WSJ: Obama set to reverse himself on criminal interrogations

Last year while campaigning candidate Barack Obama used to boast about a law he helped to enact in the Illinois state legislature, which required all police interrogations to be videotaped. This mandate of transparency, he said, would discourage abusive interrogation practices in the future and serve to hold accountable any public servant who dared to engage in them. Today, however, Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal report that President Obama is on the verge of ordering the Justice Department to block the disclosure of evidence of extremely brutal interrogations – on the grounds that it would be too embarrassing for the public to see quite how abusively government employees behaved.

The three videotapes in question, from 2005, show the interrogations of multiple suspects (none ever charged with any crimes). Officers inflicted a variety of diabolically clever forms of torture on them as well as plain old physical brutality. For example, one preferred method of "interrogation" was to bang a suspect's head against the wall repeatedly.

Although the Justice Dept. wishes to publish the tapes, in compliance with an ACLU lawsuit seeking their release, some of the wise establishment types surrounding the new president reportedly are urging him to reverse his earlier position on transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. Their reasons?

According to the WSJ, they argue that release of the tapes would hurt the government's credibility, hand a propaganda victory to America's enemies, and alienate some officers - who might not be willing in the future to engage in such practices if their recent misdeeds are not concealed. As one government official commented anonymously, making public the details of government wrongdoing would make officers "disinclined to take any risks in the future."

And there you were thinking that the whole point of exposing criminal deeds was to disincline people from repeating them in the future.

A tip of the hat to Milo for alerting me to the WSJ report.

Dick Cheney's New Year predictions

On Christmas day my old friend Milo came for a visit. He watches the Sunday blabfests so that I don't have to, and usually sends me the good bits right away. But what with one thing and another, he didn't think until this afternoon to mention that the Great Man himself made an appearance on Fox News Sunday. He made some startling predictions for 2008, Milo told me. From Milo's description I knew the interview would make good material, so I went and reviewed the video.

It's not that the man's opinions about anything are worth a damn. He has been wrong more spectacularly about more things than just about any of the other very serious people in DC—consistently, laughably wrong.

Were it not for his lofty position, and his personal standing within the tightly interconnected neocon family running the government, he would have been ditched by the TV producers long ago. On the basis of what he actually has to say, the Great Man is demonstrably useless. But no matter how ridiculous his every appearance turns out to be, he's eagerly sought for further interviews.

And predictably, on Fox News Sunday his forecast for 2008 produced some real good 'uns. The biggest "news" was his prediction that there'll be a brokered Republican convention next summer.

CHRIS WALLACE: Mr. Vice President, I know you've said you don't intend to comment on the presidential race –

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: And I won't.

CHRIS WALLACE: - but if you were -

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: I won't go there. You can ask your questions all you want, Chris, but I just cannot allow myself to be drawn into the politics of this campaign. It's just not something, frankly, I feel comfortable doing.

CHRIS WALLACE: If you had to predict what will happen in one month, two months, down the road who will end up –

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: Look, as much as you'd like me to tell you what's going to happen, we just don't know. This race is wide open at this point, and frankly we don't know how the votes will turn out. We haven't decided, the voters haven't decided that yet. We don't even know at this stage who the vice president will be.

CHRIS WALLACE: You mean who the running mate will be?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, but he'll become the next Vice President, I'm certain of that much.

CHRIS WALLACE: The Republican candidates will win the election?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: Of course. But the decision about the running mate will be mostly up to the nominee, if you will. But we don't have one yet, and it's much too early to talk about that. We have several very strong candidates on the Republican side of things, and any one of them I can see becoming president. So there will be a robust primary campaign, and it will be a tough fight, but fair, and I think it's going to come down to the wire frankly.

CHRIS WALLACE: You think it won't be decided for a few months?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: I think it will end up as a brokered convention, Chris. All the signs are there, and so it will be up to the delegates to choose the best man for the job. And frankly, I think they will have to look beyond the announced candidates to find a compromise that all factions, all wings of the Party can agree on.

CHRIS WALLACE: The eventual nominee won't be any of the current frontrunners?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: No I'm pretty certain it won't be.

