do is replicate what we already know from the Abu Ghraib photographs — then how can it possibly be the case that they will do any damage? To argue that they will harm how we are perceived is, necessarily, to acknowledge that they reveal new information that is not already widely known.
(7) We are supposed to have what is called Open Government in the United States. The actions of our government — and the evidence documenting it — is presumptively available to the public. Only an authoritarian would argue that evidence of government actions should be kept secret in the absence of a compelling reason to release it.
The presumption is the opposite: documents in the government’s possession relating to what it does is presumptively public in the absence of compelling reasons to keep it concealed. That the documents reflect poorly on the government is not such a reason to keep them concealed. If it were, then it would always be preferable to have political leaders cover-up their crimes on the ground that disclosing them would reflect poorly on the U.S. and spur anti-American sentiment. Open government is necessary precisely because only transparency deters political leaders from doing heinous acts in the first place.
UPDATE: Here (.pdf) is the letter the DOJ sent to the court this afternoon, advising the judge that they changed their minds “at the highest levels of Government” and would not, as previously promised, release the photographs, but instead would attempt to appeal the Second Circuit’s decision compelling their release to the Roberts Supreme Court.
UPDATE II: In comments, Paul Daniel Ash addresses the Obama supporters who are defending Obama’s decision to keep these photographs concealed on the ground that “no good would come” from disclosure:
Indeed, it’s pretty hard to believe that the people who are arguing that “no good will come” from release of these photos either (a) lived through the impact of the Abu Ghraib photos and/or (b) are living through the “torture debate” we are now having.
Photographs convey the reality of things in a way that mere words cannot. They prevent people who want to deny what was done the ability to do so. They force citizens to face what their country did and what they are now justifying and advocating. They impede the ability of political leaders to use euphemisms to obscure the truth. They show in graphic detail what the effects are of sanctioning torture policies. They prove that this was about more than ”dunking three terrorists into water.” They highlight the fact that no decent person believes that this should all just be forgotten and its victims told that they have no right to have accountability. That’s precisely why the photographs are being suppressed: because of how much good they would do.
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.