August 2008 Archives

Biden in some ways is the anti-Dick Cheney. And that's change the party can believe in. Newsweek

Biden can't help with working class whites in swing states? Do you mean Irish catholic, blue-collar, Scranton-fire, firemen/cop booster, Amtrak commuting, women-supporting, son-going-to-Iraq Joe Biden? Are you serious?

Tell me Jim, what color is the sky on your planet?

-- Posted by O'Biden

My stomach is in knots over the turn the campaign is taking and the selection of Joe Biden. However, Biden may help energize our base; he should appeal to NASCAR dads, Irish Catholics, unions, and Jews, who have been uneasy about Obama's support for Israel but should be reassured by Biden. I think to win, we need to fight this the Chicago Way: McCain pulls a knife, we pull a gun. Biden has a reputation as a street fighter; and we need a bruiser to sink the Swift Boaters. Hopefully, Biden will not sink himself first.

And yes, right now I am thinking more about what it takes to win than what it takes to govern. Whether or not I am sold on Joe Biden's world view, I am definitely not sold on John McCain's.

My little email from the Obama campaign solicited a welcome message for Senator Biden as he accepts Barack Obama's invitation to run for Vice President. My message was the following:

Dear Senator Biden: Your party and ours is counting on you to help Barack Obama take back the White House. We are counting on you to bring your wealth of foreign policy and legal knowledge to put our country back on a sound and ethical policy. Let us seize this historic moment, and deliver our country. Senator Biden, we are proud of you for shouldering this burden and relying on you to carry it to the end. For myself, for my two young children who will grow up in the America we make, for all the victims of discrimination whom I represent in the courts, for our countrymen at home and those dying in Iraq, for our country and our world, let us take back our government of the people from the power mad and the money hungry and make our way in the world confident of our strength, secure in our good will, and dedicated to the principles of freedom and justice. Sincerely, Bill Day

So, it is officially Obama-Biden. Despite his history of minor gaffes, Biden does seem like an appropriate number 2. He won't steal the limelight or undercut the candidate, he's got some foreign policy and working class cred — perhaps he will be seen as adding some steak to the sizzle. While I am not enthusiastic about Biden the way I am about Obama, perhaps that is not necessary. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Once again it is startling to see such a lack of self knowledge in an article by conservative columnist William Kristol, who fails to see evil born of good intentions in the Iraq War and all that has flowed from it. Or perhaps Kristol secretly acknowledges that even the intentions were not good.

Thomas Nephew reflects in the Huffington Post on efforts to restore the Fourth Amendment and undo the damage of such legislation as the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments law, and the Military Commissions Act:

Our Constitution is not a nuisance. It is the foundation of our democracy. It makes freedom and self-governance possible, and helps to protect our security. The Democratic Party will restore our Constitution to its proper place in our government and return our Nation to our best traditions-including our commitment to government by law, and not by men.

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
John Adams famously described the American government as one of "laws, not of men." In eight years, the Bush Administration has reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by turning that dictum on its head in their zeal to ensure that another attack does not occur on their watch. In particular, the President's confidence that he is a "good man," has led him to embrace the advice of a ruthless cabal within the United States government whose first article of faith is that there are no limitations on presidential power in a "time of war."

Jane Mayer's excellent book on the prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" is a "must read" not primarily because it reveals new information: many of the facts have already been exposed in the nation's media, including in some of Mayer's own articles for the New Yorker. Rather, this book adds two essential dimensions to the national debate on the government's actions. First, it describes the political and legal decisions of the White House, the Vice President's Office, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and the Attorney General to reinterpret, and subvert, the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the criminal statutes of the United States with horrific consequences. Second, in describing those consequences, it paints a far more vivid picture of the gruesome consequences of the torture policy than the press's usual glib invocation of "water boarding."

