The Enlightened Despot

Over the past few weeks, almost every political blog I read that didn’t have an evening link round-up has added one. I suspect they know something we don’t, so I’m jumping on the bandwagon. The plan is to have an installment every week night, and a longer one on Sundays covering the weekend and looking back at the prior week. I’ll include a bit more of a comment on many of the items than one finds in a typical round-up, hence the title.

Tonight’s edition is of bonus length, including all sorts of old news from the past few weeks that I never got around to mentioning. Here we go:

• Nancy Pelosi doubled down on her claim that the briefing she got from the CIA in 2002 did not include the revelation that waterboarding had already been used. She requested that the CIA release its notes on the briefing to verify her claim. If she’s bluffing, I tip my cap to her ballsiness, if not to her torture-enabling. Even generally pro-Pelosi folk agree that the truth about her briefings probably wouldn’t look too good for her. Meanwhile, John Boehner says Pelosi should provide proof that the wasn’t told about the waterboarding or else apologize to the CIA for accusing them of lying. This makes perfect sense. By the same token, I hope Boehner will provide proof that he didn’t tell me how much he likes smoking crack, or else refrain from accusing me of lying about the matter.
• President Obama reversed his position on releasing a series of photos depicting the abuse of prisoners, deferring to the military’s purported belief that they would inflame anti-American sentiment abroad, thus endangering our troops. Needless to say, everybody completely lost it. Deep breaths, guys. Obama might be planning to punt on holding Americans accountable for torture, but the only plausible path toward not punting is necessarily a long, slow affair, with plenty of disappointment along the way. We simply won’t be in a position to judge any time soon.
• Cheerios are now a drug. Seriously. For some time now, General Mills has been advertising that Cheerios are “clinically proven to reduce cholesterol”. That counts as marketing the product as a cholesterol-combatting medication, which requires that the breakfast cereal be subjected to FDA testing. Assuming they don’t want this, General Mills will have to back off the claim. But I fear that we’ll still see off-label Cheerios recommendations from the medical community. There oughta’ be a law!
• Over at Next Right, Max Borders came up with five planks for a revamped GOP platform. Three of them are good ideas on the merits, and of those three, one could conceivably be adopted by a reformed Republican Party: means-test all federal entitlements. It does not make sense, Borders argues, to make direct transfer payments to rich old people simply to bolster the illusion that Social Security is actually a pension plan. No, Max, it sure doesn’t. And taking the lead on taking money away from rich people on solid conservative grounds in a way that would make Democrats uncomfortable would be tactically clever as well. Which is to say, we won’t be seeing this in 2012.
• Speaking of 2012, Utah governor Jon Huntsman, subject of 2012 GOP presidential-candidate buzz, received the nod from Obama to become our next ambassador to China. The near-consensus is that this is a masterstroke from Obama, taking his most dangerous competitor out of the race years ahead of time. This is an incredibly stupid near-consensus. Huntsman has been getting a lot of attention recently because he is a youngish Republican with a serious job who isn’t crazy, and, indeed, seems to be at least somewhat bright. But one thing pretty much all non-crazy, somewhat bright people have in common is that they don’t want to run for president as a Republican in 2012. Mike Allen has reported that some of his advisers think he’d be better of waiting until 2016. Great scoop, Mike!
• The Senate’s newest Democrat, Arlen Specter, said he was confident a compromise on EFCA would be worked out, perhaps by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter. Everyone on earth said this was a massive flip-flop. I hate defending Specter against charges of unprincipled waffling, because he has no principles of which I am aware, and often waffles. But this is entirely fabricated by people refusing to pay attention to details. Specter said he wouldn’t support EFCA as-is, in part because it included a card check provision. The chances of a bill with card check passing went from around 5% to a nice round 0%. Now he says he thinks a compromise bill will pass. That compromise won’t include card check. Where’s the fire?

Quote round-up:

• Andy McCarthy: “If President Obama wanted to refrain from releasing these photos in order to protect the military forces he commands or promote the security of Americans — his two highest obligations as president — he could do so by simply issuing an executive order.” Keeping the military safe is one of the president’s two highest obligations? Maybe we should stop sending them to the middle-east, then. The artists-formerly-known as Blackwater should handle that - I think our troops would be much safer at home.
• Dick Cheney: “We fail to recognize the fact that we’re alone out there in terms of trying to achieve the objective of forcing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons … Everybody’s in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve.” I’ve always assumed that Cheney only used the apocalyptic line as a means to serve cold, calculated ends. But I’m starting to suspect that he’s genuinely batshit crazy. I’m sorry I misjudged you, Dick!
• Andrew Sullivan: “It is quite something to have a government stamp in your passport, as I do, that will tell any immigration or police officer with a connection to a government database that I have HIV, that I am therefore a threat and can be arrested and detained and deported at the border if necessary.” That really is quite something, an aspect of the HIV ban of which I was unaware, and one that really is appalling. On this issue, though, I’m not sure that there is actual stalling, rather than just the beaurocracy working at the speed at which it works. But the delay on dealing with DADT is the least-defensible part of Obama’s record to date.
• Jay Nordlinger: “In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush.” I’m not usually in to partisan hacks, but there is something so pure and simple about Nordlinger’s hackery that really appeals to me, and this is a pretty special piece of hackery even from him. But I’m just generalizing here.
  

