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Group That Shaped Death Penalty Gives Up on Its Own Work →

“Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”

"Polanski was not actually arrested like a “common terrorist” [as in Bernard Henri-Lévy’s phrase]. He was arrested like a common fugitive child rapist. Actually, he was arrested like a distinctly uncommon fugitive child rapist, what with being on his way to pick up a lifetime achievement award for a body of work largely completed while he was evading being sentenced for raping a child. That’s really not how things play out for most fugitive child rapists, as I understand it. I’m pretty sure only the white, wealthy, well-connected ones are ever permitted to make such a mockery of justice for so long…"

— Can I get an amen? Jezebel via Ze

In our name

Dick Cheney, notorious will-o’-the-constitutional-wisp, would like to see classified documents made public, so long as they confirm the effectiveness of Bush-era torture. The Gabfest has noted that there’s a delicious element to the man who wouldn’t turn over his doodles to the archivist now taking this position. But the New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch perfectly articulates the deeper fallacy of this debate; perhaps the thinking person’s version of the Sheppard Smith outburst I linked last week. Here’s Gourevitch on the Political Scene:

What if [the interrogation method] works but it happens to be a crime? It’s effective to assassinate people. They’re dead and they’re no longer a problem. I would just say the effectiveness debate is a false debate. I think the effectiveness debate is a sort of cloud that Cheney’s trying to cast over it and he’s trying to keep the debate very much also on this idea of “We did this to those terrorists…”

Slowly what’s changing is that we’re starting to realize that when we commit torture, it’s something we’re doing to us. When you look back five years ago at the Abu Ghraib pictures, everybody said, “Wow, why are our soldiers doing those things to those people?” But the important question, too, is why are we doing that to our soldiers – turning them into torturers? Why are we doing that to our nation? Why is this what we’re doing to our laws? Why is this what we’re doing to our political institutions and our standing in the world? And I think that that’s a debate that Dick Cheney knows perfectly well he’s lost catastrophically and cannot win on any grounds.

EDIT: Gourevitch’s above quote appears to have been a rought draft of a Comment piece that ran in the magazine two weeks later. You can read that piece here.

(Video not safe for work)

Finally. Perhaps I should take it as a sort wake up call that my catharsis came through Fox News anchor Sheppard Smith, but I don’t:

WE. ARE. AMERICA. I don’t give a rat’s ass if [torture] helps! We are America! We do not fucking torture.

Although for purposes of civil discourse, I find ways to make this some intellectual belief founded in constitutional law and geopolitics, at root I am Smith, pounding on the plastic table and cursing for values that shouldn’t need to be articulated, let alone dithered around by everyone from our forty-third president to a couple of second-rate, streaming cable blowhards. Hat tip to Smith.

(via Colbert)

"For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding." →

Times editorial from Ali Soufan, FBI supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005.

Supreme Court to conference on Al-Marri this week

For a while now, the “season” whose statistics, subplots, and relative greatness I track with the most enthusiasm is that of the Supreme Court of the United States, and we are in the thick of things this year.

Although it’s invigorating to see that this court found in favor of a consumer (a consumer!) in the Wyeth drug labeling case, this civil libertarian is entirely consumed by Al-Marri v. Spagone, which was just featured in a great piece in the New Yorker.

Al-Marri is the ultimate test of Bush-era indefinite detention holdings, which have represented perhaps the most shameful abrogation of American values since 2001. The Obama administration did the right thing (the right thing!) by indicting him on criminal charges and beginning a path towards justice this week, as you likely heard. They’re doing the wrong thing, and perhaps attempting to hold onto illegally broad detention powers, by using the fact of that indictment to attempt to push Al-Marri’s case off the Supreme Court docket.

Anyhow, all of this inane background for one piece of real news, via the SCOTUSblog: the justices will conference Friday on what to do with the case, and we’ll probably know by next week. As reported in the link, “The Court agreed in December to rule on Al-Marri’s case, and the government’s brief — if the case is not dismissed — is due March 23.”

A criminal indictment is a deeply reassuring first positive sign from Obama that he’ll do right by civil liberties, but here’s hoping that the SCOTUS steps up to the plate and begins to reign in executive authority. I could have ended with a sports metaphor there, but I didn’t want to bowl anybody over.

Madam Senator,

Though the political slate - particularly for California - is already overcrowded, I would like to register my vigorous endorsement of the dispassionate but unshrinking reasoning in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times, ‘To Investigate or Not: Four Ways to Look Back at Bush.’

