Do Public Officials Ever Lie? Better Question: Do They Ever Tell The Truth?

Since taking over from Tim Sebastian in 2006, Stephen Sackur has been the anchor for the BBC's flagship news interview show, HARDtalk, which runs four times a week. I travel a lot, so I see it a lot. Sackur has a well-deserved reputation as the voice of Establishment Group Think propaganda and for asking questions and then aggressively interrupting his guests when they attempt to answer. He's one of television's most annoying little twits and I often wonder why credible figures ever agree to be interviewed by him. Last week, he interviewed Glenn Greenwald. I haven't been able to access the whole half hour back and forth, but above is a three-minutes excerpt that wound up on YouTube.

I could see by the tightening in Greenwald's face that he was about to explode at Sackur's mindless and sycophantic line of questioning. And Greenwald did not disappoint. Sackur started quoting patently false assertions from a batch of Military-Industrial Complex war criminals as "evidence" against whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Sackur pretends to be unable to comprehend that anyone in the upper echelons of the British Establishment could ever lie for any reason. Greenwald: "There is this thing called the Iraq War in which the U.S. and the U.K. governments persuaded their media outlets and their populations to support an aggressive attack on another country by making one false claim after the next, designed to scare the population into believing that there was a security threat that did not really exist, that they had to go to war to stop. What journalism is about," he tried explaining to the very-well paid state propagandist who plays the role of a journalist on television, "is based on the premise that when people like Mr. Robins and others who exercise power in the dark make these kinds of claims to justify their own power, they're often lying. They often tell things to the population that turns out to be untrue and the job of a journalist is not to investigate other journalists who are investigating those powerful officials; it's to try and be responsible when telling their viewers and readers what government officials are saying and then to access whether there's evidence for it. That's my role…"

By this time Sackur realized he and the Establishment he reveres were under attack and he was having none of it and started a series of interruptions to prevent Greenwald from completing his response to the questions. He went from attacking Ed Snowden's credibility to atticking his guest's credibility, begging the question of why he invited Greenwald onto the show (if not to discredit him on behalf of BBC viewers). He probably didn't count on how well Greenwald could hold his own-- and more.

"First of all," he began responding to Sackur's outburst, "I think the Iraq War in a pretty significant…" when Sackur burst in again, obviously intent on preventing him from answering. That's when Greenwald let him have it:

If you want to scream at me and make all kinds of filibustering remarks, I can just disconnect and you can do that, but if you want to ask me a question, you're going to give me time to actually answer it! The evidence that government officials lie is found in history with things like the Iraq War, when the U.S. and the U.K. destroyed a country of 26 million people based on lies they told over the course of two years to their population. And if you look at what happens in counties where there's constitutional guarantees of a free press, which I know doesn't include the U.K., but includes most western democracies, what you find us all sorts of people who have created those protections have done so based on their recognition that people in power, specifically national security officials, will routinely lie to their population. The evidence that I have is that 3 Democratic senators, just two weeks ago in the United States, who are on the Intelligence Committee and have access to classified information, came out and said that the claims of NSA officials and others that these programs have stopped terrorist plots is completely false, that there is no evidence for it.

I assume the three senators Greenwald was referring to were Ron Wyden (OR), Mark Udall (CO) and Martin Heinrich (NM), all moderate centrists. A few days ago they penned an explosive OpEd for the NY Times, End The N.S.A. Dragnet, Now. "The framers of the Constitution," the wrote, "declared that government officials had no power to seize the records of individual Americans without evidence of wrongdoing, and they embedded this principle in the Fourth Amendment. The bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records-- so-called metadata-- by the National Security Agency is, in our view, a clear case of a general warrant that violates the spirit of the framers’ intentions. This intrusive program was authorized under a secret legal process by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, so for years American citizens did not have the knowledge needed to challenge the infringement of their privacy rights.

"Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism. If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records. But this can be done without collecting the records of millions of law-abiding Americans. We recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition that those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of temporary safety will lose both and deserve neither.

"The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization.

"Congress needs to preserve the agencies’ ability to collect information that is actually necessary to guard against threats to our security. But it also needs to preserve the right of citizens to be free from unwarranted interference in their lives, which the framers understood was vital to American liberties."

This grotesque perversion of the Constitution was specifically designed by Dick Cheney and David Addington in a serious and still unpunished series of criminal endeavors while Bush was fast asleep at the wheel. Pulitzer Award-winning journalist Barton Gellman laid out the whole operation in his jaw-dropping Cheney exposé Angler. This comes from Gellman's website:

One untold story that Angler recounts at length is what happened behind the scenes of the Bush administration's internal rebellion over warrantless domestic surveillance. Top advisers say on the record that Cheney came close to destroying Bush's presidency. This episode takes up two full chapters of Angler. The Washington Post gives a taste of the narrative in a pair of condensed excerpts.

From part one of the excerpts

A burst of ferocity stunned the room into silence. No other word for it: The vice president's attorney was shouting.

"The president doesn't want this! You are not going to see the opinions. You are out… of … your... lane!"

Five government lawyers had gathered around a small conference table in the Justice Department Command Center. Four were expected. David S. Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney, got wind of the meeting and invited himself.

If Addington smelled revolt, he was not far wrong. Unwelcome questions about warrantless domestic surveillance had begun to find their voice.

Cheney and his counsel would struggle for months to quash the legal insurgency. By the time President Bush became aware of it, his No. 2 had stoked dissent into flat-out rebellion. The president would face a dilemma, and the presidency itself a historic test. Cheney would come close to leading them off a cliff, man and office both.

On this second Monday in December 2003, Addington's targets were a pair of would-be auditors from the National Security Agency. He had displeasure to spare for their Justice Department hosts.

Perfect example, right here. A couple of NSA bureaucrats breeze in and ask for the most sensitive documents in the building. And Justice wants to tell them, Help yourselves? This was going to be a very short meeting.

Joel Brenner and Vito Potenza, the two men wilting under Addington's wrath, had driven 26 miles from Fort Meade, the NSA's eavesdropping headquarters in Maryland. They were conducting a review of their agency's two-year-old special surveillance operation. They already knew the really secret stuff: The NSA and other services had been unleashed to turn their machinery inward, collecting signals intelligence inside the United States. What the two men didn't know was why the Bush administration believed the program was legal.

It was an awkward question. Potenza, the NSA's acting general counsel, and Brenner, its inspector general, were supposed to be the ones who kept their agency on the straight and narrow. That's what Cheney and their boss, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, told doubters among the very few people who knew what was going on. Cheney, who chaired briefings for select members of Congress, said repeatedly that the NSA's top law and ethics officers-- career public servants-- approved and supervised the surveillance program.

That was not exactly true, not without one of those silent asterisks that secretly flip a sentence on its tail. Every 45 days, after Justice Department review, Bush renewed his military order for warrantless eavesdropping. Brenner and Potenza told Hayden that the agency was entitled to rely on those orders. The United States was at war with al-Qaeda, intelligence-gathering is inherent in war, and the Constitution appoints the president commander in chief.

But they had not been asked to give their own written assessments of the legality of domestic espionage. They based their answer in part on the attorney general's certification of the "form and legality" of the president's orders. Yet neither man had been allowed to see the program's codeword-classified legal analyses, which were prepared by John C. Yoo, Addington's close ally in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Now they wanted to read Yoo's opinions for themselves.

He was massive in his swivel chair, taut and still, potential energy amping up the menace. Addington's pugnacity was not an act. Nothing mattered more, as the vice president and his lawyer saw the world, than these new surveillance tools. Bush had made a decision. Debate could only blow the secret, slow down vital work, or call the president's constitutional prerogatives into question.

