Prosecuting the torturers

That’s the topic of my Scripps column with Ben Boychuk this week. My take:

If Republicans like Dick Cheney had their way, there would be no law that CIA agents — or their White House bosses — couldn’t break in the name of national security.

Eric Holder isn’t going after officials, such as Cheney, who authorized the “enhanced interrogation methods” that probably broke domestic and international laws against torture. Holder isn’t even going after very many agents who participated in the interrogation program. Instead, he’s going after the agents who went way too far — the ones who broke the Bush administration’s already-expansive rules about what constituted torture.

The result? We know that some detainees died in custody, and that others suffered mightily. There will be few tears shed, of course; most of these men were terrorists. But our treatment of them is a stain on the national honor.

What Cheney is saying is that even the agents who broke Bush administration rules “deserve our gratitude” and shouldn’t be prosecuted. But if CIA agents shouldn’t be held accountable for breaking the laws, orders and legal guidance set out by Congress and the White House, how can America possibly put limits on the actions of its agents? And how can we trust our government not to misuse that awful power? We can’t.

The truth is that Holder’s investigation doesn’t go far enough. It risks scapegoating lower-level CIA employees who were carrying out orders, while Cheney and others who gave those orders face no consequences. That’s unfair and unfortunate. But Cheney and his fellow Republicans are suggesting that utter lawlessness is acceptable in the name of defeating terrorists. It’s not.

Just in case it isn’t clear, what I’m saying is this: The criticism by Cheney and other Republicans of the investigation gives lie to their assertion that all the Office of Legal Counsel memos justifying torture were actually efforts to keep the CIA within strict legal limits to avoid torture. If that were really the case, then Cheney et al would agree that agents who crossed the lines laid down by the Bush Administration should face sanction of some sort. Instead, such agents “deserve our gratitude.” It’s further proof — if any was needed — that the OLC memos were an exercise in bureaucratic ass-covering.

‘Great White Hope’

I’ve met and interviewed Lynn Jenkins, the Kansas congresswoman who’s achieved a measure of blogospheric fame today with her comments that the GOP needs a “great white hope” to lead it out of the electoral wasteland. Some folks were offended, while others wryly see it as a window into the soul of the Republican Party. Me? I see it as evidence of the stupidity of high-achieving politicians.

Simply put: A great many politicians are very smart people who put the entirety of their intellect to one task and one task only: Getting elected and staying elected. So their knowledge of other parts of life — culture, books, history — can suffer a bit. They end up stupid about everything but politics, which sometimes causes the politics side of thing to suffer.

Jenkins isn’t alone in this. Her predecessor, Democrat Nancy Boyda, was a bit of a dim bulb. And Boyda’s predecessor, Jim Ryun, was just plain dumb. The poor folks of the 2nd District of Kansas haven’t had a bright representative for a long, long time.

Ted Kennedy, RIP

1932-2009.

Torture

I’m still making my way through the CIA Inspector General’s report on torture which was released (with some redactions) yesterday. I’ll have some thoughts, I think, once I’ve given it a closer look. But for now, I think, publius sums things up nicely:

The highlights include:  (1) mock executions; (2) threatened rape of family members; (3) threatened murder of children; (4) kicking and beating a detainee with a metal flashlight to death; (5) threatening naked hooded detainees with power drills; (6) blowing cigar smoke in detainees’ faces until they got sick; (7) waterboarding with massive volumes of water far beyond what OLC authorized (to make it “poignant”); (8) stress positions that nearly caused shoulder dislocations; (9) scraping detainees with stiff brushes; (10) choking a detainee with one’s bare hands until they nearly pass out; (11) subjecting detainees to extremely cold temperatures and water dousing; (12) “hard takedowns” (sometimes in diapers); and (13) beating detainees with butts of rifles (followed by kicking them).

There will be folks who will say that all of this is justified: We’re at war! But it’s still torture. Not “enhanced techniques,” but torture. Plain and simple — let me say it again — torture. Almost certainly in the legal sense, but also (because the law can be an ass) quite certainly in the moral sense.

Go ahead and defend it. But if you try to tell me it’s not torture — that it isn’t what it plainly is — I must conclude you’re either delusional or lying.

Why universal health insurance may, in fact, be doomed

The New York Times today profiles Bob Collier, a town hall attendee who isn’t screaming about Nazis or death panels or anything like that. Nonetheless, he opposes health reform.

