John Yoo's latest affront to decency

For Lent this year, as in every year, I'm attempting to swear off french fries, and contempt for any and all other members of the human race. I'm doing much better with the french fries so far. John Yoo is not helping, what with his latest braying, narcissistic rant in the Wall Street Journal about how grateful Barack Obama should be to him for preserving his commander in chief powers.

I haven't the time this morning to deconstruct every self-pitying contrivance the Journal has seen fit to publish in this op-ed, but I can't help myself in pointing out two things.

One, Yoo is following the script that last week's release of the OPR report on his and Jay Bybee's misdeeds in the Office of Legal Counsel, and senior attorney David Margolis's refusal to adopt the recommendations of professional sanction, represent a full vindication of everything Yoo did. This is just absolutely wrong. Margolis agreed with every substantive claim the OPR made about Yoo and Bybee's biased, shoddy, inaccurate, and destructive work on behalf of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to say nothing of the fact that said work was also rejected by his own Justice Department after years of damage. What saved Yoo from a disbarment recommendation was solely the fact that everyone knew he was an ideologue to begin with, and he actually believed in the president's policy objective independent of the law. What Yoo is saying now is simply a lie.

The second point I have to make is in reference to the last few paragraphs of today's op-ed, where Yoo characterizes the repudiation of his brand of unchecked presidential and military ruthlessness as unserious and manifestly dangerous, and far worse, co-opts the American military to do it:

This is no idle worry. In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.

In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation's wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.

This absolutely makes my blood boil with, yes, contempt, and it does me no good with God to hide it, even during Lent. This is how the story of the SEAL deaths is actually described, by the sole survivor who lived it, Marcus Luttrel:

The four Seals zigzagged all night and through the morning until they reached a wooded slope. An Afghan man wearing a turban suddenly appeared, then a farmer and a teenage boy. Luttrell gave a PowerBar to the boy while the Seals debated whether the Afghans would live or die.

If the Seals killed the unarmed civilians, they would violate military rules of engagement; if they let them go, they risked alerting the Taliban. According to Luttrell, one Seal voted to kill them, one voted to spare them and one abstained. It was up to Luttrell.

Part of his calculus was practical. "I didn't want to go to jail." Ultimately, the core of his decision was moral. "A frogman has two personalities. The military guy in me wanted to kill them," he recalled. And yet: "They just seemed like -- people. I'm not a murderer."

Luttrell, by his account, voted to let the Afghans go. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about that decision," he said. "Not a second goes by."

At 1:20 p.m., about an hour after the Seals released the Afghans, dozens of Taliban members overwhelmed them. The civilians he had spared, Luttrell believed, had betrayed them. At the end of a two-hour firefight, only he remained alive.

I won't comment on the ultimate wisdom, or lack thereof, of Mr. Luttrel's decision not to murder the Afgahn civilians who ultimately betrayed him and his men, except to say God bless their memories and there but for the grace of Heaven go I. But no matter what, John Yoo's assertion, five years after the fact, that the SEAL team leader ordered those civilians released, not because he wasn't a stone cold killer and detaining them in the middle of a covert operation was impossible, but rather because he shared Yoo's irrational fear of an overactive civil liberties lobby and therefore suppressed his best military judgment, is a supremely detestable and self-serving distortion of the available facts.

I don't want to see John Yoo imprisoned, or disbarred, or flogged in the street. I only want him to shut the f**k up. He can rot away at Berkeley for the rest of his miserable life, for all I care - but make no mistake, he is absolute poison. That's ten dollars in the jar for me; I'm off to Penance.

Blistering, mind-numbing stupidity at Newsweek.

