Boy, it sure is great that Susan Collins made sure we didn’t waste any money on pandemic flu preparations in the Recovery Act. That’s moderation I can believe in!
And then there’s Chuck Schumer: ” ‘All those little porky things that the House put in, the money for the [National] Mall or the sexually transmitted diseases or the flu pandemic, they’re all out,’ Schumer said.”
Nice Work!
I think it’s great that Thomas Friedman is on the right side of the great climate debate, but this sentence is unduly fuzzy: “At this stage, I’d settle for any carbon price mechanism — cap and trade, fee-bates, carbon tax and/or gasoline tax — as long as it real and provides consumers and investors a long-term incentive to shift to clean cars, appliances and buildings.”
I agree with the spirit of what he’s saying here; it’s perverse to waste time quibbling about the details of caps versus taxes and precise levels of rebates and offsets when the important thing is to get policy that’s in the right ballpark. But even though a higher gasoline tax is something I would strongly support, one really has to see that such a tax is by no means equivalent to a comprehensive approach to regulating climate pollution. That would, among other things, leave coal-fired power plants completely untouched. And that would make serious progress on controlling climate change totally impossible.
On Friday, Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren interviewed former House speaker Newt Gingrich regarding President Obama’s recent release of Bush-era OLC torture memos. Throughout the interview, Gingrich tried to sit on the fence of the torture debate — saying, for example, that “releasing the documents last week was a big mistake” but also saying “I want to see the United States run the risk, at times, of not learning certain things in order to establish a standard for civilization.”
When Van Susteren asked if waterboarding is torture, Gingrich hemmed and hawed. “I think it’s something we shouldn’t do,” he said, but he qualified his statement, adding, “Lawyers I respect a great deal say it is absolutely within the law. Other lawyers say it absolutely is not. I mean, this is a debatable area.” When asked if waterboarding violates international law, Gingrich played dumb:
VAN SUSTEREN: But you said a minute ago that it was torture, waterboarding…
GINGRICH: No, I said it’s not something we should do.
VAN SUSTEREN: OK. Is it torture or not?
GINGRICH: I — I — I think it’s — I can’t tell you.
VAN SUSTEREN: Does it violate the Geneva Convention?
GINGRICH: I honestly don’t know.
Watch it:
Gingrich added, “I think — I think that there — I am exactly where Senator McCain was.” But McCain, a former prisoner of war, has repeatedly said that waterboarding is a “horrible torture technique.” “One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period,” McCain said last week. Indeed, it is a fact — and not a matter of “debate” — that waterboarding is illegal torture. The interrogation tactic violates both U.S. statute and international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory.
Perhaps the Bush torture memos are so disturbing that they have gotten even Newt Gingrich reexamining his position on torture. Yet he is still unwilling to fully break with the right-wing on the issue.
Porter Goss writes that “We can’t have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets” and it’s time for the country to start putting “Security Before Politics” and stop holding people accountable for their illegal activities.
Goss is clearly right that there’s a tension between America’s desire for a secret intelligence service and America’s desire to know what its intelligence services are doing with our money allegedly to secure our national interests. But at the same time, this is clearly a spectrum rather than a choice. There can be more and less secrecy, not “secrecy” or “no secrecy.” And it’s worth questioning Goss’ view that there’s a straightforward trade-off between disclosure and security. Afte rall, the goal of an intelligence service is not to have a lot of secrecy but to have a lot of efficacy. Secrecy can improve efficacy. But secrecy can also reduce efficacy. If you have no idea what your intelligence services are doing, and if politicians know they can engage in illegal activities by working through the cloak of secrecy that hangs over intelligence operations, then you have a recipe for law-breaking, incompetence, and corruption, not awesome intelligence success.
Meanwhile, I don’t think one should overstate the role of effective covert intelligence operations in securing a nation. The KGB was, by all accounts, a very high-performing intelligence agency that had a great deal of ability to keep things secret. But the Soviet Union was not a high-performing country. Its economic system couldn’t deliver sustained prosperity, its political system was repressive and unstable, and its international relations approach was incapable of achieving meaning cooperative relationships with countries it didn’t coercively dominate. The long-term viability of the United States depends much more on our ability to sustain liberal institutions than on our ability to carve-out effective exceptions to the basic principles of transparency, democracy, and accountability.
Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) repeated his view that the United States had conducted torture by authorizing waterboarding. Saying the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times was “unacceptable,” McCain declared, “One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period.”
However, discussing torture on CBS’s Face the Nation today, McCain insisted, “We’ve got to move on” and ignore the Bush administration’s torture program. Indeed, McCain refused to support the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee — even as he acknowledged that Bybee had broken both U.S. and international law in authorizing torture:
MCCAIN: He falls into the same category as everybody else as far as giving very bad advice and misinterpreting, fundamentally, what the United States is all about, much less things like the Geneva Conventions. Look, under President Reagan we signed an agreement against torture. We were in violation of that.
McCain claimed that “no one has alleged, quote, wrongdoing” on the part of Bush administration lawyers, only that they had given “bad advice.” And yet minutes later McCain himself acknowledged that Bybee’s advice led the U.S. to be “in violation” of both U.S. and international law. Watch it:
Later on Face the Nation, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who supports holding broad investigations about torture, pointed out that McCain supports a commission to investigate the causes of the financial crisis. “But just as important as losing our money, what happens when we lose our national honor? That’s what we should look at,” Leahy said.