The NSA lawyers returned to their car empty-handed.

The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing-- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk.

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.

…Addington's behavior with the NSA auditors was "a wake-up call for me," Jack Goldsmith [chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel] said. Cheney and Addington, he came to believe, were gaming the system, using secrecy and intimidation to prevent potential dissenters from conducting an independent review.

"They were geniuses at this," Goldsmith said. "They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want."

…Mike Hayden and Vito Potenza drove down from NSA headquarters after lunch on Feb. 19, 2004, to give Jim Comey his first briefing on the program. In the Justice Department's vault-like SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, Hayden got Comey's attention fast.

"I'm so glad you're getting read in, because now I won't be alone at the table when John Kerry is elected president," the NSA director said.

The witness table, Hayden meant. Congressional hearing, investigation of some kind. Nothing good. Kerry had the Democratic nomination just about locked up and was leading Bush in national polls. Hardly anyone in the intelligence field believed the next administration would climb as far out on a legal limb as this one had.

"Hayden was all dog-and-pony, and this is probably what happened to those poor folks in Congress, too," Comey told his chief of staff after the briefing. "You think for a second, 'Wow, that's great,' and then if you try actually to explain it back to yourself, you don't get it. You scratch your head afterward and you think, 'What the hell did that guy just tell me?'"

The NSA chief insisted on limiting surveillance to e-mails, phone calls and faxes in which one party was overseas, deflecting arguments from Cheney and Addington that he could just as well collect communications inside the United States.

…By the end of February, Goldsmith and Philbin had reached their conclusion: Parts of the surveillance operation had no support in law. Comey was so disturbed that he drove to Langley one evening to compare notes with Scott W. Muller, the general counsel at the CIA. Muller "got it immediately," agreeing with the Goldsmith-Philbin analysis, Comey said.

"At the end of the day, I concluded something I didn't ever think I would conclude, and that is that Pat Philbin and Jack Goldsmith understood this activity much better than Michael Hayden did," he said.

On Thursday, March 4, Comey brought the findings to Ashcroft, conferring for an hour one-on-one. Three senior Justice Department officials said in interviews that Ashcroft gave his full backing. He was not going to sign the next presidential order-- due in one week, March 11-- unless the White House agreed to a list of required changes.

And today? The situation is not better… it's worse, as though Cheney were still completely in charge and unchecked. This week, Andrew Rosenthal wrote a major editorial for the NY Times, The N.SA. Dips Into Pornography. The NSA is now collecting data on what porn sites people access online. "On one level," wrote Rosenthal, "this is old news-- using embarrassing sexual information against enemies. Spy novels are replete with the fabled 'honey trap' in which a tempting woman is placed in the path of an intelligence target in the hope that he will succumb and be vulnerable to blackmail. The only progress we’ve made in our digital times is that no actual person need be involved anymore, just images on the web. On another level, it’s sort of hilarious to imagine a gang of techno spy nerds in a darkened room, poring over browser histories, hunting for dirty URL’s, which of course they don’t linger over."

But beyond the absurdity of it all, this is precisely the way that politically directed, clandestine surveillance goes off the rails-- by digging into personal behavior. Because all of these operations are conducted in secret, according to secret rules, the public has no way of knowing whether the targets are actually enemies of the state, or just individuals who have fallen out of the state’s favor.

In fact, according to the Huffington Post, “none of the six individuals targeted by the N.S.A. is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots.”

J. Edgar Hoover compiled secret dossiers on the sexual peccadillos and private misbehavior of those he labeled as enemies-- really dangerous people like Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, for example.

Government officials have repeatedly claimed that the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata is perfectly legal.  We should not worry about the N.S.A., according to President Obama, because there are safeguards in place to protect our constitutional rights. Agents would never, ever misuse that information to, say, check on where you’ve been web surfing.