Decades from now, perhaps on a slow-news week during the Timberlake administration, historians will look at the first years of the 21st century and study how, in the United States, temporary erosions in government accountability and civil liberties were accompanied by a staggering reduction in the probative and intellectual standards of the Establishment press. Exhibit A could likely be yesterday's inexplicable posting of an internal discussion amongst the Newsweek editorial staff, regarding the use of the word "terrorist" in our common discourse in the light of last week's Texas suicide bombing/plane crash directed at the IRS. For reasons that surpass understanding, the leadership at Newsweek decided to make available for public consumption an exchange of ideas that would have any reasonably demanding tenth grade civics instructor throwing up her hands in disgust. Here are a few tastes, but by all means read the whole thing:

Kathy Jones, Managing Editor (Multimedia)
Did the label terrorist ever successfully stick to McVeigh? Or the Unabomber? Or any of the IRS bombers in our violence list?

Here is my handy guide:
Lone wolfish American attacker who sees gov't as threat to personal freedom: bomber, tax protester, survivalist, separatist

Group of Americans bombing/kidnapping to protest U.S. policies on war/poverty/personal freedom/ - radical left-wing movement, right-wing separatists

All foreign groups or foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American gov't: terrorists



Patrick Enright, Senior Articles Editor
Yeah, maybe the distinction depends too on whom you're attacking — if it's the people you think wronged you (like the IRS), you're a protester/separatist/etc., and if it's indiscriminate killing of clearly innocent people, you're a terrorist.

A managing editor at a national news magazine, thinking about whether Timothy McVeigh can still be called a terrorist, and proposing that the word only be used when scary foreign people do bad things. For Americans who maim and kill their fellow civilians, we'll just call those people radicals, separatists, protesters, and survivalists. (Funny, I had no idea those things were crimes.) Then, a helpful suggestion that if the perpetrator thinks he's only killing people who wronged him, then that's not really terrorism. Like if you're just trying to kill anyone happening to work at the IRS that day, as opposed to say, the people who worked at the Pentagon on 9/11, then that's not terrorism. But this one's my favorite:

Dan Stone, Reporter
Yep, comes down to ID. This guy was a regular guy-next-door Joe Schmo. Terrorists have beards in live in caves [sic]. He was also an American, so targeting the IRS seems more a political statement – albeit a crazy one – whereas Abdulmutallab was an attack on our freedom. Kind of the idea that an American can talk smack about America, but when it comes from someone foreign, we rally together. Or in the case of the Christmas bomber, vie for self-righteousness.

Bombing the IRS, if you're an American, is just a crazy political statement, whereas true "terrorists" are easily identifiable because they have beards.

And it goes on and on like that. None of these august members of the Fourth Estate, oddly, have the idea to Google the federal statutes, which define terrorism thusly:

the term "Federal crime of terrorism" means an offense that
-
(A) is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of
government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against
government conduct

No mention of a rhetorical pass if the suspect is making a decent political point, or if he's a scary foreigner. But here we have journalists, partly responsible for guiding public opinion, actively proposing that terrorism, against which we are generally at war, should be defined solely as acts perpetrated by foreign madmen who just hate our freedom and couldn't possibly have a coherent political thought in their heads, whereas if an American takes it upon himself to kill his fellow citizens to make a political statement, that's different. We certainly shouldn't apply any terms that inspire our universal outrage and repudiation - that guy's just a protester, and since he's an American, maybe therefore we ought not to dismiss his point of view entirely. I suppose I should be happy on some level that we aren't going to war with everyone who hates the tax code in response to Texas - but is it any wonder how wars in Muslim countries get started and sustained when people think this way?

This double standard isn't limited to Newsweek. To wit, here's Rep. Steve King, R-IA, talking to ThinkProgress (what is it about Republican Congressmen names King):

KING: I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. And I’m still for abolishing the IRS, I’ve been for it for thirty years and I’m for a national sales tax. [...] It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.

"Sad the incident happened." Can you imagine a government official opportunistically using a terrorist attack (like the Christmas Day attempted bombing) to shore up his or her case against civilian deaths in Afghanistan? And here's Jed Babbin making a JOKE about the Texas suicide bombing and fellow tax protester Grover Norquist at CPAC:

"I'm really happy to see Grover today. He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."

