I wonder if Jay Bybee would have been confirmed if the Senate had known that he authored this.
Michael Froomkin’s analysis of Torture Memo 2 is a good place to get an overview before going on to read the full document.
Links via The Gamer’s Nook and the Washington Monthly.
I thought we fought WWII to get rid of this kind of stuff:
The defense offered by the GOP’s local functionaries is that the soldiers asked to attend the rally “so they could show their support for their commander-in-chief before getting shipped out to fight the war on terrorism.”
And, of course, they were also given those t-shirts to wear. So at least they weren’t in uniform.
So how could anyone – except maybe some pinko terrorist lover – complain about something so innocuous?
Well I wouldn’t – if not for the fact that we already have several thousand years of history to draw on for examples of what happens when the armed forces of a powerful state dabble in politics – or, worse still, allow themselves to be transformed into the personal shocktroops of a political leader or party.
Your assignment: Read the original news article and the rest of Bilmon’s long post.
Study question: What is the role of the military in a free society?
Mark Danner writes in the New York Review of Books:
What is clear is that the Abu Ghraib photographs and the terrible story they tell have done great damage to what was left of America’s moral power in the world, and thus its power to inspire hope rather than hatred among Muslims. The photographs “do not represent America,” or so the President asserts, and we nod our heads and agree. But what exactly does this mean?I agree that the photographs do not represent America but what has become abundantly clear is that the photographs do represent the bush administration (article is from the Wall Street Journal ($)):
Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.For more details see Bilmon, Phillip Carter, and Kevin Drum who states the issue clearly:
The United States has fought many wars over the past half century, and in each of them our causes were just as important as today’s, information from prisoners would have been just as helpful, and we were every bit as determined to win as we are now. But we still didn’t authorize torture of prisoners. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Reagan � all of them knew it wasn’t right, and the rest of us knew it as well.Do we really have to wait for an election to toss these people out of office?
So what’s different this time? Only one thing: the name of the man in the White House. Under this administration, we seem to have lost the simple level of moral clarity that allowed our predecessors to tell right from wrong.
Nope, not drug or alcohol addiction though I suspect Bill Masters, sheriff of San Miguel County, Colorado would support individuals working to end their addiction.
Instead Masters argues that it is time to end the drug war addiction:
“The only reason why drugs and crime have expanded to reach every Mayberry village in the country is our blind obedience to misguided laws and police tactics that just do not work,” Masters writes in his essay introducing the collection. “It is time to admit our own folly and stop our addiction to the drug war.”
What does the drug war addiction cost:
According to research cited in Master’s book The New Prohibition, state and federal authorities spend more than $9 billion a year to imprison close to half a million drug offenders. More people are sent to prison for drug offenses than for violent crimes, a trend that’s been consistent since 1989. The overall cost to the justice system of arresting, convicting, punishing and supervising drug offenders stands at about $70 billion a year.
$70 billion??? I suspect that we could find much better things to do with that money. Including, of course, rehabilitation and retraining for the ex drug war addicts.
The Masters article via Avedon Carol.
On Friday Michael Medved spent part of his radio program bashing libertarians or, in his words, loosertarians. I say part because I listened to only 15-20 minutes. He may well have spent the entire show on this subject. Does anyone know if other talk jocks have taken up libertarian bashing now that there has been so much discussion about bush possibly loosing the libertarian vote?
Medved’s attack, at least while I was listening, was primarily ad hominem and without substance.
I found it particularly interesting that Medved, a lawyer, found it important to put down one of the Libertarian candidates because this candidate was teaching an 8 hour class on the U.S. constitution in conjunction with the Libertarian convention. This suggested to me that Medved perhaps does not consider the consitution important or important for the president to understand.
g w bush has sworn to uphold the constitution but can you imagine him teaching a class on the constitution? Even one as short as 8 hours?
Just to be fair and balanced: while kerry’s presentation may be smoother then w’s it is not at all clear that either Yale grad could teach this short course.