Turd in a Guilded Cage

So HuffPo guy Nico Pitney, who has been jacked into events in Iran while the Washington Press Corpse has been doing its usual fluff, was tabbed to convey a question from Iran at a presser.

Here's Dana Milbank defending his turf:



Newspapermen used to belong to guilds. And the primary purpose of these guilds, which date back more than 1000 years, was to keep competition out. Via wikipedia:

The earliest guilds were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society. They often depended on grants of letters patent by an authority or monarch to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials.

And the journamalistic version:

The Newspaper Guild is a labor union founded by newspaper journalists in 1933 who noticed that unionized printers and truck drivers were making more money than they did. In addition to improving wages and working conditions, its constitution says its purpose is to fight for honesty in journalism and the news industry's business practices.

See much honesty in journalism in Milbank's pique?

As Milbank's furious tantrum demonstrates, the quality of the work is irrelevant. The fact that Pitney asked a much better question than 90+% of the drones around him dared to ask is irrelevant. And the fact that Obama wouldn't answer his question (which completely undermines any claim of substantive collusion) is irrelevant. Jeff Gannon is irrelevant, as is the complete indifference of Milbank & Friends to his extended stay in the pressroom. What matters to the Guild is that their ability to protect their turf has suffered another blow.

The end really can't come soon enough for these guys.

Man of Guantanamo

I am a pretty picky consumer of culture these days. One of the forms of entertainment I no longer much care for is musical theater. Andrew Lloyd Webber makes me barf; almost everything else is a revival or otherwise recycled. There are perhaps two shows that I consider worthy of such resurrection: West Side Story and Man of La Mancha. The former is so insanely difficult and demanding that it is virtually never staged (I've only seen the 1961 film); the latter is much easier to find (I've seen at least four stage productions).

One thing they have in common is their centuries-old source material -- Shakespeare and Cervantes are almost perfect contemporaries. (The two Broadway shows launched only a few years apart as well.) Another similarity is the importance of that material: Don Quixote is widely considered the first modern novel. And of course they are both tragedies in which optimism collides with a dark, hostile reality.

An interesting diffference between the works of the two authors is that Shakespeare's plays are often staged in updated contexts (the whole point of West Side Story); La Mancha is almost always staged in its original context. The whole play-within-a-play takes place in a prison where the protagonist awaits his turn before the Spanish Inquisition. That context has seemed sui generis for most of the 40+ years since its first run.

Until now.

And that's why I'm prattling on about Broadway -- I just realized that Man of La Mancha ought to be staged in a new prison with a Spanish name: Gitmo.

(It turns out I am not the first to think of this, and there have been small productions that are explicit, and a more mainstream one that drew explicit parallels in the program without changing the setting. But I think this is a textbook case in which familiar art could make an uncomfortable but needed point to people who might not otherwise hear it. Were I to stage it now, the play would start conventionally during the Inquisition, but when the play-within ends, the scene would be Guantanamo.)

More on La Mancha in context here. If you don't know the show and are tempted, skip the movie and find a stage production.

Free John Demjanjuk

Deported by the United States, retired autoworker John Demjanjuk was carried in a wheelchair onto a jet that departed Monday evening for Germany, which wants to try him as an accessory to the murders of Jews and others at a Nazi death camp in World War II.

Demjanjuk, 89, arrived in an ambulance at Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport after spending several hours with U.S. immigration officials at a downtown federal building. Airport commissioner Khalid Bahhur confirmed Demjanjuk was on the plane and that its destination is Germany.

The deportation came four days after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Demjanjuk's request to block deportation and about 3 1/2 years after he was last ordered deported.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN'-yuk) is wanted on a Munich arrest warrant that accuses him of 29,000 counts of accessory to murder as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The legal case spans three decades.

I really don't see how we can allow Demjanjuk's prosecution to go forward.

Would it not be unfair to "prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect (their country) for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by (their government)"?

