Salon: Glenn Greenwald

The NYT calls Iranian interrogation tactics "torture"

Glenn Greenwald — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:05:00 PDT

(updated below)

Today is the ideal day to celebrate America's specialness, and America's paper of record inspirationally leads the ritual:

Clark Hoyt, New York Times Public Editor, April 26, 2009:

A LINGUISTIC shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning. Until this month, what the Bush administration called "enhanced" interrogation techniques were "harsh" techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are "brutal". . . . . The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were "widely denounced as illegal torture." Jehl changed that to the "harshest interrogation methods" since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed. . . . And why not, then, go all the way to torture? Jehl said that when the paper is discussing what is generally regarded as the most extreme interrogation method the C.I.A. used, waterboarding, "we’ve become more explicit in saying in a first reference that it’s a near-drowning technique" that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and many other experts "have called torture." But he said: "I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?" Jehl argued for precision and caution. I agree.

The New York Times today:

Top Reformers Admitted Plot, Iran Declares CAIRO -- Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a "velvet" revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran’s disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say. . . . The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. . . . In 2001, Ali Afshari was arrested for his work as a student leader. He said he was held in solitary confinement for 335 days and resisted confessing for the first two months. But after two mock executions and a five-day stretch where his interrogators would not let him sleep, he said he eventually caved in. "They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year," Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. "They eventually broke my resistance."

Virtually every tactic which the article describes the Iranians as using has been used by the U.S. during the War on Terror, while several tactics authorized by Bush officials (waterboarding, placing detainees in coffin-like boxes, hypothermia) aren't among those the article claims are used by the Iranians. Nonetheless, "torture" appears to be a perfectly fine term for The New York Times to use to describe what the Iranians do, but one that is explicitly banned to describe what the U.S. did. Despite its claimed policy, the NYT has also recently demonstrated its eagerness to use the word "torture" to describe these same tactics . . . when used by the Chinese against an American detainee.

Notably, the NYT article today seems to take particular offense that the Iranian Government is putting people on trial using confessions they obtained via torture ("the government planned to put on trial several Iranian employees of the British Embassy — after confessions were extracted"). Just two days ago, The Washington Post reported:

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday accused the Obama administration of using statements elicited through torture to justify the confinement of a detainee it represents at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The ACLU is asking a federal judge to throw out those statements and others made by Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who may have been as young as 12 when he was captured. His attorney argued that Jawad was abused in U.S. custody, threatened and subjected to intense sleep deprivation.

"The government's continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past," said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who is representing Jawad in a lawsuit challenging his detention."The government's continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse violates centuries of U.S. law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past," said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who is representing Jawad in a lawsuit challenging his detention.

Just read the details of what we did to this adolescent to marvel at what the NYT (and, of course, NPR) refuse to call "torture" when done by us. Though the human rights abuses of the Iranian Government are well-documented and severe, there's also no mention in the NYT article of these interrogation tactics being applied by Iran to teenagers (such as Jawad) or resulting in numerous detainee deaths (as happened during the Bush era).

During the presidential campaign, Rudy Giuliani was widely ridiculed for arguing that whether these tactics are "torture" depends, at least in part, on who uses them (it's torture if They do it, but not when We do it). But he could take that definitive moral relativism to any leading American newspaper, become an Editor, and fit right in, since that's exactly the editorial policy of our leading media outlets. What's most striking about all this media behavior is that people around the world -- outside of the U.S. -- aren't fooled by these sorts of blatant double standards, whereby the U.S. even claims the power to change the meaning of words based on whether it or another country is doing something. The target of this government and media behavior is purely domestic.

It's not particularly unusual for a government to permit itself to do something that it prohibits others from doing. The U.S. is hardly the only country that does that. But when that country's media collectively abets that government effort by molding its language to reflect that exceptionalism, it elevates the propaganda to a much different level. When I documented the American media's obsession with journalists detained by other countries and its virtually complete blackout of much, much longer (and often more oppressive) detentions of foreign journalists by the U.S., that was the central point I tried to emphasize:

Pointing to other governments and highlighting their oppressive behavior can be cathartic, fun and gratifying in a self-justifying sort of way. Ask Fred Hiatt; it's virtually all he ever does. But the first duty of the American media -- like the first duty of American citizens -- is to oppose oppressive behavior by our own government. That's not as fun or as easy, but it is far more important. Moreover, obsessively complaining about the rights-abridging behavior of other countries while ignoring the same behavior from our own government is worse than a mere failure of duty. It is propagandistic and deceitful, as it paints a misleading picture that it is other governments -- but not our own -- which engage in such conduct.

Since the American Government has acted -- and continues to act -- overtly to protect and shield those who engaged in this conduct, will it condemn Iran for torturing detainees? As for The New York Times, at this point, they don't even seem interested in pretending that they make these editorial judgments independently or with a pretense of objectivity. They're perfectly happy to have you know that when the U.S. Government does X, it is called one thing, but when foreign governments do X, it is called something else entirely.

UPDATE: From NPR yesterday (h/t reader EI):

Meditations On Freedom: Refugee Finds Peace In U.S. Musa Saidykhan had been a reporter in his home country of Gambia for more than a decade when he was arrested and later tortured by government officials. Following Saidykhan's imprisonment, he fled the country with his family and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Saidykhan explains how he will commemorate freedom on this, his first, Independence Day in the U.S.

All the impediments that prevent American media organizations from using the word "torture" certainly do evaporate quickly when it comes to other countries.

Salon Radio: Charlie Savage on Obama's civil liberties record

Glenn Greenwald — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:03:00 PDT

(updated w/transcript)

Back in February, The New York Times' Charlie Savage -- who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing Bush's use of signing statements to break the law -- wrote an article reporting that, after a first-week Executive Order from Obama banning torture, "the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda," which is "prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies." About Savage's February article, I wrote:

While believing that Savage's article is of great value in sounding the right alarm bells, I think that he paints a slightly more pessimistic picture on the civil liberties front than is warranted by the evidence thus far (though only slightly).

In retrospect, Savage was right and I was wrong about that: his February article was far more prescient than premature.

Today, in the NYT, Savage has another article examining the same topic, headlined: "To Critics, New Policy on Terror Looks Old." In it, he explores this question: "Has [Obama], on issues related to fighting terrorism, turned out to be little different from his predecessor?" A key point from Savage's article -- which I've tried to emphasize several times -- is that whereas these policies were supported by roughly half the population (Republicans) in the Bush era but vehemently opposed by the other half (at least ostensibly), Obama's embrace of them is now causing a large part of the other half of the population (Democrats) to support them as well, thus entrenching them as bipartisan consensus:

In any case, Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said Mr. Obama’s ratification of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them, Mr. Balkin said, Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government. "What we are watching," Mr. Balkin said, "is a liberal, centrist, Democratic version of the construction of these same governing practices."

That was the point former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith made when arguing last month that Obama is actually strengthening (rather than "changing") the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism even more effectively than Bush did by entrenching those policies in law and causing unprincipled Democrats to switch from pretending to oppose them to supporting them, thus transforming them into bipartisan dogma.

Savage is my guest on Salon Radio today to talk about Obama's record on terrorism and civil liberties, and the way -- as Savage describes it -- Obama has embraced and replicated many of the core "War on Terror" polices of the Bush presidency, particularly in the form they took in Bush's second term (even as Obama largely purports to reject the Bush theories of unilateral presidential power). We also discuss how so many people who previously criticized these polices rather vocally when pursued by Bush are either silent or actively supportive now that Obama is defending them. There simply aren't any better reporters on these issues than Savage, and I highly recommend listening to his very nuanced and well-informed views on these topics.

The discussion is roughly 20 minutes in length and can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below. A transcript will be posted shortly.

UPDATE: The transcript is now posted here.

On a note related to all of this, the Obama administration -- which has repeatedly delayed releasing a less redacted version of the 2004 report of the CIA's Inspector General that aggressively challenged both the legality and efficacy of torture -- today announced that it would delay its disclosure by at least another seven weeks, to August 31, 2009. We're in the New Era of Tranpsarency.

To listen to this discussion, click PLAY on the recorder below:

Glenn Greenwald: My guest today on Salon Radio is Charlie Savage of The New York Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on George Bush's use of signing statements to evade legal obligations. He's also the author of the 2007 book Takeover - the Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Charlie, thanks for joining me today.

Charlie Savage: Thanks for having me on.

GG: Back in February you wrote an article in The New York Times in which you reported: "even as it pulls back from harsh interrogation and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush's war on terrorism, the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor's approach to fighting al-Qaeda," and you said that these developments were "prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush era policies." And at the time I wrote about your article and I think I called parts of it, in my view, slightly "premature," and I actually, in retrospect, think that that article now was more prescient than premature.

I wanted to ask you, since that February article, it's been several months, and you have a new article in The Times today that poses this question: "Has Obama, on issues relating to fighting terrorism, turned out to be little different from his predecessor?"

With regard to the actions that the Obama administration has taken since you wrote that February article, in your view, has the Obama administration continued to express, as you called it, "continued support for the major elements of Bush's approach to fighting al-Qaeda?"

CS: The answer to that is: it depends on what you mean by Bush's approach to fighting al-Qaeda. If you mean the actual policy of how are we detaining people, how we are monitoring communication in order to gain intelligence, what we are doing with Predator drone strikes in Pakistan and so forth, the substance of what is happening now, and what was happening on, say, January 20, 2009 before noon, when Bush was president, is very similar, and there's some superficial changes like they're going to try to close Guantanamo, but the policy of indefinite detention without trials for terrorism suspects who are deemed too dangerous to release, but too difficult to put on trial, remain. So the essence of that policy is the same, whether it's at Guantanamo or somewhere else.

On the other hand, the Obama people point out that they dramatically toned down the rhetoric that George Bush was famous for, as far as asserting a unilateral, inherent, sweeping theory of Commander-in-Chief power that the president can do whatever he wants at his own discretion – set aside legal constraints, not go to Congress to change laws, but simply bypass them if he thinks doing so is necessary to protect national security – the Obama people don't talk like that. What they're doing is getting congressional authorization statutes, so in that sense, what they're doing is quite different, or at least how they're going about getting to the end is quite different than what Bush did, at least in Bush's first term.

GG: Let me ask you about that, because I think there have always been two separate prongs to the criticism of how Bush handled these policies. One is the content of the policies itself, namely the denial of basic rights, the refusal to recognize core American values and principles and the like, and the other aspect of it is how those policies were effectuated. There was a good period of time when they were just outright violating the law, breaking the law, acting contrary to congressional statutes. But then there came a point when, due to Supreme Court rulings that they were breaking the law, and the fact that some of these programs were leaked and became publicly known, that they actually went to Congress and got support for these same policies.

So, in terms of that second category – namely how these policies were effectuated, whether they were breaking the law or doing it with congressional authorization – can you describe the difference between, say, the first Bush term and the second Bush term in terms of how they went about doing these policies?

CS: Right. So, what you're getting at, this is a round-about way of answering that – is during the Bush administration years there was a great chorus of criticism from different factions that all agreed that what the Bush administration was doing was bad, but they were coming at it from different angles.

There was the civil libertarian faction who thought that the state should not have this much power over individuals, government agencies should not be able to wiretap without getting warrants, people should not be detained without trial, this is just too much state power and not enough individual rights. And secondly, there was the rule of law critique, which was kind of agnostic on that issue, but was saying, wait, the president should not have the power to violate statutes, and treaties that had been ratified, and the law.

So, in the second term of the Bush administration, prompted in part by news reports and in part by the various Supreme Court rulings, Congress finally woke up and started adjusting federal statutes to bring them into alignment with what the Bush administration was doing. In the Military Commissions Act, they authorized military commissions and a bunch of other stuff related to detainees, and in the FISA Amendment Act and the Protect America Act, they authorized the National Security Agency program, wiretapping without warrants. And that relieved a lot of the legal pressure on what was happening.

The rule of law crowd kind of fell away at that point because now the president was acting pursuant to and in compliance with federal law. There was still the civil libertarian critique, which has some rule of law overtones, where the ACLU would say, well wait a minute there's still the constitutional problem with wiretapping without warrants, but at least you didn't have a specific, explicit, federal statute that the president seemed to be flouting any more. That made a big difference.

But in addition to that, what we now know is that it appears that even though they continued to insist that their harsh interrogation policy was legal all along, they stopped doing most of that stuff after Abu Ghraib, or certainly into the second term of the Bush administration. So even though you had, recently, Dick Cheney saying, you know, oh my God, Obama saying that the CIA has to not torture people is going to cause tremendous risks to the country, and if we get attacked that will be why. In fact, those policies hadn't been exercised for years. And so, the set of counter-terrorism programs that Obama inherited, and has largely continued since January 20, looked very different than what was happening in 2002, 2003, 2004.

GG: So then, let's take that comparison, then, because part of the significant controversy once the Democrats took over control of the Congress in 2006, was that as Bush administration counter-terrorism policies became public, as they became invalidated by courts including the Supreme Court in the case of Hamdan in 2006, that what the Democratic Congress proceeded to do was essentially to authorize, to give its legal approval to, many of these most controversial policies, so that the controversy in the second term was no longer about "is Bush breaking the law?"; instead, the controversy was: look at Congress giving its approval to these radical policies that, as you say, civil libertarians objected to in terms of what they actually did.

So in terms of comparing the Bush second term terrorism approach to Obama's current approach since he's been inaugurated, since you wrote that February article, do you think it's fair to say that those two periods -- namely Bush's second term, Obama now -- are much more similar than they are different in terms of how they're approaching these issues?

CS: Oh, I think it's very fair to say. I mean, Bush had emptied the CIA prisons in 2006 when he brought all the high-value people to Guantanamo; they rhetorically said, we can still do that if they want, but it's not clear that they were. With Obama now reviving military commissions, but with statutory authorization is what Bush was doing after the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The wiretapping program, in alignment with federal statute, is quite the same, and so forth. There's a few things that have been adjusted around the edges; the Obama people, A) they would say, look, we're still reviewing this, this isn't the final chapter yet, but B) they would also say, we've added some extra protections here or there. These are, in some places, true, but in terms of the broad outline, it is essentially the same thing going forward.

You know, I had this interesting conversation when I was working on this article that came out this morning with Jack Balkin at Yale Law School, and he compares this moment to when Dwight Eisenhower took over, in 1953, and after FDR and then Truman had built up the New Deal administrative state, which Republicans hated, but then Eisenhower, instead of dismantling it, just sort of adjusted it with his own policies a little bit, and kept it going. And at that point, there was no longer any sort of partisan controversy about the fact that we were going to have this massive administrative state; it just sort of became a permanent part of the governing structure of the country.

And in the same way he said in 1969 when Richard Nixon took over from LBJ, he did some adjustments to the great society welfare state that LBJ had built up, but he didn't scrap it. And at that point, Republicans and Democrats had both presided over the welfare state and the welfare state became part of just how government worked.

That in the same way, Obama now, by continuing the broad outlines of the various surveillance and detention and counter-terrorism programs, is draining them of plausible partisan controversy, and so they are going to become entrenched and consolidated as permanent features of American government as well, going forward.

GG: Right. Now, to me, that is the critical point, the one that you referenced and described Jack Balkin as making, and you actually quoted him in your article making this point as well, namely that these approaches to how we think about civil liberties and counter-terrorism, detention, and the like, have been transformed by Obama from purely Republican and George Bush-advocated policies, into bipartisan consensus, as a result of the fact that we now have a Democratic president as well, not just advocating these policies, but implementing them and aggressively defending them.

I know I've noticed a significant change in how Democrats and progressives talk about national security issues in the past several months. None of them used to defend secrecy policies of George Bush or detention powers or the denial of habeas corpus, or the right of preventive detention, and of course many, many of them now do.