CHRIS WALLACE: You look like you have an idea who will end up being the candidate.

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: I do. I think it's very likely to be Bill Kristol.

CHRIS WALLACE: No kidding?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: No kidding. Bill has what it takes to win. He's been consistently right on the war on terror. He's universally admired. He knows that you don't come to this town to make friends. He doesn't need to call in advisors to figure out what to think. He takes a line and sticks to it. You won't see him changing course. That's what we need.

Dick Cheney appears to be positioning himself to be the kingmaker, if not the next VP. After Wallace presses him repeatedly about whether he'd agree to be Kristol's running mate, Cheney concedes that "the Party can do with me what it wills."

His predictions about the Democratic race were if anything less credible:

CHRIS WALLACE: I'm back with Dick Cheney discussing his predictions for 2008. Who will the Democrats nominate?

DICK CHENEY: I'd like to think they'd choose Senator Lieberman, but I'm pretty sure they don't have the sense to see he's their best candidate.

CHRIS WALLACE: Plus he's widely despised.

DICK CHENEY: Yes and it's rare that somebody that reviled, frankly, becomes his party's candidate. So I think they'll end up with that funny little guy. The anti-war one.

CHRIS WALLACE: Kucinich?

DICK CHENEY: No, the other one, Paul.

The Vice President also seemed to predict that Lynne Cheney would be elected to the Senate in New England, but then back-tracked. It was a peculiar moment in the interview.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get ahead of myself on that. Forget I said anything.

Cheney's predictions for Iraq were very much as you'd expect:

• That the Iraqis would discover "new, untapped sources of electricity" in the western deserts



• That "98, 99% of reconstruction projects" would be completed satisfactorily and under budget in 2008



• That NATO would send "an additional 100,000 troops" to take over security in Baghdad



• That "Prime Minister Maliki will convert to Islam" as a good will gesture to the Sunnis



• That Blackwater's image will be restored as it "gradually takes over day to day operations in Fallujah."

Finally, and most surprisingly, the Great Man predicted that the prison at Guantanamo Bay would be closed.

THE GREAT MAN: You'll see, when these guests of the nation are released and they can speak freely about their experiences, it will turn out that they enjoyed the best possible treatment in our care. There will be testimonials to our kindness, frankly a lot of them. All the naysayers will be shown to have exaggerated, if you will, the torture aspect of it.

Milo didn't think the latter was likely to occur, and I have to say I agree with him.

Milo gets one mostly right

You may recall that last November I wrote about a story sent to me from North Carolina by my friend Milo. It concerned a dispute among local Baptist churches, some of which wanted to expel the usurers in their congregations while others were for tolerance: The Only Sin that has its own advocacy group.

"I believe that avarice is sinful behavior, but it is not the only sinful behavior in the Bible," said Don Gordon, pastor of Yates Baptist Church in Durham. "Every generation has had its troubles. ... Let's focus on addressing the most pressing issues -- spiritual emptiness, hunger, AIDS, poverty, egocentric leadership -- and in that, be a light for Jesus Christ and God who loves the whole world."…

"We certainly won't be walking down the streets of heaven with people who've been lending money at crippling interest rates," said Ray Seeley of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Canton. "If they have a change in their lifestyle, I believe in bringing them in and loving them. If they do not change, they shouldn't even ask to be baptized -- that would be baptizing sin in the church. "

I took a lot of heat for that report from readers, and had to partially retract it.

I may have been a little precipitous in posting that story, though. Baptist ministers responded by insisting, in multiple emails, that they'd done no such thing—yet. They were concentrating for the moment on expelling gays rather than usurers, they explained.

I think we'll just have to see whether my report on the Baptists turns out to have been premature, then.

It's a good thing I did not retract the story fully. I see now that Milo was right about certain matters, though just a bit ahead of his time. The news report he sent me had occasion to mention a lobbying group for predator lenders:

Jeanette Holt, associate director for The Alliance of Predatory Lenders [said] "This new policy sounds to me like an interfering witch hunt."

After so many Baptists wrote to insist that I was essentially in error with that post, I tried to scare up some information on The Alliance of Predatory Lenders. When I found nothing at all, I concluded that Milo had been duped somehow.