Look, I can concede that there are close cases here when we try to apply the terrorist label. Nidal Hasan attacked what could be perceived as a military target at Fort Hood, although no one could ever claim he or anyone else was under a direct threat from unarmed troops that hadn't yet deployed to a battle zone. Scott Roeder's murder of George Tiller unquestionably had a political context, but his target was specifically Tiller, not just abortion policy in general. (For the record, they're both terrorists as well.) But for the love of Pete, Joseph Stack flew a plane into a building because he didn't like government policy, and he killed an innocent man in the process, and yet we have members of the press and the government unwilling or unable to treat his crime like the textbook definition of terrorism that it is. As long as that's because either his looks, his name, or his politics reminds us too much of ourselves, then we are truly lost.

It's worth pointing out that we could be having the same exact discussion about the word "torture". To most defenders, acts like waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, beatings, etc. are unquestionably torture when Someone Else does it to us. Of course John McCain was tortured, that's the perfect word to use. But when Americans do the exact same things, use the exact same tactics, to detainees in the war on terror, it couldn't possibly be torture - even when the victims turn out to be completely innocent - because we're the Good Guys, and our hearts are always in the right place even when we cross the line once in a while. Again, little wonder we can't seem to help ourselves.

Hat tip to Greenwald on this, with another great post.

Listen to General David Petraeus

This is a REAL voice on national security:

"I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on in the 101st Airborne Division we're just going to--look, we just said we'd decide to obey the Geneva Convention, to, to move forward with that. That has, I think, stood elements in good stead. We have worked very hard over the years, indeed, to ensure that elements like the International Committee of the Red Cross and others who see the conduct of our detainee operations and so forth approve of them. Because in the cases where that is not true, we end up paying a price for it ultimately. Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are nonbiodegradables. They don't go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick in the Central Command area of responsibility. Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual that was given, the force of law by Congress, that that works."

Video here.

OPR report on Bush-era torture released

Last Friday, the Justice Department finally released its report from the Office of Professional Responsibility regarding the legal work of Messrs. John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which provided the Bush Administration lawful cover to systematically dismantle America's commitment to domestic and international prohibitions on cruel and inhumane treatment. The final recommendation of the OPR was that both attorneys receive professional sanction for being in breach of their duties as officers of the court, in that they failed to provide thorough, objective, and independent advice to their client, the government of the United States. Also released with the OPR report, however, is a refusal to accept the OPR's recommendation, from David Margolis, the senior Justice official responsible for adjudicating disputes of this nature within the Department. Mr. Margolis agrees with the substance of OPR's assessment of the legal work of Yoo and Bybee, but finds that no clear enough standard of behavior actually exists in the Department of Justice against which these attorneys could be held in violation. So while they indisputably showed "poor judgment", they're more or less off the hook.

I'm of two minds on today's events, neither of which involves any real outrage. On the one hand, what I feel in reading these reports - as I struggle to digest the process by which the country's most powerful attorneys deliberately twisted, manipulated, or simply ignored centuries of theory and precedent in service to facile, long-discredited thuggery - is just kind of a detached sadness and revulsion. Sort of like watching seagulls pick away at the dessicated carcass of a beached whale, and reflecting how something once great and majestic can so easily be reduced to dead rotting weight. I won't reproduce the entire case against Yoo and Bybee here - this piece does a pretty thorough job of it - except to say that Margolis's defense more or less boils down to the fact that these lawyers can't be held responsible for doing what everyone expected them to do anyway, which was to find a way to justify Bush and Cheney's desired policy, no matter what a truly objective, independent assessment would yield in the longer term. John Yoo is on the record as saying that the President of the United States is not bound by any law whatsoever when he is acting in defense of the nation - up to and including the mass murder of civilians. What difference would it make to him that US Courts have prosecuted foreign and domestic individuals for waterboarding? Why would he care that the eventual exposure of the administration's activities would render moot any future prosecution of our enemies, for similar violations? Why would it matter at all to him that the federal statutes prohibiting cruel and inhumane treatment tie those standards specifically to the protections that American citizens enjoy under the fifth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments? The President wanted a legal opinion, and John Yoo had a law degree; that's all that was ethically required. Not competence, not thoroughness, not consensus. Just John Yoo. That's how this works.

