The OPR report

The OPR report on the 'Torture memos" is remarkably disheartening and hopeful at the same time.

It's fate is disheartening because its quashing by Margolis is one more example of shielding the big fish while small fry get served up for dinner. It really is a scandal that the likes of Lynndie England are prosecuted while senior officials get a pass.

I agree that the CIA operatives who may have tortured or abused someone in custody based on the shoddy legal framework provided should not be prosecuted -- so long as the high muckety-mucks that authorized it are held accountable. Of course, that is not happening nor does it seem to be in prospect. Instead there's mumblings about holding people responsible who may have "exceeded" the guidelines, which sounds a lot like deciding to scapegoat some small fry again.

It's a hopeful development in another sense, because it's one more brick in what will obviously be a very long process of bringing people to justice. No one should forget that there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. Many years, even decades later crimes committed by the Nazis, by the Khmer Rouge, by South American death squads have been successfully prosecuted. Dick Cheney's ticker may give out before he faces a serious consequence but Yoo is a young man and will have to spend many more years looking over his shoulder. It's already dangerous for him to travel outside the U.S.

Speaking of Dick Cheney, his recent mild heart attack has prompted some comment about karma but I, for one, hope he sticks around for a long time. Should he die soon there is no doubt in my mind that there will be a rush, a freaking deluge, of people blaming him for what happened. The only defender he'll have left will be his daughter, but every partner in crime will suddenly coke clean about how "Dick made me do it."

Cheney, in my view, certainly does bear a lot of culpability, but he was just one man and he had plenty of help in dishonoring America. It would be a shame for those fellow criminals to get away with their crimes by burying their sins in Cheney's grave.

Thinly veiled racism at the Drudge Report

Matt Drudge rarely passes up an opportunity to smear Muslims. On his site he trumpets that Five Muslim soldiers were "arrested" on allegations they Poisoned fellow soldiers at Ft. Jackson. Yet even the story he links to does not actually say anyone was arrested and other reporting says that nothing was substantiated. So much for "presumption of innocence."

It's this mindset that led to so much abuse during the Bush administration. It's the mindset that turns accused or even merely suspected detainees into "Terrorists" who can and should be tortured because they might know something. It's the mindset that leads to profiling that gets any Muslim or anyone some ignorant fool thinks may be Muslim (like a Sikh) targeted. Meanwhile we're somehow supposed to win the hearts and minds of Muslims while treating them as enemies without distinction.

Meanwhile, hours after contrary reports emerge that don't fit his narrative, Drudge leaves up his accusatory headline. A quick Google search shows it's already going viral on various right-wing blogs and sites even though it's already been debunked. As is so often the case, the truth will have a hard time ever catching up to the lie, which is the insidious thing about the way Drudge operates whenever he's dealing with one of his favorite themes (climate change, Sarah Palin, Obama approval ratings, corrupt Democrats, among others).

A cool ad

No torture and he talks

Excellent summary of the facts at Obsidian Wings but the bottom line is that reading the terror suspect his rights, treating him humanely and observing due process not only upholds our honor but actually results in more intelligence than harsh "Jack Bauer" style acts.

Quote if the day

Quote of the day on listening to Sarah Pailn from www.balloon-juice.com

"Listening to her speak is like Free Republic Mad Libs."

List of US forces used abroad 1798-1993

This is an interesting list useful for putting some things into perspective. Some points I took away from it are these:

1) American armed intervention abroad is nothing new. This list shows about 234 instances between 1798 and 1993, or on average more than one per year.

2) There's been little real controversy over the president using military forces abroad, even in some fairly significant ways, without specific Congressional authorization. Indeed, only five of the 234 instances were declared wars.

3) That said, the vast majority of the instances were very limited in scope, casualties and duration.

4) The typical distance from the US had tended to increase as the country became more powerful, but even in the early 1800s there were interventions in the Arab world and even in the 1990s there were interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America, so there's no hard-and-fast rule on where the next intervention might be.

Down the slippery slope

Sullivan:

Notice again how far down the slippery slope we have gone. Krauthammer's first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone's control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer's arguments to back us up. Stephen Hayes, Cheney's stenographer along with Mike Allen, even argued on Fox News that Cheney's assault on the president as an alien threat to the American people was too soft and wanted to "squeeze" the pantie-bomber for more info. These are neo-fascist sentiments, empowering lawless violence by the government, justified solely by fear of terror incidents. Whatever else junking the entire history of Western jurisprudence and the laws of war is, it is not in any way conservative. It is a radical assault on one of the central pillars of our civilization.