Pruning Shears

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

Lakhdar Boumediene was interviewed by Jake Tapper. It was somewhat coincidental since Tapper was in France covering the president and didn’t make the trip specifically for Boumediene, but at least he made good use of the opportunity. What jumped out most at me was Boumediene’s level-headed assessment of how he thought it might have been reasonable for the U.S. to react to the 9/11 attacks. Speaking of the extrajudicial processes and denial of civil rights he said, “I give you 2 years, no problem, but not 7 years.”

Jane Harman is taking on The National Applications Office. Haven’t heard about it? Don’t feel too badly. It’s flown under the radar (its bland-sounding name is by design I’m sure). I wrote about it over a year ago but overall it’s really stayed out of the spotlight. Let’s hope Harman changes that.

Despite the nice sounding rhetoric Barack Obama is basically embracing the Bush administration’s torture policies. Some people have started to call him out on that.

An inmate at Guantánamo apparently killed himself and Glenn Greenwald pointed out the degree to which the right has tried to downplay the horrors inside it. I don’t know what it takes to discredit those who have managed to attain Respectable Standing in the capitol. Karl Rove doesn’t even pretend to make sense at this point but it doesn’t seem to matter. If he ended up in prison Fox would probably air shows from his jail cell.

Potential danger for Dick Cheney. Could be interesting.

Gene Healy of the Cato Institute writes that Sonia Sotomayor’s record on executive power “is thin, but it gives us reasons for cautious optimism.” I don’t know if Cato laid low during the Bush era or if right wing outlets declined to seek them out (probably a little of both) but it’s nice to see the right starting to come around on this issue. I’ve said before that this is likely not a restoration of principles as much as a political calculation. The right is out of power, so time to rail against it. When the Republicans get back in they’ll be all Keep America Safe again, so let’s trim back as much as we can until then. Make hay while the sun shines.

I’ve added a link to the ACLU’s Restore the Rule of Law page to my “action” section on the left. Have a look and throw them any support you can. You’ll be supporting worthy efforts such as this:

You see, we’re eventually going to find out that, in fact, the Administration had—based on Yoo’s 2002 memo—made a policy decision to blow off complying with CAT’s Article 16 altogether. And lied about that policy to Congress repeatedly.

The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t want to let us know about environmental damage now. Remember the good old days when it was all about bin Laden? DHS will continue to expand its reach from identifying mortal threats to suppressing politically embarrassing stories unless something (or someone) steps in the way. Its mandate is way too vague and obscure for it to not be irresistibly tempting to those in charge of it. It will used in unanticipated ways. (This is an example where the Catos of DC could do us all a favor and jump in with both feet.) Similarly, when you reach the point of government using a “back door wiretap” to bust people hawking fake boner pills you’ve gone pretty far afield.

Every now and then I wonder if calling my regular Sunday review “This Week In Tyranny” is a bit over the top: It isn’t really that bad, right? Then I see stories like this and I think, no it’s just right. The proposed Cyber Command is ripe with possibilities for abuse. It feels like a shadow that keeps on creeping.

Bruce Watson on why financial reporting is abysmal, and Joseph Stiglitz on why the financial industry’s shell games aren’t working so well anymore:

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
…
Faith in democracy is another victim. In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules which put at risk the entire global economy—and then, when the day of reckoning came, turned to Wall Street to manage the recovery. They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens. They see, in short, a fundamental problem of political accountability in the American system of democracy. After they have seen all this, it is but a short step to conclude that something is fatally wrong, and inevitably so, with democracy itself.

UNPACKING JANE: On pp. 178-9 Mayer reports on the dubious utility of torture:

Rather than accepting [Abu] Zubayda’s limitations, [retired FBI agent Daniel] Coleman believed, the Agency had tortured him into telling them what they wanted to hear. Zubayda gave up a few useful tidbits, according to the 9/11 commission, including the name of an Al Qaeda recruiter who was soon captured. Foes of coercion often argue that it doesn’t work. Experts suggest this is misleading. Torture works in several ways. It can intimidate enemies, it can elicit false confessions, and it can produce true confessions. Setting aside the moral issues [!], the problem is recognizing what’s true. Zubayda, for instance, reportedly confessed to dozens of half-hatched or entirely imaginary plots to blow up American banks, supermarkets, malls, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and nuclear power plants. Federal law-enforcement officials were dispatched to unlikely locations across the country in an effort to follow these false leads.

To Daniel Coleman, who was back in Washington working on another FBI fusion team helping the CIA to decipher Zubayda’s diaries, the terror suspect’s marginal value came as no surprise. The diaries were a huge disappointment. Instead of operational intelligence, they contained hundreds of pages of nearly incoherent blather. Zubayda, he said, wrote in three different voices, giving himself three different names, “Hani 1, 2 and 3,” each apparently reflecting himself at a different age. There was poetry. There were religious musings. And there was enough sexual content for a CIA briefer to say all she had learned from the diary was, “Men are pigs.”