So, one guy says waterboarding's legal, then another bunch of guys says no it's not and anyone who says otherwise is a lousy lawyer, then another guy says ok, maybe it's not legal, but if people who think it is are acting in the interest of the President, who are us simple folk to say any different, and so on, and so forth. Kind of despicable all around; but actually I think today is a good day on balance, because at long last it's all out in the open. David Margolis actually has a history of preferring OPR reports to remain sealed, so as not to unnecessarily humiliate targets of internal DoJ investigation. But now, all Americans finally get to see how all this sausage is made, and consider the consequences of allowing the parts of the DoJ which check the government to rot like a beached whale. This is our right, more than anything else - to know the truth. Defenders of the Bush Administration have already begun to claim that the OPR report and Margolis's addendum exonerate Yoo and Bybee, which of course they don't. Should the public choose to find out the truth for ourselves, by reading the actual words of the parties involved, now we can do that.

One final point on the report...I was unaware until I read it that the waterboarding torture of Abu Zubaydah actually was claimed to have supported allegations against Binyamin Mohamed, once suspected of being involved in a dirty bomb plot against the US. I've written about Mohamed before; he was released last year because he was INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES, and his case was the subject of a dispute between the British High Court and American intelligence agencies, regarding the release of classified information pertaining to his treatment while in custody. The seven originally redacted paragraphs in the Court's opinion have also been released, to the consternation of American authorities, and the government of Great Britain is now on the record finding that the US engaged in behavior that would be in violation of British and international law had it happened there. As this Washington Post article documents, just as the torture of Abu Zubaydah produced bad intel on Binyamin Mohamed, the cruel and inhumane punishment of Binyamin Mohamed produced bad intel on other detainees, which were also ultimately released. This is worse than just honest mistakes that unfortunately resulted in the pain and suffering of some foreigners - this was an unconscionable waste of resources by people trusted to keep us safe. Until Cheney and Bush came along, everyone knew that this stuff didn't work, that it was the sole hallmark of fools and tyrants, and that it would produce more bad intelligence than good. To this day, not a single verified case of actionable plot-related intelligence against al Qaeda has been successfully attributed to the "enhanced interrogation program", although there have been dozens of documented deaths from it. And yet, even after Bush himself shut it down as useless and detrimental, the program's defenders continue to stroll the op-ed pages of the country's biggest papers crowing about unfair politicizing of sound legal opinions, and how Barack Obama is undoing all the great work they did for this country. Insanity.

And finally, in the background to all this, the American government disrupts a huge plot to set off explosives inside New York City, without military tribunals, or enhanced techniques, or indefinite detention laws. Naijbullah Zazi has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit terrorism, and is cooperating with authorities, while facing a certain life sentence. What say the critics? Nothing yet - but I'll let you know...

Dick Cheney admits to a being a war criminal

From the transcript of his This Week interview:

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding."

Sullivan sums it up nicely - but just keep in mind that the current president has said waterboarding is torture. Torture is a war crime. It doesn't matter who's doing it, or to whom it's being done. Torture is a war crime. So OK, there have only ever been three choices here, but now they're starker than ever, since we have a clear admission.

1. Prosecute Dick Cheney under the federal war crimes statutes. If waterboarding is torture, and torture is a war crime, and the Bush Administration ordered that waterboarding be done, then Eric Holder is himself in violation of law if he doesn't investigate and prosecute.

2. Redefine waterboarding as not being torture (putting ourselves on the other side of our allies, the International Red Cross, and hundreds of years of domestic precedent), and thereby abdicate any authority we might have to prosecute our enemies for waterboarding American troops.

3. Decide that whatever standards we may want to apply to the rest of the world, they don't apply to the American government when one President or another says otherwise, so screw all y'all.

What will the Obama administration choose? Doing nothing implies either option 2 or option 3, and he's already on the record as not supporting option 2. Option 3 might make the troops safer, but does anyone want to explain how Option 3 keeps us average folks safer? Anyone?

