Pruning Shears

SEE BELOW - UPDATE 1 - UPDATE 2 - UPDATE 3

Special “Link Dump” edition.  There are some stories I plain forgot to link to in the last few weeks.  Others I’ve had queued up and waiting for a reason to use; they were important enough to flag but I haven’t been able to work them into anything I was writing.  So today I’ll just drop them in without any context or attempt to make them part of a separate thesis.

Let’s just keep reminding ourselves that Democratic leaders are a major obstacle to prosecuting, or even finding out about, the lawlessness of the last eight years:

Some observers outside the Obama camp are also questioning how much Democrats really want exposed with regard to interrogation, since top Democrats in Congress were briefed in secret on some of the harshest tactics used by the CIA and appear to have done little, or perhaps nothing, to stop them.

This has more to do with position in the D.C. establishment hierarchy than party affiliation.  The administration made sure all the relevant players were sufficiently implicated; don’t expect them to be leading the charge.  In fact, they will probably work energetically behind the scenes (if they haven’t already) to keep the secrets hidden.

For a long time, though clearly not long enough, the phrase “enhanced interrogation” was a notorious example of a banal euphemism to describe the bureaucratization of vile behavior.  America will sadly make at least a few contributions to this lexicon.  Bland-sounding items like National Security Letters and extraordinary rendition may end up being regarded as the loathsome product of our era’s indefensible violations of human and civil rights.  It can’t be said often enough:  Look at the company those actions put us in. UPDATE 3: Per Andrew, add “under coercive conditions” to the list.

On the same topic, see this and this by Jane Mayer.  Since I’m already pimping her once a week I’ll just leave it at that.  Actually, I lied.  At the Harper’s link she says of Jesselyn Radack:

She told me, “It was like ethics were out the window. After 9/11, it was, like, ‘anything goes’ in the name of terrorism. It felt like they’d made up their minds to get him, regardless of the process.” Radack believed that the role of the ethics office was to “rein in the cowboys” whose zeal to stop criminals sometimes led them to overstep legal boundaries. “But after 9/11 we were bending ethics to fit our needs,” she said. “Something wrong was going on. It wasn’t just fishy—it stank.”

From the “spare me” file:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said his concerns about oversight diminished after the Treasury program’s focus shifted from purchases of financial firms’ troubled assets to capital injections into companies. “The concern was they’d be buying assets and we wouldn’t know the price,” Frank said. The revised bailout program “doesn’t have the conflicts of interest and the other things people were concerned about.”

Dear Barney,

No one who throws in with this administration is improved by it. It reeks of corruption and wrongdoing, and those who (even tentatively) embrace it take on its stench. We know how they work.  We’ve seen all their best moves.  It was plain going in that mind-boggling sums would be put in the service of crony capitalism and that the White House would never let anyone know what was going on behind the scenes.  They don’t feel bound by the law, you jackass - what made you think they’d feel bound a promise?

Sincerely, Dan

UPDATE 2:  More evidence regulators were asleep at the switch.  At this point it’s more confirmation than revelation, but the details do matter.

Speaking of the bailout, you know how you are almost afraid to open that first credit card bill after the holidays because you don’t want to see the details of just how much waste you’ve laid to your finances?  Get ready to feel that not just for your household but for your country.

You knew this would happen, right?  (Congress has tools to fight some of this, you know.)  And let’s hope this does (via).  But having said that, all the speculation on what he might do or could do is getting tiresome.  I think some folks might be going into postelection political withdrawal.

It seems at this point that Guantánamo will soon be reduced to a constituency of one.  Of course, it’s the only one that matters. Andy McCarthy brings the best that supporters can muster at this point:

What was the standard of proof by which the court found evidence that was good enough to detain was now not good enough to detain? We don’t know. In its Boumediene decision, the Supreme Court did not provide guidance as to how these habeas hearings it has ordered should be conducted. Congress, moreover, has failed to enact any rules, even though that is Congress’s job (as previously explained here). Indeed, as I reported here, Attorney General Mukasey implored federal lawmakers to prescribe sensible procedures back in July — and the Democrat-controlled Congress gave him the back of the hand.

Savor that:  “the Supreme Court did not provide guidance as to how these habeas hearings it has ordered should be conducted.”  How about in the same way habeas corpus has been handled for centuries?

The right wing is now self-marginalizing.

UPDATE 1: Glenn Greenwald highlights another problem with McCarthy’s post.  Self-parodying, too.

Here in Ohio we take our vote suppression efforts straight up.  We don’t bother raising the specter of vote or registration fraud.  It’s got an admirable purity to it.

Off topic, but Kate Harding warmed my blogger’s heart with this:

Like many bloggers, William K. Wolfrum is a former journalist, and he figured it out by doing some old-fashioned investigative reporting. Meanwhile, the media outlets who quoted and linked to “Eisenstadt” as a reliable source apparently didn’t even go so far as old-fashioned fact-checking. Unbelievably, Pérez-Peña rushes past that point, reassuring Times readers that “most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet.” Except for the part where “Eisenstadt” has had an online presence for at least a year, and mainstream outlets have been uncritically using him as a source for months, all while the tidbit that there is no Eisenstadt has been “bouncing around the internet.” Said Wolfrum in an e-mail, “For the last several months you could Google the name ‘Martin Eisenstadt,’ and the third entry that came up was my post from Shakesville calling him out as a hoax.” Darn those unprofessional bloggers who will quote anyone without even a cursory search on his name!

More from Kate over here.

UNPACKING JANE:  On page 106 she describes a scene between Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the FBI’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002 and FBI Director Robert Mueller.  Cloonan is discouraged (and disgusted) by the abusive and incompetent treatment of alleged al-Qaida detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libiby the CIA:

Cloonan retired from the FBI soon after in disgust.  Before walking away from a twenty-seven-year career, he confronted Mueller in a huge staff meeting in New York about the Bureau’s response to illegal interrogation techniques being used on U.S.-held captives abroad.  According to Cloonan, the FBI’s top man replied, “I’m not concerned about due process abroad.”

Our agencies were making significant efforts to put their actions outside the law.  It was not an accident.