The Colliers are committed conservatives who have voted Republican in presidential elections since 1980. They receive much of their information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and Matt Drudge’s Web site. But they said their direct experience with the health care system had persuaded them of the need for change.

When Ms. Collier’s breast cancer was diagnosed three years ago, Mr. Collier’s employer-provided insurance paid for her office visits, a biopsy and three surgeries. But the insurer covered only a small fraction of her radiation treatments, which it considered experimental, leaving the Colliers with a $63,000 bill. To their great relief, the charge was later written off by Emory Healthcare, whose doctors had recommended the regimen.

Mr. Collier’s employer, Buccaneer Inc., which is based in Atlanta, pays 100 percent of his health premiums but requires $509 a month to cover his wife. That cost has been escalating by at least 15 percent a year, and the couple’s deductibles have quadrupled.

Furthermore, Mr. Collier recognizes that were he to lose the job he has held for 39 years, his wife’s pre-existing condition might well make her uninsurable.

“We’ve got to do something about those people who can’t get insurance,” he said. “There has to be a safety net there. But I don’t want that safety net to catch too many people.”

Right. The Colliers aren’t necessarily bad people. It’s just that — quite rationally — they’ve got theirs. And they want to keep it.

Here’s the dirty secret of the health reform debate: The standard talking point is that 46 million Americans don’t have coverage. When you strip out a few million who simply — by virtue of principle or a belief they won’t get sick or injured — choose not to have insurance, what you have left, essentially, is a bunch of poor people.

And as a rule, poor people don’t vote. The politicians know this. President Obama knows this. So do all the Republicans.

Which means the voting population is largely made up of people who already are covered. Who aren’t necessarily concerned about the folks who aren’t. And who might not be entirely satisfied with their coverage but — like Bob Collier — are worried that major reforms might end up replacing it with something worse.

That’s going to be a tough political battle to win.

Update: I’m going to partially retract this. As other observers have pointed out, a guy who listens to Rush and watches Fox for most of his news might not be your average voter.

But I think my larger point still stands: One of the big obstacles in health reform is asking people with stuff to care about people without stuff. The people with stuff vote; the people without don’t. Bob Collier may not be the best example of this, but the dynamic still exists.

Newspapers don’t seem to understand their competition

It’s hard to get anybody who doesn’t work for Rupert Murdoch to praise the man — especially if the person doing the praising is a die-hard liberal. Yet the Los Angeles Times’ Tim Rutten says Murdoch will be the “savior” of the newspaper industry by leading the way for papers to charge for online content.

Congress, Rutten writes, needs to exempt newspapers from anti-trust laws so that they can collude to start charging their online audience:

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal already does so, but the Australian-born media magnate understands that what’s required for serious — which is to say expensive-to-produce — journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee. For such a scheme to work, the papers’ owners need to agree on when to act and what to charge. (Murdoch and his digital strategist, Jonathan Miller, believe the Journal’s existing website model offers a place for what the latter calls “premium” journalism.)

This suggests to me that Rutten and Murdoch — and Brian Tierney of Philadelphia Newspapers, it should be noted — fundamentally misunderstand the new media marketplace. These newspaper guys seem to believe that they’re competing against themselves, that people are (and will continue to) get their news from newspapers and newspaper-backed websites. And that’s not necessarily the case.

Because newspapers’ online competition isn’t just other newspaper websites. It’s websites of news-oriented radio stations. And TV stations. It would be one thing if those websites simply offered archived audio and video, but they don’t. They — like newspaper sites — offer text, as well.

And I don’t think radio stations are going to start charging for access to their websites.

The comeback from newspaper advocates is likely to be that radio and TV stations rip them off. (There’s long been griping about the “rip and read” practice of radio broadcasters reading, essentially, news directly from the paper. Lawsuits over this kind of thing are rare. Is Rutten ready to start?) But here’s a question for them: Do you think your audience is likely to care? If they have a choice between paying for original journalism and getting the ripoff for free, which are they likely to choose?

The newspaper folks will counter, rightly, that they can provide more in-depth coverage than their broadcast competition, even online. But anybody who has spent time above the reporter level in the media industry has seen readership studies showing that most readers get — at most — a headline and a few paragraphs of a story before moving onto the next page. (That’s one reason why the Philly papers both have the “At A Glance” page summing up the paper.) If that’s the case, will most readers notice or care if they’re getting the “At A Glance” version from a radio station’s website if they can get it for free?