The case of Anwar al-Awlaki: the Presidential death sentence

More details and commentary continue to trickle in regarding President Obama's claimed authority to assassinate American citizens as part of the fight against Islamic terrorism. Exhibit A is Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric from a Falls Church, VA mosque who was in contact with Nidal Hasan prior to his rampage at Fort Hood in November, and who, following that act of multiple murder, praised Hasan as a warrior for Islam. More recently, reports have emerged that al-Awlaki also had contact with Umar AbdulMutallab, the Christmas Day attempted bomber, and is also a top recruiter for al Qaeda in Yemen, our most recently opened front in the war on terror.

Wow. Pretty damned open and shut, wouldn't you say? All the evidence seems to point to this guy being a clear and present threat to the safety of American citizens, and if the CIA has the means and opportunity to take him out, who could call them wrong for doing so, Fifth Amendment or no Fifth Amendment? Except maybe, since we are after all talking about a death sentence here, perhaps looking just one layer deeper won't hurt.

Inconvenient fact #1: Authorities were aware of the emails between Hasan and al-Awlaki for months prior to the Fort Hood massacre. In those emails, the cleric sympathizes with Hasan's frustration at the Muslim casualties from the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan, which far outweigh American losses, both military and civilian. But, officials found no direct incitement to violence in the correspondence. There was never even enough evidence to put Hasan on restricted duty, much less to charge his penpals with conspiracy to commit murder.

Inconvenient fact #2: Al-Awlaki's statements of support after the Ft. Hood murders, in which he praises Hasan's choice of a military target rather than a civilian one, are protected speech in this country. We are free to despise and vilify him for it, and to point out all the myriad ways in which he is wrong, but in a nation where we permit White Power parades to be put on by modern day Nazis and openly elude to armed revolution in the context of health care reform, that speech is, like it or not, legal. He can't even be arrested for it, much less executed without trial. Put it this way, if Jeremiah Wright came out and said the same things about Fort Hood, how would we respond?

Inconvenient fact #3: The evidence that (anonymous) officials tell us we have linking al-Awlaki to ongoing al Qaeda recruiting efforts comes from two places: Umar Farouk AbdulMuttalab and Yemeni intelligence. Now look, I'm the first one to say I'm thrilled that the Christmas bomber is cooperating with authorities after being arrested, Mirandized, and charged in the civilian justice system, but even so - can we really not think of any reason to take that son of a bitch's word with a grain of salt? And the Yemenis - please - we're giving them $70M in military aid to fight terrorism inside their borders. We're gonna want to see some results from that - handing us an American citizen who's on the record saying despicable things about us, and is probably somewhere in Yemen right now, costs them very little. Call me unconvinced.

According to Al-Awlaki's family, he's currently hiding in Yemen not with terrorists, but with local tribespeople. Naturally, since we've announced our intention to kill him, he's keeping his head down, except to give interviews to al Jazeera where he praises the actions of Hasan and wishes Abdulmuttalab had chosen a military target, even while insisting that he had nothing to do with the planning or execution of either of those attacks. Who the hell knows whether he's guilty of everything the government says he is, or if it's his family who's right, and the guy is just an outspoken fanatic with no operational impact on terrorist activities at all. The point is that adjudicating the distinction between those two possibilities is extraordinarily critical to our way of life in this country. Before the American government gets to just put someone's name on a list and execute them on sight, they're supposed to have to prove their case better than this.

I hold no particular sympathy for Anwar al-Awlaki - I find his his willingness to praise the actions of terrorists, and violence in general, totally and completely repugnant. For all I know there is plenty of evidence that I have not seen which would convict al-Awlaki of material support for such terrorism. But that's the point - no one has seen or evaluated that evidence, and the accused has had no opportunity to confront it. The decision to kill this cleric from Falls Church was made by the President of the United States alone, with no independent review by a judge or by Congress, and that too is repugnant to me. Extra-judicial assassination is one more authority our government has claimed, along with the torture of both the innocent and the guilty, that until now was the exclusive province of the most backward, fanatical, and theocratic regimes on the planet.

