The Power of Money

Feel like getting riled up today? Read this post by Glenn Greenwald about the shady deals financial companies are making with the government.

This stuff is sickening and just points to the corrupting influence of vast wealth. I'm not against anyone getting rich, but I am against the people who do have more money than they know what to do with being able to use it to manipulate government to make laws and policies more favorable toward them at the expense of the not-so-rich person. That is wrong. Some have argued that the limits on campaign contributions is a First Amendment issue. Perhaps it is, but the problem is that money inflates a wealthy individual's clout to the point where they can drown out thousands of voices of the less wealthy.

Now I don't have any easy answers for this problem. But it is a problem and it needs to be dealt with. Sadly, even though this has a direct impact on the lives of Americans, I don't think there is enough anger, will, knowledge, or caring about the problem to get something done.

Colin Powell: Coward

I was really disappointed watching Colin Powell on Rachel Maddow.

I understand that Powell is trying to protect his image here, but it's disappointing nonetheless. I really want to respect Powell. I think he has more integrity than anyone else from Bush's cabinet. But his refusal to come clean on torture makes it difficult for me to maintain a high opinion of him. What the Bush administration orchestrated is one of the greatest moral blights on America in our history. For Colin Powell to not stand up and accept some responsibility, to not come clean, is cowardice pure and simple. And if he doesn't want to fess up, then he shouldn't be doing interviews at all. He should just stay home and shut up and think about what went on and why he didn't do more to stop it.

"They feel very guilty."

Oh, no doubt they do.

"Hey, honey, Adam's missing."

"Really? Oh, he'll turn up anytime now."

"Yeah, you're probably right. Kids are tough. He'll be fine."

Ten years later.

"Hey, honey, you realize Adam's still missing?"

"Is he? Hmmm...what do you think we should do about it?"

"Well, gee, I don't know. I don't think we need to do anything. He'll be fine."

"Yeah, you're right."

Wow. What do you even say about something like this? What sort of parents don't report their child missing, even if he or she is an adopted child? It's just sick.

Torture Pardons

A bill has been introduced in the House to prevent the expected preemptive pardons by Bush for crimes his administration has committed. There has been talk that the Obama team is worried about pushing this issue themselves feeling that they would burn political capital and fuel partisan bickering. I understand that, but find it incredibly sad and pathetic, too. What kind of message does it send to people that we won't investigate wrong doings, especially things as grotesque as torture, if it might make some people mad?

If you care about this issue, go here and sign this petition supporting this resolution and send an email or letter to your Congressional representatives asking them to support it, as well. If we the people don't take a stand on this, we have no right to complain in the future when elected officials break the law.

Bush Administration Has Never Tortured

Yes, that's the new line from the White House. Dana Perino said, "This president has said that we did interrogate terrorists, and we did so to protect the country from possible imminent terrorist attack. We did not torture."

When did the White House change its name to the Ministry of Truth? Oh, I forgot, waterboarding isn't torture anymore. I'll have to make a note of that.

Assisted Suicide

A UK woman asked the court to clarify the law on assisted suicide, but was denied. She has multiple sclerosis and says that if her condition get worse, she wants to travel to Switzerland to end her life, but does not want her husband to face prosecution.



Having MS myself, I sympathize with this woman's condition. I have no physical debilities, yet, but the knowledge that someday I will is always lurking in the back of my mind. However, I do not think that just because life gets hard, we should end it. If the only thing keeping you alive is a machine, then I don't think it is a problem to pull the plug. That is not morally objectionable. But deliberately taking steps to end your life because you are in pain or are physically incapacitated is not something I condone.

That said, I think laws against suicide are stupid. Laws against assisted suicide are another matter, though. That should definitely not be legal. I believe that life is precious, all life. If my mother or my daughters or anyone I dearly love suffered from chronic pain or any sort of serious incurable illness, I would do everything in my power to comfort them and be there for them during their time of need. I would not help them commit suicide, however. As much as I would want their pain to end, it is not my choice to make for when that end comes. That decision is above my pay grade.

The US Attorney Scandal

While the story has all but disappeared from most media outlets, the investigation into the potentially politically motivated firing of nine U.S. Attorneys continues.

Before the court of public opinion, White House spokespeople have long maintained President Bush had no involvement in the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys, the central decision that mushroomed into one of the biggest scandals in eight years of the Bush administration.

"[T]here is no indication that the President knew about any of the ongoing discussions [about firing U.S. attorneys] over the two years, nor did he see a list or a plan before it was carried out," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters in March 2007.

