Betting On America's Failure

The Republican strategy is clear.

The government of the United States of America, with the Executive and Legislative branches in Democratic hands, is actually working to solve major problems that face the country, its people -- and all people.

If the health care reform bill passes and becomes law, all the political benefits would inevitably go to the Democrats in power. If I didn't have health insurance last year, and the Democrats passed health care reform, and now I am able to buy affordable insurance -- or my former insurance company is required to re-instate my coverage -- then the Democrats will get the credit.

As well they should.

The Republicans have nothing to gain by America's success. So they're betting on failure.

If -- with or without Republican help -- Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress actually solve the problems the American people sent them to Washington to solve, Obama will be re-elected, and the Democrats will retain control of Congress.

The Republicans lose.

If, on the other hand, those problems go un-solved -- and America fails to fix the health care delivery system, fails to stave off catastrophic global warming, and fails to repair the economy -- the Republicans will use the failure to their own electoral advantage. They can make the case that those problems represent the failure of the Democrats (and count on Americans forgetting that many of these problems were created or exacerbated by Republican inaction.)

So they are betting on failure -- and then working as hard as they can to ensure that failure ensues. That's why they are obstructing the health care bill, and it's why they're still stalling on a bill to internalize the hidden costs of greenhouse gas emissions.

But just in case those bills do pass, and those problems are solved -- or, at least, the United States government actually seems to be moving toward solutions to major problems (rather than actively working to prevent solutions), the Republicans are working hard to convince their "base" -- and independents who are disillusioned by the state of the economy -- that repairing the health care delivery system in this country is a Nazi plot. And that internalizing the costs of greenhouse gas emissions with a cap and trade program is a Communist plot. All designed to destroy Americans' Freedom.

And speaking of America, Freedom, Nazis, Communists, and global warming -- today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- a conservative who was believed to have blocked, for political reasons, then-Candidate Obama's attempt to speak at the Berlin Wall in 2008 -- lectured the United States Congress on the need to move quickly to avert disastrous climate change due to greenhouse gas-caused global warming.

The Democrats cheered, while the Republicans sat on their hands.

The sight has become familiar.

From 2002 to 2009, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee was chaired by a man who hails from an oil state; and whose biggest campaign donors hailed from that state's oil and gas industries, and who equated the greenhouse effect (the thing that prevents earth from being, like its moon, a barren, frozen rock) with big foot and the loch ness monster -- a hoax. And so Congress did absolutely nothing to solve the problem of global warming and the attendant climate disaster.

For eight years, America's climate policy was run by oil industry operatives working within the White House. That's why, instead of working with our traditional allies in Europe and Asia to solve the problem, we were working with Exxon's allies -- the Saudis and the Chinese -- to scuttle action -- at every single global climate negotiation from January 2001 to January 2009.

Now that we have people who actually understand how the actual earth actually works running the Senate Environment and Public Works committee -- its chair is my Senator, Barbara Boxer -- nuts and fossil shills like Inhofe have been sidelined. And this country is actually beginning to work to solve the global warming crisis.

Today, after Merkel's plea, the committee met to work on the Cap and Trade bill. But the committee's Republicans boycotted. Why? They want the Environmental Protection Agency to run some more tests, some more economic models that include "a new set of assumptions" about the economic effects of the bill.

George Voinovich of Ohio, representing the absent GOP senators, pled with the Democrats to put off action to stave off global warming, for just a little bit longer -- out of "decency."

You see, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's report estimated that Cap and Trade would cost the average American family $175 per year. The Republicans want voters to believe that it will cost the average American family thousands per year.

So they are stalling. They want a different outcome. They want the facts to fit their portrayal of a reality in which it simply costs too much to save humanity from self-destruction. It's a reality in which scientists are liars, the Nobel Prize is awarded to undeserving scoundrels, and the only people brave enough to tell the truth are crypto-fascist talk show hosts.

The Republicans spent the first decade of the 21st century running this country into the ground, dismantling the social contract, and shipping our money off to Iraq to be burned on behalf of oil companies -- to maintain the power of an old paradigm that served Republicans very well.

And now they demand that we wait just a darn minute -- don't move so fast -- before we solve all the problems they left unchallenged. They want a second chance.

It's only common courtesy, the Republicans appear to be arguing, for the rest of us to allow them a little more time to plot their return to power before we actually begin to solve our problems without them. It's the "decent" thing to do to put off solving problems that have become crises, for just ... a little ... bit ... longer ...

Because if there's one urgent crisis the Republicans are interested in solving, it's the problem of the empowerment of minorities.

Republican minorities.

In the House, the Senate, and the Electoral College.

Six Degrees To Devastation

by Richard B. Simon

The UN Environment Programme now holds that if the current, unmandated, approximate world targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 are met, the world's average temperature will increase by an astounding 6 degrees by 2100 -- that's within the lifetime of today's young children.

We need serious, hard targets, and we need to meet them immediately.

The tragedy is that had the United States signed onto the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, we would have already reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2009. That was the target -- ask Senator James Inhofe (R-Oilklahoma). He's on the anti-action warpath right now and is planning to be a one-man army of Climate Denial at Copenhagen in December. Perhaps he'll finally realize that the only people on earth who don't believe that global warming is real and caused by humans burning fossil fuels are American "Conservatives".

Inhofe argued in a 2003 Senate floor tirade, sequentially, that 1. global warming is not happening, 2. it's not caused by humans, 3. it's good for us, 4. Doing something about it is bad for the economy and will kill jobs in the hundreds of thousands -- especially for poor "blacks and hispanics." Today he is literally arguing that global warming isn't real because God exists.

Interestingly enough, Inhofe refers throughout his 2003 speech to "greenhouse gases" -- which is a pretty tacit -- if accidental -- admission that the greenhouse effect is, indeed, real.

What else is interesting is that Inhofe says that the Kyoto targets would have been virtually ineffectual, anyway, because they would only reduce temperature by a fraction of a degree by 2050:

Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, found that if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by all signatories-now I will note here that this next point assumes that the alarmists' science is correct, which of course it is not-if Kyoto were fully implemented it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 0.13 degrees Celsius by 2100. What does this mean? Such an amount is so small that ground-based thermometers cannot reliably measure it.

I'll take the fraction of a degree reduction in temperature over a six-degree rise any day. Two degrees is the difference between the last Ice Age, when much of North American sat under a mile of ice, and today. Six degrees means a Heat Age even more severe, that will last for thousands of years.

According to Inhofe himself, in 1998, when Kyoto was signed, six degrees was worse than the worst-case scenario that climate modelers imagined. In 2009, six degrees is our best case scenario.

