It’s the second time in a month that CNN commentators have come under fire for controversial comments: Dana Loesch recently cheered reports of members of the United States Marine Corps urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans and suggested that had she been present, she would have joined in. But while Martin apologized and will experience an indefinite suspension, CNN and Loesch refused to apologize for her remarks, and she’s remained on the air.

The clear difference between the two cases? A sense that CNN’s audience was offended. GLAAD, which keeps a careful eye on defamation against gays and lesbians in the media, moved quickly to call for Martin’s dismissal and to track the network’s response to the incident. CNN got the message that its own constituents were upset, and that it would suffer consequences — or at least a lot of annoyance — if it failed to act.

Loesch’s comments on the other hand, offended human rights advocates and decent people everywhere. But that’s not the same as running afoul of an organization with a well-established plan to respond to these kinds of events and a well-worn path to media outlets who would cover and amplify their response. While Loesch’s comments were reprehensible, there was also no organized group who was likely or able to hold CNN accountable for her words, and for continuing to let her appear on-air without penalty.

Taken together, the way CNN handled Martin’s and Loesch’s comments makes it look like CNN has no consistent internal values, and no internal standard for how to respond when it commenters express sentiments that are an anathema to those values. I’m glad to know, per CNN’s statement, that “Language that demeans is inconsistent with the values and culture of our organization, and is not tolerated.” But why should it take several days of consideration for CNN to arrive at that conclusion? If the network’s truly committed to the proposition that violence against gay people is no joking matter, that’s something it should know in advance, and CNN should have a personnel policy in place to determine what the appropriate penalty is when someone violates their standards. Similarly, whether Loesch’s comments violate CNN’s internal values shouldn’t be something that’s determined by the level of outrage outside the network’s headquarters.

My sister, Theon thought, my sweet sister. Though he had lost all feeling in his arms, he felt the twisting in his gut, the same as when that bloodless Braavosi banker presented him to Asha as a ‘gift.’ The memory still rankled. The burly, balding knight who’d been with her had wasted no time shouting for help, so they’d had no more than a few moments before Theon was dragged away to face the king. That was long enough. He had hated the look on Asha’s face when she realized who he was; the shock in her eyes, the pity in her voice, the way her mouth twisted in disgust. Instead of rushing forward to embrace him, she had taken half a step backwards. “Did the Bastard do this to you?” she had asked.

“Don’t you call him that.” Then the words came spilling out of Theon in a rush. He tried to tell her all of it, about Reek and the Dreadfort and Kyra and the keys, how Lord Ramsay never took anything but skin unless you begged for it. He told her how he’d saved the girl, leaping from the castle wall into the snow. “We flew. Let Abel make a song of that, we flew.” Then he had to say who Abel was, and talk about the washerwomen who weren’t truly washerwomen. By then Theon knew how strange and incoherent all this sounded, yet somehow the words would not stop. He was cold and sick and tired… and weak, so weak, so very weak.

She has to understand. She is my sister. He never wanted to do any harm to Bran or Rickon. Reek made him kill those boys, not him Reek but the other one. “I am no kinslayer,” he insisted. He told her how he bedded down with Ramsay’s bitches, warned her that Winterfell was full of ghosts. “The swords were gone. Four, I think, or five. I don’t recall. The stone kings are angry.” He was shaking by then, trembling like an autumn leaf. “The heart tree knew my name. The old gods. Theon, I heard them whisper. There was no wind but the leaves were moving. Theon, they said. My name is Theon.” It was good to say the name. The more he said it, the less like he was to forget. “You have to know your name,” he’d told his sister. “You… you told me you were Esgred, but that was a lie. Your name is Asha.”

I initially hated Theon—and it was hard not to. He was the character who was perhaps most invested in both the lies of the path and in the idea that the path to glory lies through conquest. But he’s become a moving testament to the lasting impact of brutality. And in this passage, he’s an illustration of how history gets mangled. It’s hard for people to believe the things that Theon is telling them about Ramsay Bolton because they’re too terrible, they’re the kinds of events and behavior that we all want to believe can’t be true. And living through the worst events of history can turn our most direct eyewitnesses into wrecks other people consider unreliable narrators.

“I’m not.” -Sgt. Nicholas Brody

The war on terror has made America sick, and accepting a cure will kill us. The finale of the first season of Showtime was full of philosophical debates. And it ended with a Carrie, a patient driven mad by a basic and critical impossibility behind those debates — the dream that we can ever be completely safe from terrorism — wiping out her own brain, all the joy and love and agony, and crucial insights, of her last few weeks. Whatever you may think of how the show has handled Brody’s motivations, there’s no question that it’s successfully walked an exceedingly fine line in making a difficult point: that it’s insanity to let yourself be consumed by a fear of terrorism, but equally insane to refuse to see the risk. It’s a tragic madness to let terrorism convince you to give up who you are, whether you’re an American elected official or a captured Marine. And it’s equally devastating to cling rigidly to the past when you desperately need to change. The show hasn’t forged a compromise, and neither have we in the world beyond the screen. But Homeland is articulating that central dilemma, the one that’s governed so much of our politics for the last decade, in a critical and urgent way.