In federal court, however, the administration's lawyers have been more ambiguous.

"The record does reflect at this stage that the president was not involved in decisions about who would be asked to resign from the department," Justice Department lawyer Carl Nichols carefully argued before a federal judge in June. But "the record does not reflect that the President had no future involvement" in the scandal, he noted.

Just how much of a role the president played in the firings and its aftermath remains unclear. But in trying to prevent top White House officials from testifying or turning over documents to Congress, the Bush administration "is very consciously trying to walk a very fine tightrope," explained Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

On the one hand, experts say, the White House finds it politically necessary to make clear statements insulating Bush from the scandal. But in court, "If they said [Bush] wasn't involved at all they would undermine their case for executive privilege," Vladeck said.

The resulting argument, he said, is "a lawyer who's trying to be very obtuse."

Still, the administration lawyers' fancy footwork hints that the president's involvement could be broader than widely known. "They are not expressly saying it but it is an implicaton because you can't mislead the court," said Charles Tiefer, former House general counsel now a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

The sad thing is that by the time anyone figures out what happened, the people who need to be punished will all be out of office, sitting around at home, drinking beer, and laughing at what they got away with. I wish the Democrats were pursuing things like this a little more seriously instead of being more concerned with winning their next election (not the Presidential contest, but their own individual reelection). That's politics, though, I suppose.

John Yoo Smacked Down

John Yoo, architect of much of the Bush policy on torture and executive power, has tried to use Thomas Jefferson to justify his thoughts and Bush's power grab. Unfortunately for him, some people out there seem to have a better grasp of Jefferson's thoughts than he does.

Jefferson did not claim plenary, exclusive, independent, or inherent presidential authority. He never argued, as did the Bush administration after 9/11, that presidential powers under Article II enabled him to violate any statute or treaty that stood in his way. I think it is false for Yoo to write: "Contrary to popular belief,Jefferson believed in an independent Presidency with inherent powers." Jefferson believed in the Lockean prerogative, subject to the conditions described above.

In reading this article, I wondered if John Yoo decided to look to earlier Presidents to determine whether their concept of the office might justify what President George W. Bush did after 9/11. Perhaps my suspicions are groundless, but the quote above did not help, nor the following: "Madison's low performance is attributable in part to his narrow view of his constitutional powers as President." Nothing in Jefferson's presidency lends support to the view widely circulated in the Bush administration that the President is endowed with inherent powers in national security that trump statutes, treaties, judicial decisions, and the Constitution.

There has been a definite strain of intellectual dishonesty on the right, especially in those slavishly devoted to Bush and his policies. You'd think that these people might remember that there are smart people out there who disagree with them and can easily pick apart the flimsy arguments they make. Of course, they were able to convince America to put Bush back in office, so maybe their tactics work.

John Ashcroft Down With Torture

John Ashcroft told a House panel today yesterday that waterboarding serves a "valuable purpose" and does not constitute torture. This is, of course, in contrast to the opinion of most other people (aka the sane ones). I still find myself baffled that we are having this debate here in America. Where did our moral compass go? When did we start thinking it was okay to be just as sinister as the bad guys? How do people sleep at night knowing that they authorized/condoned/participated in torture?

I suppose it comes back to 9/11 as it so often does these days. Yes, the events of that day were horrific beyond imagining. That does not give us the green light to ditch our morals, though. Indeed, it is in times such as those that we need to staunchly reaffirm what we stand for, what we believe. Unfortunately we have let fear overrule our reason which has led to our leaders saying that it is okay to torture, but it's not really torture 'cause we're the good guys and we're doing it to protect America.

Well, I don't want to live in that America. I would rather see it fall than become a nation so corrupted morally. Thankfully, we can still undo this. We can elect politicians who do not support torture and will prosecute those who practice it. I'm not sure where they are, but they have to be out there, right? Right?

The Dregs of Humanity

Another story to make me weep for humanity.

In the windowless front rooms of a former day care center in a tiny Texas community, children as young as 5 were fed powerful painkillers they knew as "silly pills" and forced to perform sex shows for a crowd of adults.

We better hope aliens do not decide to visit our little corner of the galaxy. If they heard about depravity like this, they'd nuke us from orbit. And we'd deserve it.