Inhofe also cites James Hansen, one of the country's top scientists at NASA, arguing in 1998 that Kyoto would not be enough:

Similarly, Dr. James Hansen of NASA, considered the father of global warming theory, said that Kyoto Protocol "will have little effect" on global temperature in the 21st century. In a rather stunning follow-up, Hansen said it would take 30 Kyotos-let me repeat that-30 Kyotos to reduce warming to an acceptable level. If one Kyoto devastates the American economy, what would 30 do?

In case you were wondering what parts of the economy Inhofe's worried about, and why, here are Inhofe's top five campaign donor industries, over his Senate career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Oil & Gas $1,223,723
Retired $606,846
Leadership PACs $524,073
Health Professionals $449,900
Electric Utilities $435,967

As for James Hansen, he is warning these days that the Waxman-Markey climate bill -- the Cap and Trade legislation that internalizes the cost of greenhouse gas emissions -- is disastrously insufficient.

Hansen writes for the Huffington Post that the 1000-page Waxman-Markey bill has been so watered down by Fossil Lobbyists that it will not stave off the worst of Climate Change. He proposes that Cap and Trade in this form be scrapped in favor of Fee-and-dividend.

There is an alternative, of course, and that is a carbon fee, applied at the source (mine or port of entry) that rises continually. I prefer the "fee-and-dividend" version of this approach in which all revenues are returned to the public on an equal, per capita basis, so those with below-average carbon footprints come out ahead.

A carbon fee-and-dividend would be an economic stimulus and boon for the public. By the time the fee reached the equivalent of $1/gallon of gasoline ($115/ton of CO2) the rebate in the United States would be $2000-3000 per adult or $6000-9000 for a family with two children.

The Senate, he says, must act with urgency to repair the House bill.

The problem is that we are dealing with Republicans who, like Inhofe, have been fooled by the Fossil Lobbyists into thinking that global warming is a "liberal issue" -- some sort of ruse to get Democrats into power and who therefore fail to understand (or to want to understand) that the greenhouse effect is real and caused by burning fossil fuels.

We are also dealing with coal-state Democrats who claim to be "moderates" opposed to environmental extremism, but who are actually serving the interests of their home state industries, rather than those of the entire human species.

As Hansen points out, these "leaders" will all be dead or "doddering" by the time the rest of us bear the brunt of the consequences of their inaction -- so they can afford to put their own short-term political and financial interests ahead of the long-term interest of the species. They don't appear to comprehend that their decisions now will actually affect the entire earth system on the grandest scale imaginable.

President Obama seems to have had -- at least publicly -- a hands-off approach to policy-making in the Congress. But Obama should follow his own lead in his UN address Wednesday (which made averting climate disaster one of four pillars of an urgent new internationalism) and push his former colleagues in the Senate to toughen up the climate bill.

There is a big difference in perception of future consequences between a forty-something leader who will still be around in 2050 -- and whose daughters may be old women in 2100 -- and a room full of 60-, 70- and 80-something-year-old leaders for whom such dates remain abstraction.

As Obama often bluntly says of his economic policy, if it fails, he won't have a second term. He should be so bold with climate. For if we fail, we won't have a second chance.

Complicating the politics is electoral math: oil states are red, coal states swing. The loss of coal-related jobs in Pennsylvania could cost Obama a second term if they're not preemptively replaced with new-energy jobs.

And Obama needs to win a second term if action on global warming is to continue at any rate. No leading Republican appears to even believe that global warming is real. Not Palin, not Huckabee, not Romney, not Boehner (who clearly doesn't have even a rudimentary understanding of science) or McConnell. Professor Gingrich appears to believe that global warming is real, but that all the solutions that could solve the problem are liberal-communist plots to destroy the economy, the country, and capitalism.

Even McCain, who seemed to lead the GOP in accepting the reality of the global warming threat, proposed an "all of the above" energy policy. That's great if the problem is merely (as the good folks in Chevron's ad agency would have you believe) energy supply, but if the problem is that burning fossil fuels causes major planetary disruption, it's exactly wrong. As Hansen makes clear, burning more oil and coal will not solve global warming -- it will only make it worse.

Politicians -- including Obama -- pay at least lip service to this idea of "clean coal." Typically this refers to carbon sequestration, which means burning coal, and then somehow "storing" the waste carbon dioxide.

Here's what the eminent geophysician James Lovelock has to say about carbon sequestration:

The world's annual production of carbon dioxide is 27,000 million tons. If this much were frozen into solid carbon dioxide at -80 ºC it would make a mountain one mile high and twelve miles in circumference. (The Revenge of Gaia, 73)

Each year.

This is a reality that our politicians appear unable to comprehend.

When I have suggested to friends in environmental advocacy that they reach out and educate members of Congress who don't understand the science, they get quickly frustrated and explain that they can't even get in the door to talk to the Republicans. Their ears are closed.

The Fossil Barons have so successfully poisoned the national debate that members of the GOP are inured to facts. They truly believe that the vast majority of the world's climate scientists are pulling some kind of hoax that only Republican members of Congress, right-wing talking heads, and oil and coal executives can see through. And they believe (not entirely incorrectly) that their political constituencies are similarly convinced. In such quarters, Al Gore's advocacy of action to repel disaster is taken as concrete evidence that global warming is a liberal plot to make us all slaves to evil solar and wind power executives.

You even have the spectacle of columnist George Will gloating that the totalitarian regime in China agrees with him and is dunderheadedly refusing, along with India, to accept mandatory emissions reduction targets as part of any international agreement.

Global warming science needs to be extricated from such partisan foolery.

We need a national teach-in, a way to educate those who don't get what the greenhouse effect is, or how earth's systems work.

I had hoped, since before he did so to confront the health care reform "debate", that Obama would call a special joint, prime-time session of Congress, and explain -- or have Hansen explain to the Congress and the American people, with all the weight that his position at NASA commands -- how the world actually works. I'm not sure that works on Republican members of Congress -- but it does appear to increase understanding among the American people.

As it is, we've been working on climate change problems with less than half our national brain. Republicans and fossil state Democrats refuse to believe it even exists -- so they're not helping to come up with any solutions.

And we're running out of time.

Cool It

   Map of projected temperature increase due to global 
   warming in August, 2100, from The Nature Conservancy.

by Richard B. Simon

One lousy summer and the whole country has gone bananas.

The most visible manifestation of this weird rage that seems to have gripped the American people is the "Town Hall Meetings" held by Democratic members of Congress to discuss proposed reforms to the interface among citizens and the medical, pharmaceutical, and health insurance industries.