It’s also become a fantasy about assassinating or undermining Dick Cheney, who is the clear model for Vice President William Walden. “My action this day is against such domestic enemies,” Brody tells us in the suicide video that he records and that begins the episode in language that echoes charges lobbed at both Cheney and President Bush. “The Vice President and members of his national security team who I know to be liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never hold accountable for. This is about justice for 82 children whose deaths were never acknowledged and whose murder is a stain on the soul of this nation.” In the video of him working with David to order the drone strike, Walden declares that “If Abu Nazir is taking refuge among children, he’s putting them at risk, not us.” There are no innocents. In giving the order, he falls into obscurantist language, saying “It’s our collective opinion that the potential collateral damage falls within current matrix parameters.” Watching years later, Saul has the reaction that many of us would: “Good God. Someone actually came up with that language?” And that’s not all he’s done. In his sitdown with Walden, Saul reminds the Vice President that David may be willing to throw evidence down the memory for the sake of his career and clothe that decision in an ideological shift, but he is not. “I’m a sentimentalist,” Saul declares with controlled venom. “I like to hold on to things. For old times’ sake. Whoever told the American people these interrogation tapes had been destroyed is mistaken. Coercion. cruelty. Outright torture makes for a very unhappy human. You gave the orders, William.” When he survives Brody’s botched attack, Walden makes grotesque use of Elizabeth’s death to kickstart his presidential campaign. He’s easy to despise.

But while Cheney is out of power, the ideas he promoted persist, and Homeland focuses instead on what the real and fictional vice presidents have wrought. Brody and Nazir come to a collective conclusion that the man isn’t what’s important. “Why kill a man when you can kill an idea?” Nazir asks Brody, as they reach an uneasy truce over a new strategy.

Even before they do that work, though, the show does it for them, showing the weaknesses in Walden’s worldview in a stunning sequence where Brody comes to within a fingernail of fulfilling his mission even after a failed attempt, and pulls away. “Tell him it doesn’t matter why terrorists do what they do,” Walden snaps at David on the way to the event, as David tells him that Saul is on to the drone strike. “He’s a security expert not a fucking social worker.” But of course it matters why terrorists do what they do: it lets us figure out how not to generate more of them, and to win potential terrorists back before they can carry out their terrible work. Which is, of course, what happens to Brody in this episode. He easily could have given up when the vest doesn’t work, but in that profoundly claustrophobic space, he reconnects the wires dislodged when he reached for his ID or in the rush through the metal detectors and tries again. I, of course, just adore that it’s a father-daughter relationship that saves the republic. And it’s extraordinary to hear Brody tell Dana first “I’m not,” when she begs him for reassurance that Carrie is lying about him being a terrorist, to see him go through the process of coming to a place where he can tell her “I’m coming home, Dana. I promise,” and mean it, to give up the cause that’s consumed so much of his life. It’s Dana with whom he can share both the roof and the revelation that “I never knew we had views.” He’s finally home.

Isa’s gone, and it’s Abu Nazir who needs him avenged. But Brody has a living daughter telling him “I need you. You know that.” And it appears that he’ll play an awfully dangerous game to serve that need. A suicide bombing has an end point. A permanent role as Abu Nazir’s lobbyist does not. And I’d be curious to know what happened to the drive from Brody’s camera that Tom Walker retrieved. Did Brody have the presence of mind to remove it from Walker’s body and destroy it? Will it be yet another thing that a newly inquisitive Dana, discovering her parents’ private lives as she develops her own, discovers around the house? And what became of the vest?

If there’s one thing I feel somewhat reluctant about in this episode and this season, it’s the treatment of Tom Walker. One of the best things about Homeland has been its commitment to letting Brody live in his contradictions, to reveal his motivations and convictions slowly, to let him explain his conversion to Carrie and to Dana (I love the latter’s “Well it is a good time you didn’t shoot a deer or step out on Mom” reaction.). By contrast, his black counterpart gets to jack an old white lady’s car and apartment. I do love Walker fluffing his victim’s hair on the way out the door after sparking the panic, which makes up for the play to trope. But there’s no question that Walker’s given short shrift here, and there are compelling questions that are left unanswered. When he and Brody face off in the tunnel and he tells Brody, “We both got to the same place, Nick. I just got there quicker,” I want to know that journey. Did Tom Walker not need 82 dead children to turn to Abu Nazir? What convinced him? Is the implication that a black man is less likely to be attached to and trust in the American idea than a white one? And what happened to Tom’s guilt-ridden wife after she helped him get away?

If Walker’s motivations are opaque to us, and seem likely to remain that way, by the end of the episode, Carrie’s are painfully clear. “It’s fucking barbaric. I won’t allow it,” Saul declares when he races into the hospital, the need to preserve “a brain I happen to love” as urgent as Carrie’s need to save the whole world. Unlike David (who seems to have become a version of his namesake, David Addington), Saul can see the value of the woman — and of the tactics, mission, and morals — his agency is throwing out like trash. But her rationale for getting shock treatment is painful but undeniable. “I want to do this thing. It was my decision. I told them to go ahead,” Carrie tells her mentor. “I need to do something. I can’t take this anymore…It won’t pass. It’s only getting worse…[The risk of memory loss is] only short term. It’s usually temporary. And a lot of what’s happened lately I’d kind of like to forget anyway…I’m grateful for the concern. But I can’t live like this anymore. It needs to stop.”

