How we live now

This is a good article to read for #NationalWalkOutDay. It is primarily about, you guessed it, the damn interminable gun debate.  But it is also about the reasons that debate appears to be so intractable. Mostly, it is because our politics, dominated by neoliberalism as it is, is bad.  

What is neoliberalism? The many competing definitions can be confusing and even misleading. And, since the history of neoliberalism has played out in many different countries, what the word denotes in one place is not necessarily the same in others. But we shouldn’t let nuance and complexity dissuade us from using the term, because neoliberalism is an incredibly powerful concept for understanding not just contemporary American life and politics in general, but our reactions to gun violence and school shootings specifically.

Neoliberalism is at once a subspecies of capitalism and a model of governance, a vision of what politics can and should be. It sees political and social life almost exclusively through the lens of the free market, and asks us to consider ourselves and our fellow citizens primarily in terms of our economic activities: as consumers, as workers, as competitors, as human resources. Under neoliberalism, in other words, the individual is less a human subject with rights that entail obligations from the government, but rather a variable in a broader calculus of efficiency, a site for maximizing revenue and minimizing expenditure. Simply put, neoliberalism is about the withdrawal of government responsibility for political problems in favor of market-based “solutions” and individual “choices.”

It doesn't have to be this way, of course.  There are other ways of organizing politics that emphasize democracy and basic human dignity.  We don't have to swallow this crap forever.  Somebody should really tell the Democrats about this.   

The Senate on Wednesday passed the most significant loosening of financial regulations since the economic crisis a decade ago, delivering wide bipartisan support for weakening banking rules despite bitter divisions among Democrats.

The bill, which passed 67 votes to 31, would free more than two dozen banks from the toughest regulatory scrutiny put in place after the 2008 global financial crisis. Despite President Trump’s promise to do a “big number” on the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the new measure leaves key aspects of the earlier law in place. Nonetheless, it amounts to a sweeping rollback of banking rules aimed at protecting taxpayers from another financial crisis and future bailouts.

That's 16 Democrats voting yes. Way to go, guys.  Is that the over/under on Democrats who will vote to confirm the Torture Lady as CIA Director?  I'm gonna take the over there.

There's money in it

Sometimes consultants make their money just selling some line of bullshit about how to water down your asphalt or whatever.  Other times they get paid to direct your deliberate human misery program.

The CIA contractors who helped develop and operate the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that the agency used on terror suspects, including waterboarding, were paid more than $80 million, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA's interrogation program released Tuesday.

The contract was for more than $180 million, but the contractors had only received $81 million when their contract was terminated in 2009.

In other words, Obama cost these guys $100 million with his godforsaken job killing torture moratorium. 

Oh well, easy come, easy go, right?  Okay, admittedly, it didn't go so easy for everyone. Certainly not for the detainees, anyway.

Coercive interrogation methods included waterboarding, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, nudity, slaps, slamming detainees against a wall. At least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, including the threat of raping a detainee's mother. And it gets worse.

"At least five CIA detainees were subjected to 'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity," the report reads, documenting in gruesome detail one such example involving detainee Majid Khan.

It's still going pretty easy for the people who implemented these inspired recommendations. They're all happily yaking away on TV right now, probably.  That's pretty bad; sociopathic, whatever.  But what really worries me are the guys who were paid slightly less than half of the $180 million they expected for, "Hey let's shove some hummus up their butts!"  Because odds are they're actually still seething about not getting it all.

This is who they are

Mentioned this last week but let me pull this Jarvis DeBerry quote again. It captures perfectly what conservatives (I include President Obama among them, btw) are all about.

Leading America requires declaring its goodness. And not just that. Leading America requires declaring that America always has been good, that it always has treasured the law. Never mind that the law failed to prohibit the destruction of one people or the enslavement of another.

Any serious examination of our problems constitutes a failure. No one is accountable. Nothing ever gets resolved and there is never any actual justice because, "The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome," and that's all anyone ever need know.

Accountability

These guys did some very very bad things.

The interrogation methods, meanwhile, were brutal — the report includes graphic details of "near drownings," beatings, and week-long sleep deprivation sessions that sometimes continued after prisoners had begun to hallucinate. Confusion and poor record-keeping kept CIA oversight and leadership in the dark about the program's operations, and staff with "no relevant experience" were put in charge of sites. In 2002, a detainee died of suspected hypothermia while "partially nude and chained to a concrete floor;" later, CIA leaders admitted they had "little or no awareness of operations" at the site in question. The CIA downplayed the harshness of "enhanced interrogations" and dodged investigations by the White House and Congress, withholding information from top officials. According to one email, it did not initially brief then-Secretary of State Colin Powell on the program details, because the White House was concerned he would "blow his stack," and it refused to say where its detention facilities were located or where it was negotiating to build new ones, in two cases telling local officials not to talk to US ambassadors about the negotiations.

