April 17, 2009

4/17: Letting The Light In

Liberal bloggers are praising Pres. Obama for releasing detailed DoJ memos describing controversial interrogation techniques used by the CIA. These memos -- which were authored by lawyers in George W. Bush's OLC -- authorized the use of harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding, keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, and "placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears." Liberal bloggers describe these memos as "chilling" and claim that the described methods clearly constitute torture. While a few conservative bloggers are defending the techniques described in the memos, most are either declining to comment or are criticizing Obama for releasing the memos in the first place.

While some liberal bloggers disagree with Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA agents who used these controversial techniques, others think the President made the right call -- assuming that he does go after the Bush lawyers who authorized these techniques. For that reason, the liberal blog Firedoglake has created a petition urging AG Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor "to determine if criminal proceedings are warranted for Justice Department lawyers who legalized these crimes, and the high level executive branch officials who ordered them." Lefty bloggers are also calling for the resignation or impeachment of Jay Bybee, the former OLC attorney who wrote one of the memos and who now serves as a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Conservative bloggers (Goldberg, Lopez, Allahpundit, Johnson, Hengler) are buzzing about a report from the conservative Cybercast News Service which claims that Obama officials asked Georgetown Univ. to cover a religious monogram on the stage where Obama spoke (Obama officials "denied that there was any effort to specifically cover up religious imagery or symbols").
• Conservative bloggers (Huston, Painter, Mirengoff, Klein, Allahpundit) continue to criticize CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen after she had several testy exchanges with tea party protesters in Chicago.
• Conservative bloggers (Lane, Reynolds, Hawkins, Vadum) are blasting Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) after she criticized the tea party protests.
• Liberal bloggers (Beeton, Benen, Bowers) continue to criticize TX Gov. Rick Perry (R) after he "refused to back away Thursday from his words of empathy for secessionists." Other liberal bloggers (Aravosis, Willis) are criticizing the GA Senate after it "threaten[ed] by a vote of 43-1 to secede from and even disband the United States."
• Liberal bloggers (Yglesias, Aravosis, Khanna) are criticizing Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) for declaring that IL residents "are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes" to the degree that Gov. Pat Quinn (D) is proposing.

Finally, please check back later today for our interview with RedState's Warner Todd Huston!

OLC MEMOS: Good For Obama...But Now What?

Liberal bloggers praised Obama for releasing the OLC memos over the objections of various current and former CIA officials:

• Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher: "President Obama deserves huge applause for releasing the OLC torture memos, as do the people in the Administration who fought for it. It's a brave move certain to bring down right wing howler monkeys crying about threats to national security, but a huge step toward restoring the rule of law in the United States."
• digby: "[G]ood for Obama for releasing these OLC memos. I know that he was under tremendous pressure from the intelligence community not to do it and it was an act of principle for him to defy them. [...] I reamin very, very disappointed that he refuses pursue charges against those who ordered these atrocities, but I am grateful that he's at least releasing this information."
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos, providing all the information and impetus the citizenry should need to demand investigations and prosecutions. But it is up to citizens to demand that the rule of law be applied."

However, some liberal bloggers are criticizing Obama for announcing "that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department's legal advice would not be prosecuted." In their view, granting immunity to C.I.A. personnel who tortured detainees would violate the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg principles:

• dday: "[I]t goes without saying that indemnifying the CIA personnel who committed the torture because they were acting under what they believed to be a legal basis violates the Nuremberg principles."
• Greenwald: "I agree entirely that it is the DOJ lawyers who purported to legalize torture and the high-level Bush officials ordering it who are the prime culprits and criminals, as compared to, say, CIA agents who were proverbially just following orders and were told by the DOJ that what they were doing was legal. But leave aside the question of whether prosecutions would produce good or bad outcomes. After all, the notion that the law can and should be ignored whenever we think doing so would produce good results or would constitute good policy was the engine that drove Bush lawlessness. If, as Barack Obama proclaimed yesterday, 'the United States is a nation of laws' and his 'Administration will always act in accordance with those laws,' isn't it the obligation of those opposing prosecution to justify that position in light of these legal mandates and long-standing principles of Western justice? How can they be reconciled?"

