Pruning Shears

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

Andrew Sullivan pointed out the conundrum now facing the pro-torture right: If torture by the Iranian regime produces false confessions why doesn’t our torture do the same? How long will we have to be completely morally compromised by our official willingness to rationalize or overlook the cruelty we have done? At some point we need to ask if political elites are willing to damage America’s national interest in order to protect their own comfort and position.

Larisa Alexandrovna reported that “Velvet Revolution, a coalition of over 150 grassroots groups” filed complaints against CIA lawyers Jonathan Fredman and John Rizzo for their efforts in authorizing torture. Torture is not going away, period. It is a festering wound that will continue to infect the body politic until it is properly dealt with. Here’s what the folks at the top in D.C. don’t understand: They can’t ignore it or preempt every strategy or obstruct every avenue activists can take. And it won’t stop until it’s rolled right up to their doorsteps. Good luck getting in front of it at that point!

File under “bears watching”:

The Justice Department has determined that detainees tried by military commissions in the U.S. can claim at least some constitutional rights, particularly protection against the use of statements taken through coercive interrogations, officials said.

Marcy pointed to Bill Leonard’s new blog. I particularly liked this: “All too often, in dealing with the public or the two co-equals branches of government, Executive branch officials simply assert classification. Equally disturbing, the judiciary and the Congress often reflexively defer to such claims.”

Antonin Scalia inexplicably stood up for consumers this week and I feel lightheaded just thinking about it. I mentioned this issue in passing a while back but didn’t think it would come to anything close to a satisfactory conclusion. Life is full of surprises, eh?

Yves Smith pointed to a great new term coined by Paul Collier: “this Intention misses the point. Faced with a corpse and a killer, police do not need to prove ill intent: manslaughter sets the hurdle lower than murder. It is enough to show the killer was irresponsible. That is the standard we need; we need a crime of managing a bank irresponsibly: in other words, bankslaughter.” Also, here’s a good reason to fight for a strong public option in health care reform - it will make the very idea of what government can do change and make proposals like this seem possible: “Who knows, maybe it’s time for a new, state-sponsored bank. A ‘public-plan’ for banks, if you will. If people like their current banking system (raise your hands, all two of you) they can keep that. If not, they can go with the public one.” Also, Martin Wolf pleads for sanity.

Did Donald Rumsfeld make decisions about America’s national defense based on his stock portfolio?

The Washington Post:

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday accused the Obama administration of using statements elicited through torture to justify the confinement of a detainee it represents at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The ACLU is asking a federal judge to throw out those statements and others made by Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who may have been as young as 12 when he was captured. His attorney argued that Jawad was abused in U.S. custody, threatened and subjected to intense sleep deprivation.

“The government’s continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past,” said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who is representing Jawad in a lawsuit challenging his detention.

Via Christy Hardin Smith comes the news that Porter Goss is now explaining himself to a grand jury. Also interesting was this tidbit about the investigation led by John Durham:

Mr. Durham has shrouded his investigation in a level of secrecy rare even by the normally tight-lipped standards of special prosecutors, and after 18 months it is still difficult to assess either the direction or the targets of his investigation.

Like a mosquito at the ear a persistent low-level buzz has begun to attract the attention of conservatives. Jonah Goldberg:

peddling a few platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government is no substitute for really knowing what you’re talking about.

She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she hasn’t. She has to stop speaking in clichés and platitudes.

UNPACKING JANE On page 185 Mayer writes how John Bellinger, then-Legal Adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was unable to make his concerns about the torture program translate into action:

Bellinger was in a political minority in the White House, however. His concern for international law and world opinion was ridiculed by the hard-line lawyers of the so-called War Council. Addington particularly disdained Bellinger, according to several sources who watched their constant skirmishes. Addington was a sectarian purist, instinctively challenging and excluding anyone less extreme, and Bellinger epitomized the art of compromise that Addington deplored. Bellinger had discovered it was always 5-1, with him outnumbered by Addington, Gonzales, Yoo, Haynes and whichever lawyer was sent by the CIA. Nonetheless, he thought that if they were making mistakes in Guantánamo , potentially incarcerating the wrong people, it couldn’t be ignored.