It does. Of course it does. But it doesn’t make it easier to see Carrie give up part of herself for the sake of sanity, to slow down that big, speeding brain. The finale suggests that she’s losing at least one insight, as Maggie and the nurses miss her murmuring “Isa. Isa. Nazir’s son. Don’t let me forget.” But I imagine she’ll have lost more than that. It will be heartbreaking next season to have see this woman we’ve come to love maimed in search of a health. Carrie can’t both purify herself entirely and remain the woman that she was. And neither can her country.

Now that Gingrich has had some time to think about it (while being influenced by some of his fellow GOP presidential candidates), he seems to have made a decision. Today at a town hall event at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, an audience member asked Gingrich where he stood on waterboarding. “Waterboarding is, by every technical rule, not torture,” the former House Speaker said, to which the crowd applauded. Gingrich seemed to justify his position claiming that the technique is legal under international law:

GINGRICH: Waterboarding is by every technical rule not torture. [Applause] Waterboarding is actually something we’ve done with our own pilots in order to get them used to the idea to what interrogation is like. It’s not — I’m not saying it’s not bad, and it’s not difficult, it’s not frightening. I’m just saying that under the normal rules internationally it’s not torture.

I think the right balance is that a prisoner can only be waterboarded at the direction of the president in a circumstance which the information was of such great importance that we thought it was worth the risk of doing it and I do that frankly only out of concern for world opinion. But we do not want to be known as a country that capriciously mistreats human beings.

Watch the clip:

Not only is the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario Gingrich refers to a red herring, waterboarding actually is illegal under international law because it is considered a torture technique. Last year, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez said waterboarding is “immoral and illegal,” and his predecessor agrees.

The U.S. military doesn’t have much use for waterboarding either, considering the Army Field Manual bans it. And Gingrich, or any other of the Republicans running for president who support waterboarding and other torture techniques, might have a hard time getting it to happen as the CIA said it is unlikely to go down that road again. “When you have years-long investigations into past practices, it’s unlikely that you want to spend a minute engaged in them,” one CIA official said recently.

“Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tweeted earlier this month. “Waterboarding is torture.”

CAIN: I do not agree with torture. Period. However, I will trust the judgement of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture. That is the critical consideration.

GARRETT: Mr. Cain, of course you’re familiar with the long-running debate we’ve had about whether waterboarding constitutes torture or is an enhanced interrogation technique. In the last campaign Republican nominee John McCain and Barack Obama agreed that it was torture and should not be allowed, legally, and that the Army Field Manual should be the methodology used to interrogate enemy combatants. Do you agree with that, or do you disagree with that sir?

CAIN: I agree that it was an enhanced interrogation technique.

GARRETT: And then you would support it as President, you would return to that policy.

CAIN: Yes, I would return to that policy. I don’t see it as torture.

While Cain claims to listen to the military, he apparently doesn’t heed its policy on waterboarding. The Army Field Manual, which governs the behavior of all military interrogators, explicitly bans waterboarding.

When Cain and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) endorsed waterboarding, the crowd at the debate cheered enthusiastically. Watch it:

On Monday, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) defended waterboarding by citing a Hollywood movie. West said that “as the president, you need to do those things which are necessary to make sure that the American people are kept safe,” adding, “and furthermore, in the movie ‘G.I. Jane,’ Demi Moore was waterboarded.”

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tweeted today, “Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding. Waterboarding is torture.”

– Karl Singer

I’m feeling rather pleased with myself for theorizing correctly — or so it seems for now — that Brody would turn out not to be a terrorist, but that Carrie’s initial information from her source would be correct, and that the two would have to find a way to work together. But I’m down in a paranoid enough place to wonder if Thomas Drake is really alive, or if there’s some sort of plant. And the mechanics of plot feel almost irrelevant in light of the larger questions posed by this extraordinary episode of television.

Carrie and Brody’s recklessness and tenderness are a marvel to behold. Just as an artistic juxtaposition, the contrast between the way Carrie plays a neo-Nazi in a bar, telling him “I love sucking Nazi dick,” with her confession to Brody that she wasn’t actually much of a mankiller in college is wonderful. Similarly, I love their tentativeness even though they’ve effectively run away together, Brody’s “Can we graduate to cabin sex?” their slow escalation from a quick fuck in a car to tender, sober, emotional sex, is great stuff. Even if the show didn’t have such enormous stakes, this would be the stuff of great romantic drama, of the negotiations between us. The heart is its own adventure.

But of course there’s more — the false intimacy of Carrie’s surveillance that lead to their real intimacy betrays her. While her showdown with Brody and its aftermath — her wounded in the woods, him crying in his living room — is amazing. It felt less like a dramatic break to me and more of a piece with other work the show is doing on consolation in the aftermath of torture and trauma. Where Jessica was upset by Brody’s scars, where he didn’t want her to dwell on them because no amount of contemplation will make her understand, Carrie is tender in the face of the evidence of what was done to him. She can touch him for the same reason she can tell him the story of seeing her translator being hung from the bridge. It isn’t only sex. “You live in despair for eight years, you might turn to religion, too,” Brody tells Carrie, explaining the garage, the nervous tic with his fingers — though not, perhaps, the inexplicable question of how deep his conversion goes. “And the King James Bible was not available.” And when Brody explains his relationship with Abu Nazir, it’s entirely psychologically plausible — and damning. “I was embarrassed. Ashamed,” he says. “Because he offered me comfort. And I took it…I’m not made of that stuff. I’m no hero. I had nothing to give. I was broken, living in the dark for years. And a man walked in and he was kind to me. And I loved him.” What does it mean that we have turned people people out into the world after doing the same to them? Who offers them kindness and comfort after Guantanamo, after indefinite detention, after extraordinary rendition? And to what ends?