But, you know, it's never a good time to "look backward." 

President Obama banned enhanced interrogation after taking office in 2009, but he was leery of prosecuting anyone involved in it during the Bush administration, saying that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." Years earlier, a CIA officer had also decided to destroy interrogation tapes that allegedly showed waterboarding; in 2010, the Justice Department completed an investigation of that incident and decided not to file charges. The Senate's reporting, however, grew out of a 2007 probe on the tapes' destruction. 

It's so bad, in fact, that the ACLU is recommending that the closest thing we can expect to accountability in this case would be if President Obama were to issue pardons. 

Today the Senate Intelligence Committee will release its report on torture during the Bush years, and we will all be reminded of what we allowed to be done in our name. With that event as a backdrop, Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, has written to President Obama, asking him to grant pardons to the torturers as a means of telling the world, and enshrining in history, the American ideal that torture is something we do not do.

I don't know about that but it does sound like President Obama would have fit in pretty well on that Eric Garner grand jury. 

According to a recent interview with the NY Daily News, at least two key eyewitnesses in the July 17 choking death of Staten Island resident Eric Garner at the hands of police described a very troubling environment when they were each interviewed by the grand jury for NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo.

While it's generally assumed that the grand jury in such a case would have taken its job with the the utmost seriousness, Ramsey Orta, 22, who filmed the tragic homicide, and Rodney Lee, 37, who manages the beauty store Eric Garner was killed in front of, painted a picture of an often condescending and generally uninterested collection of people who seemed to have little interest in indicting Officer Daniel Pantaleo.

Meanwhile, Saints receiver Joe Morgan did some very very bad things. He was held accountable.

Though the specific reason for Morgan's release is unclear, the fourth-year backup has clearly been in the doghouse this season. He was suspended by the team for two games earlier this year for an undisclosed reason. And even when on the active roster, he has been used sparingly.

Then this past Sunday, it appeared that both Payton and quarterback Drew Brees corrected Morgan for assignment errors. At one point, Payton chased down Morgan on the sideline to yell something to him. At another point, cameras caught Brees appearing to suggest that Morgan should have come back to the ball on a deep route.

So, there you go.  Justice. 

The Torture Report is (partially) public today

Here you go

It's the Dome Siren, a piped-in air raid alarm-style noise played at ear-splitting intensity each time an opposing team gets ready to play a third down.

It's a new game "innovation" this year, and is nearly universally reviled. Apparently designed to rally the "12th man" to create "fan impact plays," fans and the media are instead in an uproar over it. Many are saying the siren is so counterproductive, so disruptive and annoying, that it's actually helping opposing teams.

"It's created a Pavlov-like feeling of dread in me when I hear it," says Karl Schott, of Lafayette. "It's a signal announcing the other team is about to achieve a first down. Should be called the 1st down siren."

Wait.  Sorry. Wrong torture report.  Here's the one I'm talking about.

The torture methods were far more brutal than originally reported. The “CIA applied its so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in near non-stop fashion for days or weeks at a time.” Detainees were forced to stay awake for up to 180 hours while “standing or in painful stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.” Some were kept in a “dungeon” that was completely dark and were “constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. ” At least one detainee was told he could only leave CIA custody “in a coffin-shaped box.” The government also rectally force-fed detainees.

The part about detainees being made to walk past a statue of Tom Benson after their torture has been redacted.  

Overreach

John Yoo is very serious about the constitutional limits on executive authority.

Those who believe Obama is going too far warn it is a dangerous precedent for future executives as well.

“Can a President who wants tax cuts that a recalcitrant Congress will not enact decline to enforce the income tax laws? Can a President effectively repeal the environmental laws by refusing to sue polluters, or workplace and labor laws by refusing to fine violators?” University of St. Thomas law professor Robert J. Delahunty and University of California at Berkeley law professor John C. Yoo wrote in the Texas Law Review.

You might remember John Yoo from such executive overreaches as...

Delahunty and Yoo served in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration. Back then, Yoo argued for an expansive definition of executive power, most famously in a series of memos maintaining that federal laws against assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to interrogators dealing with al-Qaeda captives.

So the "reach" of the executive, ideally, goes only as far as it takes to attach the electrodes to the prisoner's genitals.  Anything beyond that is too far.