So I wanted to ask you: in the course of your reporting, you talked to lots of people on the Hill and otherwise, have you noticed a change in how Democrats, progressives, people who are defenders of Obama talk about these issues as compared to how they talked about it during the Bush presidency, compared to how they talk about it now? Are they more willing to tolerate these sorts of things under Obama than they were under Bush? Have you noticed a change yourself in the mentality?

CS: Yes. Now, you've got – I have. Definitely you see people who used to be delivering blistering floor speeches in Congress now letting things go unremarked upon, or saying things in a much more restrained tone, if they say them at all, and this is part of, I guess, the sort of entrenchment, or the draining of partisan controversy over this.

That's also part of what's interesting about seeing or understanding what was happening during the Bush years. In the same way that a component of the criticism of Bush was based in civil liberties concerns, and a separate component was based in rule of law concerns, which are now not a problem any more, it's clear that another part of it, or at least of the noise we've heard in that era, had to have been, in retrospect, partisan. And of course the Bush administration defenders had said all of it was partisan, and that's not fair, that's not right, there were rule of law concerns and there were civil liberties concerns. But from people who used to shout and not aren't, that's probably the explanation.

On the other hand, to be fair, there's a shifting of the goal posts here because, again to emphasize, the stuff that was open to legal criticism, as being illegal because it clashed with congressional statutes in the beginning, in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005; it's much harder to make that claim now. The legal concerns have been dramatically reduced. And you can criticize Congress on policy grounds, if you are a civil libertarian, you can say they ought not to have done that, but the fact is that you win some, you lose some, and at least the process that we think of as the traditional process by which society in the United States is supposed to determine what we're going to do, which is Congress deliberates and then votes, well it's followed belatedly to come into the bulk of these policies...

GG: Let me ask you about that, because, you're right, and I agree that the lawlessness aspect of it eroded as Congress began endorsing these policies, but Congress really did that, not under the Obama administration. These policies didn't come into legal compliance in the last couple months; they came into legal compliance in the second term of the Bush administration in 2006, 2007.

And so when Obama was running around in 2007 and 2008 aggressively criticizing the Bush administration's approach to the War on Terror, and when Democrats and progressives in 2006, 2007, 2008 were doing the same, it was already the case that there was legal authorization for these policies; therefore it must have been the case that that critique, which continued as vigorously in those later years, was based on objections to the policies themselves. Isn't that fair to say is just a logical matter?

CS: I don't know if I agree with that. I think that that's underplaying the factor of pandering. When Obama was running around, as you say, making these aggressive critiques, that was primarily in the context of the Democratic primary for president, when he was speaking to the most liberal component of the electorate that was angered at what Bush had been doing over the years, and no one was going to get to the left of whoever was eventually going to win that nomination. And so they were all competing with each other to give voice to the frustrations of people who were very angry at George Bush over what they perceived to be law-breaking.

And, in that context, I think it's quite valid to call it pandering, but it's also this political reality the candidates, including Senator Obama, were not careful about distinguishing what it was they were criticizing. What was happening at that moment, or was it what had been happening two or three years earlier, some of which we were only then starting to have recently found out about? That lack of carefulness about what exactly it was he was criticizing now makes his continuation of these policies as they existed at the very end of the Bush administration look more questionable. But then when you parse it, and you look for the weasel words and so forth that you would find in any political speech, you can construct the line, well, maybe what he was really saying was, what they were doing in '03, '04, was bad, and he was allowing his audience to think that he was speaking more broadly.

GG: Right. I guess those are two separate issues: number one -- are the policies that Obama is implementing and pursuing good or bad policies, and then the other, separate question is: did he indicate during the campaign that he would reject those policies and quote-unquote "change" the approach, or did he leave room to believe he would actually continue them? And I guess those are two separate things, but along those lines, I want to ask you this question, and I have a couple more for you only:

Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer, wrote an article in The New Republic, I think about six weeks ago, arguing -- I believe persuasively -- that Obama's generalized approach to the war on terror is not just similar to Bush's, but it's actually strengthening Bush's policies, because in Goldsmith's view, one of the flaws, one of the mistakes that Bush made, was by not seeking congressional authority in the beginning, he failed to get as much support, as much entrenchment for these policies legally, as he would have been able to had he gone to Congress. And that Obama is actually being more successful in institutionalizing these war on terror policies than even Bush and Cheney were, not only because he's draining it of a partisan conflict, as you described earlier, but because by going to Congress and vowing to work with Congress, he's providing a much firmer foundation for these policies and ensuring that they endure for a longer time and might be more invulnerable to judicial challenge as well.

Do you agree with Goldsmith's view, that not only is Obama replicating a lot of these policies, but actually strengthening them through his approach?

CS: Absolutely. That was a great article, and it also reflected the themes of his book, in which he similarly talked about what a great strategic error it was for people in the Bush administration to be so unilateral in their rhetoric. His point was not just making a show of going to Congress, but it was also saying the right things as far as, we really want to respect checks and balances and separation of powers and oversight, we are worried about the Constitution as we do these things, and so it sort of reassures people that as executive power is accreting, that it's not going to be abused when you hear the person talking like that. Even if under the surface of things the power is the same, as opposed to Bush who made a show of saying, I can do this on my own, the heck with what you think, and so forth. Even if what's happening on the ground is the same, that rhetoric provides a political context which bolsters public confidence rather than undermining it. But this is all sort of stage-craft, the pageantry surrounding a reality that may be quite similar.

But I think what Goldsmith would also say – and I think he's probably also right about this – that it's not just empty rhetoric, right? Saying the right thing over and over again, and making a show of going to Congress adds up to substance after a while. It adds up to – people should go read that article for themselves, I'm sort of mangling, I don't want to leave the impression that he was saying or that I think there's nothing to this. There's something to it, but maybe not as much as the casual listener would be led to believe.

GG: I wrote a long article about Goldsmith's article and I will link his article again as well as my analysis of it, because I do think it captured a lot of the key issue in a really nuanced and illuminating way.

Let me ask you this last question. You, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize for your work on signing statements, and Bush's use of them. During the campaign, you submitted a questionnaire to all of the candidates, many of whom answered, one of whom was Obama, regarding many of these executive powers including signing statements, and Obama said at the time that he does not, as John McCain said, believe that signing statements are always illegitimate, and he did not vow that he would never use them, he actually said that he thinks they have a proper place in presidential power, and since then I think they've clarified, and I think you wrote an article about this a couple of months ago, about when they believe that they would use signing statements and how it was distinguished from how Bush used them, that they would inform Congress ahead of time that there were provisions they thought were invalid, attempt to get it out first, things like that.

There were some signing statements issued last week in connection with the war supplemental bill. How do you compare Obama's use of signing statements thus far to Bush's use, in terms of frequency, in terms of content, and anything else you think is important.

CS: Well, Obama is definitely making legal argument in his signing statement that similar to some of the legal arguments that Bush made in terms of control of negotiations overseas, in terms of appointment power issues and so forth. They're quite similar. Obama has yet to make any sort of really staggering claim, that is to say, invoking constitutional theories that are flabbergasting, or attacking a statute that is a really high-profile politically combustible statute. One of the reasons that there was not much press attention to Bush's signing statements at first was, it took the trigger of Bush using one to say that he didn't have to obey the McCain torture ban, which was and remains his most famous signing statement, to put the spotlight on the rest of what he was saying. So far Obama has been using it to go after small boring stuff, but he's been using it quite a lot.

He's challenged many more sections of bills at this point than Bill Clinton after the first few months of his term, and even probably that George W. Bush had in the first few months of 2001; one reason for that there's just been a lot more legislation early on in 2009. But I think that we're seeing in the same way that we were talking about the institutional relation of the counter-terrorism policy earlier in this conversation, what we're seeing is one-way ratchet effect of the signing statement device. Just as no-one used it very much at all, although there are isolated cases going back to the 19th century, but no-one really used it regularly until the end of the Reagan administration, and then Bush I, and then Clinton came in and used it some, and then Bush took that new plateau and ratcheted it up again.

Obama is using it more than Clinton did before him and certainly than any other previous Democratic. The argument over what is the issue with signing statements – are signing statements legitimate in and of themselves, as long as the legal theory is that the president is invoking the reserve of a right to ignore a law is uncontroversial, is that okay, or is it the American Bar Association absolutist position that a signing statement is never okay; a president should be vetoing. I think is sort of reinstitutionalizing, the first approach is the one that presidents of both parties, forever, are going to keep using.

GG: Very good. Well there are few better places to stay informed about terrorism and civil liberties and national security policies than Charlie Savage's byline and that's been true for quite a long time now, and Charlie, I really appreciate your taking the time to talk about your important article with me this morning.

CS: My pleasure. Thanks a lot, Glenn.

[Transcript courtesy of Thames Valley Transcribe]

The still-growing NPR "torture" controversy

Glenn Greenwald — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:03:00 PDT

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

There are several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR's Ombdusman, Alica Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR's ban on using the word "torture" to describe the Bush administration's interrogation tactics. Given the utter vapidity of her rationale ("there are two sides to the issue. And I'm not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?"), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches "Media Ethics" to graduate students at Georgetown University (my amazement quickly dissipated once I recalled that this is the same institution that, until last year, paid Doug Feith -- Doug Feith -- to teach students "national security policy" and that Berkeley Law School has John Yoo "teaching law" to its students; next semester at Georgetown: Karl Rove teaches Civility in a Post-Partisan Age, Bill Kristol lectures on Accountability in Punditry, while David Gregory examines The Role of Intellect in Adversarial Questioning).

NPR's "torture" ban and its Ombudsman's incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR -- and rightfully so. Yesterday, The Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day long, focusing on Shepard's refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a long column on Shepard's refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR's policy (indeed, this controversy began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR's steadfast refusal to use the word "torture" and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that).

Also, along with her On the Media appearance this weekend, Shepard went on another NPR-affiliated show -- Patt Morrison's KPCC Southern California Public Radio program -- in a quality segment that included several good questions from Morrison (and even better ones from callers); a very well-compiled, illustrative and cringe-inducing montage of NPR's repeatedly going out of its way to avoid calling Bush interrogation tactics "torture," juxtaposed with an excerpt where NPR explicitly accused Iraqis in Sadr City of "using torture" against detainees; and, finally, the inclusion in the discussion of a Berkeley Professor of Linguistics explaining why it matters so much what the media does in this regard and how virtually all media around the world -- other than what he called the "spineless U.S. media" -- call these tactics "torture" (the KPCC program credits my criticisms of Shepard for catalyzing the controversy and the segment can be heard here). Amazingly, a caller asked Shepard about the advent of blogs and how it has diversified commentary, and in replying, Shepard put on her most condescending and self-glorifying voice to say this:

I think, um, we're now at a stage where the debate is between dialogue and diatribe, and I wish there was more dialogue. I think there's more diatribe.

That's from the same person who refuses to "dialogue" about her views outside of NPR-affiliated confines.

Along those lines, Shepard has gone back to her NPR blog to write yet another column about this controversy and to assure NPR listeners in her headline that "Your Voices Have Been Heard." In it, she references my criticisms without bothering to address any of them, and also claims, for whatever it's worth: "For the record, I have brought this issue and the volume of comments to the attention of NPR's top editorial staff."

Finally, Shepard today will appear on yet another NPR program, the nationally broadcast Talk of the Nation, beginning at 2:00 p.m. EST, for a segment entitled "Why Doesn't NPR Call Waterboarding Torture?" Readers here are obviously quite familiar with this controvery as well as Shepard's conduct in it thus far and could obviously pose excellent questions to her. Her appearance this afternoon on Talk of the Nation provides a good opportunity for that (the call-in number is 800-989-8255; for those in cities (such as NYC) where NPR doesn't broadcast that show, CarolynC has information about where to hear it).

* * * * *

Several weeks ago, when writing about all of the various euphemisms employed by The New York Times to avoid using the word "torture," I wrote about why I think this matters so much and why the media's use of euphemisms invented by the government torturers themselves so vividly reflects the core corruption of American "journalism":

This active media complicity in concealing that our Government created a systematic torture regime -- by refusing ever to say so -- is one of the principal reasons it was allowed to happen for so long . . . The steadfast, ongoing refusal of our leading media institutions to refer to what the Bush administration did as "torture" -- even in the face of more than 100 detainee deaths; the use of that term by a leading Bush official to describe what was done at Guantanamo; and the fact that media outlets frequently use the word "torture" to describe the exact same methods when used by other countries -- reveals much about how the modern journalist thinks. These are their governing principles: There are two sides and only two sides to every "debate" -- the Beltway Democratic establishment and the Beltway Republican establishment. If those two sides agree on X, then X is deemed true, no matter how false it actually is. If one side disputes X, then X cannot be asserted as fact, no matter how indisputably true it is. The mere fact that another country's behavior is described as X doesn't mean that this is how identical behavior by the U.S. should be described. They do everything except investigate and state what is true. In their view, that -- stating what is and is not true -- is not their role. The whole world knows that the U.S. tortured detainees in the "War on Terror." Yet American newspapers refuse to say so.

That second paragraph is a pure distillation of how Shepard -- the "Media Ethics" Professor in Georgetown's graduate journalism program and NPR's Ombudsman -- explicitly thinks. And that -- a refusal to state facts and instead amplify and give credence to plain falsehoods -- is one of the principal and most destructive sicknesses in American establishment journalism. All of that was perfectly captured by penetratingly true satire back in August, 2004, from Jon Stewart and Daily Show "reporter" Rob Corddry [sent to me this week by a reader to illustrate what NPR is doing]:

Stewart: Here's what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry's record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the U.S. military, and hasn't been disputed for 35 years. Corddry: That's right, Jon, and that's certainly the spin you'll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days. Stewart: That's not a spin thing, that's a fact. That's established. Corddry: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontrovertible fact is one side of the story. Stewart: But isn't that the end of the story? I mean, you've seen the records, haven't you? What's your opinion? Corddry: I'm sorry, "my opinion"? I don't have opinions. I'm a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called "objectivity" -- �might want to look it up some day. Stewart: Doesn't objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out what's credible and what isn't? Corddry: Whoa-ho! Sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! Listen, buddy: Not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me.

That derision is also as pure an expression of how Alicia Shepard and NPR think as one can imagine. And it's not just Shepard, but American journalists generally. From a 2006 interview Jim Lehrer gave to Columbia Journalism Review:

CJR: At CJR Daily, we spent a lot of time during the 2004 presidential campaign criticizing just the sort of story that it seems [Ben] Bradlee is describing — stories that "highlight the controversy," report this claim versus these competing claims, rather than providing facts for the reader and helping them navigate toward the truth. What are your thoughts on this? How do you approach reporting what a public official has said something that is blatantly untrue? Lehrer: I don’t deal in terms like "blatantly untrue." That’s for other people to decide when something’s “blatantly untrue.” There’s always a germ of truth in just about everything . . . My part of journalism is to present what various people say about it the best we can find out [by] reporting and let others — meaning commentators, readers, viewers, bloggers or whatever . . .

But remember: don't ever call them "stenographers." That's insulting and offensive. Rather, what they do is called "reporting," by which they mean: "We call people in power and write down what they say really accurately and then we faithfully repeat what 'each side says' without commenting on it or judging it (except where it's our Government's claims against some foreign country, in which case we state our Government's claims as fact)."

* * * * *

What makes this practice particularly destructive in the torture context is that the central enabling deceit of the Bush administration was that there are no objective, verifiable standards for what "torture" is. Instead, it's just all in the eye of the beholder, easily re-defined to include or exclude anything we want, dependent upon who is doing it, devoid of any authoritative sources on what it means, and, ultimately, entirely subjective. It is that rotted premise -- that there is no fixed, known understanding of "torture" -- that outlets like NPR are not just accepting, but actively promoting, by refusing to use the term on the ground that "there are two sides to the question" (see ABC News' Jake Tapper for an imperfect though still commendable exception: tactics used by CIA "qualify under international law as torture").