It seemed as if Republican operatives were planning to greet Democratic lawmakers with shitstorms of fury. Indeed, the GOP and the health insurance industry sent out frightening messages, trumpeted by Fox News and talk radio commentators, about how "Obamacare" (itself a phrase designed to summon the doomed "Hillarycare") would lead the country to "socialism" which is equated alternatingly with either Soviet or Nazi-style totalitarianism. Never mind that the two were opposed ideologies.

The town halls were interesting to watch. There was something ominous about rooms full of people jeering and shouting down members of Congress. Those folks weren't there to talk or make their ideas known -- they were there to make noise, to rattle the Senators and House members.

At one meeting, held by the recently-minted Democrat Arlen Spector, of Pennsylvania, a woman in the front row asked vague questions along the lines of, "Arlen, Arlen, when are you going to stand up for the Constitution and restore our country to what the Founding Fathers intended?" A befuddled-looking Specter started talking about warrantless wiretapping -- a Bush-era abuse of the Constitution (he was defending his record; really, he didn't do such a great job of oversight as Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee).

But that wasn't what this woman was asking about. She seemed to be addressing these vague charges that somehow the Obama Administration was in a full-throttle assault against the Constitution.

It was interesting. I would have liked to ask Specter a similar question -- three, four years ago. And there is something compelling about citizens venting rage at members of Congress, who often seem very removed from how Americans live.

Then this woman sat down, and the man sitting directly behind her stood up, and said something like "Thank you for coming to speak to the people who elected you -- Republicans." The woman in the front row, meanwhile, had whipped out a video camera, and was filming this man.

It was pretty clear, after seeing four, five, six people at a few different town halls, ask their questions in the same format, "will you promise to oppose a bill that includes ...." horrible thing X?, it became clear that these people were filming campaign commercials for the Republican challengers in the midterm elections of 2010. They were plants.

But they weren't all plants. Some of the folks asking questions had good suggestions, and legitimate concerns.

There also are a lot of angry people out there. Some of them, sure, can't process that a man with brown skin is their leader. Some of them don't like Democrats. But many Americans are hurting, badly, from the recession. They don't see things getting better quickly for them, and they are mad.

They are mad that "the government" handed their money to a bunch of billionaire bankers supposedly to save their dying corporations, and therefore the economy -- only to see it lavished on vacations on private islands and megayachts -- while their own bank accounts have run dry.

They are mad that "the government" gave their money to GM just to keep it afloat, when their businesses are suffering and dying and wrecking their family's dreams right behind their devastated retirement accounts, and no one is helping them save their businesses.

They are mad that the government gave their money to their next-door neighbor (the bum) to help him buy a car, when no one helped them buy a car.

This anger is legitimate, and also misplaced.

It certainly doesn't help that propagandists like Glenn Beck, who works for a television network whose goal is to produce an "alternate reality" to counteract other news channels in a way designed to help the GOP regain and retain power in the government -- and which is owned by a foreign corporation -- spend hours on the air each week fomenting rage and violence, and comparing the new Administration to the Nazis.

Beck's job is to take all that anger and use fear and misinformation to direct it at the Democrats, so that Republicans may re-take Congress and the White House. And it is effective. Beck is a wild-eyed propagandist. His show is frightening, no matter which side of whatever political divide you're on.

And so we are really having a national conversation over whether the government is going to murder senior citizens to save a few tax dollars that would be otherwise spent on health care.

The Fox News pundits are literally calling for violent revolution.

All this because their party has been out of power for, what, seven months?

And the people who are so enraged that they are bringing guns to Presidential speaking engagements don't seem to get that they're showing up the day after the bomb went off and throwing rocks at the guy who's trying to clean up the mess. And the rocks are being handed to them by the guys who set the bomb.

Cool it.

When you're angry and afraid, you'll do all sorts of irrational things that you'll regret later -- like wage war against a country that didn't do anything to you.

So cool it.

That's what my dad has always said to me when I've gone off the deep end, all riled up about some injustice, real or perceived. After the cooling, then comes the rational explanation and discussion -- and, typically, understanding.

Cool it, America.

First of all, we have to clear a few things up -- because a lot of different policies have become conflated, in some cases purposefully.

Let's start with the bank bailouts. It's not fair that billionaire bankers are vacationing on their private estates in Croatia with our money after we gave it to them to clean up a mess that they made, taking with it the value of our retirement accounts.

Still, I seem to remember, about eight months ago, a near-panic that we were heading into a new Great Depression. People are still hurting, the bank accounts are still empty, and the jobs haven't come back -- but you don't hear folks fretting about the next Depression anymore. People are buying houses and cars. People are being hired. As much as it may represent theft, the bank bailouts seem to be working. It's not fair -- but it's probably better than the whole global economy collapsing entirely.

Next is the stimulus. The stimulus is not the bank bailouts. The stimulus is another program entirely. It is money pumped throughout the economy -- on things like infrastructure projects and subsidies for alternative energy sources like wind farms and solar power plants.

When you start a project to, say, rebuild part of the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, you generate jobs -- jobs to design it, jobs to plan it, jobs to actually build it. Once constrution begins, all the people who are working on that project are making money -- which trickles out throughout the economy, from the coffee shop across the street from the trailers that suddenly has a hundred new twice-daily customers, to the stores where those workers buy clothing for their kids. That's good for local businesses, and it's good for local tax revenues -- which then fund further infrastructure projects. And so on.

When the dot-com bubble collapsed in San Francisco, it wasn't just a bunch of Internet startups that disappeared. It was also the restaurants and the furniture stores. I bought my desk from a place that liquidated the dotcoms. They had desks as far as the eye could see, in a giant warehouse. So the businesses that built new desks were competing with cheap, used, like-new desks. The collapse spread throughout the economy.

Stimulus is intended to do that, only in reverse. And it seems to be taking root in infrastructure projects across the country.

This isn't extraneous wasted money. You have to recall that the United States has essentially been frozen in time for the last eight years. Call it the Wasted Decade. Or don't you remember the bridge collapsing in Minnesota? The city lost in Louisiana? The President who said the high point of his presidency was catching a particularly large fish on his ranch in Texas? We built plenty of infrastructure in Iraq -- and then we blew it up. And then we built it again. It was great if you happened to, say, own a contractor with a lot of business in Iraq.

But not much happened over here.

The nation's infrastructure has simply not been maintained. This is eight years worth of work that needed to be done, and is getting done now. We're putting it on the credit card, because that's the only choice we have. How can you rebuild the economy if our bridges are falling down?

And this is ... Obama's fault?

In the last decade, the United States has spent $200,000,000,000 a year in Iraq -- using our tax dollars to ensure that oil keeps flowing. We have invested practically nothing in alternative sources of energy that would allow us to get off oil, and prevent future entanglements in the Middle East.

