Pruning Shears

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

Sharon Begley reported on a new study that thankfully got quite a bit of attention:

Shane O’Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin explains in a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science called “Torturing the Brain,” “the use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or ‘enhanced’ interrogation.”

I originally started This Week In Tyranny as a link dump for items I didn’t have room for in my Thursday posts. Returning to those roots, here are some extras on the state secrets developments:

• LarryE had a great examination of it, with lots of background and context. I updated my original post with a link but wanted to point it out here too. I particularly like this (emphasis in original):

  Savor that for a moment, as it is indicative of the bizarre netherworld of the national security state: Even though the lawyers have seen the documents, the court has seen the documents, and the government has seen the documents, they all must now act as if those documents don’t exist. And the government can and did argue that the plaintiffs have no standing to sue because they can’t prove they were surveilled - even though everyone involved knows for an absolute fact that they were because they have seen the documents that prove it.

• bmaz looked at how it might be playing into the government’s strategy in the al-Haramain case.
• From the Library of Congress’ Law Library of Congress I found this from Louis Fisher on the murky world of secret legal memos.
• Finally, the government still officially claims there was no fraud involved in the Reynolds case. This in particular clears the awesome bar: “‘The mere fact that the information … may strike the plaintiffs today as innocuous, trivial, or unimportant, is simply not probative’ of whether they were sensitive 50 years ago, the government stated.”

I need to get in touch with my local ACORN rep and get multiple voter registrations in Minnesota so I can vote for Al Franken over and over again. (By the way, if the effort to defund ACORN ends up de-funding war profiteers it may be the wisest $53 million the government ever spent.)

Less than one half of one percent of the “sneak and peek” warrants were used for terrorism investigations. They were legalized by the USA Patriot Act, as Daniel Tencer notes, “ostensibly as a counter-terrorism measure.” Or in other words, they were abused over 99.6% of the time.

Radley Balko is upset because liberals are dismissive of the newly formed Tenth Amendment Fan Club. There are two very sensible reasons to be dismissive. The first, lesser reason is that the Tenthers are using it to oppose health care reform, which is a prime liberal priority. This means there won’t be a strange bedfellows coalition like we saw with, say, feminists and fundamentalists opposing pornography or liberals and libertarians opposing the FISA Amendments Act. That’s just how it goes in politics, and if Balko is shocked and outraged by it he hasn’t been paying attention very long.

But here’s the big reason the Tenthers are just a bunch of goofballs: They make no attempt whatsoever to articulate a coherent philosophy. This is a one shot deal aimed at derailing health care reform and that’s it. If they want to be taken seriously they need to take a page from Ron Paul and extend the Constitutional principle they assert far and wide. Throw in with Ron Paul and you get an audit of the Fed. But you also get a return to the gold standard. If these folks really were Tenth Amendment crusaders who happened upon the health care debate in progress, wouldn’t we also be hearing them loudly calling for an end to the minimum wage, the repeal of all federal environmental regulation, and so on? Not to mention the abolition of Social Security and Medicare, which ought to be very low hanging fruit for anyone going Tenther on the pending reform proposals.

In short, it’s obviously not about the Tenth Amendment at all. Balko might be justified in feeling irritated that liberals aren’t more gullible, but that’s about the only thing conservatives can be reasonably upset about here.

I hope it’s obvious I’m a big Glenn Greenwald fan. That said, I sometimes think his sarcasm gets the better of him. He did use it to hilarious effect this week, though:

In today’s New York Times, the grizzled warrior David Brooks performs a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War. It’s filled with self-glorifying “war-is-hell” neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong. No more hiding like cowards in our bases. It’s time to send “small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places.” Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the “illusion of the easy path.” Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars: “all out or all in.” The central question: will we “surrender the place to the Taliban?,” etc. etc.

Dianne Feinstein’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has undertaken a fairly quiet investigation of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. There have been some indications it might be something like a real investigation and not a whitewash, which was given another boost this week when SSCI Republicans led by Kit Bond pulled out of it entirely. Fellow Missourian Blue Girl has my preferred take on his action, which I would call “Show Me…the door.”

I didn’t know this until Josh Marshall published it, but “federal law has an incredibly expansive definition ‘WMD’” (via).

FBI spokesman Bill Carter explained the destruction of its documents by saying, “We would need warehouses to keep everything we’ve collected.” Then do so, put the old documents there and open the buildings to the public as monuments to our secrecy and paranoia. (Fortunately the agency is now able to take advantage of electronic storage.)

Bad news and good news on the gulag of our time.

Jim Geraghty:

The average Democrat doesn’t like fighting wars. They don’t like using military force. They don’t just dislike collateral damage and civilian casualties and flag-draped coffins; they cringe at the concept of combat with citizens of another country

It’s amazing the degree to which mere transparency - not regulation, not punishment, just simple openness - is objectionable in Washington.

UNPACKING JANE: On page 65 Mayer writes this about legal memos from the Office of Legal Counsel: “If the OLC says a previously outlawed practice, such as waterboarding, is legal, it is nearly impossible to prosecute U.S. officials who followed that advice on good faith. As Jack Goldsmith, who headed the OLC in 2003 put it, OLC memos were virtual ‘golden shields.’ The office wields ‘one of the most momentous, and dangerous powers in the government: the power to dispense ‘get-out-of-jail-free cards.’” On page 308 she writes why they were so highly prized:

The OLC, with its tremendous authority to issue “golden shields” to the executive branch against prosecution, was designed to exercise independent judgment. But according to another former administration official, a conservative lawyer who was troubled by the leverage over the office that was exerted by the White House, “They didn’t care if the opinions would stand legal scrutiny. They just wanted to check a box saying, ‘OLC says it’s legal.’ They wanted lawyers who would tell them that whatever they wanted to do was okay.