I’m less compelled by the psychology behind Aileen’s turn to terrorism, that Saul can turn her back because they’re both so hopelessly, heartbrokenly lovestruck. Maybe her politics really do come down to a childhood love, but it’s a less interesting, challenging story to have it all come down to Philip Larkin, to a racist, wealthy father, to a mandate not to assimilate into the all-consuming breadth of the American Midwest. There’s no question that there’s real power in Saul’s warning to Aileen that “Well, if no one claims him, he’ll be buried in a Potter’s Field,” and her reaction. But I am concerned that Homeland is giving somewhat too little credence to the power of ideology. People come to worship destruction without being beaten near to death, without falling in love. Their stories may be less fathomable to us, but they’re no less important.

There’s the contrast between Darwyn’s three case agents. Ray’s well-intentioned, but not particularly ideologically engaged: to him, terrorism is a crime and it doesn’t seem to be particularly important to him to learn about Islam as a motivating force for that crime. Patrice actually knows a lot about Islam — she’s more knowledgeable about and respectful of mainstream Muslims than Ray is, but she’s also more militant than Ray about fighting extremist forms of the faith. She’s willing to put her body on the line to try to kill extremist Iraqi insurgents. And when she’s killed by those same kinds of extremists, they’re murdering not just another foot soldier, but someone who was working on eliminating the misunderstanding between non-Muslims and Muslims that is jidhaists’ most powerful recruiting tool. Warren Russell, the case officer who replaces Patrice, is all too easy to dismiss as an arrogant, inexperienced ass even though his skepticism of Darwyn’s faith is probably a realistic portrayal of what happens when you go through the FBI’s Islamophobic training regimen. And presenting his distrust of an entire faith as a deeply ingrained institutional problem rather than as something only jerks fall prey to would be more useful and disturbing, an actual spur towards reform rather than an isolated incident.

Similarly, I have mixed feelings about the way the show presents Farik’s torture at American and Saudi hands. At one point, one of his interrogators complains that torture isn’t consistent with U.S. values but that it’s something the country’s been forced into by terrorism. Of course it’s true that the greatest victory Osama bin Laden won on September 11 was suckering us into giving up on core American values, but that’s only part of the story here. I don’t really think there’s a question that there are people who believe that torture should always have been part of the menu of options for the military and law enforcement, and who saw the September 11 attacks as an opportunity to tear down rules against torture. The key is how to get folks to recognize both that streak of thinking and the wrongness of it. If you’ve got a cackling, black-hooded dungeon master representing that position, it’s easy for audiences to turn away in revulsion and reject it as implausible.

Lockhart/Gardner goes up against the U.S. government this week in “Executive Order 13224″ as they represent Danny Marwat, an American of Afghan descent who was arrested while working as a translator for a defense contractor in Afghanistan and is now suing the government for torturing him. The various government witnesses keep claiming that they can’t answer questions because of the Classified Information Procedures Act, and Diane repeatedly uses this to her advantage by getting the judge to agree that if the government says information about something is classified, they can’t also claim that it never happened in the first place. Diane is enthusiastic about the case because it’s “the right thing to do,” even if it means, as she says, “poking the bear,” but Will isn’t convinced that it’s right at all. His pragmatic worry that going after the government could make life hard for the firm is combined with his belief that Diane is “fighting an old war.” “Rumsfeld and Cheney are gone. They’re writing books,” he tells her, but she’s firm in her conviction that the government should be held liable for torture anyway. When they discover that Marwat has been lying to them about his connection to a suspected terrorist, though, Will and Diane agree to drop the case. But the Justice Department uses evidence uncovered in that trial to bring criminal conspiracy charges against Marwat, and Lockhart/Gardner is back in, this time to defend Marwat. Diane uses a similar tactic: A military officer refuses to answer questions about an interrogation because the information is classified, so the judge agrees that evidence from that interrogation is inadmissible, and throws out the case. Much of Lockhart/Gardner’s work on this case involves reading through redacted transcripts from secret military trials, and the show made very effective use of bleeping techniques during imagined reenactments of these trials to illustrate the extent of the redaction.