China and Germany and Japan have booming industries in solar panels, wind turbines, and hybrid cars -- and we're bailing out GM.

We've been standing still. We are way behind. We need to catch up if we're going to continue to be an industrial power.

We're not going to do it by not spending money on solar and wind while we subsidize oil to the tune of hundreds of billions.

Cool it, people.

We're paying plenty per gallon for gas. It's just hidden in our income tax. We need to get off oil entirely, by shifting our energy use from gas-powered cars to electric cars. That figures in the GM bailout, and cash for clunkers.

Cash for clunkers is great. It took 700,000 cars off the road and replaced them with cars that get, at a minimum, 5-10 miles per gallon more.

The average car travels 15,000 miles per year. Those cars would have travelled 10.5 billion miles next year. At 15 miles per gallon, that would have meant 700 million gallons of gasoline. At 22.5 miles per gallon, the new cars (presuming an average increase of 7.5 mpg on the new cars), the new cars will burn 467 million gallons of gasoline. That's a savings of 233 million gallons of gasoline -- that's 233,000,000 gallons -- each year, or 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline over the next ten years, which translates roughly to 92 million barrels of oil (presuming a yield of 25 gallons of gasoline per barrel of oil).

All that for 3 billion dollars, which is about what we spend in Iraq every six days.

Not a bad deal, I'd say -- especially since that money, too, will go to, yes, the banks in the form of interest; to the car dealers, which are local businesses (and then to the families of the salespeople, who will spend it on food and clothing at other local businesses); and to the automakers, one of which we own and are hoping will become solvent so that we can sell it.

GM has already re-opened a shuttered plant, meaning jobs.

And that's not to mention the progress toward dealing with global warming. That 92 million barrels of oil that will not be burned into the atmosphere is among the most significant actions taken to prevent catastrophic greenhouse warming in this country in the last 30 years.

Global warming is a real problem, a real, planet-scale disaster unfolding. For eight years, we did absolutely nothing to make it better, and everything to make it worse. The ice caps are melting. Sea level is rising. It is happening, and faster than anyone predicted.

Which brings me to cap-and-trade. Yes, its purpose is to raise energy prices -- but not on all forms of energy. Only on those that, used correctly, lead to melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, expanding disease vectors, mass extinctions, crop devastation, and widespread displacement of humans, and therefore wars.

The purpose of cap-and-trade is to make the people who are either buying or selling the products that are damaging the planet's suitableness for human life pay for the cost of repairing the damage, before the damage happens -- so that there is no damage.

As it stands, if we do nothing, guess who will pay to relocate all those people from their drowned cities? Think FEMA trailers -- for New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Charleston -- all up and down every coast. The oil and coal companies oppose it tooth and nail, because as it is, you're the sucker who gets to pay for the damage. Cap and trade will make them pay for it. After all, it's their product and their profit.

Sure, they'll pass on the cost to the consumer. The answer to higher fuel prices from cap-and-trade is to buy a car that gets better mileage. Insulate your house. Use less energy from fossil fuels. It ain't a tax if you can opt out. And you can opt out -- by shifting your energy use away from burning dinosaur corpses.

Cool it.

Obama has been President for 219 days.

His administration has helped stave off a depression, saved General Motors, begun to rebuild a devastated national infrastructure, and reduced U.S. gasoline consumption by 233 million gallons of gasoline per year in a matter of weeks. They've begun to wind down the war in Iraq, and try to clean up the disaster we created by abandoning Afghanistan. They've rescued American hostages from pirates, from North Korea, and from the Myanmar junta in Burma.

It's not a bad start.

Green Velvet Revolution, Live

Folks, here's Nico Pitney's outstanding liveblogging coverage of the extraordinary events unfolding in Iran at the Huffington Post, including news reports, video coming in via YouTube from Tehran, photos, tweets, emails, and satellite communications.

At this stage, the government appears trying to put a lid on widespread street protests by shutting down the country's electricity grid and placing opposition leaders under house arrest.

Remarkable.


UPDATE:

Andrew Sullivan's coverage.

The Liberal blog Daily Kos aggregates coverage in its "Crisis in Iran Mothership."

The regime appears to be blocking Twitter and other social networks, and hunting down those with satellite phones. Not really a trait common to legitimately elected governments.

Ahmedinejad is claiming that the West is waging psychological warfare against Iran.

Perhaps. Or perhaps people everywhere who love freedom honestly think you're an asshole, and would like to see the Iranian people free from the Mullahs' tyranny.

UPDATE 102 am pst:

Pitney reports at HuffPo link, above, that there may be a move afoot to depose Khamenei -- that the election results may have represented a military coup -- and that this is the beginning of civil war.

Fresh pics here, at Tehran Live.

Oddly, Al Jazeera English seems to be downplaying these events. They are not buying the vote fraud story, and are painting the protests as something having to do with Northern Tehran hipsters -- and reporting that concerns about the legitimacy of the results stem from the U.S., Britain, and Canada ... only.

Judge Sotomayor In Context

by Richard B. Simon

President Barack Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, has triggered the predictable controversy that every Supreme Court nominee triggers in this splintered age.

The Republican Party, of course, opposes Sotomayor as a matter of principle. That principle appears to be the principle of opposing whomever a Democratic president nominates to the Supreme Court (much as the Democrats would likely oppose any GOP court nominee). In this case, the Republicans began publicly sketching out their arguments against the nominee before there even was a nominee.

The chosen argument against the Nuyorican Sotomayor is that she is a "racist."

The Republicans point to a speech Sotomayor gave in May, 2001 -- in the pre-9/11 era -- at Berkeley, in which she said "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Of course, we have now seen this quote trumpeted back and forth across the various newsmedia, used as a bludgeon (along with a 3-judge panel decision that struck down the New Haven fire department's promotion exam for being racially biased to white males) to accuse Sotomayor of "racism."

What we haven't seen anywhere, even on news programs where you'd expect better, is the supposedly inflammatory quote in context -- so that we can actually understand what she meant.

Of course, we have to also understand the context in which the speech was given. According to the Times,

It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, a symposium issue entitled "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation"

So, the topic specifically under discussion was the under-representation of Americans of Latin culture (and, in the case of this speech, women) in the American judiciary. And in the speech, Sotomayor is specifically making the point that judicial nominees who are not both caucasian and male were blocked by Congress more often and for longer than caucasian male nominees to the bench:

In at least the last five years the majority of nominated judges the Senate delayed more than one year before confirming or never confirming were women or minorities. I need not remind this audience that Judge Paez of your home Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, has had the dubious distinction of having had his confirmation delayed the longest in Senate history. These figures demonstrate that there is a real and continuing need for Latino and Latina organizations and community groups throughout the country to exist and to continue their efforts of promoting women and men of all colors in their pursuit for equality in the judicial system.

