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Stuart Taylor has a follow-up article on the Holder torture review in the National Journal. Last Tuesday we posted his article in Pickings about why he didn’t think that there would be any CIA or Bush administration officials prosecuted. In his latest article, Taylor discusses the Justice Department lawyers and the memos involved.
…But many still hope to drive from the legal profession the Bush administration lawyers who advised that waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods were legal.
And Attorney General Eric Holder is endlessly mulling a 200-plus-page draft report recommending (according to news leaks) referral of former Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo to state bar authorities for disciplinary proceedings.
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility presented the draft to Holder’s predecessor, Michael Mukasey, in December after a five-year investigation. It focuses on two lengthy, August 1, 2002, memos that Bybee and Yoo, then his deputy, co-authored. They helped open the door for the CIA to use brutal interrogation techniques by construing very narrowly the 1994 law that makes “torture” a federal crime.
Holder should unambiguously reject this recommendation, as Mukasey reportedly did in a still-unreleased memo before leaving office. Even if these “torture memos” were wrong, the relevant rules clearly provide that the only grounds for the OPR or state bar officials to discipline Bybee or Yoo would be proof that they acted in bad faith by knowingly misstating the law, or were incompetent.
There is nothing remotely like such proof. Nobody who knows Bybee, now a federal Appeals Court judge, or Yoo, a leading scholarly advocate of sweeping presidential war powers who teaches law at the University of California (Berkeley), doubts that they believed in their own interpretation of the anti-torture law.
Nor does the sometimes sloppy reasoning in the two memos prove incompetence. These were highly capable lawyers working under severe time pressure with little guidance from case law, amid pervasive fears that another mass-murder attack might be imminent unless the CIA could force captured terrorists to talk. …
Fouad Ajami looks at the political and foreign policy realities surrounding the war in Afghanistan.
…But it will not do to offer up 9/11 as a casus belli in Afghanistan while holding out the threat of legal retribution against the men and women in our intelligence services who carried out our wishes in that time of concern and peril. To begin with, a policy that falls back on 9/11 must proceed from a correct reading of the wellsprings of Islamist radicalism. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him.
No Arabs had been emotionally invested in Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but the ruler in Baghdad was a favored son of that Arab nation. The decapitation of his regime was a cautionary tale for his Arab brethren. Grant George W. Bush his due. He drew a line when the world of the Arabs was truly in the wind and played upon by powerful temptations. Mr. Obama and his advisers need not pay heroic tribute to the men and women who labored before them. But they have so maligned their predecessors and their motives that the appeal to 9/11 rings hollow and contrived. In those years behind us, American liberalism distanced itself from American patriotism, and the damage is there to see. …
…Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the “electronic herd.” We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.
Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven’t been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing.
On The Corner, Jonah Goldberg posts his thoughts on Glenn Beck.
From the Washington Post:
“Beck Strikes Again; Yosi Sargent Reassigned at NEA
By Michael A. Fletcher
The National Endowment for the Arts has reassigned former communications director Yosi Sergant, who had become the latest target of FOX News talk show host Glenn Beck.Acting NEA communications director Victoria Hutter said Thursday that Sergant had left the communications post. The move came after he had come under attack from Beck, a conservative commentator who accused Sergant of attempting to use taxpayer money to fund art to support the president’s initiatives.”
Yes, I know some of my friends on the Right wring their hands about Glenn Beck. I don’t so much. Not only am I grateful for his support of my book, I like the guy personally. Moreover, while he can be bombastic and over the top rhetorically (and we don’t always see eye-to-eye), what makes his populism palatable to me (I’m not a big fan of populism) is that he’s fundamentally a libertarian populist. He’s not clamoring for the government to do more, he’s clamoring for the government to do less. And that’s the safest kind of populism there is. Meanwhile, he’s been absolutely fearless in going after stories and trends that even the rest of the conservative media have ignored. But we can have that conversation another time.
What I find striking is that if Beck were of the Left, taking down (or helping to take down) Bush appointees — with the same bombast and success — he would be hailed as the living reincarnation of the great Muckrakers of yore. He’d be the working man’s I. F. Stone, the TV heir to Michael Moore (which is a good thing to the Left). If he explored the roots and idea animating conservatism the way he has with progressivism, he would be a vital service to the education of the nation. And because a left-wing Beck would have to be working at MSNBC, you could be sure that the gang over there would be foursquare behind him.
Mark Steyn posts on Kyle Smith’s article in the New York Post on The New York Times’ latest excuse for its slow reporting of the Van Jones scandal.
The New York Post’s Kyle Smith has a peach of a column on The New York Times’ explanation that it missed the Van Jones story because “our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period”:
Here’s how long-staffed The New York Times actually is. Long after Glenn Beck reported — back in July — that Jones was history’s first communist czar, and even after Gateway Pundit reported, on Sept. 3, that Jones had signed a wackadoodle 9/11 “truther” petition, The Times sent two reporters to Boston (in a story published Friday, Sept. 4) to pre-report the non-story of Joseph P. Kennedy II’s run for Ted Kennedy’s seat. (He later said he wasn’t interested. Also, the picture of Joseph the Times ran was actually of his brother Max.)
