Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Marcy Wheeler had a great piece about Dick Cheney’s applying the experience of Iran-Contra to his vice-presidency.  Another post that I failed to note - maybe from her, maybe not - drew in his experience in the Ford administration as well.  He spent at the federal level and he put it all to use.  He knew the system inside and out, knew which levers to pull and how to get things done.  His theories and ambitions would have been much less damaging had he not also been a master bureaucrat.  Of course, there’s a difference between manipulating the system and operating in a legal (and ethical) manner.  He used those skills not just to attempt to implement a radical and near-dictatorial theory of executive power, but to do some truly repulsive things.  Now he is in an increasingly frantic damage control mode, trying to talk his way out of disclosures that have started to dribble out and that only promise to increase.  As Andrew Sullivan notes, that puts him at cross-purposes with his party.

More Sully.  Glenn Greenwald pointed out that liberals have already been more critical of president Obama than conservatives were during eight years of Bush.  On the same topic Andrew wrote:

So these posturing opportunists didn’t just sit back and play partisan games as Bush made left-liberalism inevitable and, in some respects, necessary as a response to this crisis of negligence, they now get to rant and rage as if they and Bush had nothing to do with this. But they did. They were critically part of the problem, enabling and abetting most of the (unconservative) policies that gave us this crisis. Rather than address that fact, which would require a certain amount of introspection and self-criticism (when did you last hear that from Malkin or Reynolds?), they pump up the outrage.

It will get worse before it gets better.

The horrors of the Bush years would not have happened if right wing commentators and the Republican base had pushed back.  Their willingness to march in lockstep behind the whole program discredits the entire ideology - and the party that represents it.  While its attempts to wield some influence in the current environment have ranged from laughable to pure comedic gold, they would be in trouble even if they were offering serious thought.  They have a lot to answer for and haven’t even started yet.  Sullivan is it right: It will get worse before it gets better.

Let’s just make it a Daily Dish hat trick - he linked to this by Atul Gawande.  Callous indifference to others is difficult to compartmentalize.  There is an understandable consistency between a society willing to routinely impose horrific conditions on its own citizens in the name of getting tough on crime and that same society being willing to tolerate a systematized torture regime in the name of taking the gloves off in the “War on Terror.”  There were some encouraging signs this week that people may have started to re-think some of that, though.

The details of the administration’s Guantánamo policy continue to be about the same in practice as during the Bush years.  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had a contempt motion filed against him to force compliance with court orders.  Detainee lawyers wrote “The conceptual approach they now advance has not greatly changed” in the Obama Pentagon.  I get the sense that Obama keeps trying to finesse his way around this, but the total absence of anything resembling a legitimate judicial process will probably remain the immovable object both there and at other cruelty warehouses like Bagram.

FBI Director Robert Mueller wants the Patriot Act renewed.  A provision “permitting roving wiretaps of terrorism suspects, was used 147 times and has helped eliminate ‘an awful lot of paperwork,’ Mueller said.”  Sarcastic response suppressed.

The UK is looking into torture (via).  Spain is looking into arrest warrants.  If we don’t do something, other countries might.  Memo to our leaders: No matter how bad you look right now it is always possible to look even worse.  Do you really want others to take the lead on investigating our crimes?

I have about 10 or 15 links from the financial mess saved up and I don’t have the heart to go through all of them.  I’ll just leave you with this from Yves Smith, who as it turns out is indispensable but I’m just getting around to realizing it: “The problem with competition in banking is banks are horribly imitative and all rush off the cliff together every 10 or 15 years.”

Oh what the hell - here’s one more (via).  Not a great one in the catalog of sins, but pretty amazing that it ran in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

UNPACKING JANE: On pp. 234-5 Mayer describes how those at the top orchestrated torture by essentially keeping two sets of books:

Evidently, the Pentagon had pursued a secret policy, hidden not just from the public but from its own high-ranking opponents in the building.  There was one version, enunciated in [general counsel of the Department of Defense William] Haynes’s letter to Leahy, aimed at its critics.  And there was another, secretly giving the operations officers legal indemnity to engage in cruel interrogations and, when the commander in chief deemed it necessary, torture.  Legal critics within the administration had been allowed to think that they were engaged in a meaningful process, but their deliberations appeared to have been largely an academic exercise or, worse, a charade.  “It seems there was a two track program here,” said Martin Lederman, the Georgetown Law School professor who was formerly a lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel.  “Otherwise, why would they have share the final working-group report with [Southern Command chief James] Hill and [Guantánamo commander Geoffrey] Miller but not with the lawyers who were its ostensible authors?”

Maybe we could give Spain subpoena power.