See if you can guess who controlled Congress during those five years.

You have to also know what racism actually is: it is the use of social stratification by physical characteristics, as a means to achieve social control.

The Republicans are asking us to ignore that this speech was given seven years before President George Bush said that he never imagined he'd see an African American president in his lifetime -- that it was incomprehensible to him. It came as a complete surprise that it was even within the realm of the possible.

And Gingrich and Limbaugh, twins born from the same cosmic egg (stamped "1992" and forever lost in that peak year for identity politics in American thought) are pretending that there is no legitimate difference in perspective on matters of justice between a member of a historically oppressed ethnic group or sexual persuasion and that of the Anglo-Caucasian male who has dominated this nation's politics of power for its entire history, often by caveat of law.

And in this, they have no idea that as unpalatably as Sotomayor's single sentence reads in this Age of Obama (and I would bet that audio from the speech reveals that this was not a line spoken entirely in earnest but a laugh line delivered with a New Yorker's stiletto tongue set firmly in cheek), they are proving it accurate.

Who else but privileged multi-millionaires, historically advantaged for their skin tone and sexual organs and having dwelled for decades in or adjacent to the seat of power, would take mortal offense at the very mention of their monopoly?

Who else could see a well-educated federal judge pointing out institutional race bias and dare call that racism, but someone who has never tasted racism's business end?

That, joke or not, was Judge Sotomayor's point.

Don't take my word for it; read the speech yourself.

The Villain, President Cheney

by Richard B. Simon

From analysis of Cheney's "national security speech" -- really an attempt to shield himself from prosecution for war crimes -- a few things become clear.

The first is that, assuming that Cheney wrote this speech and is acting as an independent operator (rather than as unleashed spokesman for the hapless Bush, who has been reduced to reminiscing to high school students about picking up dog feces), Cheney's entire worldview emanates from the trauma of being carried off to the bunker by the Secret Service on the morning of 9/11/01 -- while terrorists successfully attacked America on his watch.

If this is true, it represents a severe case of post traumatic stress disorder -- a potent brew of fear and guilt that resulted not only in such absurdities as the oft-derided (by Jon Stewart) "man sized safe" in the Vice President's office; the removal of Cheney's actual residence from the Google Earth mappng program; and the "undisclosed location" that was Cheney's official home for seven years -- but also such monstrosities as the legalization of torture at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

If one has the oft-derided (by Republican commentators) quality of empathy, the ability to see from another person's point of view, one might understand why Cheney is so angry. He believes that he did everything -- everything -- he could to save the country from another terrorist attack.

And he did. In seven years plus, no major terror attack (besides the anthrax letters that killed five and sickened seventeen Americans) occurred on U.S. soil. Unless you count the DC sniper shootings that killed thirteen people. Or the attacks on the soil of our NATO allies in London (2005, 37 killed, 700 injured) and Madrid (2004, 201 killed) in direct response to the Bush and Cheney administration's invasion of Iraq. No Americans were killed by terrorists (regardless that between a hundred thousand and a million Iraqis and nearly five thousand U.S. troops have died in the war in Iraq, with over 30,000 major injuries to U.S. troops alone.

Al Qaeda was kept on the run (Bin Laden and much of al Qaeda escaped the clutches of U.S. troops in Afghanistan as Bush and Cheney pulled U.S. Special Forces out, mid-battle, and sent them to Iraq to advance the coming war), its leadership command capability severed (though they did manage to assassinate Pakistani dissident Benazir Bhutto and commit major attacks in Mumbai and in Pakistan.) The Taliban was defeated, routed from power, and replaced in Afghanistan with the democratically-elected government of former Unocal executive Hamid Karzai (Although the Taliban actually advanced in Afghanistan -- Karzai's government controls little outside of Kabul -- and began the surprisingly-easy process of taking over Pakistan itself, advancing to within a hundred miles of the nuclear-armed capital.)

The Bush-Cheney foreign policy has left the world a much more dangerous place. They built a high wall around the "homeland" and fanned the flames of chaos outside it. But in Cheney's view, they staved off the destruction of an American city (well, unless you count New Orleans). And so how could Americans be so ungrateful (the bastard masses!) as to allow the evil, duplicitous Democrats to railroad him for committing war crimes -- to humiliate him again -- when all he did was everything he could -- everything! -- to keep America safe?

All of this presumes, of course, that Cheney was largely responsible for Bush's foreign policy, and that Cheney has not come out purposefully as a target to deflect blame from Dubble-yoo Dog-Doo.

In fact, Colin Powell's former deputy at the State Department, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, long considered to speak for Powell, confirmed last week that

Cheney was co-president. I'd go further than that and say that for national security issues and other critical issues Cheney was the President.

Who can blame Cheney for grabbing the reins? Bush was in over his head from the start. Certainly he was not qualified to defend the country. You leave the kid alone for one lousy month of summer vacation and look what happens. If you want something done right, you can hear the Vice President's wife telling him pillowside, you've got to do it yourself.

Of course, to accept even this, we must presume the best of intentions on his own part. That's what newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter did for the nearly eight years in which he led the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with legal oversight of the administration. (And what a fine job he did.)

And so we must forget, entirely, that Cheney moved from the Defense Department, where he pushed to outsource military functions to private contractors; then went to work as CEO of the biggest such military contractor-slash-oilfield services provider; then started a war from which that contractor-slash-oilfield services provider profited to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars -- and all the while, the "Vice" President took an annual paycheck from the corporation nearly equal to his pay as "Vice" President -- and sometimes more.

(The Congress and the mainstream news outlets, at least, appear to have forgotten.)

Matthew Alexander, a lead interrogator in Iraq, has written an essay at the Huffington Post, in which he tells us that it is common knowledge among Iraq vets that the foreign fighters did not come streaming into Iraq to kill U.S. troops until after the revelations of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib:

Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.

He further asserts us the most valuable information that interrogators harvested from both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah came before they were tortured. KSM admitted to planning the planes operation (aka the 9/11 attacks) before he was tortured. Zubaydah gave interrogators the name of Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomber" (who himself was later tortured until he was totally crushed and broken, and information from him inadmissible in U.S. court) before he was tortured. Alexander argues that the non-torture interrogation techniques may have yielded bin Laden's whereabouts; torture never would.

But if normal, long-effective interrogation techniques were working in spades, why resort to interrogation techniques that are just as likely to get the prisoners to say absolutely anything?