…Jill Abramson, the managing editor, admitted only to being “a beat behind” the story but added that the paper had caught up — after the saga was over. The EMS equivalent of this statement would be, “Sorry I didn’t take your 911 call for four days. At least I was in time for the funeral.”
There are two possibilities:
(a) the Times is as dopey as Ms Abramson seems eager to paint herself as;
or (b), they decided to ignore what was very obviously a real story and thus (vastly overrating their waning powers as gatekeepers to “all the news that’s fit”) bury it.
And here’s Kyle Smith’s piece.
…Jill Abramson, the managing editor, admitted only to being “a beat behind” the story but added that the paper had caught up — after the saga was over. The EMS equivalent of this statement would be, “Sorry I didn’t take your 911 call for four days. At least I was in time for the funeral.”
Although Abramson’s excuse was not an excuse, she proceeded to offer another one: “Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official.”
Oh. And here I was, thinking that he was “one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers,” as I was told by, well, The Times, on its Caucus blog on Sept. 5. Confusing, confusing. …
…The Times was aware of the story, knew it was bigger than most of the stuff it puts in the paper every day, and had plenty of resources to cover it.
But The Times purposely ignored it because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn’t be forced out. The Times doesn’t like people like Glenn Beck and didn’t want him to be able to claim Jones’s scalp. The Times’ prejudice blinded it to the fact that Jones’ fall became obvious on Friday, when a White House spokesman refused to defend him.
Newspaper of record? The Times isn’t so much a newspaper as a clique of high school girls sending IMs to like-minded friends about their feuds and faves and raves and rants. OMFG you guys! It’s no more objective than Beck is. …
Tim Novak, Art Golab and Chris Fusco, in the Chicago Sun-Times, examine one of the causes of Illinois’ fiscal crisis, fat pensions.
Want to retire with a fat pension? Get a government job in Illinois.
Nearly 4,000 retired government workers have pensions that pay them at least $100,000 a year. They include politicians, judges, doctors and school administrators, as well as top cops, firefighters and park officials.
And these numbers are soaring faster than taxpayers can afford. …
…It’s a frightening picture. It costs more than $800 million a month for state and local governments to cover their pension burden, according to a first-of-its-kind Sun-Times analysis of data obtained from the 17 largest retirement plans for government workers in Chicago, Cook County and the state of Illinois. Those plans cover 374,041 retired government workers or their survivors.
Even as the economy has forced governments to cut services and jobs, they’ve had to borrow money or raise taxes to meet their soaring pension costs.
And the problem has lingered for decades, as elected officials continually postpone dealing with it, much like a homeowner putting off needed repairs. In fact, they’ve kept sweetening retirement benefits for themselves and others, even as they shortchanged the pension funds, diverting money to other programs and services. And early retirement programs have made things worse.
“It’s both illogical and extraordinarily expensive for the governments, and the taxpayers pay the burden,” said Laurence J. Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a 115-year-old watchdog organization that has studied retirement benefits for government workers.
“We’re facing increased taxes and lower services to pay for these extremely generous pensions. It’s the unintended consequence of providing six-figure pensions to people who will live 20 years or more. People are drawing pension benefits far richer than they would in the private sector.” …
The Economist reviews a new biography of Charles Dickens, written by Michael Slater.
Over dinner once an American friend quizzed Charles Dickens about the workings of his imagination. Where on earth did those wonderful characters come from? “What an unfathomable mystery there is in it all!” replied the creator of Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, Pip, Pickwick and the rest. Raising a wine glass, he continued: “Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty, and becomes instinct with life.”
Scholars have pondered this mystery for well over a century. Michael Slater’s biography begins with two key events in Dickens’s childhood: the imprisonment of his father for debt and the boy’s own humiliating experience working in a boot-polish factory. More than 600 pages later the ageing Dickens, by now rich, famous and almost universally revered, is to be found hobnobbing with the queen, making genteel small talk about servants and “the cost of butchers’ meat and bread”. …
…Two things stand out. He is good at relating events in Dickens’s life to his books. This is especially useful in his discussion of “David Copperfield”, the most autobiographical of Dickens’s novels (and his “favourite child”). He is good, too, on the composition of the major works. He reproduces snippets from Dickens’s “mems”, the terse notes that he used to keep track of his large casts of characters and multiple storylines. “Esther’s love must be kept in view, to make the coming trial the greater and the victory the more meritorious”; “Jo? Yes. Kill him.” That such jottings were all Dickens needed to keep the spaghetti-tangle of “Bleak House” straight in his head is astonishing. Still more astonishing is the fact that with some of his later novels, such as “Great Expectations”, he saw the plot so clearly from the outset that he did not bother with notes of any kind. …