The blogosphere’s answer to talk radio, Michelle Malkin, comes through with a pretty representative attempt at humor (I hope), advocating waterboarding Nancy Pelosi to find out exactly how much she knew about waterboarding. Regular readers will know that I am about as receptive an audience as you could hope for for a joke attacking Pelosi and torture, but Malkin failed to make me crack a smile. The most striking thing about her failure, though, is the technical ineptitude of her visual humor:

Honestly, is the worthy of one of the internet’s highest traffic blogs? Does she really have no minions with even a cursory understanding of Photoshop? Without any of her financial resources, the Despot - a humble labor of scorn - has its own dedicated forger of political images, and I assure you, dear readers, we would never run anything so amateurish.

So I am hereby issuing the Michelle Malkin Challenge to our Fake Photogaffe department: within the next 48 hours, our expert will produce a waterboarding-related photo that puts this media-powerhouse to shame. I haven’t even told him yet - that’s how confident I am. Michelle Malkin, prepare to be upstaged.

ABC reports:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah in September 2002, according to a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News.

The report, submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Capitol Hill officials Wednesday, appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding or other special interrogation tactics. Instead, she has said, she was told only that the Bush administration had legal opinions that would have supported the use of such techniques.

The report details a Sept. 4, 2002 meeting between intelligence officials and Pelosi, then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, and two aides. At the time, Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

The meeting is described as a “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

EITs stand for “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a classification of special interrogation tactics that includes waterboarding.

Case closed, from where Michelle Malkin is standing:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew from September 2, 2002 that enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, were being used on jihadi detainees.

She knew. From Day One.

That’s what the CIA memo, published at Human Events, shows.

ABC News follows.

Emptywheel leaps to Pelosi’s defense:

So Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, and Porter Goss have all already identified problems with a document that the CIA itself refuses to vouch for. And who does ABC believe?

One more thing, which is more about CYA at the CIA than outright deception–maybe. For just about every briefing, the CIA lists who from the CIA attended the briefing (by function): for example, it lists CTC (Counterterrorism), DCI (Director), DDCI (Deputy Director), OGC (General Counsel). The exception are six briefings in 2005 and one in 2006. That’s particularly curious, given that Mary McCarthy has said the CIA lied during two briefings in 2005 (though note–that story says the briefings took place in February and June, which doesn’t correlate with the list, which shows briefings in January, March, October,  and November).

I’ll have more to say about this list in the coming days (particularly about the way it shows CIA briefed Republicans on torture a lot more than it did Democrats–and even the CIA never asserts it told any Democrat about waterboarding until after the 2004 IG Report came out).

But for now, suffice it to say it’s clearly full of easily discerned problems. Which might be why CIA won’t vouch for it.

Nevertheless, ABC thinks it’s as great as the story they got about Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded just once.

Marc Ambinder splits the difference:

One can’t help but conclude that while Pelosi might not have known everything, she knew enough. And in today’s political climate, that’s kind of tough. But back in 2002, when more Americans (probably) supported those techniques than they do now (and most Americans support at least some of the EITs), and when Pelosi herself did not have the means or the legal knowledge to perform her own analysis of the legality of the techniques, and when the climate of dissent was quashed — her reaction is understandable… maybe not, from our current perspective, excusable, although there is a range of opinion on that question.

I’d say Ambinder pretty much has the right of it. Pelosi is almost certainly guilty - the idea that she was briefed on legal justifications for EITs but didn’t think to wonder if they would actually be used is absurd - but this latest isn’t much of a smoking gun. Meanwhile, the single-minded focus on waterboarding will continue to confuse this issue, in this case to Pelosi’s benefit. Her defender’s can say - rightly - that, pace the Malkin’s of the world, this doesn’t provide much evidence that she knew about waterboarding specifically. But that is irrelevant: Pelosi has denied knowledge that any of the EITs were being used. If they told her that Zubaydah was being tortured via sleep deprivation and stress positions, she was lying, and she needs to go.

This is welcome news, but very odd:

Pelosi on Wednesday seized on Obama’s openness to prosecuting top Bush administration lawyers who formulated policies to strip, slap, shove and waterboard detainees said to be among Al Qaeda’s worst in U.S. custody after 9/11.

“It gives further impetus among members to have some kind of truth commission as to what happened,” Pelosi said. “I do not think immunity should be granted to everyone in a blanket way,” she added.

Perhaps she is so convinced that this isn’t going to happen that she feels safe coming out in favor of it. I’d like to think she wants America to get serious about holding people accountable for torture, but I’m almost positive she’d like to keep her job. Those goals are incompatible. In a way, it’s a good thing that important Democrats are complicit - though most of the blame lies with Bush administration officials, it would be difficult to paint torture backlash as a partisan witch hunt if it cost the Speaker of the House her job. But if Pelosi really wants something done, it’s probably a witch hunt she has in mind.