As it turns out, interrogators were ordered to turn to harsh techniques when the Bush administration was actively seeking a pretext to trigger an invasion of Iraq. At the request of the Vice President's office, interrogators asked "high value detainees" about links between Iraq and al Qaeda -- while torturing them.

The tactics, borrowed from the SERE training program which trains US troops to resist North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet torture tactics by actually using those tactics on them, pretty much guaranteed that the interrogatees would make false claims -- in this case, false "evidence" linking Iraq and al Qaeda. SERE officials even wrote to argue against the use of such tactics. No one listened.

Maybe Cheney and Bush really suspected an Iraq link to 9/11, and would stop at nothing -- nothing! -- to know the truth. Or maybe they wanted was false positives.

Here's Wilkerson again:

What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 -- well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion -- its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

We know from Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that the Administration planned to invade Iraq from its first Cabinet meeting in 2001 -- many months before 9/11.

According to CNN,

[author Ron] Suskind said O'Neill and other White House insiders gave him documents showing that in early 2001 the administration was already considering the use of force to oust Saddam, as well as planning for the aftermath.

"There are memos," Suskind told the network. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"

Suskind cited a Pentagon document titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which, he said, outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from ... 30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq."

In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting asked why Iraq should be invaded.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" O'Neill said.

Now we know that torturing al Qaeda operatives captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and elsewhere was one of those ways.

Bush and Cheney hijacked 9/11 and used it to divert national retaliatory war fervor from capturing bin Laden to invading Iraq -- for reasons that pre-date the 9/11 attacks -- including Iraq's oil.

They let bin Laden go free -- and used him as a bogeyman to scare Americans into giving Republicans control of Congress in 2002; supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and re-electing Bush Cheney in 2004.

It is the original sin from which most post-9/11/2001 Bush administration crimes emanate.

The invasion of Iraq has made the world is a more dangerous place. America's moral authority remains in tatters. The Taliban are within arm's reach of nuclear weapons. The bad guys remain free. Engaged in a propaganda war -- which is, by definition, what a war against terrorists is -- the Bush administration handed the enemy an incomprehensibly stupid and potent victory.

But look who's done well.

The United States remains addicted to oil. The global warming crisis has intensified as the world, "led" by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, declined to act. The ice caps began to disintegrate, opening up yet another potential boon for Cheney's Halliburton, as a newly thawed international Arctic needs roads built, wells drilled, and pipelines lain.

What's more, Iraq's oil industry has been successfully de-nationalized; Exxon and Chevron are back in action in Iraq, from which they had been expelled in the 1970s. Halliburton made billions rebuilding Iraqi oil infrastructure and providing often-shoddy support services for U.S. troops. And Cheney made over a million in pay from Halliburton while in office. He retains 433,000 Halliburton stock options, as well as a Halliburton retirement account.

Come to think of it, it's no surprise that Cheney opposes shutting down Guantanamo -- he hired his own company, Halliburton, to the tune of between $40 and $500 million, to build the damned prison there in the first place.

And he profited from the deal. In 2002, the year Halliburton got that contract, Cheney was paid nearly as much by Halliburton as by the American taxpayer:

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney filed their federal income tax return for 2002 today ... The wage and salary income reported on the tax return includes $190,134 in government salary for the Vice President. In addition, the tax return reports the payment of deferred compensation from Halliburton Company, in the amount of $162,392.

In 2005, when Halliburton received an additional $30 million contract to expand the prison, Halliburton paid Cheney more than the U.S. taxpayer did.

Vice President and Mrs. Cheney released their 2005 federal income tax return today ... The wage and salary income reported on the tax return includes the Vice President’s $205,031 government salary. In addition, the tax return reports the payment of deferred compensation from income earned in 1999 from Halliburton Company in the amount of $211,465.

He'll probably profit from its dismantling.

Cheney has argued for years that the annual salary represents portions of his annual salary for 1999, and that the salary is fixed, and not tied to Halliburton's fortunes. But a Congressional report found in 2003 that Cheney did, indeed, retain financial ties to the company, as they are defined by ethics guidelines that bar such ties, even as he pursued policies from which the company profited in the extreme.

This is pretty basic movie villainy.

Whether he was a man with good intentions who was traumatized and led astray by a damaged psyche, or a truly evil, heartless criminal mastermind who ordered that people be tortured (phony morality be damned!) to gain false evidence to use to sucker the American people into waging a war for oil and profit and is now trying to build an insanity defense, the man must be brought to justice. We paid for this madness -- don't we have the right to at least know which it is, incompetence or evil? We've waited eight years to find out.

If he had class, courage, or dignity at all, he would accept that the country has moved on, that the time for Red Alert mode, for harsh torture and shock and awe and dictatorship had passed -- and like other hard men in our culture who cross the line, he'd disappear. Like Batman or Spider-man or the Mission Impossible team. They accept the ultimate responsibility for their lawlessness. Knowing that no one has your back if you get caught is part of the job. Accepting that is what makes them heroes.

But instead of accepting responsibility for lawlessness that they insist was absolutely necessary to protect country -- which the American people would be inclined to excuse -- Cheney and Bush, cowards both, purposefully sought to make lawlessness legal in order to protect themselves from criminal prosecution in the future. That's how it spread to Abu Ghraib.

Now they deny that the spread of legalized torture was their fault. Support the troops? They are still handing the troops the bag.

If we allow this behavior to pass into history without an accounting, without accountability, it sends the message down the ages that you, too, can take over this country, break its laws, destroy its moral standing, violate the Constitution you swore under oath to uphold, do with it what you will -- and you will get away with it. Because the precedent has been set: when the President authorizes it, it's legal. That ain't Democracy. It's Dictatorship.

Cheney opposes a truth commission? Okay. Make it Congressional hearings and a Justice Department criminal probe. Put him in the dock and watch him snarl at the judge. It will make for good television. And that's a good enough reason in America, isn't it? Maybe he'll bang his shoe on the table.

Still, a hundred bucks says that if Cheney winds up on trial, he dies of a heart attack out on his favorite river in Wyoming before it ever begins. The local doc, an old hunting and fishing buddy, will sign the death certificate, and -- just like Kenny Boy Lay -- no one will ever see the body.

We've seen this movie before.

Dissident Cheney

                       Mark Wilson / Getty Images

by Richard B. Simon

What does Dick Cheney want?

The former Vice President made a high-profile speech Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where his wife is a board member, essentially as a refutation of President Barack Obama's speech condemning torture and making the case for closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The two speeches could not have been a clearer illustration of the difference in policy, tone, and attitidue toward the American people between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Obama's speech was long and methodical and reasoned - typical of Obama's professorial style. His purpose was to herd members of Congress in both parties toward shutting Guantanamo. A Senate vote Wednesday yanked funding for closing the controversial facility, largely in response to Republican arguments that it is just too dangerous to have terrorists on U.S. soil, and in our justice system.