Surely we can agree that Demjanjuk was "pressured by (his) fear, by (his) sense of duty to a fearful nation, led by a (government) awash in fear—all of this swimming in (his) head and clouding that moral compass—acted in good faith, from (his) perceptions." Under such circumstances, “no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the (Ministry) of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.”

WWII was, of course, a "dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

Indeed, "the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now ... to excoriate those who kept (their country) safe ..."

Torture in three grafs

As awful as The New Republic can be, this is brilliant in its economy:

First, there's no such thing as a government policy of "torturing terrorists. " There's only a policy of torturing people the government thinks are terrorists. Many of the suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, subjected to agonizing stress positions, turned out not to be terrorists--not because the soldiers who captured them were venal, but because they were human.

Second, torture is designed to force prisoners to provide an answer the interrogator already knows. The torturer relents when his subject provides the "correct" answer. Intelligence gathering, by contrast, is designed to garner answers the interrogator does not already know.

Finally, yes, we can imagine ticking-time-bomb situations where regular interrogation methods work too slowly and extreme measures might prove helpful. But this premise bears the same relationship to the question of legalizing torture as the morality of stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family does to the question of legalizing theft.

Pass the popcorn

Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration.

The photographs of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad jail in 2004 sparked worldwide outrage but the previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking “bad apples” who were acting on their own.

The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.

Some of the guards who were convicted of abuse want to return to court and argue that the previous administration sanctioned the abuse but withheld its role from their trials.

In other words, the patsies want another go at the "only following orders" defense -- the same one folks who set up the patsies now want to use themselves.

Josh Marshall, April 2009:

Being bold means taking responsibility for being bold. As I've argued before, I think the answer to the ticking time bomb rationale for torture is this: that in the extremely unlikely circumstance that government officials ever found themselves in that position of having a ticking time bomb ticking away, they might have to make the decision to break the law. Not fudge it or keep their actions hidden, but take the decision on their own responsibility that it was the best thing to do in the situation -- despite it being wrong as a general matter -- and then bring their decision to attention of the people and law enforcement authorities and throw themselves on the mercy of the public. Thomas Jefferson explored a similar question and argument for the position a president could find himself in when faced with extra-constitutional or even unconstitutional actions.

In any case, if your patriotism is such that in an extreme situation you'd risk your own liberty to defend the lives of Americans, that's courage. But nothing else really cuts it.

Me, December 2005:

If you really believe in some higher law, then you should be willing to pay a temporal price for your willingness to torture in its service. Then when the time comes, perhaps you can explain to your higher authority why you think making it safe for heathens like me to torture with impunity makes ours a better world.

I feel there is a strong categorical imperative against torture. I am also in at least some contexts a utilitarian. I honestly don't know what I would do if faced with this situation. But I do know that if I honestly believed that by doing something I considered wrong I would certainly prevent the suffering of millions, the illegality of my actions would not be a major factor in my decision. I would much prefer that my government declare torture illegal and risk jail in your hypothetical situation than sleep in my own bed in a country that condones such barbarity.

Moral decisions involve costs. What personal price would you pay to prevent the Holocaust? I would like to believe I am strong and noble enough not just to commit a personal wrong, but to pay the price for that transgression, to benefit the many. And I would hope that, when compared to the millions of deaths and countless other horrors prevented, my own punishment for murder would have only trifling weight in my personal calculus.

Doing the right thing often means paying a price. Ask Joseph Wilson. Ask Sibel Edmonds. Ask Bunnatine Greenhouse. Torture is, at the very least, almost always the wrong thing. I want my country to make sure that torturers pay a price, and I’d rather punish the one-in-a-million person whose actions are justified than encourage others with motives less pure to sin with impunity.

And that's a big part of why I don't post so much nowadays.

Clarity

A simple answer to a simple question:

It has been known for years that torture is useless as a technique for intelligence gathering. Subjects will say anything to make it stop. All it is good for is extracting false confessions. So why would the Bush Administration engage in torture?

Because false confessions were not just an unfortunate side effect of the torture; they were the point of the torture.

Update: Frank Rich goes there:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.