One of the senators nodding and winking at the NSA shredding of the Constitution is Maine's make-believe moderate, Susan Collins (R). Luckily, an independent-minded grassroots progressive, Shenna Bellows, is running against her this cycle. Shenna, the former Executive Director of the Maine ACLU, has a very different perspective on the importance of the Constitution and the importance of legitimate privacy than Collins does. This morning she reiterated that "History demonstrates time and time again that government secrecy breeds abuse of power. The revelations about NSA spying show that yet again, the NSA is engaged in surveillance operations that clearly violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. News that the NSA is monitoring the online pornography habits of "radicalizers" is eerily reminiscent of the FBI's surveillance of the private lives of leading political figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars and an attack on civil liberties. Yet, Congress continues to abdicate its critical role in providing checks and balances on the Executive branch. The decision by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to codify NSA spying authority and expand the Patriot Act demonstrates a dangerous disregard for our fundamental constitutional freedoms. It's time to rein in an out-of-control NSA and restore our constitutional freedoms. In a healthy democracy, the government doesn't spy on the private lives of its citizenry."

If you'd like to help Shenna replace Collins in the U.S. Senate, you can do that here on the Blue America Senate 2014 page.

UPDATE:

The BBC has now posted the entire Sackur-Greenwald video on YouTube. Kudos! Here is is:

Do The Ruling Elites Just Assume Laws Are For The Little People Only?

The Friday morning tweet from Alan Grayson (above) was anything but gratuitous. Grayson worked his way through Harvard as a janitor. He graduated, summa cum laude, with a degree in economics. Before going back to Harvard Law, he worked as an economist. He graduated from Harvard Law magna cum laude. So, you don't have to take my word for it when I tell you that his is one of the most brilliant and rigorous minds to be serving in a House of Representatives that includes so very many men and women of no talents beyond rabble-rousing. Think of losers-at-life like Steve Stockman (R-TX), Paul Broun (R_GA), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Rob Woodhall (R-GA), Bachmann (R-MN), David Scheikert (R-AZ), Tom Graves (R-GA), and then, of course, the Tea Party Medusa, Bachmann/Gohmert/King. At the same age those last three were still trying to learn how to read without moving their lips, Grayson had already been a law clerk for both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. He has the best track record of any lawyer in the world to have taken on Iraq War corporate profiteers and beating them. So when he worries aloud about the lack of accountability wrecking America's democracy, he's not just handing his opponents some opposition research they can use against him in an election some day.

In covering Barton Gellman's shocking and brilliant book about the Cheney presidency, Angler, we looked at the palpable-- and very rational-- fear many of Cheney's law-breaking minions had about going to prison in a post-Bush/Cheney future.

I would wager that history will treat Nancy Pelosi well. She is not just the first woman Speaker of the House, she is also one of the Speakers with the most accomplished records. Tarring her legacy however, is one 3-word phrase, "off the table." One of her daughters once blamed me for popularizing the unfortunate Pelosi response to a question about holding Bush and Cheney accountable for the most criminally-oriented American government in all history. I suspect a Speaker Alan Grayson would have handled it very differently. He may be a huge Pelosi backer but he has some very different priorities and is a lot more serious about the U.S. Constitution than most mere politicians.

Gellman makes it clear in his book how Cheney moved with lightning speed to take over the U.S. government from an incurious and ill-equipped-- both intellectually and morally-- George W. Bush and how Cheney and his team of war criminals used the NSA to grab more and more power within the administration and freeze out any and all rational debate. An out-and-out fascist shit-bag like David Addington, Cheney's completely unscrupulous chief lawyer, didn't seem to care… but he was pretty much the only one not obsessed with President Kerry throwing the whole lot of them in jail for subverting the Constitution. If Cheney was the E.F. Hutton on the Bush Regime, Addington was the alpha lawyer of the snarling, snapping pack of ruthlessly bred attack dogs. Gellman:

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. Back in 2001, it had been Cheney who brought Bush a radically new concept of electronic surveillance at home. Through his lawyer, the vice president now guided the program's expansion and development. Words, once assigned by the commander in chief, became orders for the nation's espionage machinery. And it was Addington who wrote those words, defining the reach of warantless intrusion into the lives of Americans. On national security matters, the president's own lawyer, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, did little more than review documents that Addington prepared.