When the case begins, Glenn Childs invokes the titular executive order. Diane says it is designed to help investigate charities who are funding terrorists, but Childs says it also applies to terrorists who hire lawyers. The judge agrees with Diane that it’s a violation of attorney/client privilege, but concedes that it’s the law, so a representative from Lockhart/Gardner must meet periodically with Gordon Higgs, a monitor from the Treasury Department. Diane assigns this task to Alicia, and though Higgs assures her that there’s a Chinese wall between Treasury and Justice, Alicia immediately feels as though Higgs is trying to make her investigate on his behalf, especially when he asks her to report back if Marwat ever mentions the Badula Qulp region of Afghanistan. Marwat later mentions Badula Qulp, so in her second meeting with Higgs, Alicia tries not to answer the question, and Higgs threatens her with a large fine and jail time. He also advises her against getting a lawyer – not something a government representative is supposed to do. Alicia decides to fight back, “poking the bear” – the government – from yet another side. Will offers her a high-powered lawyer who is experienced in cases like this, but Alicia wants some distance from the firm and instead goes to Elsbeth Tascioni, one of the lawyers who worked on Peter’s case. Tascioni first comes across as scattered, a little ditzy, and almost amateurish, but she then uses these behaviors that are generally coded as “feminine” and ineffective to run circles around Higgs. Even Alicia doesn’t realize what Tascioni is up to as she gets Alicia to agree to help her with a case involving an insurance company – and then reveals that this insurance company covered Marwat’s company, so Alicia can’t answer questions about Marwat without it breaking the insurance company’s attorney/client privilege. She even throws in a hilarious bit about how the Supreme Court is very into corporate personhood recently and wouldn’t “take kindly” to Higgs infringing on the insurance company’s rights.

Peter is still cleaning house over at the State’s Attorney’s office, where he’s dropping any long-term investigations from the Childs era that don’t involve drugs or homeland security. We finally learn the details of the mysterious $45k in Will’s shady past as Peter and Cary discuss whether to drop the RICO investigation into Will’s activities. Fifteen years ago, when Will had a gambling problem, he took $45k from a client’s account, planning to put it back, but was caught, and Blake Calamar – that creepy investigator from last season – was “tasked with” covering it up. (An aside: Is the timing coincidental? Assuming it took him a few years to hit bottom, this implies that Will’s problem started around the time Alicia married someone else.) Cary argues against keeping the case open: it’s old, took place out of their jurisdiction (in Baltimore), doesn’t involve drugs or homeland security, and is “too fraught” given Cary’s employment history and Alicia’s current employment. Dana thinks they need to pursue the case in order to get Lemond Bishop, and Peter is clearly torn. He and Cary argue over whether they’d pursue it were Will “anyone else,” and Peter decides to go ahead so it won’t look like he’s giving his wife’s boss special treatment. Interestingly, if Will and Alicia’s relationship were public knowledge, that might tilt the scales the other way: Peter wouldn’t want it to look like he was going after his wife’s lover for personal reasons. Will is confronted by a reluctant Cary and an enthusiastic Dana, and though he more of less laughs at them for trying to intimidate him, he’s shaken enough to go confront Peter on the courthouse steps. I can’t quite decide how our metaphor of the week shakes out here: Peter is poking a bear by going after Will in the first place, but both men are very powerful, and Will is instigating in turn by taking things to a more personal level. Will tells Peter that he’s not buying new clean image, and insists that Peter’s still down in the mud with the rest of them. They then play an incredibly tense game of chicken as Will more or less dares Peter to accuse him of sleeping with Alicia, and I started hoping that they’d actually get into a fistfight, because wouldn’t it be great to watch Eli try to spin that? Alas, there are no fisticuffs or actual accusations regarding Alicia. They have to leave something for the midseason finale, I suppose.

Back at Lockhart/Gardner, Diane begins to poke the bear of Will and Alicia’s relationship as her plausible deniability slips away. She and Kalinda have Will on speakerphone when they hear Alicia’s distinctive ringtone of Grace saying “Mom, pick up the phone” – because Alicia is in bed next to Will. (I actually wasn’t sure why this incident was such a smoking gun. They both tell Diane they’re at lunch, so couldn’t Diane have heard Alicia’s phone because she and Will were eating lunch together?) Instead of confronting Will, Diane brings in an insurance company rep to talk about their coverage for sexual harassment accusations and lawsuits regarding bosses sleeping with subordinates. When she asks what Will thinks, he doesn’t quite crack, but says, “I think I trust your judgment, Diane. As you trust mine.” We’ll see about that. At least for now, Diane isn’t backing off – she makes everyone watch a video about sexual harassment. While this ploy is clever and pretty hilarious to watch, I think it slightly misses the mark. I can’t come up with a scenario in which Alicia would sue Will; the real threat seems to be claims of favoritism by others in the firm and/or retribution from Peter’s office. Will comes into the video screening late, walks by half the firm to sit with Alicia, and talks to her during the video, which is not exactly the most subtle behavior – unless he’s trying to give the impression that the busy lawyers don’t have time for this nonsense. He doesn’t seem to tell Alicia that Diane’s on to them – Alicia certainly acts like she’s confused by Diane’s cold behavior – and also avoids telling her about the investigation into him. Is he protecting her or himself?

And that phone call from Grace that tipped Diane off? It was to ask if she could go to a Bible study, which is exactly the question every mother hopes to get while she’s spending her lunch break in bed with a man who isn’t her husband. I like the way the show has stuck with this thread of Grace’s religious exploration, and shown that online video and other media are used in evangelism the same way they are in politics. This week, the video Grace watches accurately points out that, in the Bible, Jesus condemns divorce but never mentions homosexuality. While it’s heartening to see the liberal Christian position on homosexuality represented on television – too often, religious characters are one-dimensional and super-conservative – the video goes on to suggest to its teenage target audience that “your divorced parents” are the ones going to Hell. We’ve always known that Grace is particularly impressionable when faced with destabilizing influences, and sure enough, by the end of the episode she’s poking the bear of her family’s tenuous status quo. She asks Peter if he and Alicia are getting divorced and says maybe they shouldn’t, but she doesn’t tell him about the video, which perhaps leads him to think she’s suggesting Alicia might be open to reconciliation. When he points out that it’s not necessarily up to him, she says her mother just wants to be happy. Peter tells Grace that sometimes he doesn’t know what the right thing to do is, and she says that he should just ask her – which leads Peter to some sort of revelation. He repeats “Ask you…” and then immediately absents himself from the case against Will, but tells Cary to go ahead with it. It’s unclear whether he does this because he’s decided it’s the morally correct decision or whether Grace’s words made him think of some new strategy involving asking someone something. Anyone catch something here I missed?