Other liberal bloggers are OK with Obama's promise not to prosecute CIA officers, as long as he prosecutes the Bush lawyers who authorized these interrogation methods:

• Anonymous Liberal: "I think Obama did the right thing by promising not to prosecute CIA officers who acted in accordance with the OLC's prior advice. Given the kind of things these folks are asked to do and the important missions entrusted to them, they have to be able to rely on the legal advice they're given by the government. If we start prosecuting people for conduct they were specifically advised was legal by the OLC, it will severely hamper our ability to conduct future intelligence work. No one will trust the advice they are given, they'll worry that the rug will be pulled out from under them at some point down the road. That's an untenable situation. The people who should be punished are the people who gave the advice. The lawyers. The Jay Bybees, John Yoos, and David Addingtons of the world."
• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement, 'It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.' How about, then, pursuing criminal charges against those who did the sanctioning?"

Meanwhile, the liberal blog Firedoglake has created a petition urging Holder "to immediately appoint a special prosecutor to determine if criminal proceedings are warranted for Justice Department lawyers who legalized these crimes, and the high level executive branch officials who ordered them."

OLC MEMOS II: Bybee Needs To Say Bye-Bye

Liberal bloggers are directing much of their fire at Bybee, the former OLC lawyer who wrote the first memo and who now serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit:

• TalkLeft's Jeralyn Merritt: "Obama plans on amnesty for the torturers, because they followed orders. How about punishing the people who gave the orders? Or at least removing their rewards? Former President Bush promoted torture memo author Jay Bybee to a federal appeals judgeship in 2002. He was confirmed in 2003 and still sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."
• The Reality-Based Community's Jonathan Zasloff: "Amidst the uproar over the torture memos, it's important not to lose sight of a crucial fact: its responsible author, Jay S. Bybee, is now a federal appeals court judge. Thus, apart from any issue of criminal prosecution, he can be impeached by the House and removed by the Senate. This would be appropriate."
• Hamsher: "Jay Bybee's job, since 2003, has been sitting on the 9th Circut Court of Appeals, deciding what is an isn't constitutional. In the wake of the release of these documents, which Andrew Sullivan rightly calls an 'unprofessional travesty of lawyering,' he ought to resign."

OLC MEMOS III: Welcome To 1984

Liberal bloggers (and torture opponents like Andrew Sullivan) were horrified by the content of the memos:

• digby: "[O]nly having read through the Bybee memo (pdf) authorizing the torture of Abu Zubayda, I feel like vomiting right now. This is the very definition of the banality of evil --- a dry, legalistic series of justifications for acts of barbaric cruelty."
• Sullivan: "[T]he Bybee memo [is] as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil."
• Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias: "The OLC memos released today make for chilling reading. They also make it clear that we're talking about interrogation methods that were whipped up by a group of people who were incredibly eager to torture some of their fellow human beings. [...] The bug box, the slap, the stress positions, the waterboarding, etc. have all the hallmarks of torture. If they were done to your dad, you would call it torture. But some folks who are both creative and demented managed to come up with a bunch of ways of torturing people that didn't fit the weird definition of torture they dreamed up."
• Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "Reading the OLC torture memos is enough to make you ill. The techniques in question are plainly and instinctively abhorrent by any common sense definition, and the authors of the memos obviously know it. But somehow they have to conclude otherwise, so they write page after mind-numbing page of sterile legal language designed to justify authorizing it anyway. It's not torture if the victim survives it intact. It's not against the law if it takes place outside the United States. Waterboarding is OK as long as it isn't performed more than twice in a 24-hour period. Sleep deprivation of shackled prisoners for seven days at a time is permissible as long as the victim's diaper is changed frequently. And on and on and on."