It is vital to keep in mind -- as I noted last week in arguing why it's so vital that torture photos be released -- that there is still very much an active, vibrant debate over torture in this country. That debate encompasses not only the question of whether we should punish those who did it, but whether or not it is right and just for us to use it. In fact, as reported just recently by Harper's Luke Mitchell, Jeremy Scahill, and Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, there is ample evidence that very serious abuse is still occurring in America's detention facilities, including at Guantanamo (all of which confirmed similar reports from earlier this year). Whether the U.S. should torture people is a matter of opinion about which reporters need not take a position. But that is plainly not the case for the proposition that these tactics are "torture." There are not two sides to that question, and media outlets that suggest otherwise are actively deceiving their audience.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention this strange email exchange I had with Anna Christopher, NPR's "Senior Manager, Media Relations," who contacted me on Tuesday after I wrote about Shepard's refusal to be interviewed. In posting the exchange, I'm editing out one sentence from my reply which references an insignificant fact about why Shepard was out of the office last week that the Salon intern who spoke with Shepard's office (on my behalf) agreed to keep off-the-record (an agreement I therefore feel compelled to respect).

UPDATE II: In comments, Paul Daniel Ash points out the glaring dishonesty in Shepard's central defense of NPR's policy.

UPDATE III: On a not unrelated note, long-time journalist Charles Kaiser (Newsweek, NYT, WSJ) notes that The Washington Post has been caught selling lobbyist access to their reporters and political officials; declares the Post dead; and writes its obituary.

E-mail from Anna Christopher to GG:

Glenn,

I just saw your most recent column, criticizing Lisa [sic] Shepard for declining your interview request. Could you please give me a call when you have a chance?

If you or your interns want to make a request to interview NPR staff, that goes through me. I would have been able to tell your intern – who so tenaciously pursued her last week – that Lisa was on vacation and unreachable until Thursday. She didn’t ignore your request. And the last time I checked, requests are just that – requests. Not demands. Able to be accepted or declined.

Thank you,

Anna

Anna Christopher | Senior Manager, Media Relations

* * * * *

Reply from GG to Anna Christopher:

Anna - You apparently didn't read the column very carefully. We were told by someone from NPR -- Anna Tauzin -- that Alicia Shepard was [out of the office] last week and would therefore respond to the interview request by Monday. That's exactly what I wrote today. Tauzin did authorize us to say: "We were told by NPR that the Ombudsman is out of the office this week and her office will get back to us by Monday with a response." That's exactly what I wrote.

I didn't say she ignored my request, so why would you deny that she did? In fact, I said the opposite: that she responded to the request by refusing to be interviewed.

If there are internal NPR structures about who has what responsibilities, that's up to NPR to make clear. Tauzin never once said it was you who had to be contacted for the interview request. She was more than willing to convey the request to Shepard, and the Salon intern then spoke with Shepard herself yesterday.

I didn't suggest that Shepard broke the law by refusing to be interviewed by me -- only that people like her who opine pedantically on controversial matters have an ethical obligation to engage critics of their views.

If you'd still like to talk, let me know and I'll give you a call -

Glenn Greenwald

* * * * *

No further reply received from NPR.

The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture

Glenn Greenwald — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:31:00 PDT

(updated below)

After numerous delays sought by the Obama administration, it is expected that a 2004 CIA Inspector General's Report -- aggressively questioning both the efficacy and legality of Bush's interrogation tactics -- will be released tomorrow. A heavily redacted version of that document was already released by the Bush administration in response to an ACLU lawsuit and it remains to be seen how much new information will be included in tomorrow's version.

In anticipation of the release of that report, there is an important effort underway -- as part of the ACLU Accountability Project -- to correct a critically important deficiency in the public debate over torture and accountability. So often, the premise of media discussions of torture is that "torture" is something that was confined to a single tactic (waterboarding) and used only on three "high-value" detainees accused of being high-level Al Qaeda operatives. The reality is completely different.

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody -- at least. While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that's one reason we've always considered those tactics to be "torture" when used by others -- because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions -- that we Look to the Future, not the Past -- are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

The record could not be clearer regarding the fact that we caused numerous detainee deaths, many of which have gone completely uninvestigated and thus unpunished. Instead, the media and political class have misleadingly caused the debate to consist of the myth that these tactics were limited and confined. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey recently put it:

We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.

Journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher John Sifton similarly documented that "approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death."

* * * * *

The ACLU has posted online numerous autopsy reports of detainee deaths in U.S. custody. These are documents prepared by the U.S. military, and they are as chilling as they are reflective of extreme criminality. Here are just a few illustrative examples (click on images to enlarge):

Autopsy ME-4309 -- 27 y/o male civilian - Mosul:

Autopsy A 03-51 -- 52 y/o male civilian -- Nasiriyah:

Autopsy ME 03-367 -- unknown age, Iraq:

A Daily Kos diarist today has more on these autopsy reports. Sifton describes numerous other cases of detainees tortured to death in U.S. custody:

Jamal Naseer, a soldier in the Afghan Army, died after he and seven other soldiers were mistakenly arrested. Those arrested with Naseer later said that during interrogations U.S. personnel punched and kicked them, hung them upside down, and hit them with sticks or cables. Some said they were doused with cold water and forced to lie in the snow. Nasser collapsed about two weeks after the arrest, complaining of stomach pain, probably an internal hemorrhage.

In December 2003, a 44-year-old Iraqi man named Abu Malik Kenami died in a U.S. detention facility in Mosul, Iraq. As reported by Human Rights First, U.S. military personnel who examined Kenami when he first arrived at the facility determined that he had no preexisting medical conditions. Once in custody, as a disciplinary measure for talking, Kenami was forced to perform extreme amounts of exercise—a technique used across Afghanistan and Iraq. Then his hands were bound behind his back with plastic handcuffs, he was hooded, and forced to lie in an overcrowded cell. Kenami was found dead the morning after his arrest, still bound and hooded.

There may be other CIA homicides yet uncovered. One case of concern involves a detainee in the CIA’s detention program named Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani who was arrested in northern Iraq in January 2004. . . . I am starting to suspect that Ghul might be dead. After all, his name was redacted from the OLC memo, unlike that of other CIA detainees now at Guantánamo. Why would the CIA be afraid of mentioning Ghul? CIA doctors appear to have determined that Ghul was in poor health when he was captured, in fact, too unhealthy to be waterboarded. Unlike other former CIA detainees, human-rights groups have not confirmed that he was rendered to Pakistan or to a third country. Did the CIA perhaps torture Ghul to death? We do not know. He has now completely disappeared.

And from Human Rights First:

The cases also include that of Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former Iraqi general beaten over days by U.S. Army, CIA and other non-military forces, stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and suffocated to death. In the recently concluded trial of a low-level military officer charged in Mowhoush’s death, the officer received a written reprimand, a fine, and 60 days with his movements limited to his work, home, and church.

As many documented cases of detainee deaths as there are, these deaths have almost certainly been under-counted, as the military and CIA have simply failed to investigate many obvious homicides or even falsely characterized them as natural deaths. As The Medscape Journal of Medicine explained after reviewing all of the available autopsy reports of detainee deaths:

In a well-publicized death of an Iraqi general that resulted from trauma and asphyxiation, the on-site surgeon ruled the death "natural."[11] On review at autopsy, this death was eventually classified as homicide by the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner.[8] According to the Church Investigation Report, in at least 3 deaths, "medical personnel may have attempted to misrepresent the circumstances of abuse, possibly in an effort to disguise detainee abuse."[21]

In the case of Kenami, detailed above by Sifton, this is what happened in the aftermath of his death:

No autopsy was conducted; no official cause of death was determined. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, a review of Kenami’s death was launched, and Army reviewers criticized the initial criminal investigation for failing to conduct an autopsy; interview interrogators, medics, or detainees present at the scene of the death; and collect physical evidence. To date, however, the Army has taken no known action in the case.

Needless to say, there has been very little accountability even for the deaths which the U.S. military itself acknowledges are homicides, as Human Rights First documented:

Since August 2002, nearly 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global “war on terror.” According to the U.S. military’s own classifications, 34 of these cases are suspected or confirmed homicides; Human Rights First has identified another 11 in which the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention. . . . Despite these numbers, four years since the first known death in U.S. custody, only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official. Of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half. While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge. Crucially, among the worst cases in this list – those of detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment; the steepest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death: five months in jail.

* * * * *

It's not uncommon, of course, for our political debates to be distorted. But discussions over torture and accountability have descended to a new level. The picture that is most commonly conveyed -- that torture was confined to a small handful of cases, was highly regulated, and resulted in no long-lasting harm -- is pure propaganda, completely false. The reality -- that our "interrogation tactics" killed numerous detainees, who, by definition, are people confined helplessly in our custody, virtually none of whom has been convicted of anything, and at least some of whom are completely innocent -- is virtually never heard as part of these debates. It's vital that this changes. Tomorrow's likely release of a new version of the incriminating CIA IG Report provides an excellent opportunity for that finally to happen.

[Thank you to everyone who particpated in the fund-raiser I held here last week. The response was very enthusiastic and it was quite successful. I tried to send personal emails thanking everyone who contributed, but it's possible that Paypal irregularties, email errors or personal oversight may have caused some to fall through the cracks, so I'll take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation. I hope and expect that it will enable me to take steps that will improve the impact and efficiency of what I do here in several ways.]

UPDATE: British journalist Andy Worthington has a superb and richly detailed examination of numerous other detainee deaths, with an emphasis on the clear link between those deaths and the tactics approved by Bush officials.

Creepy, revealing quote from White House staffer

Glenn Greenwald — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:31:00 PDT

Jane Hamsher details the extremely aggressive tactics the White House and House leadership used to coerce liberal environmentalist members to vote for the cap-and-trade bill despite their belief that it helped polluters more than it did anything else (and remember their ability to do that the next time they claim that a bill they ostensibly support simply couldn't pass because it lacked the necessary votes). Jane quotes from a Politico article reporting on White House anger towards environmentalist Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, due to an impassioned floor speech he gave arguing that the bill was so industry-friendly that it would do more harm than good. That article contains this quote:

The White House is smoking mad at Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who says he's voting against the climate bill — despite the lobbying of the entire First Family in the Oval Office last night. If the bill goes down, Obama won't forget Doggett's role, Democrats say. It's "stunning that he would ignore the wishes not just of his president, but of his constituents and the country,” said an administration official.

This has become an emerging theme among both the White House and House leadership: that progressive members of Congress have an obligation to carry out "the wishes of the President" even when they disagree (now, apparently, it's "stunning" when they defy his dictates). That was the same subservient mentality that led House Democrats who admitted they opposed the war supplemental spending and/or the foreign bank bailout to nonetheless vote for the bill: because they President favored it. The duty of Congress is not to obey the wishes of the President.

Note, too, that the sort of bullying tactics that were used for the war supplemental bill and now for the cap-and-trade bill are only directed towards the House progressives who want legislation to be less beholden to corporate donors; those tactics are never invoked against Blue Dogs who play a vital role in impeding progressive legislation and thus supply the perfect excuse for Democratic leaders as to why such legislation does not pass. Let's see if these tactics are used against Blue Dogs who impede a public option for health care, the repeal of DOMA and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and various issues relating to the closing of Guantanamo. Will we hear condemnations from Rahm Emanuel's underlings about how stunning and outrageous it is that conservative Democrats are "ignoring the wishes of the President?"

NPR Ombudsman refuses interview regarding "torture"

Glenn Greenwald — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:31:00 PDT

NPR's Ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, wrote a column last week justifying NPR's policy of using euphemisms such as "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- while barring the use of the word "torture" -- to describe the interrogation tactics used by the Bush administration. I wrote a critique of that column which was widely cited, and the comment section to her column was filled with hundreds of angry criticisms -- many times the number of comments her column typically attracts (usually in the range of 10-20). As a result of all that, last week I extended an invitation to Shepard to discuss her column with me on Salon Radio, and was told by an NPR representative that she would respond to the invitation by Monday.

Yesterday, we received Shepard's response: no. According to the Salon intern who tenaciously pursued Shepard all week and spoke with her yesterday:

I just got off the phone with Alicia Shepard. She declined to have an interview, or to go on Salon Radio. To quote, she thought "misleading things" were written about her on Salon, and said "I don't want to get into a shouting match." As for what the "misleading" statements were, she didn't clarify.

I've conducted close to 100 interviews since we launched Salon Radio in July of last year -- including numerous interviews with people expressing views I criticized rather harshly (one of whom was NPR's Tom Gjelten) -- and not a single one could be characterized as a "shouting match." In fact, I don't think any of them entail anyone raising their voices at all. That's a rather lame excuse to avoid facing challenges to one's arguments. And if it's really true that I made "misleading" statements about her column (despite my excerpting large portions of what she wrote), that would be all the more reason to clarify what she believes.

But this is a quite common affliction in our political discourse. There are many people who love to opine pedantically and express all sorts of provocative opinions -- as long as they don't ever have to confront criticisms of those views. People like Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol will stay hiding on Fox News where they can spout all sorts of claims without challenge, but then refuse to be questioned about those views by someone like Bill Moyers. Rachel Maddow constantly invites prominent Republicans on her show so she can interview them, but most refuse. I can't even imagine writing a column that caused as much anger as Shepard's did -- on a topic as obviously controversial as torture -- and then refusing to discuss it with someone who led the objections to what I wrote. That's why I've debated journalists I've criticized and have even gone on right-wing talk radio to discuss columns I wrote, and routinely respond to criticisms in the comment section to the posts I write. For reasons I've explained before -- in response to a Marc Ambinder post advocating that pundits be more willing to engage those with whom they disagree -- seeking out a public forum in which to express controversial views (as Shepard has done) entails the obligation to confront critics and criticisms. Refusing to do so is irresponsible cowardice that singularly enables reckless opining (The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus did the same thing after writing columns advocating that Bush officials not be investigated for the crimes they committed only to then refuse to be questioned about her views).

Revealingly, after my interview invitation was extended to her last week, Shepard did appear for a five-minute segment on an NPR program -- On the Media -- to discuss her column with an NPR host. There's only so much an interviewer can accomplish in a five-minute segment, and that's particularly true when one is an NPR host interviewing a fellow NPR employee about an NPR management policy. That said, the interviewer -- Bob Garfield -- did a very good job of asking some of the key questions (though there are many others I'd like to ask her). As a result, even with those constraints, the emptiness of Shepard's rationale quickly became evident. The segment can be heard here (or by clicking PLAY on the player below) and is recommended. The comment section to the interview is filled with NPR listeners furious at the NPR policy and Shepard's defense of it. It's not hard to see why Shepard is eager to avoid being questioned adversarially, outside of NPR, about her position.

* * * * *

The Supreme Court's Ricci decision

Glenn Greenwald — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:30:00 PDT

(updated below)

In the now famous "white firefighter" affirmative action case -- Ricci v. DeStefano -- the Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 ruling (.pdf), reversed the decision of a unanimous Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel (which included Judge Sonia Sotomayor) and held that the firefighters were the victims of unlawful racial discrimination. The Court split along standard ideological lines (Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito and Kennedy in the majority), with Kennedy writing the Court's opinion. Four Justices agreed with the Second Circuit's panel, including David Souter, the Justice whom Sotomayor has been nominated to replace. Several points are noteworthy about this decision:

(1) In light of today's ruling, it's a bit difficult -- actually, impossible -- for a rational person to argue that Sotomayor's Ricci decision places her outside the judicial mainstream when: (a) she was affirming the decision of the federal district court judge; (b) she was joined in her decision by the two other Second Circuit judges who, along with her, comprised a unanimous panel; (c) a majority of Second Circuit judges refused to reverse that panel's ruling; and now: (d) four out of the nine Supreme Court Justices -- including the ones she is to replace -- agree with her.

