Update [2005-2-28 10:45:11 by Armando]: From the diaries by Armando. Please also see Bob Herbert today. If you had any doubt that the GOP condones torture this should put it to rest:
As a nation, does the United States have a conscience? Or is anything and everything O.K. in post-9/11 America? If torture and the denial of due process are O.K., why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish - which it can, and which it does - where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross? . . . Mr. Arar was the victim of an American policy that is known as extraordinary rendition. That's a euphemism. What it means is that the United States seizes individuals, presumably terror suspects, and sends them off without even a nod in the direction of due process to countries known to practice torture.
A Massachusetts congressman, Edward Markey, has taken the eminently sensible step of introducing legislation that would ban this utterly reprehensible practice. In a speech on the floor of the House, Mr. Markey, a Democrat, said: "Torture is morally repugnant whether we do it or whether we ask another country to do it for us. It is morally wrong whether it is captured on film or whether it goes on behind closed doors unannounced to the American people."
Unfortunately, the outlook for this legislation is not good. I asked Pete Jeffries, the communications director for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, if the speaker supported Mr. Markey's bill. After checking with the policy experts in his office, Mr. Jeffries called back and said: "The speaker does not support the Markey proposal. He believes that suspected terrorists should be sent back to their home countries." Surprised, I asked why suspected terrorists should be sent anywhere. Why shouldn't they be held by the United States and prosecuted? "Because," said Mr. Jeffries, "U.S. taxpayers should not necessarily be on the hook for their judicial and incarceration costs." It was, perhaps, the most preposterous response to any question I've ever asked as a journalist. It was not by any means an accurate reflection of Bush administration policy. All it indicated was that the speaker's office does not understand this issue, and has not even bothered to take it seriously.
More important, it means that torture by proxy, close kin to contract murder, remains all right. Congressman Markey's bill is going nowhere. Extraordinary rendition lives.
The GOP condones torture. And so do Right Wing pundits like Goldberg, as MB demonstrates in this diary.
One thing about the ascendancy of the rightwankers has been positive. To capture the reins of power, they've employed disinformation techniques and dirty tricks that make Jeb Stuart MacGruder's and G. Gordon Liddy's underhandedness a third of a century ago look like pranks in a student body presidential election. They deploy smears and misleading statistics and outright lies to further objectives as far away as the Iraqi oil fields and as close to home as your FICA deductions. When their nominees to high posts come around for confirmation hearings, suddenly once-pithy opinions soften and blur and memories fade.
But winning is the dad of hubris, and every so often, despite all the PR consultants' warnings, one of their minions, seeing decades of NeoImp rule ahead, slips up and gives us ... ahem ... a clear channel directly into his "thought process."
So it is with Jonah Goldberg's phone interview with Salon's Mark Follman regarding why the right has been so quiet on the issue of torture. [The boldface is mine.]
"To be brutally honest, I'm torn about it. I don't mean to be callous about it: I think the U.S. government should do everything it can to see to it that innocent people don't get treated horribly. I don't know anybody on the right who would say, 'I'm in favor of innocent people being tortured.' But that said, I think a lot of people on the right are skeptical of hype: That the allegations are not nearly as horrendous or as widespread a matter of policy as the media portrays."
Goldberg adds that many Bush supporters are more "realist" than their detractors say. "For an undertaking of this scale, this war is probably one of the most humanitarian efforts the U.S. has ever conducted, in terms of limiting civilian casualties and all of these things. What you get is an environment in which the U.S. gets punished for only being good, and not being perfect," he says. "But many people I know don't buy into the notion that wars which need to be won can be fought as antiseptically as people who are against the war claim they should be."
For him, that concept extends to the clandestine activities of the U.S. government. "If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans -- and I'm all in favor of that -- we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I'm not horrified by that proposition," Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, "what undermines what we stand for," he says, "is the publication of all this information." ...
"I do think there's a reason why the CIA does this stuff in secret, and why I think it should do a lot of things in secret. These things have a lot of propaganda value, both negative and positive, so I think we need to separate out what we think are 'good policies' from what the consequences are if those policies are publicized."
Many progressives I know might, upon reading this gaudy putrescence, dream about chaining Mr. Goldberg to the floor in front of his computer for a 36-hour stretch, letting him squirm in his own feces and urine while listening to George Bush say "moooooolahs" and "nukular" repeatedly at 100 decibels. But none of my friends would turn their idle dreams of torture into reality no matter what the provocation, no matter how insidious the enemies of freedom like Mr. Goldberg become.
Likewise, civil discourse with these spouters must remain an unfulfilled dream. The men and women Goldberg has aligned himself with secretly outsource torture to Egypt and Pakistan and then wonder why so much of the world sneers when America publicly urges these nations to make progress toward democratic rule. Dissent they view as treason, so what can there possibly be to discuss? Maggots are unmoved by argument.