While most conservative bloggers didn't comment on the content of the memos, a few of them denied that the interrogation methods described in the memos constitute torture:

• Power Line's John Hinderaker: "I find much to agree with in the memos and little, if anything, with which I disagree from a legal standpoint. Several things about the memos are striking: the concern that is shown for the health and well-being of the detainees; the very limited circumstances under harsh interrogation techniques were used (only when the CIA had reason to believe that the detainee had knowledge about pending terrorist attacks, among other limitations), and confirmation of the fact that thousands of American servicemen have been waterboarded and subjected to the other techniques in question, as part of their training -- a practice that continued at least up to the dates of the memos."
• RedState's Jeff Emanuel: "No, I won't call them 'Torture Memos'. [...] Co-opting the word 'torture' to include methods far less offensive than the majority of interrogation techniques I underwent in military SERE training isn't a victory for moralists and humanitarians in any form; rather, it's an Orwellian perversion of a word that once had meaning by those who have spent the last eight years on constant lookout for some greviance to hold against a president whose mere existence they resented."

OLC MEMOS IV: The Reaction From The Right

The conservative blogosphere's reaction to the release of the memos was muted, especially when compared with that of the liberal blogosphere. However, several conservative bloggers criticized Obama for releasing the memos:

• Townhall's Carol Platt Liebau: "President Obama is willing to release CIA memoes that will have an adverse effect on our national security."
• NRO's Andy McCarthy: "[This was] a terrible decision, pushed for aggressively by AG Eric Holder."

Meanwhile, Townhall's Hugh Hewitt defends the Bush lawyers who wrote the memos: "The DOJ legal analysis was the best effort of front-line lawyers in the aftermath of a massive attack on the United States. Their Congressional critics of today who did not demand a defining vote on what constituted torture are the worst sort of hypocrites. They are the lawmakers, and chose -- even when House and Senate were controlled by Democrats from January 2007 to the present -- to avoid passing a law bringing clarity to the very gray areas of the law of interrogation."

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey makes a similar point, although he is more critical of the legal reasoning employed by the Bush lawyers: "Bybee and the OLC were asked what interrogators could do within the law, and instead the OLC reverse-engineered a legal opinion to allow them to violate it. I understand why they did, but it still violated the statute. That's what was wrong with John McCain's assertion that a president could just break the law and hope Congress justified it later, rather than rewrite the statutes to make plain what could be done in the 'ticking time bomb' scenario. The law is supposed to hold all people equally accountable. If we foresee a need to work outside the law, then change the law to make sure it covers those situations."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Hyperbole, Anyone?

David Frum:

"...Republicans seem to be making up their mind that they lost in 2006 and 2008 because they were not conservative enough. Like the proverbial Englishman on vacation, they seem to think that if the locals aren't responding to what they have to say, the thing to do is to say it louder. And are they getting loud!

Obama has been in office nearly three months. Far and away his most important initiative over that time has been to continue George W. Bush's costly Troubled Asset Rescue Plan. Next most important: a mortgage rescue plan that likewise follows ideas bequeathed by his predecessor. Obama has not yet raised taxes. He has not yet introduced a healthcare plan. He has not yet detailed a climate-change policy. He has declined to rescue the automobile companies. [...]

Yet to listen to Fox News and other conservative media, you'd think we were living in Czechoslovakia in the final hours before the 1948 communist coup. Anchors end interviews by solemnly pledging to defend liberty and oppose tyranny. The network's rising star Glenn Beck has mused about the coming turn to totalitarianism -- and warned his audience that he has not been able to 'debunk' fears that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is constructing an archipelago of concentration camps for political opponents of the Obama administration."

LEST WE FORGET: Area Woman's Safety Net Braces For Another Impact

From The Onion:

"ALBANY, NY -- Despite already being stretched to its breaking point, the strained threads of Patricia Hapsburg's social safety net have once again begun readying themselves to absorb the emotional impact of the 29-year-old finding out her ex-boyfriend is now engaged. 'We have white zin chilling in the fridge, her comfiest sweats laid out, and Under The Tuscan Sun cued up in the DVD player,' said one friend, Leanne Shuyin, whose strength has been repeatedly tested by Hapsburg's numerous professional stumbles and tendency to fall for men who move into her building. 'I can't say how long we'll be able to support her, though. Janet has been looking pretty frayed since she agreed to accompany Patricia on that spiritual retreat.' For her own mental stability, Hapsburg will spend the next four weeks joined at the hip to Mike Gantz, her unusually resilient and supportive gay lifeline."

Posted by Ian Faerstein at April 17, 2009 01:15 PM