Now that all of these bears have been poked out of hibernation, where do you think everything’s going? Some sort of epic confrontation or revelation seems inevitable, presumably on the last episode before the holiday break. Will suddenly-calm Cary temper angry Dana’s enthusiasm for the case against Will? Will Diane and/or Peter make their suspicions of Will and Alicia explicit? Will Grace get in the middle of things and blow it all up in some spectacular manner? Will Kalinda finally get some quality screen time? And will Eli please come back soon?

Kate Linnea Welsh is a New Hampshire-based writer and taxonomist. (No, that doesn’t involve dead animals.) She’s a senior editor at TheTelevixen.com, on staff at Vampire-Diaries.net, and writes about other TV shows, books, and more at her blog (http://katelinnea.blogspot.com). She’d love to talk to you on Twitter: @katelinnea

Homeland is thick with complex relationships we’re encountering long after they initially began, from Brody’s friendship with Mike; to David and Carrie’s professional relationship, affair, and present uneasy collegiality; to Carrie’s relationship with Saul. The network’s so complex that the show could be forgiven for some duplication for the sake of emotional signaling — implying affairs between both Carrie and David and Carrie and Saul, for example, which would establish that Carrie has a pattern. But it’s a mark of the great show Homeland is becoming that it doesn’t take those shortcuts, and that all the backstories have a rich specificity. And tonight’s episode explored two relationships in the same mold: the father and daughter relationship between Carrie and the man who gave her life and Carrie and the man who gave her a professional identity.

Having seen Carrie with her sister, it’s nice to see her with her father — especially because it seems that the mental illness that stalks her might be hereditary. “Sometimes you feel like you’re spinning out of control when they bring you up instead of down,” Carrie tells her father, explaining that she understands the impact that his medication has on him. Much as her sister keeps Carrie coming back with the promise of more pills, her father, it seems, keeps their tie with food, making her a sandwich, wrapping it up to go in a show of understanding, and when she has to go, telling her, “Drive safe. And fuck the CIA,” with his daughter joining in a chorus on the second sentence.

She’s not as fortunate with Saul, who shuts her down again when after David lets Brody visit his former captor (Brody tells him “I need to be physically and mentally ready to honor my duties as a Marine and as a man. But first I have to close the book on this chapter of my life.), Hamid commits suicide with a razor shard Carrie doesn’t believe he could have hidden on himself previously. When she comes to see him at home, complaining that “I’m over your whole detached routine,” totally unaware that Saul’s girlfriend may have just broken up with him, Saul is of course within his rights to tell Carrie, “You’re out of line. You’re in my home.” But she may be right that he’s lost his nerve, that he’s no longer in a place where he can see an investigation all the way through and be as tough as he needs to be. Even so, Carrie still needs his affirmation. When he tells her, “Take some boxes with you. You’ll need them when you clean out your desk,” it sends her, hysterical, to her sister’s house. Babbling out of control, she tells her sister, “I think I just quit my job. I’m serious. I’m done. I’m done. I’ve had it up to here…You were so right, you were so fucking right when you told me my job would kill me one day.”

But of course she can’t give it up. And there’s something profoundly moving about her conviction when her niece wakes up from a sleepover with her aunt to ask if she’s afraid of the bad guys, “The ones who blow people up…I have an idea,” says the little girl who has no idea what her aunt does for a living or why she’s distraught, “Come live with us. We’ll protect you.” It’s those words that bring Carrie back to herself, promising, “No, honey, that’s my job.” Brody, meanwhile, is having a harder time living up to his responsibilities, missing his son’s martial arts exam and finding that Mike’s taken his place there, snapping at his wife, praying for his own recovery. Getting better is more than a matter of confronting the man who tortured you, telling him, “I’m a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, shitbird. How did you think this would end?” and wrestling him to the ground if you’re innocent. Worse if you’re guilty.

A lot of the speculation in this episode is going to center around whether Brody slipped Hamid the razor blade. But for me the more interesting question — and way forward — is why Brody didn’t reveal that he and Carrie met at the support group. There’s not just a frisson of electricity between them now: there’s a complicity. Whether Carrie will use that to crack him, whether Brody will use that to discredit her, or whether the true plot will be something that brings Carrie, Brody, Saul, and David together in an uncomfortable collaboration remains up in the air. And I’m fascinated to see what it is.

