We know that Republicans don’t do governance, they don’t do policy, they don’t do substance.  There’s one thing you can always count on from Republicans–a good one-liner.  They really can do messaging, and they seem to have settled on their message when it comes to defending torture: we shouldn’t criminalize political differences.

Joe Scarborough trotted out this line, brilliant in its Orwellian deceptiveness, about 10 minutes ago (Mika Brzezinski sagely responded to his question “do we criminalize political differences”?  by saying “I’m not sure”.)  A few minutes later, Republican Sen. John Thune repeated the mantra.  When Pat Buchanan asked if there should be an independent counsel appointed to investigate allegations of torture, Sen. Thune repeated that we should not criminalize political differences.

This is pure dishonesty.  This isn’t about punishing the Bush administration for being supply-siders, it’s about holding them accountable for waterboarding detainees hundreds of times.  And let’s debunk, once and for all, the claim that torture was aimed at “keeping us safe“.   As Paul Krugman suggested “let’s say it slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.  So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.”

That’s what we need to investigate.  It’s funny, Republicans (including Bush himself) like to deride moral relativism.  It turns out that they are the real relativists.  I say torture is always wrong–that’s a moral absolute.  Bush, Cheney and the rest argue torture is sometimes ok–even when it’s used to make people confess to a nonexistent link between Iraq and 9/11.  This isn’t about criminalizing political differences — it’s about criminalizing inhuman, barbaric torture aimed at extracting confessions that could be used to justify a phony war.  Keep defending that Scarborough, and keep enabling him Mika.

It’s not really “news” anymore that we tortured people during the Bush years.  But it’s clear that we don’t know all the details yet, though more keeps coming out.  We know that one man was waterboarded 183 times, another 83 times.  A question one might ask is: why waterboard people so many times?  We’re starting to get what may be an answer: the Bush administration may have been torturing people in an attempt to get them to provide “evidence” of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq that simply did not exist.

This had nothing to do with keeping Americans safe and everything to do with the Bush administration trying to justify its false claims that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots.  That was, quite simply, a political goal aimed at justifying the invasion of Iraq.

“Reprehensible” doesn’t quite do this justice, but it’s a start.  We really need leadership here, in order to know exactly what happened and who knew about it.  Torture is always wrong, but if the Bush administration was torturing people for political ends that is truly despicable and needs to be dealt with.

Having left the United States in the worst economic crisis in 75 years, with two unresolved, ongoing wars abroad and Bin Laden still at large, you’d think the least Dick Cheney could do would be to keep a low profile.  Instead, he has been busy irresponsibly claiming that President Obama’s detainee policies are making us less safe (imagine what VP Cheney would have said if some Democratic leader had dared to level a similar claim at President Bush).

What were the Bush detainee policies that kept us safe?  They included torture.  All right, a Cheney defender (are there any?) might concede, but hard times call for hard choices–sure, we violated the Constitution and basic concepts of humanity, but at least playing Jack Bauer kept Americans safe.

Cheney’s timing was pretty poor.  Just a couple of weeks after he recklessly charged that Obama’s move toward humane detainee policies was making us less safe, there is evidence that torturing a key terrorist suspect foiled a grand total of zero terrorist plots.

If torturing detainees didn’t actually do anything to make us safer, why, exactly, were Bush and Cheney choosing this approach?  Was is that they had absolutely no plan for responding to terrorism (their big plan abroad, of course, centered on invading a country that had absolutely nothing to do with attacking the U.S.), or was is that Cheney has a sadist streak that would put De Sade to shame?  Perhaps the next time Cheney favors us with an audience, he can tell us.

I didn’t like when Dick Cheney, as Vice President, tried to scare the hell out of us, and I don’t like it any better now.  Cheney doesn’t mince any words: he claims that Obama “is making choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

Are you kidding me?  What would Vice President Cheney have said if someone outside the Bush-Cheney cabal had dared to challenge his wisdom?  I think the would-be critic would have been lucky to have gotten off with a patented Cheney snarl–more likely, Cheney would have suggested they were a traitor.

You know what, Bush and Cheney were asleep at the switch when we were hit with the worst terrorist attack on American soil.  They ignored warnings and did nothing to even try to respond to the threat.  After September 11, they failed to catch the man behind the attacks and ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks (though Cheney and Bush rogueishly, and very irresponsibly, kept suggesting otherwise).

The invasion of Iraq boosted terrorist recruitment and made us less safe. I’ve heard as much as I need to hear from Cheney, a man who helped make us less safe, about how best to protect Americans.  Judging from Cheney’s popularity ratings (or lack thereof), it seems that mst Americans feel similarly.

I believe that words matter.  Many politicans understand this too, and are adept at manipulating the media to use words that advance their own view of the world, as I mentioned earlier today in a different context.