Impeachment

If the incoming GOP majority in the House really is looking for an impeachable offense in the Obama administration, might I suggest obstruction of justice for his refusal to prosecute George W. Bush for approving these war crimes.

In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was "Damn right" and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.

Addington Administration

Something pulled Billmon back out from behind the curtain. The updated post concludes,

God knows I'm all in favor of shedding more light on the CIA's dirty laundry. But there doesn't seem much point in passing a new law unless we're willing to prosecute the people who made mincemeat out of the old one.

Which is to say that the ball is in Eric Holder's court. That is, if you assume that we have a politically independent Justice Department. Otherwise, you can consider it Obama's problem.

Holder might well do the right thing. He is an able lawyer who knows how to run an investigation. And, despite the bashing he would take from the pro-torture right, the Attorney General could come out of the process as an American hero -- a lawman committed to the rule of law, as opposed to the Constitutional wrecking crew that occupied the Department of Justice when Dick Cheney was calling the shots.

But the Attorney General will not do that right thing without a go-ahead from Obama's White House. The president and his aides have been highly resistant to probing the abuses of the previous administration. That stance may be softening.

But don't expect Holder to force the president's hand. The Attorney General is neither so legally nor so politically adventurous.

This President Sucks

We are totally screwed.

Easy Target

The thing that keeps bothering me about the Jane Harman situation is that she's an easy and somewhat insignificant scapegoat in the larger failure of the Democratic party to offer any sort of meaningful resistance to Bush's attack on the Constitution and human dignity.

Right now, the person most responsible for letting the illegal wiretappers and the torturers go unpunished is President Obama. If anyone in Congress were serious about protecting the Constitution, the President would be impeached for his failure to do so. But, in reality, they're all more worried about mitigating the blame. And so now it's all Jane Harman's fault.

Don't get me wrong. Jane Harman is an asshole. But the idea that she is the only person who has to answer for any of this is absurd.

Update: I'd love to say here that the President is bowing to the massive pressure generated by the Yellow Blog calling for his impeachment...

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday left open the door to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, and he did not rule out taking action against the lawyers who fashioned the legal guidelines for the interrogations.

But as any adult knows, "bipartisan commission" is Washington-speak for cop-out and gloss-over.

Question

Why is our justice system designed in such a way that witholding public records related to small-time municipal corruption will get the book thrown at you but conspiring to piss on the US Constitution and enable torture probably won't even get you disbarred?

Jesus, people

Greenwald (in his latest Update) writes.

Both Sen. Leahy and Sen. Whitehouse express serious doubts about the Bond/Washington Times report, noting (correctly) that it would be a highly improper act (to put it mildly) for a Senator to demand, and for a nominated Attorney General to agree, that no prosecutions will be pursued in a specific case in exchange for the Senator's support for the nomination.

Since when is "highly improper" any sort of barrier to anything? This is obviously the deal that has been cut. Republicans vote to confirm Holder. Holder lays off prosecuting Bush officials in torture cases. Why should we believe anything different?

Update: On the other hand, ("on the other hand" is becoming a trademark around here) please see this post on the decidedly anti-torture makeup of Obama's OLC hires. Note, however, that this still does not mean we'll see any prosecutions of Bush's pro-torture people.

I don't think those words mean what you think they mean

President Obama:

"I can say, without exception and without equivocation, that the United States will not torture"

Meanwhile, Greg Sargent highlights White House counsel Greg Craig (really? your folks decided to call you Gred Craig?) offering exceptions and equivocations:

Among the hard questions Obama left open, in fact, is whether the C.I.A. will have to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. While the President has clearly put an end to cruel tactics, Craig said that Obama “is somewhat sympathetic to the spies’ argument that their mission and circumstances are different.”

Now if you read through Sargent's post and the comments, you'll get some pretty good discussion about Obama's other appointments at OLC and how they signal a "clear break" with the Bush policy on torture as well as reference to a theory that it might pragmatically appropriate for Obama to appear deferential to the CIA in these matters. I'm not so convinced of this but there is a cogent, somewhat reassuring argument to be made there.

Continuity of torture

Obama wants to interrogate "by the book"... but will they put torture in the book?

(Obama's order) Required all U.S. personnel to follow the U.S. Army Field Manual while interrogating detainees. The manual explicitly prohibits threats, coercion, physical abuse and waterboarding, a technique that creates the sensation of drowning and has been termed a form of torture by critics. However, a Capitol Hill aide says that the administration also is planning a study of more aggressive interrogation methods that could be added to the Army manual — which would create a significant loophole to Obama's action Thursday.