Put another way, 11 out of the 21 federal judges to rule on Ricci ruled as Sotomayor did. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that she ruled erroneously, but it's definitively unreasonable to claim that her Ricci ruling places her on some sort of judicial fringe.

(2) The irony of using Ricci against Sotomayor has always been that the reason this case resonates for so many people is due to empathy for the white firefighters. That irony is underscored by today's ruling, as Justice Kennedy devotes multiple paragraphs at the beginning of his opinion to highlighting all of the facts (as opposed to legal arguments) which make people sympathetic to Ricci. Conversely, Justice Ginsburg, writing for the dissenters, noted upfront that the white firefighters "understandably attract this Court's sympathy," but it must be the law -- i.e., long-standing legal precedent and the purpose of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act -- which determines the outcome.

From the start, those protesting Sotomayor's decision in Ricci did so by appealing not to law, but to emotion, non-legal precepts of "fairness" and empathy -- at the very same time that those very same people mocked the notion that those considerations should play any role in judicial decision-making.

(3) For all the chatter about "judicial activism" and that dreadful Roberts metaphor of "a neutral umpire calling balls and strikes," it is so striking how frequently conservative judges invalidate policies which conservatives dislike as a political matter. Here we have the conservative wing of the Court declaring illegal the employment decisions of local government officials, who used a political approach -- diversity -- which conservatives dislike on policy grounds. So often, the outcomes of the allegedly neutral conservative judges are completely consistent with (and aggressively advance) the political preferences of conservatives (Bush v. Gore being only the most obvious example). Indeed, few things are rarer than conservatives Justices invalidating policies that conservatives like politically, or upholding policies they despise -- the true test for whether one applies the law independently of political and outcome preferences.

(4) As is true for most discussions of affirmative action, the fight over Ricci has completely ignored the countless ways that whites in America have long benefited, and continue to benefit, from exactly the sort of non-merit considerations which affirmative action opponents decry. As Justice Ginsberg noted, whites had a virtual monopoly for decades on firefighter positions until Congress extended Title VII to public employment ("firefighting is a profession in which the legacy of racial discrimination casts an especially long shadow"), and city officials in this case determined that the test in question was flawed because, among other things, it did not reward merit. The result of the Court's decision in Ricci -- barring the City of New Haven from invalidating metrics with a racially disparate impact -- is this:

Regardless of one's views on affirmative action, the complaints about not-merit-based factors cut both ways. As for Sotomayor, the Court's 5-4 decision today ought to put an end to the attempt to use Ricci to depict her as being somehow out of the judicial mainstream and thus unfit for the Court.

UPDATE: Scotusblog's Tom Goldstein makes several similar points about the decision:

I am struck by the extent to which the majority opinion largely treats the court of appeals’ ruling as a non-event. To the contrary, Justice Kennedy almost seemingly goes out of his way not to criticize the decision below, notwithstanding that the [five-member majority of the] Supreme Court takes a dramatically different view of the legal question. The Court indicates that the state of the law before today’s ruling was “a difficult inquiry,” and that its “holding today clarifies how Title VII applies.” It rejects the plaintiffs’ outright attack on the Second Circuit’s decision as “overly simplistic and too restrictive" . . . . In the end, it seems to me that the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci is an outright rejection of the lower courts’ analysis of the case, including by Judge Sotomayor. But on the other hand, the Court recognizes that the issue was unsettled. The fact that the Court’s four more liberal members would affirm the Second Circuit shows that Judge Sotomayor’s views were far from outlandish and put her in line with Judge Souter, who she will replace.

That last sentence is the key point and should end any attempts (other than by right-wing polemicists looking to raise money off her nomination) to use Sotomayor's Ricci decision to depict her as out-of-the-mainstream.

Establishment view of Obama's civil liberties record

Glenn Greenwald — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:30:00 PDT

One of the most cherished weapons for dismissing political arguments without having to engage them is to claim they come from "the Far Left" or are confined to "liberal ideologues." For years, that was what was said about withdrawing from Iraq even as majorities of Americans supported that position, and it is how the political and media establishment now demonize the call for investigations into Bush/Cheney crimes, despite large percentages and diverse ideological support for those views . Exactly the same tactic is used to dismiss those who criticize Obama for adopting Bush policies in the areas of civil liberties and secrecy: only people from the Far Left fringe or civil liberties extremists would equate Obama and Bush when it comes to such matters.

From today's Op-Ed page of The Washington Post -- the ultimate establishment organ -- one finds this observation about Obama's use of the state secrets privilege from a Post Editorial:

The second Bush administration took the state secrets doctrine to new heights by arguing that an entire case should be dismissed -- sometimes at its earliest stages -- if it could touch on any information that could conceivably have national security ramifications. The Justice Department under President George W. Bush used this approach to try to quash litigation involving, among other things, domestic surveillance and extraordinary rendition (the forced transfer of detainees to countries where they may be tortured). President Obama has said that the state secrets doctrine should be reformed, and he has promised to be more measured. Yet when confronted with actual cases the Obama Justice Department has adopted the same legal arguments as the Bush administration.

From a Post Op-Ed today by two of the leading advocates of preventive detention -- former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith and Benjamim Wittes of the right-wing Hoover Institute and neoconservative Brookings Institution -- there is this observation on Obama's possible use of an Executive Order to vest himself with preventive detention powers rather than having Congress do it for him:

Obama, to put it bluntly, seems poised for a nearly wholesale adoption of the Bush administration's unilateral approach to detention. The attraction is simple, seductive and familiar. The legal arguments for unilateralism are strong in theory; past presidents in shorter, traditional wars did not seek specific congressional input on detention. Securing such input for our current war, it turns out, is still hard. The unilateral approach, by contrast, lets the president define the rules in ways that are convenient for him and then dares the courts to say no. This seductive logic, however, failed disastrously for Bush -- and it will not serve Obama any better.

That Obama is replicating the Bush/Cheney approach in these areas isn't a by-product of some civil liberties extremist refusal to appreciate the joys of pragmatism or Leftist-purist dissatisfaction with all dogmatic imperfection. That this observation is heard from The Washington Post Editorial Page (of all places), from right-wing advocates such as Wittes and Goldsmith, and from mainstream, liberal and pro-Obama outlets (TPM this weekend: preventive detention approach is "the latest installment in the Obama administration's tendency to mimic the Bushies on war on terror tactics") demonstrates that rather conclusively. Rather, it's just a blindlingly clear fact that any minimally honest person is compelled to acknowledge. When one combines that with the fact that Bush's actions in the areas of civil liberties, Terrorism and secrecy were (at least ostensibly) central to the widespread anger about the Bush presidency, it's impossible to understand how anyone whose objections over the last eight years were sincere (as opposed to a handy weapon opportunistically used to politically weaken Bush) could be supporting what Obama, in these areas, is doing now.

* * * * *

One last related point: Ever since Obama reversed himself on the question of whether to suppress the torture photos, I've been searching for an Obama supporter who (a) defends his decision to suppress those photos but also (b) criticized him when, two weeks earlier, he announced that he would release those photos. I haven't found such a person yet, but I'm still looking.

When Obama originally announced he would release the photos, he was attacked on seemingly every television news show by people like Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney and Joe Lieberman for endangering the Troops, but I don't know of a single Democrats who joined in with those criticisms on the ground that the photos shouldn't be released. But as soon as Obama changed his mind and embraced the Graham/Cheney/Lieberman position, up rose hordes of Obama supporters suddely insisting that those photos must be suppressed because to release them would be to endanger the Troops. I'm still searching for any pro-photo-suppression Democrats who criticized Obama when he triggered controversy by orginally announcing he would release them.

Obama contemplates Executive Order for detention without charges

Glenn Greenwald — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:28:00 PDT

(updated below - Update II)

When Obama first unveiled his "preventive detention" policy, many defenders praised him (and claimed he was different than Bush) because of his vow that -- as he put it -- "my Administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime." But now, relying exclusively on three Obama officials speaking behind a veil of anonymity, Peter Finn and Dafner Linza of The Washington Post and ProPublica report that the White House is "crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely." TPM calls this "the latest installment in the Obama administration's tendency to mimic the Bushies on war on terror tactics." And the article itself points out the obvious: "Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war." Revealingly, the article quotes two Bush national security officials justifying the need for detention without charges.

Anonymous trial balloon articles like this one are difficult to comment on because it's obviously designed to announce that a certain policy is being considered before it's actually written, and so none of the key details is known. Would Obama's new detention powers apply only to current "War on Terror" prisoners at places like Guantanamo and Bagram, or would they also apply to future, not-yet-abducted detainees as well? Would these powers apply to detainees picked up anywhere in the world, far away from "war zones"? Would there be any judicial review or other meaningful oversight provisions so that -- even in theory -- this was something other than the unilateral, unchecked presidential power to detain indefinitely without charges? None of these important details is known (though the article notes that, under one White House proposal, "ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review"; the Emperor, sitting alone, will decree once a year whether they must remain in a cage).

This specific article is even worse than the usual one of its type, since it's particularly uncritical in passing along administration claims without any skepticism (I addressed each of the "justifications" for Obama's preventive detention proposal -- Obama has to do this because of what Bush did; we can't get convictions because of Bush's torture; it's common in War to do things like this, etc. etc. -- here). Worse, the article does not provide any information about the Obama officials whose mission the reporters are dutifully carrying out, so there's no way to assess their motives.

Those journalistic practices produce egregious sentences like this: "'Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order', the official said." I'd love to know which so-called "civil liberties groups" are pushing the White House for an Executive Order establishing the power of indefinite detention. It's certainly not the ACLU or Center for Constitutional Rights, both of which issued statements vehemently condemning the proposal (ACLU's Anthony Romero: "If President Obama issues an executive order authorizing indefinite detention, he’ll be repeating the same mistakes of George Bush").

All of that said, we already know that Obama wants a system of preventive detention without charges -- because he said so explicitly in last month's "civil liberties" speech ironically and cynically delivered in front of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives. And it's hard to imagine how he won't get what he wants: Republicans are eager to grant the President this detention authority (Sens. Tom Coburn and Lindsey Graham have both gushingly praised Obama's proposal) and, as the Bush era proved, there are always more than enough Congressional Democrats to join with the GOP caucus to enact any new system of expanded detention and surveillance powers. Absent serious public opposition (and one recent poll shows overwhelming opposition), it seems highly likely that Barack Obama will wield the power to imprison people indefinitely without charges of any kind.

* * * * *

There is one point in particular I really want to highlight about all of this:

There has now emerged a very clear -- and very disturbing -- pattern whereby Obama is willing to use legal mechanisms and recognize the authority of other branches only if he's assured that he'll get the outcome he wants. If he can't get what he wants from those processes, he'll just assert Bush-like unilateral powers to bypass those processes and do what he wants anyway. In other words, what distinguishes Obama from the first-term Bush is that Obama is willing to indulge the charade that Congress, the courts and the rule of law have some role to play in political outcomes as long as they give him the power he wants. But where those processes impede Obama's will, he'll just bypass them and assert the unilateral power to do what he wants anyway (by contrast, the first-term Bush was unwilling to go to Congress to get expanded powers even where Congress was eager to give them to him; the second-term Bush, like Obama, was willing to allow Congress to endorse his radical proposals: hence, the Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act, the FISA Amendments Act, etc.).

That, for instance, is the precise pattern that's driving his suppression of torture photos. Two federal courts ordered the President to release the photos under the 40-year-old Freedom of Information Act. Not wanting to abide by that decision, the White House (using Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman) tried to pressure Congress to enact new legislation vesting the administration with the power to override FOIA. When House progressives blocked that bill, the White House assured Lieberman and Graham that Obama would simply use an Executive Order to decree the photos "classified" (when they are plainly nothing of the sort) and thus block their release anyway. In other words:

We'll go to court and work with Congress so we can pretend that we're not like those bad people in the last administration, but if we don't get what we want by doing that, we'll just do it anyway through unilateral Presidential action, using the theories that the last administration so helpfully left behind and which we've been aggressively defending in court.

This was also the mentality that shaped Obama's "civil liberties" speech generally and his "prolonged detention" policy specifically. In that speech, Obama movingly assured us that some of the Guantanamo detainees will be tried in a real court -- i.e., only those the DOJ is certain ahead of time they can convict. For those about whom there's uncertainty, he's going to create new military commissions to make it easier to obtain convictions, and then try some of the detainees there -- i.e., only those they are certain ahead of time they can convict there. For the rest -- meaning those about whom Obama can't be certain he'll get the outcome he wants in a judicial proceeding or military commission -- he'll just keep them locked up anyway. In other words, he'll indulge the charade that people he wants to keep in a cage are entitled to some process (a real court or military commissions) only where he knows in advance he will get what he wants; where he doesn't know that, he'll bypass those pretty processes and assert the unilateral right to keep them imprisoned anyway.

A government that will give you a trial before imprisoning you only where it knows ahead of time it will win -- and, where it doesn't know that, will just imprison you without a trial -- isn't a government that believes in due process. It's one that believes in show trials.

And here again, with this Executive Order proposal, we see this same mentality at play. According to the Post article, one motive behind the Executive Order is that "White House officials are increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may be impossible." In other words: we'll be happy to work with Congress as long as they give us what we want; if they don't, we'll just do it anyway using unilateral presidential powers. It's certainly possible -- in fact, I'd say it's likely -- that if Congress passes a preventive detention law, it will be even more Draconian than the one Obama wants. But a President who recognizes Congressional authority only when he likes the outcome -- and ignores it when he doesn't -- isn't a President who actually recognizes Congressional authority at all.

* * * * *

What ultimately matters here is that we not lose sight of the critical point: no matter the form it takes, and no matter which route is used to implement it (act of Congress or executive order), indefinite detention without charges is a repugnant and tyrannical power. Democrats and progressives had no trouble understanding that fact during the last eight years, so they should have no trouble understanding it now. As The New York Times columnist (and Obama supporter) Bob Herbert put it this week: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." Herbert also wrote:

Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention , imprisoning people indefinitely, for years and perhaps for life, without charge and without giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their innocence. And yet we’ve embraced it, asserting that there are people who are far too dangerous to even think about releasing but who cannot be put on trial because we have no real evidence that they have committed any crime, or because we’ve tortured them and therefore the evidence would not be admissible, or whatever. President Obama is O.K. with this (he calls it "prolonged detention"), but he wants to make sure it is carried out -- here comes the oxymoron -- fairly and nonabusively. Proof of guilt? In 21st-century America, there is no longer any need for such annoyances. Human rights? Ha-ha. That’s a good one.

Just look at the rationale being invoked by Obama officials to justify all of this, from the Post article:

Tawfiq bin Attash, who is accused of involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and who was held at a secret CIA prison, could be among those subject to long-term detention, according to one senior official. Little information on bin Attash's case has been made public, but officials who have reviewed his file said the Justice Department has concluded that none of the three witnesses against him can be brought to testify in court. One witness, who was jailed in Yemen, escaped several years ago. A second witness remains incarcerated, but the government of Yemen will not allow him to testify. Administration officials believe that testimony from the only witness in U.S. custody, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, may be inadmissible because he was subjected to harsh interrogation while in CIA custody.

I thought Democrats (and Obama himself) believe that information obtained via "harsh interrogation" is unreliable. Isn't that supposed to be a core Democratic belief? If so, why would we want to imprison someone as "dangerous" based on unreliable information obtained using those methods? If the accusations against someone were drowned or beaten out of another person, shouldn't we consider those coerced accusations too unreliable to justify keeping the accused in a cage for years with no trial? And if they're willing to repeat the accusations in court now that they're not being tortured -- and if we have independent, non-coerced evidence to prove the accusations -- why would past abuse bar the use of their testimony (as Marcy Wheeler suggests, the real reason why we'd want to prevent witnesses who were tortured from testifying in a court seems to be "because we're covering up our own torture")?