Before he resigned in 2004-- and wrote a book about his experiences inside the Bush Regime (The Terror Presidency)-- Jack Goldsmith headed the Office of Legal Counsel, the final arbiter on what was and what wasn't legal inside the administration. He quickly fell out with Cheney and Addington-- he wrote in his book, "Nobody had said no to them before"-- over torture and domestic spying. The carefully placed network of Cheney apparatchiks throughout government demanded ex ante pardons for the activities they knew were illegal. Goldsmith pulled that rug out from under them and there was a general freakout at the CIA and among others who were carrying out Cheney's criminally insane agenda. Gellman writes that "Cheney and Addington, Goldsmith came to believe, manipulated the legal advice they sought. 'They were geniuses at this,' Goldsmith said. 'They could divide up all the problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answer together to get the result they want.'"

There were all kinds of excuses floated for clearly criminal activities like insisting customers-- so forget citizens-- waived their privacy rights in the fine print of their telephone and Internet service contracts.

If only they knew how accommodating Nancy Pelosi would be, lots of sleepless, fearful nights could have been avoided!

A lot of lawyers played a key role in the Bush regime's law-breaking. Shouldn't they pay a price?

John "Mr. Torture" Yoo

We've been talking about what can be done to hold the law-breakers of the Bush regime to account for what they've done. Last night I passed on the suggestion by Georgetown law professor David Cole in a current NYRB article:

The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward. We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment -- our own federal government -- the healing cannot begin.

As Professor Cole points out, with regard to possible prosecution, John "Mr. Torture" Yoo's infamous "torture memo," drafted in the bowels of the Justice Dept., "would be a legal defense for any but the lawyers who wrote it." Well, what about the lawyers?

I've taken the liberty of yanking this comment by reader drinkof out of our comments section to make sure everyone sees it. -- Ken

"Surely Yoo, Gonzales or Addington's offenses are worth a couple of Clinton units of suspension time?"

by drinkof

For various unfortunate reasons, criminal prosecutions are unlikely.

On the other hand, there is a mechanism which can make a substantial statement as to our dedication to the rule of law, and for which there is ample (and, for critics, inconvenient) precedent. Lawyers involved at various points of approving, and covering up, torture and related practices in their official capacity should face disbarment.

Yoo, Gonzales, Addington, for that matter, Jack Goldsmith (sorry, but the half-ass mea culpa doesn't cut it) and dozens more should answer for their actions.

Complaints as to criminalizing policy differences simply don't apply. Law practice is a privilege, not a right, and it's time the legal profession begin to purge its ranks of these practices.

And recall, Bill Clinton got his license to practice suspended for 5 years for whatever it was that he did. Surely Yoo, Gonzales or Addington's offenses are worth a couple of Clinton units (e.g., 10 years) of suspension time?

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Just because Americans aren't ever likely to arise en masse against the practice of torture doesn't mean we can relax our efforts to put a stop it

"What hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty."

--international law expert Philippe Sands, on Bill Moyers' Journal

If you have a chance to catch a PBS repeat of last night's Bill Moyers' Journal, don't miss it -- or check out the video (and transcript) and other coverage on the Journal area of the PBS website. Roughly the first 40 minutes are devoted to a remarkable interview with a remarkable Briton, a breathtakingly articulate law professor and international lawyer named Philippe Sands, who knows more about the subject of torture and probably more about America than anyone you're likely to have heard lately.

Most recently, Sands has (1) published an apparently astonishing new book called Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, and (2) testified on the subject before Rep. Jerrold Nadler's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee.