Aside from the personal elements of this episode, this is a twisty little story about interrogation. Before Brody agrees to, as Carrie puts it, “provide us with information we can use to unsettle him, to prove we have complete control, to demonstrate our omnipotence,” he wants to know if Hamid will be tortured. “We don’t do that here,” she tells him sweetly, before keeping Hamid awake with bright lights and heavy metal until he gives up an email address that leads them to Faisal. Later, Brody tells David that he has to give him a minute with Hamid because he cooperated “Hard as it was to watch us dance around his rights after what he did to me for eight years.” It’s impossible to know what either of them thinks is right. It does seem that Carrie’s treatment of Hamid worked, at least to a very limited extent. But we’re a long way from the end, and from ultimate knowledge.

Latham & Watkins’ Maureen Mahon­ey took on a major assignment when she agreed to represent Jay Bybee, a federal appellate judge who was accused of violating ethics rules for his work at the U.S. Department of Justice on so-called “torture memos.” Newly released records show just how big the assignment was. . . . Nearly all the assistance, $3,251,893, came from Los Angeles-based Latham, whose lawyers used to appear before Bybee in the courtrooms of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Its worth noting that Mahoney isn’t just any big corporate law firm attorney, she is a former law clerk to then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist and is widely considered one of the top appellate litigators in the country. Although it is common — and indeed admirable — for attorneys of this caliber to provide pro bono services, those services are typically offered to the genuinely needy and not to powerful government officials who could resign their judgeship and immediately receive a job in private practice earning a high six or seven figure salary.

Also worth noting is the fact that Miguel Estrada, another top right-wing lawyer and former Bush judicial nominee, represented Bybee’s fellow torture apologist John Yoo. As a law professor, Yoo does not have the same obligation Bybee has to disclose gifts, but it is likely that Estrada’s legal services are no less expensive than Mahoney’s, and unlikely that Yoo’s salary as a law professor pays him enough to hire Estrada on his own unless Estrada’s firm made much or all of his services available for free.

To Bybee’s credit, he is currently recusing himself from cases that Latham & Watkins participates in — an example that Justice Clarence Thomas could learn something from. Nevertheless, Mahoney’s willingness to provide hours upon hours of free legal services in order to protect a key player in President Bush’s torture policy is a frightening sign of just how far conservatives are willing to go to protect their own.

Indeed, as Judge Pierre Leval explains, if the Supreme Court upholds a Second Circuit decision holding that corporations have total immunity from a law holding the most atrocious human rights violators accountable to international norms, it would enable corporations to profit freely from some of the greatest acts of evil imaginable:

According to the rule my colleagues have created, one who earns profits by commercial exploitation of abuse of fundamental human rights can successfully shield those profits from victims’ claims for compensation simply by taking the precaution of conducting the heinous operation in the corporate form. Without any support in either the precedents or the scholarship of international law, the majority take the position that corporations, and other juridical entities, are not subject to international law, and for that reason such violators of fundamental human rights are free to retain any profits so earned without liability to their victims. [...]

The new rule offers to unscrupulous businesses advantages of incorporation never before dreamed of. So long as they incorporate (or act in the form of a trust), businesses will now be free to trade in or exploit slaves, employ mercenary armies to do dirty work for despots, perform genocides or operate torture prisons for a despot’s political opponents, or engage in piracy – all without civil liability to victims. By adopting the corporate form, such an enterprise could have hired itself out to operate Nazi extermination camps or the torture chambers of Argentina’s dirty war, immune from civil liability to its victims. By protecting profits earned through abuse of fundamental human rights protected by international law, the rule my colleagues have created operates in opposition to the objective of international law to protect those rights.

The centerpiece of this case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, is a U.S. law known as the Alien Tort Statute which allows private parties to be sued for the very worst violations of international law. Nothing in this law distinguishes between violations by actual persons and violations by corporations — and indeed a footnote in a 2004 Supreme Court opinion strongly suggests that the opposite is true. Nor is there any international legal consensus granting lawsuit immunity to corporations. Rather, the Second Circuit’s majority seems to have invented a new corporate immunity doctrine out of whole cloth.

Moreover, lest there be any doubt, Judge Leval’s warning of the consequences of their decision is not hypothetical. Earlier this year, the DC Circuit parted ways with Leval’s colleagues — holding that corporations are not free to commit mass atrocities. Had the court gone the other way, it would have completed immunized Exxon from allegations that their agents committed shocking human rights violations while in Exxon’s employ:

In addition to extrajudicial killings of some of the plaintiffs-appellants’ husbands as part of a “systematic campaign of extermination of the people of Aceh by [d]efendants’ [Indonesian] security forces,” the plaintiffs-appellants were “beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty” amounting to torture, as well as forcibly removed and detained for lengthy periods of time.

Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider this issue, Exxon gets another bite at the apple. If the Roberts Court rules their way, Exxon may be the first corporation to celebrate the birth of Leval’s nightmare scenario.

My deep and abiding love for the Homeland pilot, which I think is the best pilot of the new season by several orders of magnitude, is already a matter of public record. But I wanted to lay out a couple of questions for discussion:

1. Do we think Carrie is insane? She’s clearly not entirely mentally healthy. From her totally inappropriate advances towards Saul in a moment of desperation, to her disregard for the law, to her somewhat uncomfortable if perhaps justifiable decision to watch the Brodys have sex. But did she really hear what she thought she heard in that Iraqi prison? And is she mistaking nervous habits for signaling? Clearly, figuring out whether Carrie’s seeing clearly or seeing things that aren’t there will be one of the key conflicts of the story. And getting the balance between making her fragile but also more than the sum of her illness will be critical in making her a compelling character rather than just a stereotype.