More important, look at the mentality being expressed -- and about to be implemented -- here: there may be instances where we cannot get convictions because of witness unavailability or other logistical problems, so we'll just imprison them anyway. Does it really require any effort to demonstrate how dangerous that mentality is -- that the President will have the power to order people imprisoned wherever there are some logistical barriers to obtaining convictions? If there's one principle that can be described as fundamental to the American founding, it's that the state -- and certainly the President -- do not have the power to order people imprisoned without charges. Thomas Jefferson said that trials by jury is "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." Why is this painfully obvious proposition still necessary to defend after the November election?

UPDATE: I posted this before, but Rachel Maddow's 7-minute commentary on Obama's preventive detention proposal was really superb and well worth watching:

On a related note: as I've written many times, the area in which Obama is replicating Bush abuses most egregiously is his embrace of Bush's secrecy obsessions. Jon Stewart last night had much to say on that topic. That Obama is adopting approaches similar to Bush's in these areas is a view that is obviously spreading -- even among Obama supporters -- and is becoming increasingly difficult to deny.

UPDATE II: Digby, today:

The irony, of course, is that the man who ran on transparency is actually turning out to be less transparent than the president he excoriated on the campaign trail for his secrecy. Bush and Cheney were pretty upfront about the fact that they believed they had the constitutional right to act in any way they saw fit, regardless of the accepted understanding of the constitution or congressional and judicial prerogatives. Bush declared "I'm the decider" and he meant it. This administration obviously believes it has that right as well --- it just pretends otherwise. I suspect they understand that keeping the folks from losing that freedom loving, patriotic illusion of American exceptionalism is an important part of exercising American political power. And they're probably right. Bush and Cheney's biggest mistakes were in being honest about something nobody wants to know.

Relatedly, Booman -- a very enthusiastic Obama supporter -- documents multiple reasons to be suspicious of the claim that the DOJ cannot prosecute Tawfiq bin Attash (the example Obama officials cited in the Post article). That's why excessive secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power -- it allows government officials to make dubious and misleading claims without any ability to verify them, all while they operate in the dark.

Neocon enemies, using diplomacy, reach deal for Shalit's release

Glenn Greenwald — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:27:00 PDT

[updated below - Update II - Update III (Goldfarb's reply)]

Last night, I noted the sudden and obviously hypocritical concern about detainee abuse emerging from The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb now that the transfer of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by the Palestinians to Egypt appears imminent and it's time to exploit his detention. In service of that same mission, Goldfarb also tries to attribute this deal for Shalit's release to the heroism of Benjamin Netanyahu, excitedly claiming that, if it happens, it will cause the Israeli Prime Minister's "approval numbers [to] skyrocket, further undermining Obama's leverage over him" (i.e., Israel will be able to continue to expand settlements on land that isn't theirs).

But as Omooex points out in comments, the Haaretz article which Goldfarb himself cited makes clear that it was not Netanyahu, but numerous other parties -- Jimmy Carter, Egypt, Syria and the Obama administration -- who engineered the agreement to transfer Shalit from Gaza to Egypt (followed eventually by his release to Israel, pending the release by Israel of Palestinian prisoners):

The move is part of a new United States initiative that includes Egyptian and Syrian pressure on Hamas . . . The idea to transfer Shalit to Egypt in exchange for the release of Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians being held in Israeli prisons was raised about a year ago during a visit by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter to Damascus, Jerusalem and Gaza. . . . Carter raised it again on his visit earlier this month, during which he met Noam Shalit, Gilad's father. . . . The European source said Shalit's transfer to Egypt was the first stage of the Egyptian-brokered agreement hammered out between Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions, in coordination with the U.S. and with Syria's support.

In other words, the deal for Shalit's release was secured by some of the neocon's most despised enemies (Jimmy Carter and Syria), with the help of a President they insist hates Israel (Barack Obama), relying on tactics they have long scorned (diplomacy, negotiating with Terrorists, including Hamas). Of course, Jimmy Carter -- who neocons endlessly smear as being Israel-hating and even anti-Semitic -- did more to advance the interests of Israeli security than every neoconservative keyboard-tough-guy combined (indeed, more than virtually any single individual on the planet) when he engineered the 1979 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, which -- even 30 years later -- continues to pay dividends for Israel in the form of this apparent agreement for Shalit's release. Identically, the Shalit deal is possible only because, as Haaretz notes, Hamas knows that there is now an American administration willing to negotiate with hostile parties, rather than trying to feel "tough" by ignoring and/or threatening them:

Hamas, which controls Gaza, has increasingly tried to reach out to the Obama administration in recent weeks.

This is but one of the numerous inanities of neoconservatives: as destructive for the U.S. as their obsession with Israel and mindless belligerence are, those fixations also do nothing for Isarel but jeopardize it further. Years of neocon rule and moronic chest-beating in Washington did nothing to help Shalit. But a deal is struck for his release -- long a top priority of Israelis -- only months into a new administration committed to engagement with Syria and other ostensible Enemies, as well as an emphatic rejection of neoconservative ideology at least when it comes to dealing with some Muslim states. But even those clear and obvious facts -- whereby this apparent success is possible only with them out of power, their ideology repudiated and their Enemies engaged -- won't stop them from claiming that this somehow vindicates their tawdry mindset.

[Along those same lines, Omooex also highlights what will be an overlooked part of the story: namely, that Israel is imprisoning "Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians" (including, until his release this week, "Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Sheikh Aziz Dweik after three years in prison" who is "a leader of Hamas in the West Bank [and] espouses a moderate line in the organization"). If this Shalit deal ends up being consummated (and that still remains to be seen), the American media narrative will undoubtedly dramatize the detention of Shalit, an actual Israel solider, even while Israel imprisons scores of "Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians."]

Notably, Goldfarb seems to think that Obama's leverage over Israel is dependent upon the domestic approval ratings of Netanyahu. Actually, that leverage is grounded in the tens of billions of American dollars in aid to Israel, the supplying of American weapons for Israel's various wars, and the multiple forms of diplomatic protection the U.S. extends to Israel. At least preliminarily and from all appearances, the Obama administration has been using that leverage for U.S. interests by demanding that Israeli actions that harm the U.S. cease. Ironically, despite all the right-wing rage about that (in both Israel and the U.S.), the refusal to cater to neoconservatives when it comes to U.S. policy towards Israel just so happens -- as demonstrated by this Shalit episode -- to be benefiting Israel as well.

UPDATE: From a Haaretz Editorial last year, entitled "Our Debt to Jimmy Carter" (h/t thomas c):

The government of Israel is boycotting Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, during his visit here this week. Ehud Olmert, who has not managed to achieve any peace agreement during his public life, and who even tried to undermine negotiations in the past, "could not find the time" to meet the American president who is a signatory to the peace agreement with Egypt. . . . Carter, who himself said he set out to achieve peace between Israel and Egypt from the day he assumed office, worked incessantly toward that goal and two years after becoming president succeeded - was declared persona non grata by Israel. . . . The boycott will not be remembered as a glorious moment in this government's history. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian missions, to peace, to promoting democratic elections, and to better understanding between enemies throughout the world. . . . Whether Carter's approach to conflict resolution is considered by the Israeli government as appropriate or defeatist, no one can take away from the former U.S. president his international standing, nor the fact that he brought Israel and Egypt to a signed peace that has since held. Carter's method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him. For the peace agreement with Egypt, he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.

That all speaks for itself, and speaks volumes about our current Middle East predicaments and what to do about them.

UPDATE II: Speaking of using leverage, the original road map "quartet" -- the U.S., the EU, the U.N. and Russia -- have now jointly adopted the Obama administration's position that Israel must "freeze all settlement activity, including 'natural growth'." Israel is long accustomed to ignoring worldwide consensus because the U.S. sides with them on those matters. Where, as here, the U.S. is publicly and privately in favor of the consensus, Israel's ability to defy it will depend upon how much leverage Obama is really willing to use.

UPDATE III: Goldfarb replies here, with the full array of textbook neoconservative platitudes. The only point worth noting is that he agrees with the observation I expressed last night that Goldfarb's views (like those of most neonconservatives) "ultimately come down to nothing more complicated than: what we do is Good and Right because we are superior and because they are inferior." Goldfarb admits he thinks torture is tolerable when we do it to Them but not when They do it to us because -- as he puts it -- "Of Course We Are Superior and They Are Inferior" (that, of course, is the very definition of "moral relativism," which Goldfarb and his allies like to pretend they oppose even as they exemplify its core premise). And -- other than a view that Muslims generally are inferior -- what possible ground is there for claiming moral superiority over the numerous detainees at Guanatnamo and elsewhere who, even by the Bush administration's reasoning, were guilty of nothing? Independently, it's bizarre to hear someone proclaim themselves morally superior when, just a few months ago, they were celebrating the benefits of the wholesale slaughter of an entire extended family -- including small children -- in Gaza.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly" . . . . Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best [] is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in "false moral equivalencies." To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group's objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly.

Goldfarb's reply is a pure expression of that warped and self-glorifying mentality.

Weekly Standard finally concerned about detainee abuse

Glenn Greenwald — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:26:00 PDT

(updated below)

Former McCain aide Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard notes a report from Haaretz about the likely imminent release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli solider captured three years ago by Palestinians and held ever since. Goldfarb speculates:

One shudders to think about the conditions of his confinement.

Previously, Goldfarb accused Bush critics of "trivializing torture" and wrote:

The Times indicts the Bush administration for exposing terrorists captured abroad to "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." Boo hoo.

"Boo hoo" -- about a torture regime that resulted in the deaths of numerous detainees and which the U.S. repeatedly called "torture" when practiced by others. Is there anything easier than imaginging the glass-shattering shrieking that would emit from Goldfarb and friends if there were videos showing Shalit disoriented from months of sleep deprivation at the hands of his Palestinian captors, being kept naked and chained in stress positions, made to stay that way in freezing temperatures with cold water repeatedly thrown on him, slapped and "walled," and then strapped down on a board and drowned 183 times? During the Israeli attack on Gaza, after an Israeli bomb killed an entire large family of a Hamas member -- wives, siblings and small children -- Goldfarb speculated about all the benefits that come from "wip[ing] out a man's entire family." So much of these debates ultimately come down to nothing more complicated than: what we do is Good and Right because we are superior and because they are inferior.

* * * * *

Speaking of which: Joe Lieberman today accused those of not wanting to "meddle" in Iran's politics of insufficient concern for The Iranian People (in the same way that those opposing the invasion of Iraq were "pro-Saddam"). But in 2007, Lieberman advocated that we drop bombs on Iran as part of "aggressive military action against the Iranians" that (whether intended or not) would have killed at least some of the very same Iranian People who, today, he's pretending to defend. That the very same people who long advocated dropping bombs on Iranians are today allowed to parade around as their defenders is really one of the more remarkable and ludicrous spectacles seen in some time.

UPDATE: Haaretz has an article today, based on interviews with experts, describing what they call the "severe trauma" Shalit likely suffered from isolation as the only Israeli prisoner in Palestinian custody (h/t sysprog). Prolonged solitary confinement is absolutely a form of torture, and while it's unknown whether Shalit was subjected to that, extreme isolation and prolonged solitary confinement are prominents features of America's prisoner system -- not only as part of the "War on Terror," but our domestic prison system as well.

A right-wing writer on how to be a real man

Glenn Greenwald — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:26:00 PDT

Andrew Klavan is a right-wing writer who, according to his Wikipedia page, specializes in "tough-guy" novels; writes for "Pajamas Media"; and believes George Bush is similar to Dark Knight's Batman because both "understand that there is no moral equivalence" between our society and the Evil Ones and that the Evil Ones "must be hounded to the gates of Hell." When Klavan demands that the Terrorists "be hounded to the gates of Hell," he means that he wants other men and women to do the hounding, as Klavan, born in 1954, has never served in the military.

Today, this super-tough guy has a column at Pajamas Media explaining -- in the context of a new film he saw that joyously depicts men as men and ladies as ladies -- what distinguishes real men like him from fake males who have had their manhood taken by women:

A lot of critics get all huffy about this depiction of the sexes - read the silly little fellow who wrote the review in the New York Times by way of example. The standard line seems to be to blame it all on childish filmmakers pandering to adolescent audiences. But you know what? I suspect a lot of it is simple realism. More and more often I meet young guys just like this: overgrown kids who are their grim wives’ poodles. They sheepishly talk about getting a “pink pass,” or a “kitchen pass,” before they can leave the house. They can’t do this or that because their wives don’t like it. They “share” household and child-rearing tasks equally - which isn’t really equal at all because they don’t care about a clean house or a well-reared child anywhere near as much as their wives do. In short, each one seems set to spend his life taking orders from a perpetually dissatisfied Mrs. who sounds to me - forgive me but just speaking in all honesty - like a bloody shrike. Who can blame these poor shnooks if they go out and get drunk or laid or just plain divorced? I’m the old-fashioned King of the Castle type: my wife knew it when she married me, she knows it now, and she knows where the door is if she gets sick of it. And you can curse me or consign me to Feminist Hell or whatever you want to do. But when you’re done, answer me this: why would a man get married under any other circumstances? I’m serious. What’s in it for him? I mean, marriage is a large sacrifice for a man. He gives up his right to sleep with a variety of partners, which is as basic an urge in men as having children is in women. He takes on responsibilities which will probably curtail both his work and his social life. If he doesn’t also acquire authority, gravitas, respect and, yes, mastery over his own home, what does he get? Companionship? Hey, stay single, dude, you’ll have a lot more money, and then you can buy companionship. All right, I know, I’m a mean old man. But I’ve also been blissfully married for 30 years to a woman who wakes up singing. I think some of these young guys have been sold a bill of goods, I really do. I think they’ve been told what they’re supposed to be like and have sacrificed what they are like. Maybe their marriages are more “fair” than mine but just looking at them, I think they’re miserable. And I suspect, deep down, their wives are probably miserable too. If you ask me, they’d be better off staying in Vegas.

I wonder what he thinks of the women who go and fight the wars for which he's a vocal (shrieking) tough-guy cheerleader but won't fight himself? Ultimately, the only cure for this level of insecurity over one's masculinity is to become a cheerleader for wars, torture, "getting tough" with our current Enemy (today: Iran), and politicians who prance around in fighter pilot costumes on the decks of aircraft carriers. The vicarious sensations of pulsating strength must be so soothing to someone like this, so desperate to prove their manhood. As Digby wrote in what I consider to be a seminal post on this topic, this has been true forever, was as pronounced during the Vietnam War as it is now: it's impossible to overstate the role this sad Rush-Limbaugh/Dick-Cheney mentality plays in the craving of people like this, from a safe distance, for wars and destruction fought in their names, by others. They get to revere a President who's just like Batman, and it makes them real "old-fashioned King of the Castle types."

The "Neda video," torture, and the truth-revealing power of images

Glenn Greenwald — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:25:00 PDT

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

The single most significant event in shaping worldwide revulsion towards the violence of the Iranian government has been the video of the young Iranian woman bleeding to death, the so-called "Neda video." Like so many iconic visual images before it -- from My Lai, fire hoses and dogs unleashed at civil rights protesters, Abu Ghraib -- that single image has done more than the tens of thousands of words to dramatize the violence and underscore the brutality of the state response.

For the last question at his press conference yesterday, Obama was asked by CNN's Suzanne Malveaux about his reaction to that video and to reports that Iranians are refraining from protesting due to fear of such violence. As Obama was answering -- attesting to how "heartbreaking" he found the video; how "anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust" about the violence; and paying homage to "certain international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression" -- Helen Thomas, who hadn't been called on, interrupted to ask Obama to reconcile those statements about the Iranian images with his efforts at home to suppress America's own torture photos ("Then why won't you allow the photos --").

