The Torture Regime
With Obama putting a priority on shutting down Guantanamo, rumors flying around about George W. Bush planning a sweeping pardon for everyone in his administration who took part in, planned, or knew about his torture regime; and the possibility of president-elect Obama authorizing a “truth and reconciliation” type commission to investigate same, this might be a good time for me to point to a review I’ve written of Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side, which I read about a month ago.
The review is at my new blog (can you say, addicted?), The Book-Driven Life.
Covering Torture
Kate Klonick at TPMMuckraker comments on today’s Washington Post report on the latest torture memos to surface:
Detainee Being Held as “Enemy Combatant” in Floating Prison Is Losing His Sanity
Yesterday, matttbastard wrote an important piece about a federal judge’s decision ordering the Bush administration to immediately transfer to the United States and release 17 Chinese Uighur detainees who have been held illegally at Guantanamo for seven years.
Torture and Warrantless Surveillance Are the Same Issue
Via Glenn, the Washington Post has a write-up on Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on America’s Ideals. Here is what Mayer reveals in that book, which is due out this week:
“Constraint is Intolerable”
Andrew Bacevich, reviewing Jane Mayer’s new book The Dark Side:
That fear should trump concern for due process and indeed justice qualifies as a recurring phenomenon in American history. In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like déjà vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else’s civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.
Although Mayer does not dwell on this historical context, her account suggests implicitly that the present period differs in at least one crucial respect. Whereas the earlier departures from the rule of law represented momentary if egregious lapses in democratic practice, the abuses orchestrated from within the Bush administration suggest that democracy itself is fast becoming something of a sham. From Mayer, we learn that in George W. Bush’s Washington, the decisions that matter are made in secret by a handful of presidential appointees committed to the proposition that nothing should inhibit the exercise of executive power. The Congress, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the “interagency process” — all of these constitute impediments that threaten to constrain the president. In a national security crisis, constraint is intolerable. Much the same applies to the media and, by extension, to the American people: The public’s right to know extends no further than whatever the White House wishes to make known.
h/t Laura Rozen
Wingnuts Want Addington in the Witness Protection Program After Delahunt Joke
The right’s hypocrisy is on display again in its unhinged reaction to Rep. Delahunt’s attempt at humor on the House floor today:
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