But today I learned that there is such a group. At its new website, it calls itself The Predatory Lending Association

The Predatory Lending Association (PLA) is dedicated to extracting maximum profit from the working poor by increasing payday loan fees and debt traps. The working poor is an exciting, fast growing demographic that includes: military personnel, most minorities, and a growing percentage of the middle class.

So Milo was really onto something after all. The whole matter will need to be investigated anew.

“Seatbelts are part of the culture of death”

Milo was helping me this morning to replace my van’s brake pads when he happened to mention another one of the Bush administration’s outlandish appointments. I’m not one to gripe (that’s as good as my motto, in fact, as a blogger). But this particular appointment does seem just a tad over the top.

With little fanfare yesterday, Bush appointed Bobby Orr as the acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Transportation Safety. The administration describes her as “highly qualified” for the job. How qualified? In the past, Orr has made many controversial statements about passenger safety. In particular, she has campaigned for years against mandatory seat-belt laws, which she claims are “about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death”.

That just seems a bit extreme to me.

It hardly needs stressing that Orr will now be in charge of the agency that ensures that seat belts remain available to drivers, even while she strenuously opposes their very existence.

For years Orr has been working a variety of angles trying to undermine seat-belt laws. For example, in March 2001 at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference Orr urged President Bush to move quickly to decertify automobiles that come equipped with standard seat belts.. And the next month, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, Orr cheered a proposal by Bush to eliminate a clause in federal employees’ insurance policies that required them to use safety belts while driving on work-related business. Said Orr, at that time the Director of the Family Research Council: “We're quite pleased because driving a car is not a disease. It's not a medical necessity that you have it.”

This is in fact, paradoxically, a cherished position of the “right to life” movement, one of whose most successful spin-offs is the “right to die in horrific circumstances, if God wills it” movement. Christian fundamentalist leaders, of which Orr is one, have argued again and again in recent years that seat belts are unknown in the Bible and therefore abominations against nature.

Many right-wing Christian groups have advocated successfully for state and federal “abstinence only” policies in regard to seat belts. The founding hero of their movement is University of Chicago guru Sam Peltzman, who argues that seat belts cause more damage than good by encouraging risky behavior.

Last year, Bush appointed a Peltzman accolyte, Jackie Keroack, to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Formerly the head of a Christian driving academy in Colorado Springs that also counseled against using seat belts, Keroack drew intense criticism from safety advocates. Ultimately, however, she was forced to resign her post in March because of allegations of fraud in her private practice.

Now it looks like we’re saddled with an equally intransigent seat-belt ideologue.

"We have another appointment that just truly politicizes traffic safety planning," said Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Motoring and Health Association. "The last time I looked, both Republicans and Democrats used seat belts in America."

Meanwhile, it looks like Orr is trying to duck questions about her hard-line stance, especially her inflammatory 2001 WaPo op-ed.

Reached by email, Orr referred questions to the Office of Public Affairs, which said she was simply supporting President Bush’s policy. “As she said then, the policy allows freedom of conscience and freedom of choice. Practically speaking, workers should be able to choose what kind of coverage matters to them.”

Unstated, but implicitly understood among fellow members of the seat-belt movement, is that once they have gutted the regulations mandating active-restraints, they plan to set their sights on passive-restraint systems. According to Milo, who has a second cousin in this movement, they’re already funding research to “prove” that air bags endanger eggs in a mother’s womb. After that, the target will be crumple zones and side reinforcement beams.

There appears to be no end in sight to this crusade.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Bush on Iraq: the view from the ground

Milo rang last night to suggest I repost this piece written a few years ago. He thinks new readers might still find it relevant. Milo believes that Bush administration policies on Iraq never really go out of style, as I too discovered in the past. So without further excuse, "The view from the ground" (lightly revised).

I don't want to badmouth anybody, but I think he was misleading you. It's much worse than he's letting on. The whole situation is a mess. It's not going to just get better by itself, you can see for yourself that it's broken beyond repair. It's up to you of course whether you want to trust him. But I think he's leading you down the path, making you think you can get off easy, then dropping the bad news on you later.