The President quickly cut her off with these remarks:

THE PRESIDENT: Hold on a second, Helen. That's a different question. (Laughter.)

The White House Press corps loves to laugh condescendingly at Helen Thomas because, tenaciously insisting that our sermons to others be applied to our own Government, she acts like a real reporter (exactly as -- according to Politico's Josh Gerstein -- White House reporters "could be seen rolling their eyes and shifting in their seats" when Obama called on The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, who has done some of the most tireless work on Iran, gave voice to actual Iranians, and posed one of the toughest questions at the Press Conference). The premise of Thomas' question was compelling and (contrary to Obama's dismissal) directly relevant to Obama's answers: how is it possible for Obama to pay dramatic tribute to the "heartbreaking" impact of that Neda video in bringing to light the injustices of the Iranian Government's conduct while simultaneously suppressing images that do the same with regard to our own Government's conduct?

The reason Thomas' point matters so much is potently highlighted by a new poll from The Washington Post/ABC News released today -- not only the responses, but even more so, the question itself (click to enlarge image):

Half of the American citizenry is now explicitly pro-torture (and the question even specified that the torture would be used not against Terrorists, but "terrorism suspects"). Just think about what that says about how coarsened and barbaric our populace is and what types of abuses that entrenched mentality is certain to spawn in the future, particularly in the event of another terrorist attack. But even more meaningful is the question itself -- it's now normal and standard for pollsters to include among the various questions about garden-variety political controversies (health care, tax and spending policies, clean energy approaches) a question about whether one believes the U.S. Government should torture people (are you for or against government torture?) That's how normalized torture has become, how completely eroded the taboo is in the United States.

It would be one thing for the Obama administration to argue that there is no value in releasing torture photos specifically, and in investigating and imposing accountability for past abuses generally, if there were consensus among Americans that torture is wrong, barbaric and -- as Ronald Reagan put it (hypocritically but still emphatically) -- "an abhorrent practice" justifiable by "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever." But we have the opposite of that consensus: we have an ongoing debate over torture that is fluid, vibrant and far from settled, with half the population embracing the twisted and morally depraved pro-torture position. For that reason, to suppress evidence of what our torture actually looks like and the brutality it entails -- particularly graphic evidence -- is to make it easier for that pro-torture position to thrive, just as it would have been easier for the Iranian Government to slaughter protesters with impunity if they had succeeded in suppressing the images of what they were doing (it was this same dynamic that led the Israeli Army to defy its own Supreme Court and forcibly block reporters and photographers from entering Gaza and which caused the embedded American press to suppress images of the massive civilian deaths which their protectors, the U.S. military, was causing in Iraq).

Americans are able to perceive torture clinically and in the abstract when they're able to endorse it without seeing its effects. They're able to delude themselves that the extreme abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorized aberrations -- rather than the inevitable by-products of the policies they support -- because the photos showing that those abuses were systematically applied at American detention facilities around the world are being suppressed. It's almost certainly true that few pro-torture Americans are aware that the policies they support -- and that were approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government -- have led to numerous detainee deaths, because investigations into such matters are being blocked; court proceedings impeded; and media discussions confined almost exclusively to questions about "water in nostrils." If Americans want to endorse government torture, they should not be allowed to avert their gaze from what they're causing and be spared the facts and details of what is done.

* * * * *

On a related note, the critique I wrote of the NPR Ombudsman's defense of their decision not to use the word "torture" has been discussed in numerous places. There has also been an outburst of angry (though highly substantive and civil) criticisms from NPR listeners in the comment section of her column. As a result, we're in the process of inviting the Ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to appear with me on Salon Radio to discuss her rationale. Ostensibly, the Ombudsman is not meant to be a spokesperson for NPR but a voice of NPR listeners. I would hope, then, that she'd be willing to engage and discuss the reaction which her column triggered (at the very least in her column, though even better, in an interactive discussion). I will post updates of any responses we receive to the invitation extended to her.

UPDATE: The media-manufactured (and, as always, right-wing-fueled) pseudo-controversy over Obama's "pre-coordinated" selection of Huffington Post's Pitney to ask a question is revealingly inane for many obvious reasons: Pitney's question was one of the most adversarial Obama was asked, and the establishment media reaction clearly stems from resentment over their perceived status being undermined by allowing The Huffington Post and, more to the point, an actual Iranian (rather than a self-anointed reporter-spokesperson for Iranians) to ask the President a question.

But equally revealing is their self-glorifying and delusional belief that only establishment media reporters are sufficiently Serious to be entitled to ask the President questions -- even as they fill Press Conferences with petty, vapid questions and otherwise endlessly reveal themselves to be substance-free and frivolous. Along those lines, The Washington Post claimed that "budgetary constraints" played a role in the firing of actually serious journalist Dan Froomkin, yet The Post spends money to produce and promote things like the below-posted video from "reporters" Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza that has to be seen to be believed. Be forewarned: many will consider the video too petty to bother posting and virtually everyone will find it painfully irritating to watch. I agree with those assessments, but there is still something about it -- the oozing smugness, the view of politics as a juvenile game, the desperation to be above it all and too sophisticated to care, the total lack of self-awareness in failing to realize how embarrassingly unfunny it is -- that makes it a tour de force in illustrating what and who so much of the Washington media really are:

UPDATE II: We were told by NPR that the Ombudsman is out of the office this week and her office will get back to us by Monday with a response. Additionally, someone from the Ombudsman's office also just left the following note in the still-growing comment section to her column:

Dear Listeners; Ms. Shepard is out of the office this week. I work closely with her and have been keeping up with all of your comments. Rest assured that when she returns she will respond to you. In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that there is someone on the other end reading and receiving your phone calls and emails. Best, Anna Tauzin Office of the Ombudsman

The feedback and pressure are obviously having some effect. I hope it continues; I would look forward to the opportunity to discuss Shepard's column with her in an interview.

UPDATE III: Bridging Update I and Update II: the Post's Dana Milbank was, completely unsurprisingly, one of the leaders in objecting to the Huffington Post/Pitney question. He's probably best advised to stick to Post-funded vaudeville videos. The Nation's Ari Melber has an excellent analysis of the petulant, self-absorbed objections as part of this empty little scandal of the day. This empty chatter is the sort of thing with which they endlessly occupy themselves -- all while condescendingly scorning Helen Thomas' real questions and acting as though questions from The Huffington Post are a major threat to their protocols of journalistic Seriousness.

UPDATE IV: At Balkinization, Law Professor Alice Ristroph also notes the relationship between (a) the impact which inflammatory images of violence in Iran have had and (b) Obama's efforts to suppress inflammatory images involving the U.S. Government:

To defend this decision, [Obama] drew a distinction between information and image, claiming that the photos would not provide any new information and would inflame anti-American sentiment. The latter worry has some merit—just as Ahmadinejad is right to believe that images of Iranian protests will inflame anti-Iranian (or anti-Ahmadinejad) sentiment. But the claim that the photos of detainee abuse have no independent value is wrong. Sometimes, images convey ideas and information for which we have no words. Sometimes, as Iranian tweeters know, images will capture attention in ways that words will not. And sometimes, as General Eisenhower knew, images can make us speak and think about subjects that we would otherwise like to avoid.

If there's one thing Americans need more of -- not less of -- it's vivid evidence of what it means to have a Government that systematically tortures -- for the same reason that all the words in the world could not have conveyed the violence of the Iranian government.

Blog news

Glenn Greenwald — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:24:00 PDT

Since I began blogging in October, 2005, I've asked readers -- twice a year -- to help fund the work I do here. But the last time I did so was back in April, 2007. Between the overwhelming response to that last request and the fact that I had moved the blog to Salon, there hasn't been a reason to hold another blog fund-raiser: until now.

Blogs have innovated political journalism, punditry and activism in numerous ways. One of the most significant innovations is the constant, multi-layered interaction between bloggers and their readers, a radical departure from the one-way monologue model of establishment journalism. Reader-funded journalism -- readers helping to sustain and expand the journalism they find valuable -- has been critical in fueling the growth of blogs. That's truer now than ever before. As newspapers, political magazines and even blogs struggle to find an economically sustainable model, reader support is becoming even more important. Even establishment media outlets are now beginning to contemplate that model, as illustrated by last weekend's column from New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt discussing ways for the NYT to enable readers who believe it provides important journalism to help it remain viable.

Salon has been (and continues to be) supportive in the extreme of the work I do here –- honoring without fail its commitment of full editorial independence and providing whatever support it can -- but being independent, along with the current economic climate, brings with it an increased need for self-sufficiency. There are numerous projects I would like to have funded that would significantly increase the impact of the work I do here -- a research assistant to work much more than the negligible number of hours per month that I have had; improved and more sophisticated podcast equipment to maximize the quality of the interviews I do; and, most of all, the ability to do television interviews remotely so that my distance from New York and Washington doesn’t continue to compel me to turn down most television interview requests. Fund-raisers of these sorts independently enable me to continue more easily to devote my full efforts to what I do here; would make possible these added projects; and all of that would, in turn, increase the efficiency and impact of what I do here.

Independence is vital because it enables one to be beholden to nobody other than one’s readers. It is independence that allows one to write without any fear of breaching conventions, violating orthodoxies, or offending anyone. Those wishing to donate can do so via Paypal (GGreenwald@salon.com) or using the link below, or for those who prefer it, can email me for a mailing address. I really appreciate anyone who contributes here in any way -- commenting, reading, emailing feedback -- and appreciate everyone who has helped to fund blog activities in the past.

[Several people have indicated problems with the Paypal button. It will likely work if it's tried again after a few minutes, but anyone can also donate using their Paypal account -- without the Paypal button -- by sending directly to the Paypal address provided above (GGreenwald@salon.com) -- or, as indicated, those who prefer can email me for a mailing address. Thanks].

Noted Obama admirer lambasts him on civil liberties, secrecy

Glenn Greenwald — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:24:00 PDT

Barack Obama has few, if any, more adoring fans in the world of establishment punditry than New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Back in February, Herbert constructed an entire column around the ultimate Obama fan cheer: he venerated Obama as a "chess master," a "championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike" who "is smart, deft, elegant and subtle." That's what makes Herbert's superb column today -- lambasting Obama for his "unwillingness to end many of the mind-numbing abuses linked to the so-called war on terror and to establish a legal and moral framework designed to prevent those abuses from ever occurring again" -- so significant.

Here's the first sentence of Herbert's column; the fact that this even needs to be pointed out -- and it does: over and over -- is significant in itself:

Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.

That's so axiomatically true that it's difficult to believe it could be disputed. But it is disputed. The prime danger of placing "trust" and "faith" in a political leader is precisely that it leads one to conclude that policies one once vehemently condemned become acceptable and even just when embraced by a Good Leader. Herbert notes the handful of steps Obama has taken to ban some of the Bush interrogation techniques, but argues that "other policies that offend the conscience continue":

Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention, imprisoning people indefinitely, for years and perhaps for life, without charge and without giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their innocence. And yet we’ve embraced it, asserting that there are people who are far too dangerous to even think about releasing but who cannot be put on trial because we have no real evidence that they have committed any crime, or because we’ve tortured them and therefore the evidence would not be admissible, or whatever. President Obama is O.K. with this (he calls it "prolonged detention"), but he wants to make sure it is carried out -- here comes the oxymoron -- fairly and nonabusively. Proof of guilt? In 21st-century America, there is no longer any need for such annoyances. Human rights? Ha-ha. That’s a good one.

White House counsel Greg Craig told Jane Mayer back in February that it's "hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law." Indeed. Bob Herbert is obviously having a hard time with that -- as every American should be. And if recent polls are any indication, most are.

Herbert next attacks Obama for what I think is the worst breach, one could even say the central one: Obama's ongoing obsession with, and embrace of, Bush's radical secrecy doctrines:

Also distressing is the curtain of secrecy the Obama administration has kept drawn over shameful abuses that should be brought into the light of day. . . . [I]n an affront to a society that is supposed to be intelligent and free, the Obama administration is trying to sit on photos that are just as important [as the Abu Ghraib photos] for Americans to see. The president’s argument for trying to block the court-ordered release of the photos is a demoralizing echo of the embarrassingly empty rhetoric of the Bush years: “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.” The Obama administration is also continuing the Bush administration’s abuse of the state-secrets privilege. Lawyers from the Obama Justice Department have argued, as did lawyers from the Bush administration before them, that a lawsuit involving extraordinary rendition and allegations of extreme torture should be dismissed outright because discussions of such matters in court would harm national security. In other words, the victims, no matter how strong their case might be, no matter how badly they might have been abused, could never have their day in court. Jane Mayer, writing in the June 22 New Yorker, said of the rendition program, in which suspects were swept up by Americans and spirited off to foreign countries for imprisonment and interrogation: “As many as seven detainees were misidentified and abducted by mistake.” The Bush and Obama view of the state-secrets privilege effectively bars any real examination of such egregious mistakes.

In a new Newsweek article this week, Michael Isikoff similarly documents the multiple ways Obama is violating his pledge of open government and transparency -- not with regard to past Bush abuses but in order to conceal Obama's actions in the present.

Finally, proclaiming Obama's record on civil liberties and transparency to be "unacceptable," Herbert concludes:

It was thought by many that a President Obama would put a stop to the madness, put an end to the Bush administration’s nightmarish approach to national security. But Mr. Obama has shown no inclination to bring even the worst offenders of the Bush years to account, and seems perfectly willing to move ahead in lockstep with the excessive secrecy and some of the most egregious activities of the Bush era.

Note that Herbert is not complaining that Obama has failed to move fast enough to fix these problems. Rather, he's exclusively criticizing Obama for Bush-replicating policies, positions and abuses which the administration has affirmatively embraced and aggressively defended. And as Herbert suggests in his last sentence -- in which he argues that Obama's actions are mutually exclusive with the pledge "to get our moral compass back" -- these issues were not ancillary to progressive objections to the Bush presidency but were central to them. As Herbert says: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House." If a full-fledged Obama admirer like Herbert has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge this and be angry about it, that's a fairly compelling sign of just how extreme this has now become.

NPR's ombudsman: Why we bar the word "torture"

Glenn Greenwald — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:23:00 PDT

(updated below - Update II)

Anyone who believes that NPR is a "liberal" media outlet -- and anyone who wants to understand the decay of American journalism -- should read this column by NPR's Ombudsman, Alicia C. Shepard, as she explains and justifies why NPR bars the use of the word "torture" to describe what the Bush administration did. Responding to what she calls "a slew of emails challenging NPR's policy of using the words 'harsh interrogation tactics' or 'enhanced interrogation techniques' to describe the treatment of terrorism suspects under the Bush administration," Shepard hauls out every trite and misleading bit of journalistic conventional wisdom to dismiss listeners' concerns and defend NPR's Orwellian practice (as I noted recently when writing about The New York Times' refusal to use the word "torture," NPR's compulsive use of Bush euphemisms has been a constant complaint of the excellent blog NPR Check).

Let's just take her claims one by one, because they're so instructive:

How should NPR describe the tactics used to coerce information out of terrorism suspects? Ted Koppel, the former ABC Nightline host and commentator on Talk of the Nation, said in May that the U.S. should "define it [torture] as being any technique or practice which, when applied to an American prisoner in some other country or captured by some other entity, that we would object to. If we object to it being done to an American, then I think it's torture." That seems clear enough, but the problem is that the word torture is loaded with political and social implications for several reasons, including the fact that torture is illegal under U.S. law and international treaties the United States has signed.

She describes Koppel’s standard as "clear enough" -- and it is. So why doesn’t NPR use that standard? Because -- she argues -- "the word torture is loaded with political and social implications for several reasons, including the fact that torture is illegal under U.S. law and international treaties the United States has signed."