As a steadfast civil libertarian, I believe that our new president cannot fully accomplish his goal of restoring this nation’s standing in the world without a full accounting of the misdeeds of the last eight years. I seek no vengeance for the pitiable men and women of the Bush administration, but the above-linked author makes a compelling case for the need to take account before memories fade and critical actors pass away. We must learn from this.

I believe you share some of my embarrassment with our recent fall from grace; I hope you will champion a thoughtful and bipartisan commission as soon as the occasion arises.

Respectfully,
Steve McFarland

The Bush Era, a coda.

George Packer, reflecting on Bush’s final press conference w/r/t his presidency, on the New Yorker’s Transition podcast:

They are tactical, they are almost communications errors he is admitting: I should have gone to New Orleans sooner, Abu Ghraib didn’t look good, it’s as if he’s saying “Our Strategic Communications office wasn’t on its game that day,” and that gets to part of the fundamental problem with his administration, which is that they thought that message control was everything, and that the actual results in New Orleans and Iraq were secondary.

This strikes me as an accurate read of the man and the administration he assembled, but I think Packer underemphasizes the extent to which sheer righteous conviction led to the narrowing of vision. Bush sees them as communications errors, yes, but I think because “If only we had better shown the American people,” or “If only they knew of the threats we knew of,” we, too, would accept something like Abu Ghraib as tenable collateral damage.

I can’t remember who said/wrote it, but the idea of “inadequate moral restraint,” seems to me the pithiest rendering of the Bush/Cheney reign. It synthesizes two things I’ve come to feel: the horror of a staunch civil libertarian in the face of international and domestic disgrace, but also an empathy for what must have been the crazy-making experience of the President’s daily intelligence brief in the aftermath of 9/11.

Conviction over and above reason led them down this path, and inadequate moral restraint – a sort of pathologically ordered understanding of America’s priorities – leads Mr. Bush to see Abu Ghraib, as Packer picks up on, as something like a distraction. Indeed, Bush finds it regrettable, but mostly lost in the wash of a greater struggle.

And that is the sorrowful legacy of this administration, from which President Bush will find no absolution. His lack of concern for individual dignity and freedom was made plain in that prison, in the Ninth Ward, the Patriot Act, Defense of Marriage act, and on countless other occasions. What they all missed is that justice and dignity to the level of the individual (enemy combatant or no) is not something to be dispensed with in lean times, it was the very stuff of 1776.

Bush fought for our stature in the world, without ever grasping the ideals, the “self-evident” truths, which won us that stature. After eight dark years, I pray that this new President, burdened as he is with the smoldering mess left by his predecessor, will begin the work of rebuilding that stature, and returning to those values which begin, “When in the course of human events…”

Can’t just cross my fingers: Prop 8

I sent this email to as many California voters as I could think of. I encourage you to do likewise.

Hello Friends,

Many of you have not heard from/seen me in years, and I hope this letter finds all safe and sound. As I try to keep up with California news from my Harlem apartment, I have followed the prospects of Proposition 8 - the ballot initiative to revoke equal marriage rights for gay couples - with some interest. I wasn’t much worried, though, counting on a fundamental sense of justice in the California people. But as polls continue to narrow, I can no longer conscience silence. I’m doing something I have never done: writing a bulk email.

This not a political matter, and this is not a choice which has any bearing on the love, sanctity, and meaning embodied in so many heterosexual marriages. Marriage is a civil right. If you have married, I’d imagine you believe it to be a fundamental one. Anything less than marriage - including a “separate but equal” pact under another name - is a profound injustice.

I urge you to vote NO on Prop 8 to preserve basic civil rights for all California citizens. If you identify as heterosexual, the need to stand up for our brothers and sisters even without our own stake in this fight is of particular ethical import. If you already plan on voting NO, I encourage you to read up on the state of the race and see if you, too, feel compelled to write as many people as you can.

In 1948, California was the first state to rule racist anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. That decision sparked a fire culminating in the landmark Loving v. Virgina almost two decades later. Our parents or grandparents never had the privilege to vote in support of civil rights on that issue, but on this occasion we do. While we pray that this struggle for a basic equality moves more speedily, we must not forsake the opportunity to make our voices heard on November 4th. Vote NO on Prop 8.

Much warmth,
Steve McFarland

"Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment."

— Hendrik Hertzberg nails some elements of this gender/race oppression one- upsmanship dialogue which, if it was avoided by the candidates themselves, was seized upon with gusto (to much gnashing of teeth from your author), by partisan camps on many sides. From the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, Exhillaration.