Obama made a pretty strong case that such fear is irrational: over 200 terrorists - including "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramsi Yousef - are already serving time in the U.S. prison system. No one, he said, has ever escaped from a U.S. Supermax (super-maximum security) prison.

More pointedly, Obama reminded his audience at the National Archives (chosen, apparently, for its authoritative-sounding natural reverb - as well as because it is where the Constitution is housed) that both parties last year chose candidates who abhorred torture and advocate the closing of Guantanamo.

Obama, as usual, spoke to the American people as if we were adults, capable of understanding and acting upon complex problems.

Cheney's tact was a bit different. He seemed ... defensive.

Despite the gymnastics of Congressional Republicans, who alternatingly abhor and embrace the policies of the Bush Administration, the national debate on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody in the War on Terror has seemed to settle on the conclusion that what the Bush Administration legalized as "enhanced interrogation techniques" amounted to torture - which is illegal, by both international and U.S. law.

Cheney has broken tradition in recent weeks to defend his administration's policies by attacking their aggressive rollback by Obama. Whether he is acting truly as a free agent, or still as the subterraneally quasi-official attack dog remains to be seen.

What is clear is that Cheney is trying to seize control of the debate, to reframe it in terms that don't cast him as a war criminal who would be liable to prosecution under international law.

Because that is exactly where this has been heading.

Cheney's speech is very clearly an attempt to re-frame the torture debate as "the criminalization of policy differences" in order to escape any sort of prosecution.

Cheney first attempts to establish his credibility by asserting that he has no hidden political agenda. He was never running for office, he is out of politics, and he is simply free, as a citizen, to speak his mind. He expects us to ignore the very real threat of personal legal jeopardy - in fact, his entire argument is based on us accepting that he is in no legal jeopardy, because all his actions were legal.

Cheney introduces his argument by saying:

The point is not to look backward. Now and for years to come, a lot rides on our president's understanding of the security policies that preceded him. And whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of the country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history.

So he is here to give us the Cheney version of "a truthful telling of history."

He gives some background on the U.S. response to terrorist incidents during Bill Clinton's tenure - culminating with the 9/11 attacks, nearly nine months into the Bush-Cheney term.

"From that moment forward," he says, "instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place."

It's a reasonable attack on the entire government response before 9/11. He continues by describing the threat spectrum the administration saw - including "the training camps in Afghanistan and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists." This is the same conflation of Hussein and al Qaeda, within the same sentence, that the administration used to lead the nation into Iraq.

"These are just a few of the problems we had on our hands," he continues. "And foremost on our minds was the prospect of the very worst coming to pass: a 9/11 with weapons of mass destruction."

He then gives a personal anecdote about his experience on 9/11, being whisked to a bunker beneath a White House believed to be about to be hit by an airplane. And he gives us an honest glimpse into the Bush White House mentality from then on:

"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities."

Cheney details Bush administration policies and successes, including dismantling Libya's nuclear program and breaking up the A.Q. Khan black market nuclear technology network.

Then he begins his attack.

So we're left to draw one of two conclusions, and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event, coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years and of the policies necessary to protect America in the years to come.

He presents a false dilemma - either we continue all of the Bush Cheney national security policies - including torture, pre-emptive wars, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens without warrants - or we treat 9/11 as a "one-off event" that is indicative of no further threat.

Obviously, in Cheney's worldview, conservatives are on one side, and liberals are on the other. There is, as he will assert later, "no middle ground" in what he is carefully framing as a political debate between the two ideologies.

Cheney next admits that the administration created legal framework in which intelligence operatives could interrogate detainees.

In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our administration gave intelligence officers the tools and the lawful authority they needed to gain vital information.

This seems to be an admission that the intelligence agents did not have the lawful authority "needed to gain vital information" - to use what Cheney will call "enhanced interrogation tactics" - until the administration gave it to them.

He then cites the Constitutional authority of the executive branch, as well as the Authorization of the Use of Military Force, the 2002 bill that gave the Bush Administration a blank check to do anything at all in pursuit of the terrorists:

We did not invent that authority. It's drawn from Article Two of the Constitution, and it was given specificity by Congress after 9/11 in a joint resolution authorizing all necessary and appropriate force to protect the American people.

One of Cheney's goals is to spread responsibility, then, to the Congress.

He then attacks the New York Times for doing journalism - for investigating and revealing Bush administration policies that violated the law - and moves directly into his defense of the interrogation practices in question:

In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.

He takes responsibility without actually taking responsibility:

In top-secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.

And states his core message:

The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.

Cheney ironically accuses the Obama administration of selectively declassifying documents, to tar the previous Administration with memos directing the interrogations from the White House, without releasing the documents that he has requested, which he says would detail not just the interrogation practices, but the answers they yielded. These answers, Cheney maintains, kept Americans safe.

The Obama administration has not denied this - but Obama has said that there are better, more effective ways to garner information from detainees and/or suspects, which do not sacrifice America's core values in the name of expedience.

Yet Cheney continues to work to frame the debate:

Over on the left wing of the president's party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they're after would be heard before a so-called truth commission. Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense and political opponents as criminals.

It's hard to imagine a worse precedent filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessor.

In Cheney's view, there is no validity in seeking to learn the truth about the Bush administration's policies. There is no valid reason for investigating whether the policies were lawful; and if not, how illegal policies such as torture were justified and legalized. In Cheney's view, the only reason anyone would want to have a "truth commission" (which in actuality has been proposed as an alternative to criminal proceedings, or to political hearings in Congress) is to "criminalize the policy decisions" of the Bush administration.

It is reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's and Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on the legitimacy of the Iraqi court and the War Crimes Tribunal, respectively.

And at this point in the speech - and increasingly with every iteration of the root "criminal," you start to sense that this man is afraid. He is trying to kill the very idea that what they did may have been illegal - and in so doing, to try to control the Bush-Cheney administration's legacy in history, which is fast being written to include torture, and then perhaps to keep himself out of prison.

He goes on to deflect the hot light onto lawyers and intelligence operators by asserting that a truth commission would impugn their service to country.

He threatens Obama by suggesting that an investigation of the interrogation methods will lead to the American people being left unprotected:

I would advise the administration to think very carefully about the course ahead. All the zeal that has been directed at the interrogations is utterly misplaced, and staying on that path will only lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people.

