Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out

Every day it is becoming more difficult for the Obama Administration to continue to embrace the appalling Peggy Noonan Doctrine of "just keep walking" where the Bush Administration's embrace of torture as a war tactic is concerned. Now that the OLC memos have been released, former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow has decided to speak up in Foreign Policy magazine:

1. The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.

Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time.

[snip]

There is an elementary distinction, too often lost, between the moral (and policy) question -- "What should we do?" -- and the legal question: "What can we do?" We live in a policy world too inclined to turn lawyers into surrogate priests granting a form of absolution. "The lawyers say it's OK." Well, not really. They say it might be legal. They don't know about OK.

[snip]

The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.

In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.

I remain unconvinced that there weren't ugly little corners of the Administration; the "You're with us or you're with the terrorist" crowd, who weren't thinking about exactly that possibility. But Zelikow's point about using lawyers as surrogate priests is, to my mind, the crux of the matter. The Bush Administration, and yes, the Obama Administration, are hiding behind lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee to exonerate them from any kind of wrongdoing. "The lawyers said it was OK." What's appalling to me is that there is NOTHING in the psyches of these men that said "Wait a minute, this is really ugly stuff." You have to be a sick, twisted, sadistic psychopath to waterboard someone, no matter how odious he is, 183 times in one month -- and still think you can take any kind of moral high road.

For over a decade, we've heard the right wing talk about morality, but only in the context of private sexual behavior. It didn't start with the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about a blowjob in a private civil case, but it gained critical mass with the impeachment. What this focus on sexuality allowed the right wing to do is to reframe all notions of morality into the context of what individuals do in their bedrooms. So as long as morality could be put into this very small box, when it came time for the Bush Junta to go to war, anything they wanted to do was fair game. Because the lawyers -- the same lawyers Republicans rail against during their campaigns -- said it was OK.

Zelikow spoke with Rachel Maddow last night:

Meanwhile, elsewhere at General Electric, Chuck Todd has shown that he's willing to embrace the torturers as part of the hazing process to become an entrenched, inside-the-beltway good ol' boy:

There does seem to be a little bit of a reaction to how this was received on the left. And the president, when he went on in those comments, Andrea, to suggest that he'd be open to some sort of special commission that was bipartisan, you know, he said, on one hand said he's worried about the process getting politicized, and frankly this feels like a political food fight now. Vice President Cheney on one side, President Obama on the other. The hard left, the hard right, fighting over this in the blogosphere. When he talks about - he fears the politicization - that may be too late, so the compromise might be, and the president basically comes out and endorses it in that photo op, questioning that he got there, which is a special commission to look into this but it opens up all sorts of doors on when legal opinions matter and all that. That is just -- this is some touchy situation, issues having to do with legal opinions, the constitution, it's a real tightrope. And the political pressure on both sides is intense.

This is what passes for political analysis in the Washington press corps these days. A moral question like torture is reduced to a political food fight between warring political parties. And note Chuck Todd's use of the term "Vice President Cheney" instead of "Former Vice President Cheney" -- as if Cheney were still very much in office (which given Cheney's claim that he has "ordered" release of documents that will show all the "good information" he got from feeding his dark soul with the screams of the tortured may very well be true). That is the third time yesterday I heard Dick Cheney referred to this way.

The Beltway crowd can paint this as a "fringe blogger" vs. the forces of All That is Good and Holy all they want to; it doesn't change the fundamental fact: We are no longer a nation with any moral authority. We are Saddam Hussein. We are North Vietnam in the 1960's. We are the Japanese during WWII, the same Japanese that WE tried and convicted for using the very same techniques that are now deemed by Bush's psychopathic lawyers to be perfectly acceptable.

The right loves to talk about religion as being necessary for morality. It kind of makes me wonder what kind of fight we're in when the religion that our leaders invoke can allow them to think that torture is an intrinisic good when WE do it.