And it’s not even necessarily the case that you’ll get cut-rate journalism from Radio and TV sites. NPR.org has revamped itself to provide a more complete reading experience — is anybody going to make the (nonideological) case that National Public Radio doesn’t offer good or in-depth reporting? Not convincingly.

Hey, I love newspapers. Spent my adult life working for them. I don’t want to see them go away — and for reasons more complex than the fact that I don’t know what else I’d do to earn money. But if newspapers step back and recognize that they’re not the only news organizations providing text-based news and information online, they’ll realize their job is bigger than getting together with other newspapers to start charging. They’re not just competing against themselves.

The New Black Panthers are just like the Taliban

I don’t think I can say often enough that the New Black Panthers who briefly stood menacingly outside a Fairmount polling station last November acted like a couple of knuckleheads. But we also know their presence there was brief, and I still haven’t heard evidence that anybody was kept from voting.

Still, the folks who kinda want you to believe Obama is president because of a Black Power conspiracy are still hard at work, keeping the issue alive. Hans A. von Spakovsky does it again, equating two or three Black Panthers with the whole of the Taliban.

The anti-reformists (the Taliban) have been engaging in violence and threats of violence in the lead up to today’s elections in Afghanistan. They may want to consider hiring the New Black Panther Party to implement their version of a “ballot security program” at the polls. After all, the NBPP is very experienced in the type of voter intimidation that the Taliban are trying to carry out. Best of all from the Taliban’s point of view, since the U.S. is responsible for security in Afghanistan at the polling places, Eric Holder and the Justice Department have already reviewed and approved the type of voter intimidation that the NBPP is so skilled in carrying out. No matter what they do at the polls, the NBPP can use their DOJ “get out of jail free” card with the Pentagon.

Riiiight.

You’ve got to remember, von Spakovsky is mostly notorious for a government tenure in which he chose to enforce election laws in such a manner as to keep African Americans and other Democratic constituencies from getting to the polls. It’s ok to lock people out of the voting process, apparently, if you’re using the power of the government to do it — and not just freelancing like the Panthers.

Atrios is right. But he’s also kinda wrong. (Or: Whole Foods redux.)

Atrios linked to my print piece about the Whole Foods boycott, dubbing my opinion “lame.”

Generally I think a whirlwind PR shitstorm is more effective than, “please don’t shop there.” That is, destroying the brand is better than guilting people into not doing something they want to do, and the desire to defend the brand can cause quick behavior changes. But the lamest argument against boycotts is that they just hurt the poor employees.

And he’s right: That’s not really the strongest argument against a boycott. Which is probably why I relegated that argument to, oh, two paragraphs at the end of the piece.

My main point — which I stand by — is this: There’s a lot of nutjob arguments (and lies) being used against health reform. John Mackey didn’t call President Obama a Nazi, he didn’t say that Democrats want to use “death panels” to kill your grandma and Down Syndrome babies. He simply argued that the market is better suited to providing health care than the state. I think his faith in the market is misplaced, to say the least, in this instance. But given all the stupid stuff out there — much of it being spread by mainstream leaders of the GOP — I still think it’s wrong to spend energy punishing a person or a business simply for being wrong. I’d rather not drive my thoughtful opponents from the debate, because that doesn’t mean the debate is over: That simply means we only have the loudmouthed wingnuts to face. And guess what? They’re not going away.

Shorter me: Given the range of opponents and arguments being made against reform, a boycott against Whole Foods is disproportionate to the offense.

But not for nothing: Worrying about employees might be the lamest argument against a boycott, but it’s not irrelevant, either. Real people work for businesses like Whole Foods — and real people lose their jobs when significant business disappears. If Dems and liberals are really on the side of the little guy — and isn’t that a huge part of what the health reform debate is about? — then it’s hypocritical, to say the least, to ignore those considerations in an effort to act out our self-righteous fury.

Politically speaking, the “larger truth” is that Israel is harvesting the organs of Palestinians

Yesterday, Jonah Goldberg admitted that “death panels” never existed in proposed health reform legislation — but defended them politically, since they hinted at dark possibilities that could possibly happen, supposedly, maybe if reform was passed.

Today, the shoe is apparently on the other foot. Here’s Goldberg’s 11:25 a.m. blog posting at National Review:

You’ve got to wonder if he recognizes how hilarious this is.

Obama is not a Nazi

And it’s good to see Barney Frank treat this idea with the contempt it deserves.