Bush is a War Criminal

While it has been known for awhile that torture has been practiced by our soldiers and intelligence officers and that it has been authorized and condoned all the way up the chain of command, we continue to gather evidence of how deep it was. This was not the practice of a few rogue elements. Torture was signed off on by all of the major player's in this administration.

Pete concedes that the administration originally seized far, far more detainees than it could prove guilty (or ever tried to prove guilty) and has released thousands falsely imprisoned. Of the thousands seized, Pete concedes many were abused and tortured, with over a hundred deaths occurring during interrogation, two score of whom the administration has itself conceded were murder-by-interrogation. All this occurred after the president decided his actions as commander-in-chief could not be constrained by the law, after he had waived the baseline Geneva Convention protections for prisoners in wartime - in violation of the policy of every previous president of the United States from Washington on - and after critical memos were signed allowing American interrogators to do anything to prisoners short of death or loss of a major organ. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff explains what this means in terms any morally responsible person would understand:

Andrew continues.

And all this was done not in the chaos of a battlefield or even by rogue units or POW camps. It was not done in a war with anything like as many soldiers and battles as World War II. It was done in a closely managed war by a professional military and intelligence service in every theater of combat as a concerted policy to get more intelligence about Jihadist terror and the Iraq insurgency. It was authorized directly in the chain of command by the president, who knowingly broke the law and hired lawyers to tell him he hadn't. No clever argumentation that "only" 270 prisoners remain at Gitmo can gainsay that. And it is not, by the way, evidence against the fact that this administration seized countless innocents and tortured them to say that they eventually released most of them. It is no consolation to the torture victims at Abu Ghraib that they were eventually set free and their innocence confirmed. Those are the standards of benign dictatorships, not democracies.

Now, you could argue that the administration, after initial understandable over-reach, has tried to set things right. But you would be wrong.

They still refuse to take responsibility for torture and abuse and murder on their watch; and the CSRTs they eventually came up with have been revealed as kangaroo courts in which acquittals are deemed out of bounds and in which countless military lawyers have cried foul. It would be great if we had had a chance to set up clear guidelines in advance, with Congressional support, to give prisoners Geneva protections and non-habeas but robust military trials in what is, as everyone concedes, a very challenging conflict. But this president decided against that, to ignore the advice from the professionals and from the military lawyers, and to do it his own way, with appalling results. Once this record has been compiled and the indecency of Bush's "new kind of war" revealed, it seems to me that no Supreme Court that gives a damn about the Constitution or the ancient traditions of Anglo-American justice or humane warfare would give the benefit of the doubt to a president like this one. Not if the word "court" and "justice" are to be deemed within the same universe.

Sometimes I wonder if I still live in America or if I have somehow been transported to Bizzaro World where this is actually the norm.

Our President authorized torturing people.

Our President locked up innocent people and did not allow them the means to prove their innocence or free them immediately upon knowing their innocence.

Our President's decisions have led to the death of dozens of people - not on the battlefield, but in shadowy torture chambers.

Our President has lied about all of this and seems completely nonplussed by the results of his orders.

Our President, George W. Bush, is a war criminal and should be held accountable along with all of the other knowing architects of this unbelievably morally bankrupt scheme. This is not the kind of America we want.

The Supporters of Torture Aren't Supporters of Truth Either

Glenn Greenwald excoriates John Yoo for his appalling WSJ op-ed supporting Bush's policies of endless detention.

Yoo, for instance, claims that the Supreme Court in Boumediene allows "an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention." But huge numbers of detainees in U.S. custody weren't "captured fighting against the U.S." at all. Many were taken from their homes. Others were just snatched off the street while engaged in the most mundane activities. Still others were abducted while in airports or at work.
...
The other deeply misleading claim in Yoo's Op-Ed is even more transparent. He characterizes the Court's decision as "grant[ing] captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court." What minimally self-respecting law professor would be willing to make this claim with a straight face?

The whole point of the habeas corpus right is that without a meaningful hearing, we don't know if the individuals our Government is imprisoning are really "al Qaeda terrorists" or something else. That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out. As this recent superb McClatchy article documents, scores of individuals detained at Guantanamo for years weren't "Al Qaeda terrorists" -- or any other kind of terrorists -- at all.

While disgusting, I cannot say I find this surprising. Once you start compromising basic moral principles, the slope becomes quite slippery and you find yourself compromising more and more in order to justify your actions. Yoo, Feith, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the other architects of the current administration's policies will continue to spout garbage like this until long after they are gone from the national stage. I hope that our next President can work to restore some of moral integrity.