Here's part of how Moyers introduced Sands:

After 9/11, writes Philippe Sands, our highest government officials sanctioned a "culture of cruelty" that put our troops, our Constitution, and our own standing in the world at risk. This week, members of the House Judiciary Committee began hearings trying to find out how the President came to approve "enhanced interrogation methods" — that's the official code for the use of cruelty in the pursuit of confession. The administration has been fighting to stop a public accounting of the internal decisions behind that policy. The officials who took part in those discussions fear they could one day face prosecution if their actions turn out to have been illegal. Those key officials talked to Philippe Sands for his book, and this week he was asked to testify at those hearings in Congress.

I want to come back to this interview when I've had a chance to look at it again and digest it more fully. Meanwhile thanks to Sam Seder for tipping us off to Sands, whom he had as a guest on his Air America Radio show this week in connection with his House testimony. And Sam sent out a clip (which I tried but failed to embed) of Senator McCranky on 60 Minutes in October 1997 acknowledging that during his POW captivity in Vietnam, he broke under torture and "confessed" to assorted crimes against the Vietnamese people.

It's a point that Sands made again in his interview with Bill Moyers, and in case the point isn't obvious, we'll come back to it.

Now, torture is an exceedingly complex issue. Not on the merits, as Sands points out, because there is remarkably little civilized disagreement that it's wrong from a human and moral standpoint. There is even surprisingly little disagreement among professional interrogators that it's wrong from a practical standpoint: The "information" produced under torture is overwhelmingly likely to be whatever the torturee has to say to get the torture to stop, which is saying what the torturer wants to hear, whether it's true or not. Sands cites the example of Britain's long struggle with Irish separatists, which he argues was prolonged for an unnecessary 15-20 years by the government's use of torture.

No, where the complexity of torture kicks in is in the perception. I don't want to say "most people," but certainly a lot of people think it's just fine under the right, admittedly extreme circumstances, and that it produces life-saving, even civilization-saving results,

There are even professionals who hold this view, but they are the sort of professionals who, for example, will pontificate about waterboarding being a perfectly acceptable procedure, even claim to have undergone it themselves, when of course they knew from the first drop of water that entered their throat that it would stop, which is exactly what the actual waterboarding victim does not know -- and therefore makes their experience in no imaginable sense waterboarding. In other words, these macho morons who imagine that they have firsthand knowledge of the subject actually know less about the subject than anyone on the planet, because everything they think they know is 100 percent, no 200 percent wrong.

And of course the ordinary Americans who reflexively don't mind or even, deep down, approve of torture are just as wrong. I realize this blunt statement will cause a lot of screaming, but let's come back to that another time -- with some documentation from Philippe Sands. (Actually, there is an extended exchange in the Moyers inteview that makes the case remarkably succinctly. Maybe we can get to that later today.)

For now, though, I just want to make two points.

(1) TORTURE IS UN-AMERICAN

First, there's Sands's extended title: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He argues that official acceptance of torture as acceptable is in fact profoundly anti-American, and that this isn't just theoretical -- that in fact some of the most important backlash against abuses like those occurring at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib came from within the U.S. military itself, where there was apparently a deep and widespread revulsion against the wholesale overturning of the U.S. Army Field Manual, with its careful incorporation of the principles of the Geneva conventions.

The revulsion against torture, it turns out, is deeply embedded in American principles, and not least in the military itself. Of course, Sands acknowledges, torture has taken place before under U.S. government auspices. However, from an official government standpoint, "What hasn't happened before is the abandonment of the rules against cruelty."

For the book, Sands talked to the people actually involved in the revolution in U.S. torture policy. He worked his way up the government legal chain, from the lawyers "on the ground" all the way up to Jim Haynes, "Mr. Rumsfeld's lawyer." If you're dying of suspense, I can tell you that all fingers point to one legal architect of the new policy, David Addington, who of course is Dick Cheney's lawyer, and can be presumed to have been acting on the instruction of his master.