So what? How does the fact that torture is illegal mean that NPR shouldn’t describe as "torture" tactics which -- when used against Americans -- the U.S. government has long condemned as "torture"? Her objection to Koppel’s very sensible standard is a total non-sequitur. How does the criminality of torture serve as an argument against what Koppel advocated? It doesn't. She’s just in defend-NPR-at-any-cost mode and wants to justify its refusal to use the word "torture," and Koppel’s standard would compel the opposite conclusion, because so many of the tactics that were authorized by Bush were ones the U.S. -- and the rest of the civilized world -- have always called "torture." If the U.S. repeatedly referred to tactics as "torture” when used by others, what possible justification is there for helping Bush officials call it something else when they themselves use those tactics? That's the key question raised by Koppel and her "answer" -- torture is illegal and is a very serious matter -- rather obviously says nothing about that question.

Both Presidents Bush and Obama have insisted that the United States does not use torture. Officials during the Bush administration acknowledged the use of what they called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

What a slimy formulation this is. It's true that "both Presidents Bush and Obama have insisted that the United States does not use torture," but they’re not -- as she tries to imply -- in agreement about whether the tactics Bush authorized are "torture." In his first week in office, Obama barred the tactics in question by Executive Order, ordering the CIA to confine itself to the Army Field Manual. So when Obama says that "the United States does not use torture," that has nothing to do with the so-called "enhanced interrogation tactics" Bush authorized. To the contrary, both Obama and the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, have both said unequivocally that waterboarding is torture (John McCain, noting that "it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today," said the same thing).

Also, not all interrogation could be classified as torture. Sleep deprivation, nudity and facial slaps are different from, say, pouring water on a cloth over someone's face for 20 to 40 seconds to create the sensation of drowning -- a practice known as waterboarding.

Nobody argues that "all interrogation could be classified as torture," so what’s the point of denying a claim nobody makes? The point is that extended sleep deprivation, prolonged forced nudity, hypothermia and waterboarding someone 183 times -- particularly when done together -- are all unquestionably, indisputably "torture" under every relevant authority.

The U.S. has prosecuted those acts as torture in the past. Multiple media outlets and even the U.S. Government have routinely described those acts as “torture” when used against Americans, rather than by Americans. The tactics are ones we copied from manuals designed to inure our own troops to the torture techniques used by some of the world’s worst tyrants. They resulted in numerous deaths. Until the Bush administration decided to call it something other than "torture" so that they could do it, nobody had any questions about whether this was "torture."

If there are tactics about which there is a reasonable dispute, then those need not be called torture by NPR. But many of the tactics that were authorized are "torture" in every sense of the word. Over 100 detainees died in U.S. custody. Even Shepard acknowledges that detainees died in U.S. custody as a result of interrogations:

A basic rule of vivid writing is: "Show, Don't Tell." An excellent example of using facts rather than coded language was a 2005 piece by former NPR reporter John McChesney. It gave meticulous details of tactics used against an Iraqi detainee at Abu Graib who later died.

How can you kill a detainee using interrogation tactics without torturing him? There is no reasonable debate about many of these tactics, and NPR is doing nothing other than misleading its listeners by refusing to apply the term and instead adopting Orwellian government euphemisms.

All of the evidence proves these tactics are "torture" using every credible and reasonable definition of the term. The only thing NPR has to set against that is: "Bush says it's not torture." But that's good enough for our modern journalist: after all, if a government official insists that something is false, they will refrain from stating that it is true -- no matter how true it is. That's because their only role is to pass on what each side says and leave it at that. That, of course, is the very definition of a "mindless stenographer" -- a term they bizarrely find offensive even as they apply to themselves its defining traits.

It's a no-win case for journalists. If journalists use the words "harsh interrogation techniques," they can be seen as siding with the White House and the language that some U.S. officials, particularly in the Bush administration, prefer. If journalists use the word "torture," then they can be accused of siding with those who are particularly and visibly still angry at the previous administration.

Here’s the nub of the matter – the crux of journalistic decay in America. Who cares if NPR is "seen" as siding with the White House or its critics? How it is perceived -- and who it angers -- should have nothing to do with how it reports. Its reporting should be guided by the truth, by verifiable facts, and by the objective meaning of words [notably, NPR's excuse -- "the Right will get angry at us if we call it 'torture'" -- is identical to The Washington Post's excuse for why they stopped calling Dan Froomkin a reporter (it angers the Right); it's amazing how much The Liberal Media makes editorial decisions based on a desire to please the Right].

Also, note that Shepard explicitly admits that, with its language choice, NPR has opted to be "seen siding with the White House and the language that some U.S. officials, particularly in the Bush administration, prefer." That, too, is an odd choice for a supposedly Liberal Media outlet. And note her snide and revealing assumption -- conventional wisdom among the establishment media -- that the only people who want these tactics to be called "torture" are those "who are particularly and visibly still angry at the previous administration" (or, as David Ignatius put it, "liberal score-settlers"). It doesn’t seem to occur to her that something other than base vindictiveness – such as a desire to maintain the universal taboo against torture, or allegiance to accuracy in language – might motivate those who want NPR to call torture "torture," rather than prettify it with banality-of-evil euphemisms invented by the very people who perpetrated it.

There has been no clear consensus on what constitutes torture, noted Brian Duffy, NPR's former managing editor in late April. "President Bush said, 'We do not torture -- period.' Yet water-boarding and several other tactics not approved in the Army Field Manual were approved by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) during his administration," said Duffy.

There was no consensus on whether Saddam had nuclear weapons and was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- some said he was; some said he wasn’t -- and therefore NPR shouldn’t take a position. There’s no consensus on whether the world is only 6,000 years old -- some say it is; some say it isn’t -- and therefore NPR shouldn’t take a position. Bush said he didn’t authorize torture ("period") -- some say he did; some say he didn’t -- and therefore NPR shouldn’t take a position.

"During his confirmation hearings, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder said clearly that water-boarding was torture, and President Obama has said the same thing," [Duffy] continued. "But the Obama Administration has issued no overarching statement on the issue. . . ."

So the President emphatically said it was torture. So did the Attorney General. But they issued "no overarching statement" on the issue? What does that even mean? What’s an "overarching statement"? More to the point, why do they need Obama to say it in order to report it? Something is either true or it isn’t -- even if Obama doesn’t issue an "overarching statement" acknowledging it. Why should the claims of political officials determine what a news organization does and does not report and how they report it?

To me, it makes more sense to describe the techniques and skip the characterization. For example, reporters could say that the U.S. military poured water down a detainee's mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds. Or they could detail such self-explanatory techniques as forcing detainees into cramped confines crawling with insects, or forced to stand for hours along side a wall.

This passage is the second time Shepard described waterboarding with the pleasant-sounding, clinical, minimizing phrase: "poured water down a detainee's mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds." Note the other nice-sounding descriptions for what the U.S. did ("forced to stand for hours along side a wall"; that almost sounds peaceful, like a yoga pose: "along side a wall").

Any mention of the numerous detainee deaths? Or the mental and physical havoc wreaked on these detainees? Or the freezing temperatures and cold water and "walling" and severe stress positions? No. In light of that, does anyone believe that she doesn’t have an opinion on this topic, and that the opinion is that these techniques are not "torture"? She makes the tactics sound milder than Dick "dunk-in-the-water" Cheney does. As is virtually always the case with modern journalists, those who scream the loudest about how they must refrain from stating facts in order to maintain "neutrality" are the ones who, in reality, are the least neutral of all. They're just too dishonest to acknowledge it.

One last point: all of this underscores the reasons why Dan Froomkin had to be disappeared from The Post and why he is such a pure journalist in the aberrational sense. Here's how Froomkin addressed this very same question just last week in a Post online chat:

Reader: If the Post can't or won't call the techniques torture, the Post's editorial position lines up exactly with the Bush Administration's line that they didn't torture, doesn't it? Dan Froomkin: I call it torture. Over and over again.

That's what real journalists do, by definition. They state facts regardless of who it offends and whether government officials deny them. NPR should try that sometime.

UPDATE: In comments, johnqeniac makes an excellent point which could apply to many other topics:

How about banning the use of the word 'terrorist' for exactly the same set of pathetic excuses? If NPR were sincere about their 'describe, don't label' doctrine, then they would forego the use of the words 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' in favor of something like 'harsh combat techniques'.

Exactly. But in that case, the U.S. Government uses the term "Terrorist" in all sorts of ways, and though its use is vigorously disputed around the world, NPR will still use it (and does use it) because the Government uses it (and/or because -- as is true for torture -- the term clearly applies despite the existence of those who dispute its application). But that's what our establishment media organizations are first and foremost: spokespeople for government claims, and they take their cues from the government. (Note, similarly, NPR's free-wheeling and quite subjective use of the descriptive term "extremist" when it suits them, even in the face of substantial dispute over its applicability).

UPDATE II: Even GE-owned NBC News was willing -- at least once, in 2006 -- to use a descriptive phrase that the Bush administration vigorously disputed in a matter "loaded with political and social implications":

NBC News on Monday branded the Iraq conflict a civil war -- a decision that put it at odds with the White House and that analysts said would increase public disillusionment with the U.S. troop presence there. NBC, a major U.S. television network, said the Iraqi government's inability to stop spiraling violence between rival factions fit its definition of civil war. The Bush administration has for months declined to call the violence a civil war -- although the U.S. general overseeing the Iraq operation said in August there was a risk -- and a White House official on Monday disputed NBC's assessment. . . Several analysts said NBC's decision was important as the administration would face more pressure to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq if the U.S. public comes to view the conflict as a civil war.

The reason for calling it a "civil war" even though Bush officials and their followers vehemently denied that it was? Because it was a "civil war." That fact, standing alone, ought to be decisive.

Contradictions that aren't seen as contradictory

Glenn Greenwald — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:23:00 PDT

(updated below)

Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Bradley Graham, discussing his new book on Donald Rumsfeld, June 15, 2009:

As for the enhanced interrogation techniques, Rumsfeld personally authorized one set of harsh measures for use at Guantanamo in December 2002, then rescinded the measures the following months after strong objections from some Pentagon lawyers. He issued a new set of 24 measures in April 2003 after a review by Pentagon officials. . . . From everything I could determine, Rumsfeld was indeed fully supportive of the invasion [of Iraq] . . . I doubt Rumsfeld will ever come to view the invasion as a mistake.

Time Magazine excerpt from Graham's book, yesterday:

Rumsfeld is in many respects an honorable man, deeply patriotic, a good friend to many, and unfailingly loyal to those he has served and to a number who have served him. He is smart, cunning, and capable of great geniality, all highly desirable qualities in a leader with such power.

* * * * *

Lindsey Graham, June 9, 2009, condemning those who oppose the suppression of torture photos:

So what we're about to do today, in stripping this language from the supplemental, is give in to people who I believe have a very naive sense of what the world is really about, that have no real understanding that this is a war, where people are getting killed every day trying to protect us against a vicious enemy. They are absolutely, completely out of touch with reality.

Lindsey Graham, February 5, 2003:

There’s no question that Iraq and Saddam Hussein aren't telling the truth. Iraq had hundreds of artillery shells with chemical weapons, thousands of liters of anthrax, and hundreds of tons of nerve agents in their inventory. Now they are not accounted for. The Iraqi response of ‘we have no weapons of mass destruction,’ is a flat-out lie. I hope the world will get behind President Bush in making sure this man cannot continue his weapons program. He either needs to be disarmed or replaced.

* * * * *

Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, June 19, 2009:

Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents.

Charles Krauthammer, May 1, 2009:

* * * * *

John McCain, Face the Nation, yesterday:

I'm not for fomenting violence, nothing except to say that America's position in the world is one of moral leadership. And that's what America is all about. And frankly, it's not only about what takes place in the streets of Tehran but it's also about what takes place in America's conscience. . . . The fact is that America has been and will be the beacon of hope and freedom.

John McCain, April 19, 2007:

* * * * *

John McCain, Twitter, June 16, 2009:

USA always stands for freedom and democracy!!

Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Bradley Graham, discussing his new book on Don Rumsfeld, June 15, 2009:

Rumsfeld's meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983 took place at a time when both the Iraqi leader and the Reagan administration were interested in re-establishing ties. Twenty years later, when the situation had drastically changed, it certainly was more than little awkward for Rumsfeld to have in circulation photos of him shaking hands with Saddam. But it was U.S. policy that had changed, not Rumsfeld.

* * * * *

Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, January 19, 2009:

Yet the incoming Obama administration seems to be inclining, in its foreign policy, toward a philosophy that says: Voting matters, but maybe not as much as economic development, or women's rights, or honest judges. Its adoption as U.S. policy would be a terrible mistake, for America's security as well as its moral standing.

Washington Post, December 12, 2006, celebrating the rule of Augusto Pinochet:

AUGUSTO PINOCHET, who died Sunday at the age of 91, has been vilified for three decades in and outside of Chile, the South American country he ruled for 17 years. For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende . . . It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. . . . Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. . . . In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

* * * * *

Tom Friedman, The New York Times, June 20, 2009:

The popular uprising unfolding in Iran right now really is remarkable. . . . Why is this so unusual? Because in most Middle East states, power grows out of the barrel of a gun and out of a barrel of oil — and that combination is very hard to overthrow.

Tom Friedman, The Charlie Rose Show, May 23, 2003:

I think [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. I think that, looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about . . . We needed to go over there basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. . . .And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand? . . . Well, Suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

* * * * *

These blatantly contradictory statements aren't considered contradictions because of the core premises of our political culture: We don't really consider torture and mass pointless slaughter -- when we do it -- to be all that bad. Those who advocated, defended and ordered it are still highly respectable -- "honorable." Those who were so humiliatingly wrong that it cannot be adequately expressed in words still prance around, and are still treated as, wise experts, while those were right are naive and unSerious. The U.S stands for freedom, democracy and human rights -- even when we don't. People who advocate unprovoked wars of aggression, torture and mass violence are irredeemable monsters -- except when they're American or our allies.

UPDATE: This might be the most glaring (unrecognized) contradiction yet: the person who wrote this definitively deranged, reality-detached rant about Barack Obama today -- one that has to be read to be believed ("as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society") -- is considered to be a very Serious legal expert -- not only by the Right, but also by many in the media.

Email from John Harris: regrets dispute with Dan Froomkin

Glenn Greenwald — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:21:00 PDT

[updated below - Update II - Update III (Sunday)]

As Jay Rosen explained so well in my interview with him yesterday, The Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin had its roots in a very revealing 2006 crusade against Froomkin, led by The Post's then-National Political Editor (and now Politico Editor-in-Chief) John Harris, insisting that Froomkin was not a real reporter but only a liberal ideologue opinionist. At the time, Rosen wrote a comprehensive piece on this dispute, which included an interview with Harris that was scathing in its criticisms of Froomkin, and Rosen elaborated on that event in my interview with him yesterday.

Today, I received the following email from Harris, in which he expresses regret and even seems to acknowledge error in leading that crusade:

Glenn, This is a quick note on your recent items on Dan Froomkin's ouster from the Post. I blundered four years ago in allowing myself to have an overwrought public disagreement with Dan over what now seems (and if I was thinking clearly at the time would have seemed then) an insanely narow [sic] issue--i.e., whether his column was appropriately labeled. I don't want any current references to that now ancient episode to obscure my actual view of Dan and his work. I think he is a distinctive and valuable voice on the presidency and on journalism. I particularly admire the entpreneurialism [sic] he has shown in his career--using the power of the Web to build a community of followers and create his own franchise. This was actually my view at the time, though it got lost in the smoke when I got indignant over a couple points that seem distant now. But my view has strengthened in the years since, with more appreciation of how the Web is changing journalism and how enterprising writers thrive in this new environment. It's been nearly three years since I have had anything to do with decision-making at the Post, and I have no insight into what prompted he and the Post to part ways. But he had some impressive achievements there, and I hope he'll find the right home for his voice soon. Best, John Harris

This sentiment is understandable and seems sincere: nobody wants to be seen as the prime culprit in someone's firing. And it is true that the way in which journalists view online commentary (and online commentators) has changed over the past several years. Whereas "blogs" were once viewed as filthy, unworthy, irrelevant interlopers by many establishment journalists and their management, most of them now operate "blogs" themselves and view them as a vital part of their business plan. That's particularly true for Politico, and so it's believable that Harris has changed his views since 2006 (when he was at the Post) regarding the value of someone like Froomkin (and perhaps Harris could put actions behind his expression of regret by offering to carry Froomkin's column, which would surely be a superb journalistic and business addition to Politico).