And if your response to all this angst is that this isn't about crime and punishment, it's about self-defense, and our President doesn't need an independent justification to do what he thinks is best when we're at war, then leaving aside just how comfortable we are with accepting the idea of a global battlefield and Presidential war powers without end, I'd like to understand just what's so wrong about Anwar Al-Awlaki's argument in the first place. If an individual like himself can be attacked and executed as a military target, plain and simple, then what do we say when he asks, what's different about Fort Hood? The USS Cole? The Pentagon? How do we justify our moral outrage at those acts of terrorism? Are we better than the enemy, or are we all just soldiers after all?

One final point. This whole discussion would be a hell of a lot more interesting to me if I thought that the execution of someone guilty of all the things of which Anwar al-Awlaki is accused would do much good in the overall fight. An analogy I've heard brought up is what we'd be justified in doing if an American nuclear scientist with classified information was defecting to the Soviets, and the CIA had him in their sights as he crossed through East Berlin. Well, candidly I'm not too sure about that situation either. But the comparison gives al-Awlaki far too much credit. If you think there is any shortage of charismatic Muslim extremists ready to encourage young fools to take up arms against the United States, and if you further think that we can reduce that overall number by sending in unmanned drones on bombing missions with individual targets (missions which have an unfortunate habit of also killing civilians), then I think you're way more credulous than me. Case in point: reports this week indicate that the US has successfully taken out the operational head of the Taliban in tribal Pakistan, Hakimullah Meshud. (This assumes we got him - he's been reported dead three times in the past four weeks). This victory comes six months after we successfully took out his predecessor, Baitulla Meshud. There are evidently three or four individuals in the Taliban hierarchy angling to replace the man recently killed...and maybe that replacement will be either less effective or less motivated to continue the fight. Maybe not. Around, and around, and around we go.

LOST RETURNS!!!

There is something magnificent about the moment a fantasy epic begins it's final chapter. That instant where you get ready to take one last ride with beloved characters before saying goodbye. Like when the lights went down for Revenge of the Sith, or cracking the binding on The Deathly Hallows, Tuesday night was one of those moments - a warmed apple turnover topped with ice cream, a new bottle of Syrah, the company of my wife, and a 50-inch plasma TV on which was displayed season six premiere of LOST.

I know many who gave up on Lost in season two when they introduced the Others, or season three when we learned they got off the island, or season five when all the timeline hopping started. My conviction remains that those people are missing out big time, because LOST isn't about an island, or a plane crash, or time travel, or anything of the kind. What it's about is far more important - it's about whether hope itself is justified, and whether faith will someday be vindicated. It's about whether our choices matter, and in just what respect. Whether regardless of we do or how we act, everything is fated to end exactly the same way, or whether as Jacob says, it only ends once, and anything and everything up until then is just progress.

Governments and religions, even those which claim universal inclusion and participation, are invariably corrupted by the allure of power and the curse of vanity. Art, on the other hand (and storytelling in particular) merely invites us, at our own pace, to reflect together on what we have in common, what makes us special, and what's going to aid us in our pursuit of the good life. And with all my heart, I believe that it is far better for men and women to reflect on such things, even at a subconscious level, than to not. So when seven to ten million people every week choose to share such an experience, like every Tuesday at 8 PM this spring, it gives me hope, when it seems so much else in this world only serves to divide us. Imagination, inspiration, a shared vicarious triumph over our personal and cultural demons - these opportunities are few and far between, and they should be savored. I'm loving this - the premiere was fantastic, and I can't wait for next week.

OPR Memo on Torture soon to be relased; McConnell calls Bush soft on Terror

One particularly crucial missing link in the ongoing effort to discover just what the hell went on during the Bush Administration's systematic dismantling of America's prohibitions on torture is the 2006 report from the DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility. The Bush team's protection from prosecution in these matters relies almost entirely on the assessment of three lawyers that subjecting al Qaeda suspects to drowning, freezing, beating, sleep deprivation, etc. was perfectly legal. However, it has long been known that the Justice Department's independent review of the legal reasoning undertaken in that assessment was so flawed and weak as to rise to the level of professional misconduct. Accordingly, it has long been obvious that, far from having taken an independent analysis of domestic and international legal precedent as pertains to torture, the public's lawyers simply told the President what he wanted to hear in a deliberate attempt to provide impunity and avoid future prosecution for war crimes. The only question has been, what has been taking so long for Obama's Justice Department to release said OPR memo to the public (after all, the legal memos which permitted the torture in the first place have themselves been released). Well, now we know - the OPR report was taking so long to be released because it was being rewritten to soften the findings.

