Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, lying to the UN General Assembly about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and so much more have not just damaged America by inspiring a new generation of terrorists, they also reduce America’s ability to lead in the world. Wild-eyed moonbats like me have warned for years that countries which could go one way or the other will start to swing hard against us. Behave like a rogue state for long enough and you start to get treated like one.
Never Too Many Cheney Threads
In two posts Josh Marshall touches on one of my favorite hobby horses regarding motivations and behavior – absent a compelling rationale for secrecy, people usually demand it to hide incompetence. Josh points out that Cheney may be a supernaturally gifted bureaucratic infighter, but his office has a real problem keeping actual secrets under wraps.
I don’t think that this point can be emphasized enough. People usually demand secrecy in order to hide their own failures, and when you give it to them their performance only gets worse.
The Nanny State
In which the nannies hate the First Amendment:
The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner case — a split decision that limits students’ free speech rights.
Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002.
Principal Deborah Morse confiscated it and suspended Frederick. He sued, taking his case all the way to the nation’s highest court.
The justices ruled 6-3 that Frederick’s free speech rights were not violated by his suspension over what the majority’s written opinion called a “sophomoric” banner.
I guess we will just let the strict constructionists explain their position on this one. Apparently the founders were in favor of every kind of speech except those that got in the way of government aims. If Larry Flynt’s case went to the court right now, he would be a convict.
My support for Roberts and Alito was yet another instance in which I was little more than a useful idiot.
Police State Republicans
If you doubt my Cheney-centric view of Bush scandals, read this account from today’s WaPo article that I referenced below.
For months, Olson and his Justice Department colleagues had pleaded for modest shifts that would shore up the government’s position. Hamdi, the American, had languished in a Navy brig without a hearing or a lawyer for two and a half years. Shafiq Rasul, a British citizen at Guantanamo Bay, had been held even longer. Olson could make Cheney’s argument that courts had no jurisdiction, but he wanted to “show them that you at least have some system of due process in place” to ensure against wrongful detention, according to a senior Justice Department official who closely followed the debates.
The vice president’s counsel fought and won again. He argued that any declaration of binding rules would restrict the freedom of future presidents and open the door to further lawsuits. On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in the Hamdi case that detainees must have a lawyer and an opportunity to challenge their status as enemy combatants before a “neutral decision maker.” The Rasul decision, the same day, held 6 to 3 that Guantanamo Bay is not beyond the reach of federal law.
The veep quite literally believes that the Executive branch can imprison any American, torture him and never answer about it to any court. You or anybody you know could find yourself naked in a cell one day and never see a lawyer or contact family. They could hold you until you die. Assuming that a Cheney-approved “review” process resembles Guantanamo, which seems if anything optimistic, prisoners could face a presumption of guilt, no access to their defense counsel and no right to review the evidence against them. Cases that the accusers lose can just be re-tried again and again until the government gets the result that it wants. Defense counsels who take their job too seriously would get punished as an example to others.
The whole premise would sound laughable, like some Kafka parody, if it was not happening today on American soil. The upshot of the Cheney-approved review process is that you don’t need any link to terrorism to find yourself locked up forever. Just the accusation, flimsily supported in a sealed brief, is more than enough.
It would really make my day if those few Bush fans who still back this drifting derelict of an administration would grow some balls and be honest about what they are defending.
Cheney Part 2
Part 2 of Gellman and Becker’s Cheney series strongly supports my Grand Unified Theory of Bush scandals, which posits that the worst, most counterproductive and dumbest decisions of the Bush presidency all seem to start in Cheney’s office. As Steve Benen noted on reading part 1, even torture memos that everybody assumed “abu” Gonzales wrote actually came from Cheney fixer David Addington.
In my view Kevin Drum sums up the key nugget of Cheney Part 2: all of the worst power grabs of the Bush administration, including but not restricted to torture (sorry, “cruel” treatment) came from the vice president’s office. It’s roughly analagous to Iago seconding a presidential ticket with Falstaff.
Cheney On Cheney
While reporters Gellman and Becker have raised blogosphere hell over their four-part Cheneyfest that starts in today’s Washington Post, I posit that everybody else has missed the real meat of Sunday’s story. We already knew that Cheney hides his appointment schedule, his staff list and his own middle name in some impenetrable secrets chest. The blogosphere long ago covered how Yoo, Addington and Fredo Gonzales cooperated to ensure that America would stop respecting such trivialities as FISA and the Geneva Conventions. But one point is news to me:
When James A. Baker III was tapped to be White House chief of staff in 1980, he interviewed most of his living predecessors. Advice from Cheney filled four pages of a yellow legal pad. Only once, to signify Cheney’s greatest emphasis, did Baker write in all capital letters:
BE AN HONEST BROKER
DON’T USE THE PROCESS TO IMPOSE YOUR POLICY VIEWS ON PRES.
Cheney told Baker, according to the notes, that an “orderly paper flow is way you protect the Pres.,” ensuring that any proposal has been tested against other views. Cheney added:
“It’s not in anyone’s interest to get an ‘oh by the way decision’ — & all have to understand that. Can hurt the Pres. Bring it up at a Cab. mtg. Make sure everyone understands this.”
In 1999, not long before he became Bush’s running mate, Cheney warned again about “‘oh, by the way’ decisions” at a conference of White House historians. According to a transcript, he added: “The process of moving paper in and out of the Oval Office, who gets involved in the meetings, who does the president listen to, who gets a chance to talk to him before he makes a decision, is absolutely critical. It has to be managed in such a way that it has integrity.”
Two years later, at his Nov. 13 lunch with Bush, Cheney brought the president the ultimate “oh, by the way” choice — a far-reaching military order that most of Bush’s top advisers had not seen.
According to Flanigan, Addington was not the first to think of military commissions but was the “best scholar of the FDR-era order” among their small group of trusted allies. “He gained a preeminent role by virtue of his sheer ability to turn out a draft of something in quick time.”
That draft, said one of the few lawyers apprised of it, “was very closely held because it was coming right from the top.”
Now that’s an interesting data point. Working under a famously dim underachiever Dick Cheney became exactly the kind of bureaucratic disaster that he himself used to warn people about. What happened? Delving too deeply probably risks getting into the weeds of psychohistory, but it is interesting to note that so many of our recent troubles could have been avoided if Dick Cheney had listened to Dick Cheney.
Approvingly Linking Reynolds
Sue me. I think that his view on the Cheney Autonomy Doctrine almost sounds like work product from a law professor, and it adds another data point to the rightwing lunacy spectrum.
The rightwing lunacy spectrum, of course, objectively measures exactly how fucking insane this administration has to get before a supporter stops pretending not to notice the smell. Reynolds and Cap’n Ed apparently have no problem with torture, lying shamelessly to sell an unnecessary war, running said war into the ground through rank leadership failures, politicizing every corner of the DOJ or unrestricted surveillance of American citizens. But bogusly exempting themselves from document archiving procedures, that’s a bridge too far. Good to know.