It's just not possible to do it his way. And they won't let us anyway even if it would work, which it won't. He's already wrecked so much of the...well, I don't want to badmouth anybody, but take it from me it's beyond repair.

You see those pipes? That's your leech field and they're all clogged. You've got to replace the entire septic. Dredge all this muck out and put in a new system.

But once you do that, you're all set.

Just like in Iraq. Cut out the terrorists, drop in a new army, and you're ready to go. You've got to listen to the generals. Just let the experts do their work, you'll get the best results.

I'm with the President a thousand percent, don't understand what those Democrats want from him. Did you see his speech yesterday? Made sense to me. So what if Iraq's a mess now? Let'm backfill and landscape, and you're all set.

Just too many bodies exposed at the moment.

It's all Saddam's fault anyway. He's the one who chose to go to war against us, we didn't attack him. He kicked out the inspectors. If he didn't want war, he shouldn't have done that.

What's that? They're all smashed right through here. If you ask me, some idiot drove a truck right over the yard and crushed the pipes. You've got an oil fill pipe over there. I bet it was an oil tanker backing up to the house instead of parking at a safe distance.

Idiot, if you ask me.

It was up to Bush to decide whether or not to go into Iraq, it wasn't Congress's decision to make. Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in, so what could Bush do? He couldn't let'm thumb his nose at us. Course if he let them in, they'd've found the WMDs so he slammed the door in their face.

Can't believe the French couldn't even see that.

They go straight down the hill. Bet they polluted the stream. Even back then there were rules. Can't believe they got away with it. You know some money changed hands. That's the way this town council has always been.

Can't trust politicians about anything.

Bush admitted the WMD intelligence was bad, you gotta admire his honesty. Of course it was bad, the CIA just didn't do its job.

You can't fault Bush for that.

Gotta come out too. I know he tried to convince you he could save it, but you can see for yourself it's all fouled up. I've got some expertise here, so I think you gotta take that seriously.

Never seen anything quite this messed up. They did everything wrong, including a few things I've never seen before.

Amazing, really.

Not that any of it matters. Saddam was a danger and we had to take him out first before he hits us with WMD. Even if Bush got everything else wrong, he got that right. You don't want to see a mushroom cloud over Cincinnati or wherever.

Aluminum tubes? No, I'm going to use PVC. Never use aluminum that way, it would be all wrong for the job.

The people who are accusing Bush of lying just aren't telling the truth. There's no evidence he ever hyped the evidence for WMD, and it doesn't matter how many times the Democrats say it, it just isn't true.

Besides every other country saw the same intelligence, and they all voted to give the President authority to overthrow Saddam. You can't just go back and rewrite history.

It's always been about giving the Iraqi people freedom and democracy, simple as that.

This is just preliminary. I'll come back next week to take exact dimensions and measure your gradient. It'll take a few weeks to draw up a plan and get estimates back for materials and fill. This is a little tricky, I want to get everything right at the outset and give you folks an accurate idea of what you're getting into here.

As I said, I think you have to give Bush credit. He's admitting that not everything went according to plan in Iraq. You won't hear many presidents admitting that mistakes were made.

Especially when they're really big mistakes.

I'm gonna put in a tank triple the size of the current one. I'd put in a bigger one but there's no room. It's much more than you probably need, but it really makes sense to go with a bigger size than necessary so you don't have problems down the road when maybe you have kids. Trying to cut corners can really cost you in the end.

The generals in Iraq say they have everything they need to win. In fact they're already winning. They don't need any more troops.

Probably start bringing them home soon, maybe, but only when there's a complete victory.

If you ask me, Bush is right to refuse to explain when that'll be. That would be artificial. We don't want the terrorists to get any ideas.

I'm pretty sure I can begin this job in three weeks, if the permit comes through. It's complicated so count on it taking at least five days. I'm thinking more like seven. Eight at the outside.

My God, look at how fast he's going on this road. No concern for life and limb.

Can you believe they're even criticizing Bush now over civilian casualties. What did they think would happen when we went to war?

It's pretty irresponsible.

Better turn my engine off. Gas is so expensive now I can barely afford to fill up. What was I saying.

crossposted from unbossed.com