As the book describes, Vice President Dick Cheney's unprecedented ability to control the flow and content of information to the president, coupled with the weight his advice has been given, put him in a unique position to guide the direction of the Administration's policy toward "enemy combatants" captured on the battlefield or subsequently abducted. With Cheney's aide David Addington as the architect in chief, the administration concluded, under the cover of John Yoo's memoranda from the Justice Department, that any limits on the president's power to order torture — whether law or treaty — could be set aside on the grounds that they were subordinate to the president's constitutional powers as Commander in Chief. On the basis of a superficially plausible theory, generally rejected by expert opinion, that the most effective way to obtain information is to inflict a maximum of pain, the Administration provided the C.I.A. with authorized methods of torture, many of which had hitherto been acknowledged in the United States and elsewhere to constitute war crimes. To the extent these failed to achieve results, the Administration pushed for the infliction of more pain. To the extent its actions were opposed or questioned, the Administration made demonstrably false claims about the effectiveness of its illegal methods in obtaining actionable intelligence. To the extent that military lawyers in the Judge Advocate General's office and other lawyers risked their careers to restore the rule of law, the seasoned bureaucratic infighters in the Vice President's office, particularly Addington, fought back ferociously.

Mayer is no less thorough in describing the hair-raising consequences of the Administration's legal decisions. In constructing their refined programs of systematic cruelty, the C.I.A. and the military drew upon the military's training programs developed to counter Chinese Communist "brainwashing" and the C.I.A.'s massive experiments on the effects of prolonged sensory deprivation during the Vietnam War. Impressed by the ability of the Communist regimes to force false confessions from prisoners at show trials in the 50's, the military had researched Communist torture programs in depth in order to train its soldiers to resist as much as possible through its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. In a diabolical twist, the C.I.A. and the military used the lessons of the SERE program to devise an affirmative program of torture designed to extract information from detainees. The fact that torture techniques had proved useful in the past primarily for forcing false confessions does not seem to have given the C.I.A. much pause. Combined with the C.I.A.'s own research into the effectiveness of sensory deprivation in creating total mental breakdown and introducing a schizophrenic state, these techniques were used to inflict a maximum of pain on detainees in the expressed hope of extracting information and (usually unexpressed) hope of exacting revenge. In reading the book, one gets a full sense of the brutal consequences of these techniques in combination, and the savagery with which our government's interrogators redoubled the pain they inflicted when they did not get the results they wanted. To the extent there were any limits on the suffering our intelligence service imposed, those limits were cast aside when the C.I.A. delivered detainees through "extraordinary rendition" to the secret police of Arab dictatorships such as Egypt and Syria.

Jane Mayer's compelling work thus documents not only how vital, and how fragile, is the rule of law, but also reminds us of the terrible consequences that ensue when it breaks down.


View all my reviews.

Besides his sleazy manipulation of racist imagery in Republican attack ads, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis also has arranged meetings between McCain and a Russian businessman who has been denied a visa to the United States because of alleged links to the Russian mafia. Just the kind of Republican dirtbag who would know all about "dealing from the bottom of the deck." Clearly the ugly side of McNasty is coming to the fore if this is who he chooses to be his consigliere.

Dear Senator Graham:

I am surprised that you would accuse Barack Obama of injecting race into the presidential campaign after John McCain ran his Paris Hilton "celebrity" ad. As a fellow citizen of a Southern state, I remember my history well enough to remember what happened to Emmett Till when he dared speak to a white woman. I am not ignorant of Richard Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy, capitalizing on JFK and LBJ's courageous commitment to civil rights, a strategy the GOP continues to count on to this day. More recently, I remember well the "call me" ad used to defeat Rep. Harold Ford. To pretend that an ad with two white blond celebrity women juxtaposed with a black candidate is not racially polarized is to ignore several hundred years of Southern history. For yet another conservative white Southern Senator -- from South Carolina, no less, "first to secede" -- to pretend that the sordid history of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, and "segregation forever" are now no more than a historical footnote is shameful. And to whitewash the GOP's racially charged appeals to the white electorate -- particularly in the South -- by pretending that by responding to such ads it is Barack Obama "who is dealing the race card from the bottom of the deck" is so deeply cynical that it can only be described as in the worst tradition of Southern racial politics.

Sincerely,

Bill Day