(2) McCRANKY KNOWS THAT TORTURE VICTIMS LIE

Okay, so torture is deeply un-American. It's still true that an awful lot of Americans don't know that torture is deeply un-American. And for this reason, I have to part company with some of the blogospheric denizens (and other commentators) I respect most deeply and say that I don't think torture is now or is ever going to be a productive political issue. Yes, it's outrageous, but the mass of Americans don't care and don't want to know.

Oh sure, there was a lot of revulsion to those amateur photos of the sickening goings-on at Abu Ghraib. But did you notice how that stopped, how it all went away?

A lot of Americans who were paying some attention managed to explain it away. Oh, it's faked, or exaggerated, or taken out of context. Oh, that sort of thing always happens. And in the extreme case, they applied the equivalent of a solution that the Car Talk guys [that's Ray and Tom at right] often suggest when a caller reports having an annoying noise in his/her car: Can you turn the radio up? If your goal is just not to hear the noise, there are almost always of managing it.

So I have to say to colleagues of mine who are waiting for great waves of popular revulsion to arise at the disclosure, for example, that Chimpy the Prez himself participated in meetings where new horizons in official American torture were thrashed out: It's not going to happen. The people who watch that dumb, utterly unbelievable, and thorouhgoingly dishonest pile of crap 24 think torture is not only selectively OK but effective, and it's what, y'know, really manly men do.

Which doesn't in any way change the wrongness of it, and that is absolutely an issue we have to fight tooth and nail, even understanding that, while we may try to elevate the level of public awareness and understanding, we aren't ever likely to rally any kind of mass revulsion.

However, on some level even the manly-mannest proponents of torture do get it. Which brings us back to the example of McCranky. His public record on the subject is frankly terrible. But nobody has more concrete knowledge than the senator that people under torture say whatever they have to say to make the torture stop.

It's interesting that in McCranky's public career no reasonable person has ever blamed him for the "confessions" he made under Vietnamese torture. I think we all understand that we would likely have broken a lot sooner than he did. Still, break he did. It's certainly possible that he told his tormentors some things that were true, but no one knows better than he does that his "confessions" were not true.


UPDATE: TORTURE TEAM ONLINE

Reader Woid notes in the comments:

Vanity Fair ran a long, chilling, excerpt from the Philippe Sands book in their May issue.

It's online at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805?printable=true&currentPage=all

In case the link hasn't come out right, what with all the copying-and-pasting, just work your way to the May Vanity Fair (www.vanityfair.com).


SUNDAY UPDATE: TORTURE TOO, THE FOLLOW-UP

I've finally posted the follow-up to this post, in which Philippe provides the basis for his assertion that torture doesn't work, and explains how the British government's use of it is now generally thought to have extended the I.R.A. conflict by 15-20 years.

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How far will "Big Dick" Cheney go to get whatever the hell he wants? We might equally well ask, "How deep is the ocean? How high are the stars?"

"Vice Presidential staff have previously testified before Congress and I am aware of no authority -- and counsel's letter cites none -- for the proposition that such staff could be immune from testimony before Congress."
--House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers [right], responding to the VP's office's latest preposterous claims that his staff isn't accountable to Congress, no way, no how


Am I the only one who did a double take, and then giggled, at the opening line of Dan Froomkin's Washingtonpost.com column today, "Cheney's Total Impunity"? You tell me:

"How far will Vice President Cheney go to shield himself and his office from public scrutiny?"

How far will Vice President Cheney go??? Doesn't the very act of asking such a question suggest that somewhere in the universe there exists some limit to how far this vice president will go to get what he wants? Does anyone really believe that such a limit exists?

Let's say someone had asked back in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, "How far will Vice President Cheney go to get us into war in Iraq?" Can anyone think of anything, anything at all, he wouldn't--in fact didn't--do?