Yesterday, the blogger dday asked Sen Barbara Boxer (D-CA) whether she would support a Congressional inquiry into Bybee, including the possibility of impeachment. “I’m very open to that,” Boxer said. “There is an ongoing investigation at the Justice Department into his work, and we’ll see how that goes. But I’m very open to that. And I’ll remind everyone that I didn’t vote for him when his nomination came up. I was one of 19 to do so.”
Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.
For historical reasons related to the geopolitics of the Cold War, the United States has traditionally aligned itself with Pakistan in Pakistan’s conflict with India. Consequently, you often see American pundits gloss the India-Pakistan conflict in terms similar to these used by Doug Bandow:
Gen. Petraeus is obviously right, from America’s standpoint. But try explaining that to Pakistan, which has fought and lost three wars with India. Indeed, Pakistan was dismembered in one of those conflicts, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.
Now none of that is wrong as such. But it leaves out a great deal of context. Pakistan and Bangladesh used to be one country (“West Pakistan” and “East Pakistan”) but with the initial set-up of the government structured so that West Pakistan dominated the institutions of state. Then in 1970, an East Pakistani political leader, Sheikh Mujubur Rahman, won the election. Instead of inviting him to form a new government, however, Pakistan’s president and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had Rahman arrested. This led to rebellion in East Pakistan which led, in turn, to a campaign of massacre that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
India did, indeed, take advantage of the situation by aiding the Bengalis and splitting Pakistan in two. But the image of a happy Pakistan bouncing along until “dismembered” by rapacious India is pretty misleading.
I have no opinions on this subject beyond the observation that it would be nice to live in a country where, if fell seriously ill due to viral infection, your access to effective medical remedies was not determined by your wealth, income, or employment status.
Today on CNN, and in a letter to John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, CAPAF President and CEO John Conyers called for the impeachment of Jay Bybee:
The one thing I disagree with you and David [Gergen] about is I do think there’s a distinction between going back and prosecuting in criminal courts the actors who were involved in these memos and letting Judge Bybee continue to sit on a court one step removed from the Supreme Court. He’s acting and listening to cases, making judgments of others, and we know he authorized things that were illegal under U.S. law and violated the U.S. obligations under international treaties.
If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn’t, I think this is one matter where he continues to sit — he doesn’t have the moral or legal authority to continue to do that. And I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.
The full text of the letter will go below the fold. But it’s worth observing that while removing Bybee from office would be a serious and important statement of principle about the wrongness of his actions, it’s also hardly the most terrible punishment in the world. Lots of people get along in life just fine without enjoying lifetime appointments to the federal bench. So for those full of Broderish concern that we not be unduly vengeful and vindictive, it’s not like anything that would shock the conscience is being contemplated for Bybee. We’d just be saying that people who have a record of failing to discharge their duty to the law and to the constitution can’t be judges.
Letter below:
Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union this morning, Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta called on Congress to commence impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee, should he decide not to voluntarily resign his seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Podesta said:
The one thing I disagree with you and David [Gergen] about is I do think there’s a distinction between going back and prosecuting in criminal courts the actors who were involved in these memos and letting Judge Bybee continue to sit on a court one step removed from the Supreme Court. He’s acting and listening to cases, making judgments of others, and we know he authorized things that were illegal under U.S. law and violated the U.S. obligations under international treaties.
If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn’t, I think this is one matter where he continues to sit — he doesn’t have the moral or legal authority to continue to do that. And I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.
Podesta added that he suspects the White House doesn’t agree with the call for impeaching Bybee. The other panelists — David Gergen and former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein — disagreed with the call for impeachment. Watch it:
Also, Podesta delivered a letter this morning to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), laying out the case for impeaching Bybee.
The letter (pdf) informed Conyers that ThinkProgress has collected nearly 20,000 signatures from concerned citizens “who have expressed their deep-felt and sincere desire to see that Judge Bybee is held to account for authorizing torture.” Podesta’s letter affixed the names of everyone who signed our petition calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Bybee. (It required 71 three-column double-sided pages.)
Thanks for all your help! This could not have been possible without the support of all of you who signed the petition. If you have not already done so, please consider joining the effort by clicking here.
Read Podesta’s full letter below: Read more
The media just keeps missing — or messing up — the story of the century.
Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change — Hell and High Water — then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so.
How else could future generations judge us if the U.S. and the world stay anywhere near our current emissions path, warm most of the inland United States 10 to 15°F by century’s end, with sea levels 3 to 7 feet higher, rising perhaps an inch or two a year, with the Southwest from Kansas to California a permanent dust bowl, and much of the ocean a hot, acidic dead zone — impacts that could be irreversible for 1,000 years if we don’t reverse emissions soon and sharply. This will require an unbroken — and indeed escalating — response by our political leadership throughout this century. The same is true for the very important, but still secondary, issue of avoiding the worst impacts of peak oil.
In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in its first 100 days is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives. While I will present a longer list below — and welcome your additions — three game-changing accomplishments stand out:
Obama has clearly demonstrated he has a serious chance to be the first President since FDR to remake the country through his positive vision. Indeed, if Obama is a two-term president, if he achieves even half of what he has set out to, he will likely be remembered as “the green FDR.”
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