Pruning Shears

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

Niño probably fancies himself an iconoclast but this is the kind of statement that causes one to live in infamy:

“This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

As it turns out John Yoo is not terribly popular at Berkely. Forget about questions of academic freedom, says Scott Horton: “If the Justice Department formed the conclusion that Yoo’s work on constitutional and international law issues was shockingly substandard-indeed incompetent-why should he be teaching those exact subjects at Boalt Hall?”

When you treat illegal immigrants as subhuman it should not be too big a surprise when their lives are held cheaply.

Before we get too excited about the wonderful new chemicals we can use in (and on) our armed forces we should probably look at how well they have worked so far:

Fentanyl, a strong painkiller, Dando said, was deployed in a still unrevealed mixture by Russian special forces in 2002 to subdue Chechen militants who had seized a Moscow theater. But its use led to the deaths of over 120 hostages among the theater-goers and Russian commandoes who went into the theater with protective gear shot dead the incapacitated hostage-takers.

Tom Ridge all but admitted (“all but” because he used language that appeared to go right up to the line but not cross it) that the Bush administration manipulated the terror alert system for political gain. Marc Ambinder made a truly wretched rationalization for the comprehensive journalistic malpractice of the DC press corps of the time and Marcy Wheeler promptly eviscerated him. Then Glenn Greenwald incinerated and interred the remains. Since Marcy and Glenn are two of my favorite bloggers this was like Christmas in August. (UPDATE: I missed this, but the Shrill One piled on too. Is that a group of carolers at my door?) One of Marc’s commenters may have had the best take of all though:

It’s not sufficient for you to explain this disparity by saying that nobody was privy to the evidence, so it came down to whether one reacted to the information asymmetry by being suspicious of the government or giving them the benefit of the doubt. For one thing, if journalists reflexively give the government the benefit of the doubt, then who can the public rely on to determine whether the government is being deceptive? And for another, as you recognize, there was indeed a “pattern of facts” that led people to — correctly — doubt the government. To you, their interpretation of that pattern appears reasonable in hindsight, but others drew immediate conclusions from that pattern, and hindsight has proven them correct.

I don’t think you really disagree with the point I’m trying to make here, which is that catching government lies is too important to do merely through hindsight. If your contemporaries are making judgments that are superior to yours, then it behooves you to understand how they arrive at those judgments, rather than trying to justify why your own thought processes are sound even when they lead you to unsound conclusions.

Athenae curses so I don’t have to:

Apparently my sick imagination did have its limit because while I personally imagined Bush would manipulate the terror alert system for his own political gain, I never imagined him doing it obviously enough to piss off Tom Ridge. You’ll notice the manipulation and incompetence had to be blatant to get Ridge riled up. It had to be, you know, not just upping the alert level on the basis of some oldsauce intel from three years ago, it had to be not just fucking up the workdays of like five thousand flight attendants and those poor TSA fuckers and grinding the airports down to a slow trickle, it had to be doing it right before an election.

So fuck Ridge in his ear. It was worth resigning over but not worth saying anything about until now, when he could make a buck off it selling books? Releasing that book on Sept. 1? Why not Sept. 11? Why not go all the way in? What an asshole. He can join a long line of former Bush administration whores at the sink all out damned spot. I mean, you tell us this NOW? Instead of in 2004, when it could have fucking helped? When it was actually happening? Four years more of that chewy little jerk, you gave us, and don’t tell me this wouldn’t have turned the tide, it was a close election, anything could have turned it, four years in which countless people died and oh, yeah, a whole fucking city drowned, and you could have stopped it?

I remember first encountering the “Irrational Bush Hatred” thing back during the Great Run-Up to War in 2002. I was at first baffled by it, being younger and, happily, less acquainted with the twisty backwards-logic of the wingnut reptile mind. There was always a certain inverted genius about the accusation. Because I did hate George W. Bush! But it was nothing personal. Strictly business. See, I thought, correctly, as it emerged, and as indeed was absurdly easy to figure out at the time, that George Bush was making up ridiculous crap in order to sucker the nation into a disastrous war that would get a lot of people killed for no sane reason. It seemed to me, not unreasonably, that someone who would do such a thing was kind of an asshole. And hence I concluded that George W. Bush was an utter asshole, as were his advisers, cronies, Sith-lords, sycophants, and Internet Fan-Base. They were all crazy assholes. And they still are!

Given the above this probably was not the best week for government officials to frighten us with vague but threatening warnings (via):

“The CIA does not publicly discuss where facilities associated with its past detention program may or may not have been located,” said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. “We simply do not comment on those types of claims, which have appeared in the press from time to time over the years. The dangers of airing such allegations are plain. These kinds of assertions could, at least potentially, expose millions of people to direct threat. That is irresponsible.”

The CIA hired Blackwater for its hit squads (UPDATE: for transferring detainees too), which we sort of heard about in June, and “Since then, stories have appeared linking Vice President Dick Cheney to the decision to keep the hit squads secret - a decision that may violate the National Security Act, which mandates congressional oversight of the CIA.” Who’s in charge of Strongly Worded Letters when they’re on vacation, anyway?

John Koeltl wins the Heller Award for this week:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the US to monitor the calls and emails of non-US citizens abroad. Human rights groups contended that their workers might be bugged for talking to people under surveillance. But District Judge John Koeltl in New York said the mere fear of surveillance was not enough to bring a lawsuit. Fears about the law’s effect on them were “subjective”, the judge added.

Are we about to turn a corner on bailout logic?

For the first time since the 1920s the capacity-to-pay principle is being made the explicit legal basis for international debt service…this agreement is the first since the Young Plan for Germany’s reparations debt to subordinate international debt obligations to the capacity-to-pay principle. No doubt the post-Soviet countries are watching, along with Latin American, African and other sovereign debtors whose growth has been stunted by the predatory austerity programs that IMF, World Bank and EU neoliberals imposed in recent decades. The post-Bretton Woods era is over. We should all celebrate.

UNPACKING JANE I’m already long on this post so I’ll keep it short. On pp. 304-5 Mayer writes how Cheney, Addington and Gonzales defended the torture policy “in terms of protecting the country from future terrorist attacks, but opponents began to suspect that they were just as concerned about protecting themselves from future legal repercussions. ‘Their theory was that if you adopt rules, people will accuse you of violating them,’ a former White House official said.”