A career lawyer at Justice has downgraded the initial assessment of the OPR - which originally said that DoJ lawyers Yoo, Bradbury, and Bybee violated their professional responsibilities by providing legal cover to the President - to say that they simply showed "poor judgment" in doing so. Poor judgment, which included a finding that the President was not bound by the Convention Against Torture or the corresponding federal statutes in a time of war, even though said treaty specifically calls out war and other emergencies as circumstances that do not rise to the level of exemption. Poor judgment, which failed to recognize the fact that waterboarding has been prosecuted by the United States as a crime of torture in both domestic law enforcement cases and international war crimes tribunals. Poor judgment, which included making this assessment only after the President was unable to secure a pledge from other divisions of justice that American agents wouldn't be prosecuted for torture after following orders from the President.

Once the new, whitewashed report comes out, it will, conveniently, remove any obligation on Obama's DoJ to take any action against Bush's lawyers, and will even remove the specter of professional rebuke for these fine public servants. And from there, anyone happy with the government's current position on torture - which is that the President can do whatever the hell he wants, whenever he wants - can rest assured that those of us who disagree are simply exercising a different legal judgment. No true law really applies - only the good graces of the executive branch. It's worth pausing here to note that the federal statutes defining cruel and unusual punishment for the purposes of interpreting the Convention Against Torture specifically refer to the same standards one would use to interpret the Eigth Amendment of the Constitution. Just imagine what will happen the next time a US citizen is abused in federal custody, now that the Obama administration has effectively notarized the Bush administration's decision to torture foreign detainees. We have officially joined the ranks of Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia in our legally sanctioned conduct against foreign threats.

In other news, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has gone on the record saying that George W. Bush made some serious mistakes in the war on terror. Namely, he never should have tried Richard Reid and others in a civilian court the way Obama's trying to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he let too many people go from Guantanamo Bay. Starting a war under false pretenses, expanding unfunded entitlements in an unprecedented manner, nominating his own in-house counsel to the Supreme Court - no objection to any of these. But following the model of Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, etc. when it comes to the treatment of non-state terrorists, and releasing detained individuals when we have no evidence that they did anything wrong - now the Senator's ready to speak out against this breach of the public trust. McConnell also confidently predicted that Congress has enough votes to cut off any funding Barack Obama might need to try any al Qaeda members in criminal court, or to close Gitmo as he desires.

On this fine morning I find myself reflecting on just how marvelous all this must make Osama bin Laden feel. After decades of treating him and his ilk like the common scum they are - with same accord as we would any other violent criminal - the United States is finally ready, on a bipartisan basis no less, to concede that today's Islamic terrorists are so dastardly, so cunning, so powerful and Batman-villainesque, that we must abandon our normal modes of operating and disavow our faith in ordinary law enforcement and civilian justice. He and his band of warriors have roused our attention so greatly and irreversibly, that we're now prepared to opine that even George W. Bush didn't take the threat seriously enough. Al Qaeda has caused us so much fear that we dare not let them into our cities and our courtrooms, even in chains, lest they turn our centuries-old system of justice against us. He must be very proud to be given this much respect.

I also find myself wondering, as our leaders go on TV to talk about how scared we should all be, just what I would say to a citizen of Pakistan or Afghanistan about why he should throw his lot in with the Americans at this particular point in history, now that we've shed our faith in the rule of law, our moral authority in the treatment of our enemies, and now finally our serenity in the face of simple-minded fanatics with nothing to offer the world but outdated revolutionist rhetoric and bombs in their underwear.