The words that AP chose for its headline today matter: “Obama Releases Secret Bush Anti-Terror Memos”.  The headline suggests that the secret memos contained plans for hunting down Bin Laden or waging war against Al Qaeda–and also suggests Obama may have betrayed national security by betraying secret memos crafted in order to keep Americans safe.

Actually, the memos contained nothing of the sort.  The reality is that these were not “anti-terror memos”.  They were anti-Constitution memos, setting forth the principle that President Bush had the power to set aside the Constitution at his whim.  As AP notes in the body of its piece, “The conclusion , reiterated in page after page of documents, was that the president had broad authority to set aside constitutional rights.” (emphasis added)

The memos don’t contain plans for hunting down terrorists, they contain plans for shredding the Constitution. In one memo, the infamous John Yoo made this very clear “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overridng need to wage war successfully.”

No one has ever convinced me that catching Bin Laden requires giving up our constitutional rights (in fact, Bush used to tell us that the reason we were fighting the war on terror was to protect our freedom).  It’s nice to see we now have an Attorney General who recognizes this–Eric Holder commented just before the documents were released that the fight against terrorism is not a “zero-sum battle with our civil liberties”.  Holder added that “Not only is that school of though misguided, I fear that…it does more harm than good.”

Introducing a new feature to this ‘bril’ blog:

The DAILY SNARK

Today’s award goes to an ace reporter who had the patience to sit through an entire press conference with State Department spokesman Robert Wood. This dutifully snarky reporter inquired about the geographical boundaries of Dennis Ross’s new diplomatic post:

QUESTION: Have your ace geographers been able to determine what Southwest Asia is and thereby figure out what exactly Dennis Ross’s mandate is?

MR. WOOD: I’m so shocked that you asked that question. Let me give you my best – our best read of this. From our standpoint, the countries that make up areas of the Gulf and Southwest Asia include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, and those are the countries

At least Wood snarked right back at him.

• Today: Slightly Invasive
• Tomorrow: An Afternoon Air Raid
• This Week: Scattered Showers
• Next Week: Endless Front Approaching

Is there a grade worse than “F”?

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

. . . .

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government’s payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI’s chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

The payout to Hatfill, a highly unusual development that all but exonerated him in the mailings, was an essential step to clear the way for prosecuting Ivins, according to lawyers familiar with the matter.

Except there now won’t be any prosecution. No testimony in open court. No hearing that might shed a little light on how the government chased the presumably wrong lead for five years before a shakeup at the FBI shifted focus to Ivins. Now we are to believe that the case is closed because the alleged suicide is somehow tantamount to a confession.

In Bush-Cheney terms, a dead “culprit” without having to go through open US courts is a BIG win.

* * * *

And then there’s the global part of the Global War on Terror™:

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.

The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

. . . .

The information linking the ISI to the bombing of the Indian Embassy was described in interviews by several American officials with knowledge of the intelligence. Some of the officials expressed anger that elements of Pakistan’s government seemed to be directly aiding violence in Afghanistan that had included attacks on American troops.

Some American officials have begun to suggest that Pakistan is no longer a fully reliable American partner and to advocate some unilateral American action against militants based in the tribal areas.

It is significant that Barack Obama began his much-discussed trip abroad in Afghanistan, not Iraq.  in recent days, Obama has succeeded in shifting debate from Iraq to Afghanistan, while McCain has struggled to keep up, essentially doing his best to adopt Obama’s point that more troops are needed in Afghanistan.  While the media has essentially forgotten about Afghanistan,  Obama has been arguing for months that Bush and McCain’s obsession with Iraq caused us to take our eye off Afghanistan and Pakistan–a region that actually has something to do with getting Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. 

Until very recently, McCain rejected this view, repeatedly calling Iraq “the central front in the war on terror” and dismissing calls to redeploy troops to Afghanistan.  After Obama’s recent speech arguing that the misguided war in Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and calling for a new strategy that would take the fight to Al Qaeda in its safe haven, McCain claimed he, too, would move troops from Iran to Afghanistan (though he quickly “revised” his position, ambiguously suggesting some of new troops might come from other countries.) 

What business does an active duty general have in weighing in on the presidential election?  Gen. Petraeus seems to have no problem wading into politics, as we’ve seen in the past.  Gen. Petraeus played politics again today–a few minutes ago, MSNBC ran an interview in which Andrea Mitchell asked Gen. Petraeus about Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw and redeploy troops from Iraq over a 16 month period.  I naively wondered why Gen. Petraeus didn’t beg off, declining to comment on a specific proposal at issue in the presidential election.  Instead, he gave the McCain response, saying timetables are not a good idea, that decisions must be based on facts on the ground, and adding that “the enemy might get a vote” (meaning we might have to respond to insurgent activity). 

I am paraphrasing, as there is no transcript or video available yet.  This is dangerous stuff.  Active duty generals shouldn’t be just one more cable TV talking head.  I would have thought this was obvious, but Gen. Petraeus’s shows otherwise.