So the latest blunt refusal to offer up Cheney chief of staff David Addington for congressional testimony runs true to form. Indeed it's heartening to see that stripping Big Dick's boy Irving Libby from the team hasn't led to any diminution of the gall and effrontery level. Because, of course, the Dickster still has Addington, the remaining half of his old pair of Spawns of Satan Bookends, on the job.

And the loads of crap these so-called legal geniuses of the Bush regime come up with--my goodness, if you submitted one of these briefs as a paper in a Government 101 class, you'd be lucky to come away with an F-minus.

Here's our Dan's take on the latest round:

Cheney's Total Impunity

By Dan Froomkin

How far will Vice President Cheney go to shield himself and his office from public scrutiny?

Last spring, Cheney asserted that he wasn't subject to executive-branch rules about classified information because he wasn't actually part of the executive branch.

Now his office argues that he and his staff are completely immune from congressional oversight. That's right: Completely immune.

Cheney's latest claim came in a response to a House Judiciary Committee request for vice presidential chief of staff David S. Addington to testify about his central role in developing the administration's torture policies.

Cheney lawyer Kathryn L. Wheelbarger wrote back: "Congress lacks the constitutional power to regulate by a law what a Vice President communicates in the performance of the Vice President's official duties, or what a Vice President recommends that a President communicate in the President's performance of official duties, and therefore those matters are not within the Committee's power of inquiry."

As it happens, that was only one of three startling responses in Wheelbarger's letter.

She also wrote: "The Chief of Staff to the Vice President is an employee of the Vice President, and not the President, and therefore is not in a position to speak on behalf of the President."

Disregard, for a moment, the fact that Addington wasn't actually asked to speak on behalf of the president - but about his "unique information and perspective." Contrary to Wheelbarger's central assertion, Addington actually does work for the president. When he took over the job previously held by Scooter Libby -- who has since been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case -- Addington also inherited Libby's title as "assistant to the president." See, for instance, his official White House profile.

Cheney's office somehow managed to omit Addington from the White House staff list submitted to Congress. But Addington isn't on Cheney's public Senate payroll either.

Finally, Wheelbarger cites, "separate from any question of immunity from testimony," questions of privilege "protecting state secrets, attorney-client communications, deliberations, and communications among Presidents, Vice Presidents, and their advisers."

In a letter to Addington, Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers yesterday lamented Wheelbarger's "legalistic and argumentative response" and warned that if Addington refuses to appear voluntarily, he may be subpoenaed. (Conyers issued the same threat to former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, both of whom also declined to appear voluntarily.)

The Conyers letter cites media reports that describe Addington as the driving force behind the administration's most controversial legal arguments. Among the citations: Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Phillippe Sands in Vanity Fair, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker in the Washington Post and Chitra Ragavan in U.S. News.

And Conyers notes: "Vice Presidential staff have previously testified before Congress and I am aware of no authority -- and counsel's letter cites none -- for the proposition that such staff could be immune from testimony before Congress."

He also attempts to turn one of Cheney's arguments against him: "While the issue of the immunity of senior advisors to the President is currently under litigation, there has been no suggestion that such immunity, even if recognized, would reach to the Vice President's office, an entity that, as you well know, is constitutionally quite different from the Office of the President.

"As to privilege, such concerns are traditionally and appropriately raised in response to specific questions and not as a threshold reason to decline a Congressional Committee's invitation to appear."

And Conyers concludes: "Presumably, you believe that whatever actions you took were necessary and comported with the law; in such circumstances, I cannot imagine why you would decline to appear and set the record straight. The American people deserve no less."

I know it gets tiresome to keep repeating it, but that's not going to stop me from asking once again how far anyone thinks the loyal squadrons of Republican rubber-stampers--in government and in the media--will tolerate the assertion of even the slightest privilege from the next Democratic president. Why don't we get together a pool to predict the exact decibel level of the right-wing stuck pigs' squealing?

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