It is classic Cheney: do exactly what I want you to do, or risk another attack. This was the entire core message of the (effective) 2004 Bush Cheney re-election campaign.

Cheney spends some time talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged master plotter of the 9/11 attacks, focusing the torture debate on him:

It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl.

Cheney is basically saying it's not torture - and, anyway, we only did it to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The latter assertion is a seeming admission that, well, sure it's torture - but it's okay to use torture on guys like this who are obviously villains. It's an argument that comes up later.

More interestingly, Cheney says:

In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib with the top-secret program of enhanced interrogations.

At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulation and simple decency. For the harm they did to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice.

This charge mirrors the administration's own conflation of Iraq and al Qaeda.

But Cheney does not appear to recall that Major General Geoffrey Miller was tasked with exporting interrogation techniques from Guantanamo to Iraq, and specifically to Abu Ghraib".

Cheney is still trying to pin Abu Ghraib on the lowest men (and women) in the chain of command - but Charles Graner and Lynndie England always maintained that they had been asked - by CIA interrogators -- to "soften up" the prisoners for interrogation. This flows directly from the "Gitmoization" of the Abu Ghraib prison - the migration of the interrogation practices which Cheney admits to having purposefully made legal from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.

This is exactly why you don't legalize torture. In theory, you can torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Osama bin Laden all you want, and not many people would complain. But once you make it legal, it spreads beyond your control.

At Abu Ghraib, innocent men who were not hardened terrorists or even al Qaeda affiliates were subjected to this treatment, because Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon sought better intelligence on the insurgency.

Still, Cheney asserts that

it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.

"Those personnel," he continues, "were carefully chosen from within the CIA and were especially prepared to apply techniques within the boundaries of their training and the limits of the law.

And then Cheney admits what we've known all along: that the Bush administration specifically sought to define the line so that "interrogation" stopped just short of torture:

Torture was never permitted. And the methods were given careful legal review before they were approved. Interrogators had authoritative guidance on the line between toughness and torture, and they knew to stay on the right side of it.

Cheney goes on to impugn the motives of those who want to see the rule of law reinstated in this country, and some kind of accounting for lawless behavior.

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

There is no such thing, in Cheney's mind, as legitimate concern for the rule of law. Any outrage about the Bush administration's legalization of torture is "feigned" and based on a false story. Any indignation is "contrived" and all discussion of morality surrounding the mistreatment of detainees is "phony."

Perhaps he is referring to Pelosi and others who may have been briefed on, and at least tacitly approved policies such as waterboarding (though had the leaders of the minority party in Congress objected to these policies, they would have had no lever for airing or acting upon dissent; we know that such briefings were conducted under threat of prosecution - members of Congress were forbidden to discuss the meetings with anyone.)

But it is difficult to not read this as an assault on anyone who expresses outrage, indignation, or any moral qualms about the Bush administration's policies.

"I might add," Cheney continues, "that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about values.

He then concocts a straw man, and attacks an argument that no one has made publicly:

Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance.

When Cheney says "Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings," he appears to be responding directly to the Convention Against Torture, which states:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Then he comes back to his central attack:

[T]o call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe.

This is a guilt appeal (how dare you "libel" the dedicated professionals who save lives) coupled with a personal attack on Obama (for false "righteousness") that ends in the requisite fear appeal: Not only is this not torture, but we must continue to do it in the future, or we will be attacked again - and it will be all your fault.

Cheney goes on to say that Obama's attempts at political reconciliation are dangerous. He asserts that there is "no middle ground" in the War on Terrorism:

[I]n the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half-exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States; you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States.

It's Cheney's way, one hundred percent, or a nuclear attack. Moreover, any policy that falls short of the line just short of torture is a "half measure."

This is the definition of totalitarianism.

Cheney continues, attacking some perceived "political correctness" before discussing the closing of Guantanamo Bay, another policy with which he disagrees. Closing the prison camp, Cheney says, will please Europe, but it won't make Americans more safe.

He refutes the notion that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses were used as "recruitment tools" by al Qaeda, and mocks any such concern, again, as fainthearted concern about a loss of American values. Yet it has been largely Cheney allies such as Senator Lindsay Graham and General David Petraeus, who have spoken out against releasing photographic evidence of prisoner abuse, lest they provide propaganda tools for al Qaeda and inflame the international press.

In any event, Cheney is more interested in making an impression on terrorists than on our NATO allies. He argues that a debate over foreign policy - a debate which, after a national election largely repudiated his policies, he started - shows weakness to the terrorists. Therefore, of course, we must not debate whether Bush policies were legal - we must simply continue them.

He asserts again that if we are wise,

Instead of idly debating which political opponents to prosecute and punish, our attention will return to where it belongs: on the continuing threat of terrorist violence and on stopping the men who are planning it.

He again touts the lack of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil as evidence of the rightness of the policies, always bringing it back to this idea of criminalization:

After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven-and-a-half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.

Throughout the final quarter of the speech, Cheney attacks the very idea that the interrogation policies represent a failure to adhere to America's core values. And anyway, there is nothing more American than preventing Americans from being killed. And there is nothing morally wrong with treating suspected terrorists unpleasantly:

For all that we've lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims.

At its core, Cheney's argument is that the interrogation policies are not torture, and that they therefore were legal. He argues that anyone who says otherwise is merely expressing phony outrage in pursuit of a political goal: the criminalization of political opponents.

We might conclude that, as he claims, he is asserting all this in service to the national debate - but he does not believe we should even have a debate. He says he wants to speak truth to the historical record - yet he opposes a truth commission to find facts objectively. He wants us to believe that he is above politics - yet Cheney does not appear to believe that there is such a thing as legitimate moral indignation or outrage. There is only cynical political posturing, self-interest, and self-righteousness.

By Cheney's own reckoning, then, we must conclude that this speech is an attempt to confuse the public's sense of the debate by claiming that it is not about legalizing criminality but about criminalizing politics. Any investigation into Bush administration interrogation policy is tantamount to criminalizing political differences, rather than legitimate inquiry into whether political leaders acted criminally, whether in the public interest or not.

In addition, by tying Democrats to a policy (Obama's) that he forcefully asserts endangers the country (i.e., lead to another terrorist attack), while asserting that no motive outside of partisan gain is even fathomable, Cheney appears to be betting his own fortunes, and those of his party, on the success of the terrorists.

Finally, by making himself a forceful and very high-profile critic of the Obama administration, Cheney is trying to cast himself as a political dissident. This will allow Cheney - and his lawyers - to argue that any pursuit of legal charges or even investigation of Cheney is the result of political persecution for his vocal criticism.

It is a pre-emptive attack against an existential threat: the threat of prosecution for war crimes.