2. Is the balance the U.S. has on civil liberties and wiretapping right? It seems that Carrie’s right that something’s going on with Nicholas Brody. But she discovered his hand signals by watching publicly available footage of him — not by sending a team she’s paying herself swarming all over his house. The show seems, so far, to be walking another important but tricky line, arguing that you can take threats seriously and pursue leads aggressively without compromising civil liberties and going outside the legal procedures you need to obtain a wiretap. That means you need more people with actual Iraq experience and more respect for their expertise, not more exceptions to the law.

3. Can we sympathize with a traumatized soldier who is also a traitor? We don’t know for sure that Brody is a sleeper agent (though it’s going to be an interesting season if he turns out not to be). Maybe the deepest secret he has is that he was forced to kill his fellow captive, and we’re going to have to see him work through that. But by presenting him as someone who, in addition to maybe betraying his country because he was tortured and brainwashed, cares about that fellow captive’s widow, is relearning how to have sex with his wife, and is building a relationship for the first time with his son, Homeland is giving us a mental workout in exploring the reactions we’re supposed to have for veterans.

Today on CNN, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) once again slammed the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” stating, “It’s very obvious one of the great recruitment tools that our enemies has is the fact that we tortured people which is not in keeping with the standards of the treatment of prisoners.” In direct rebuttal of Liz Cheney, he added, “We never got useful information as a result of torture but we sure got a lot of angry citizens around the world.”

When asked whether Obama owes the Bush administration an apology over his rebuke of torture techniques, McCain coyly responded, “About what?” Noting resounding opposition in the Senate to torture and the United Nations Geneva Convention’s prohibition of such treatment, he dismissed the idea that the Bush administration deserves any apology after having used those methods:

MCCAIN: The vote was 90 to 6 in the United States Senate to prohibit cruel and inhumane mistreatment — this amendment, a piece of legislation that I was a sponsor of. The Senate has spoken, the American people have spoken, people of the world have spoken. Torturing people in violation of international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions is prohibited and frankly very harmful to the image of the United States of America.

Watch it:

Citing Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 in which he criticized the Bush administration for “overreacting to the events of 9/11″ and called for a ban on torture when “we [the Bush Administration] were never torturing anyone in the first place,” Cheney said he felt that Obama owes the Bush administration an apology. Insisting that enhanced interrogation techniques helped identify the location of Osama bin Laden, his daughter Liz Cheney added that “he slandered the nation” in Cairo and “he owes an apology to the American people”:

Watch it:

For the record, the Bush administration actually admitted to using torture techniques in 2008 and, as Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted, those techniques did not lead to the location of Osama bin Laden.

Cheney dismissed the question, saying they waterboarded only “a handful” of people, which, he claimed, “produced phenomenal results”:

CHENEY: When we get into the whole area of one of the most controversial techniques, waterboarding. … Three people were waterboarded — not dozens, not hundreds. Three. And the one who was subjected most often to that was Khalid Sheik Mohammad and it produced phenomenal results for us.

There are reports that the intelligence committee did of the results of the program which were declassified at my request and are now available on the internet that talk about the quality of information that we got as a result of our enhanced interrogation techniques applied to a handful of individuals. We are talking about only a handful of people who were indeed part of the al Qaeda organization.

Watch it:

The “reports” Cheney is presumably referring to are two CIA documents the agency released in 2009 — at Cheney’s request. However, they do not prove torture worked and in fact, they “actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.”

The bottom line is that there is no evidence to support Cheney’s claim that torture “produced phenomenal results.” “What we got [from waterboarding] was pabulum,” said one FBI agent. A former senior CIA official said most of what came from waterboarding “was total f*cking bullsh*t.” “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence,” said another former Pentagon analyst.

“[Cheney] fears being tried as a war criminal,” former top Colin Powell aide Col. Lawrence Wilkerson said last month, “This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will ‘Pinochet’ Dick Cheney.’”

In addition to extrajudicial killings of some of the plaintiffs-appellants’ husbands as part of a “systematic campaign of extermination of the people of Aceh by [d]efendants’ [Indonesian] security forces,” the plaintiffs-appellants were “beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty” amounting to torture, as well as forcibly removed and detained for lengthy periods of time.

Needless to say, Exxon is very upset that they might be forced to endure slightly lower profit margins over something as minor as widespread human rights violations, so they’ve now asked the full Court of Appeals to immunize them from this lawsuit. And, sadly, Exxon has a good chance of prevailing despite the existence of a federal law that allows private parties to be sued for many of the most atrocious violations of international law.

The D.C. Circuit is one of the most conservative courts in the nation, and it includes several of America’s most ideological judges. Judge Janice Rogers Brown once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.” Judge Douglas Ginsburg is an avowed tenther who is most famous for suggesting that the Depression Era vision of the Constitution that struck down everything from the minimum wage to child labor laws is a “Constitution in exile” that should be revived. And Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who dissented from the panel’s decision, believes that Exxon should not be held accountable for atrocities because Exxon is a corporation, and corporations enjoy complete immunity from the international legal norms forbidding such barbaric behavior.

So if Exxon triumphs before this court, the reason will likely have nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the identities of the people trusted to apply it.