That said, I strongly disagree with Harris' characterization of the dispute he and other Post reporters had with Froomkin as "narrow." That controversy was actually fundamental, as it highlighted how most establishment media figures understand the role of "journalist." It also revealed how petrified media figures were (and remain) of being criticized by conservatives (read the quotes in the linked post expressing that fear, including from Harris), and how eager they were in the Bush era to refrain from real journalism in order to keep the administration and the Right generally pleased and satisfied -- even (or especially) if it meant refraining from reporting honestly on the Bush administration. That is why I have devoted so much focus to this episode over the last few days. And, as Rosen notes, the media have never come to terms with their conduct during the Bush era, never admitted it, never even bothered to conduct a debate about it -- except, as David Gregory, Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson do, to defend it.

That's why this Froomkin firing is so revealing. The fact that one of the very few people to practice real adversarial journalism in the Bush era was decreed not to be a real "journalist" -- and has now been fired by the Post -- is one of the most illustrative episodes of the past several years regarding what the real function of the establishment media is. Along those lines, Harris might want to consider also acknowledging that Froomkin was absolutely right when insisting (and Harris wrong when doubting) that Froomkin was not acting as "liberal opinionist" when criticizing Bush, but rather, was as an "accountability journalist" because he was merely pointing out facts, and would subject the actions and claims of a Democratic president to the same journalistic scrutiny. Froomkin's tenacious criticisms of Obama leave no doubt about that.

The ultimate meaning of Froomkin's firing was captured nicely yesterday by Paul Krugman, who incorporated long-standing blog critiques into his analysis:

On the face of it, it’s a puzzling decision. Aside from the excellence of Froomkin’s work, he’s popular with readers. On sheer business grounds, why drop him? . . . Here’s how I see things: many people in the news media, especially at the managerial level, decided a long time ago that movement conservatism was The Future — and that the sensible thing, whether or not you yourself were a conservative, was to go with the wave. . . . And anyone who didn’t treat the right with great respect, who didn’t get with the program, was a flake, a moonbat. . . . Now, you might think that the way things turned out — the total failure of movement conservatism in government, and the abrupt, humiliating end to the Permanent Republican Majority — would lead to some soul-searching. But that’s not how human nature works. Instead, it became more urgent than ever to assert that those who didn’t get with the program were flakes and moonbats, not worthy of being listened to, while those who believed in the right to the bitter end were “serious”. Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You’re not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you’re not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last 3 years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you’re not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble. That’s why the firing of Dan Froomkin now makes a perverse sort of sense. As long as the right was in power, he was in effect the Post’s designated moonbat, someone who attracted readers but didn’t threaten the self-esteem of the self-perceived serious people at the paper. But now he looks like someone who was right when the serious people were wrong — and that means he has to go.

It makes perfect sense that one of the people to whom Krugman's critique applies most -- Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt -- is the one with ultimate responsibility for the Froomkin firing. Froomkin is the anti-Hiatt: someone who was right about the Bush administration and neoconservatives; who performed the real functions of journalism; and, most of all, sees himself as an outside check on, rather than a loyal servant to, establishment power. If you were Fred Hiatt, wouldn't you also be eager to see Dan Froomkin fired and disappeared from sight, for exactly the reasons Krugman wrote?

UPDATE: One likely benefit of the Froomkin firing is that it highlights the principal and long-standing editorial function of Fred Hiatt, Donald Graham and the Post: to justify and defend Bush radicalism and lawbreaking and promote neoconservatism. Along those lines, the Post today has an Editorial condemning the recent decision of a federal judge who is a Bush-43-appointee (a fact the Editorial omits) allowing a lawsuit brought by Jose Padilla against John Yoo to proceed (I wrote about that decision here -- see Item 5). As a result of memos written by Yoo, Padilla -- an American citizen -- was imprisoned for years without charges, without any access to the outside world (including a lawyer), and was brutally abused.

But to the Post, Yoo's authorizing that conduct was a mere good faith legal dispute for which (as always) there should be no accountability. That's one of the Post's primary goals in life: to defend Bush officials from any consequences of their actions, even when those actions violate core Constitutional guarantees and criminal statutes. Froomkin, a vigorous proponent of accountability (and vocal critic of Obama for blocking such accountability) was completely anathema to that mission.

Along those lines, Andrew Sullivan -- who has been criticizing neoconservative dogma and the Post's allegiance to it for the role it played in Froomkin's firing -- is predictably being smeared as an "anti-semite" by the usual manipulators of that term. Andrew rightly notes that "these vile smears are designed to police the discourse some more," but it's so striking how nobody cares anymore about these smears because they've been so overused and are so transparently dumb (Andrew himself dismisses them as "tedious," and that's all they are).

Everyone knows what neocons are. Everyone knows that "neocons" are not tantamount to "Jews." Most Jews reject neoconservative ideology. Some of the leading and most scathing critics of neoconservatism are Jews. Many leading neocons -- Dick Cheney -- are not Jewish. Depicting criticisms of "neocons" as "anti-Semitism" is every bit as manipulative as applying that term to those who criticize Israel. Neoconservatism is a radical, deceitful and destructive ideology and nobody is going to be deterred from aggressively pointing that out because Weekly Standard, National Review, Commentary and The Washington Post Editorial Page casually toss around the word "anti-Semite" in order to intimidate people out of that criticism. Those people and that tactic are far too discredited for that to work with anyone. It doesn't inspire fear -- only pity and contempt. That The Post is a leading house organ for neoconservative opinion is an important fact and screeching "anti-Semitism" at anyone who points it out will achieve nothing.

UPDATE II: Jane Hamsher makes some important points about the relationship between The Washington Post, Froomkin and online traffic.

And regarding the trite right-wing "anti-semitism" attacks on Sullivan for his criticisms of the Post's conduct here, Gator90 sarcastically writes in comments: "Because nothing screams 'Anti-Semitism' like criticizing a newspaper for firing a Jewish journalist." They use the "anti-semitism" smear so constantly and reflexively that they no longer even bother to see if it makes basic logical sense.

UPDATE III: Referencing the Froomkin essay I posted the other day on the (abdicated) duty of journalists to "call bullshit" on government officials, Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller recounts a conversation he had this week with a high British government official:

It’s difficult not to feel despair at the increasing banality of journalism in the US. A couple of days ago, I had the privilege of spending the evening with Lord Carlile of Berriew, who has served as the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation since 9/11. He has no binding authority, but he insisted that his power to "name and shame" gives him a great deal of actual influence over the content of antiterrorism legislation. And indeed, it seems clear that many of the UK’s imperfect antiterrorism laws would have been far less perfect but for his efforts. I found Lord Carlile’s discussion of his "soft power" fascinating, so I asked him why he thinks the power to name-and-shame has almost no effect in the United States, where those who are named as the intellectual authors of repressive legislation feel no shame and suffer no consequences for their actions. He gave a very simple answer: journalists. I won't repeat some of the words that he used to describe just how pathetic he considers US political journalism, but it’s clear that he believes it has completely abdicated its duty to — as Froomkin describes it — call bullshit on the government.

There are many reasons why establishment media discussions of our political conflicts are so incomplete, distorted, vapid and unsatisfying. But one significant reason is that one of the most important causes of our decayed political culture is a topic which is excluded almost completely from those discussions: namely, the central role the establishment media itself -- with its uncritical and loyal subservience to political power -- plays in enabling and protecting that decay.

Obama, the Right and defendants' rights

Glenn Greenwald — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:21:00 PDT

On Thursday, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), ruled that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access the state's evidence in order to subject it to DNA tests which could prove their innocence. Two lower courts, a district court and the Ninth Circuit, had ruled there was such a right. In reversing those rulings, the Court's majority was composed of its conservative Justices (Roberts (who wrote the opinion), Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy).

Numerous liberal commentators are, rightfully, infuriated by the decision, but have been notably incomplete in their critiques. Matt Yglesias describes the ruling as "Conservative Justices’ Strange Enthusiasm for the Punishment of the Innocent" and argues that ruling in favor of the state over defendants, the executive over the legislature, and the corporation over the individual is "conservative jurisprudence in a nutshell." Think Progress' Ian Millhiser also blames conservatives for this perverse outcome. Scott Lemieux, in making excellent arguments against the Court's reasoning, similarly writes that "this is your court on conservatives" and concludes that it gives the lie to the John-Roberts-claim that judges are mere neutral "umpires." Several other liberal commentators exclusively blame conservatives for this decision.

There's one important fact missing from all of that analysis: namely, this was yet another case where the Obama DOJ sided with the Bush administration and advocated the position that the conservative justices adopted. The Obama DOJ aggressively argued before the Court that convicted criminals have no constitutional right to access evidence for DNA analysis. Indeed, its decision to embrace this extreme Bush position caused much controversy and anger back in February. Law Professor Darren Hutchinson wrote back then:

The Office of the Solicitor General has adhered to Bush's position that the inmate does not have a constitutional right to re-test the DNA evidence, even though doing so could establish his innocence and despite the fact that his attorney will pay for the new scientific analysis of the evidence. . . . As a state senator, Obama sponsored and lobbied for legislation that gave all inmates a post-conviction right to DNA evidence -- the same right that Osborne asserts in this case. . . . The Bush administration was not required to take a position in this case. Although the Bush administration decided to submit a brief in the case, the Obama administration could have refused to defend it, withdrawn it, or even switched position.

Indeed, the Obama DOJ rejected explicit requests from defendants rights advocates to repudiate the Bush position. Instead, the Obama DOJ announced that Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal would make his debut appearance before the Supreme Court in that capacity advocating the Bush position (and that's what then happened):

The solicitor general's office has turned down a request by the Innocence Project to disavow a Bush Administration stance on prisoners' access to DNA evidence in post-conviction proceedings. As a result, on March 2, Neal Katyal will make his debut as deputy solicitor general by arguing before the Supreme Court in support of the state of Alaska's view that prisoners have no constitutional right to obtain DNA evidence that might help them prove their innocence -- even if the prisoners pay for the DNA testing themselves. . . .

In all of the commentary condemning this decision, the only acknowledgment I saw of the role played by the Obama administration was in yesterday's New York Times Editorial:

We are also puzzled and disturbed by the Obama administration’s decision to side with Alaska in this case — continuing the Bush administration’s opposition to recognizing a right to access physical evidence for post-conviction DNA testing. Thursday’s ruling will inevitably allow some innocent people to languish in prison without having the chance to definitively prove their innocence and with the state never being completely certain of their guilt.

There may be justifications for what the Obama DOJ did (all other things being equal, government lawyers tend to prefer continuity in positions after changes in administration), but -- as is true for so many controversies these days -- it's rather difficult to heap all the blame on conservatives for something that the Obama administration itself embraces and is working to bring about.

In general, how much one criticizes Obama is largely a function of the areas on which one tends to focus. If I had spent the week writing about Iran, I would be largely defending -- and praising -- Obama's very wise restraint, even in the face of bipartisan political pressure, when it comes to interfering in Iran's internal political disputes. His private and public refusal to cheer on all of Israel's policies is also commendable. Conversely, those who focus on gay issues have been understandably furious with the administration, and in the areas of civil liberties, secrecy, and his Justice Department generally, the administration has been nothing short of abysmal. Criticizing the Right for its support of these positions is understandable, but in our modern political culture, the President is, far and away, the driving force, and those who supported him can have far more of an impact pointing out, rather than ignoring, the role he is playing in advancing these policies.

The Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media

Glenn Greenwald — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:20:00 PDT

[Updated below - Update II (Interview with Jay Rosen) - Update III]

The American establishment media in a nutshell:

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say 'this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this,' that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role" -- NBC News' David Gregory, thereafter promoted to host Meet the Press.

"Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . . "Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy. "It also resonates with readers and viewers a lot more than passionless stenography. I’m not sure why calling bullshit has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum. "If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers. "I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way" -- Dan Froomkin, fired yesterday by The Washington Post.

* * * * *

The Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin reveals much about the modern establishment media. Froomkin was one of the very few journalists working for an establishment outlet who understood and practiced the function of journalism. That is why he had a history of tension with the Post. Froomkin is everything that a political journalist is supposed to be -- and everything that most of them are not. That's why he was an aberration -- and, to them, an unpleasant one. Just look at the record.

The first public controversy erupted when then-Post Political Editor John Harris -- now, appropriately, the Editor-in-Chief of the consummately wretched Politico -- demanded that the name of Froomkin's column ("White House Briefing") be changed because Froomkin was too liberal to be presented as a real reporter. The Post's Ombudsman Deborah Howell defended that decision, noting that "Political reporters at The Post don't like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin's 'White House Briefing,' which is highly opinionated and liberal." She quoted Harris as saying that Froomkin's column "dilutes our only asset -- our credibility" and he "writes the kind of column 'that we would never allow a White House reporter to write.'"

Why was Froomkin deemed "liberal," inappropriate and biased? Because he pointed out that the Bush administration's claims were false and their policies radical -- i.e., he wrote what was factually true. But that -- writing what is factually true and pointing out false statements from those in political power -- is the number one sin in establishment journalism. As David Gregory said, that's not their role. In the Bush era, pointing out the lies of Bush officials was all that was necessary to be deemed a leftist. Stephen Colbert explained why: "reality has a well-known liberal bias." Here's just one illustrative example from a chat Froomkin gave last week when he was asked about the Post's refusal to use the word "torture" when referring to Bush policies:

Reader: If the Post can't or won't call the techniques torture, the Post's editorial position lines up exactly with the Bush Administration's line that they didn't torture, doesn't it? Dan Froomkin: I call it torture. Over and over again.

To be a real establishment journalist (objective), you're not allowed to say when one side is lying -- even when they are. All you're allowed to do is repeat what both sides say and leave it at that (Colbert: "The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home"). Froomkin -- unlike David Gregory -- believes that reporters should actually point out when the Government is lying. That's what he did. That's why, to The Post, he wasn't a real reporter but, rather, an "ideologue." That's the sickness of American journalism in a nutshell.

Then there's Froomkin's freakish, exotic belief that journalists should be adversarial to and skpetical of the claims of government officials, especially when it comes to matters of war and national security. See his superb guidelines for press skepticism of government claims ("You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority"); his criticisms of the establishment media for uncritically reporting Bush claims about the Iranian threat; his blistering critique of the failures of the media in the run-up to the Iraq War; and his criticism of Tim Russert's protection of political power. Skepticism towards -- rather than mindless repeating of -- the claims of the political establishment is almost as severe a sin in modern journalism as pointing out when government officials are lying.

And then, most ironically (given John Harris' accusations that he's not objective), is Froomkin's insistence on treating all politicians the same -- subjecting all political leaders to adversarial journalistic scrutiny rather than declaring himself on one side or the other and spouting standard partisan talking points. He couldn't be pigeonholed as reflexively pro-Bush or pro-Obama -- i.e., he has intellectual and journalistic integrity -- and therefore confused the mind-numbing little formula used to simplify and deaden our political debates. The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen put this best:

The Politico says the move is "sure to ignite the left-wing blogosphere," but Froomkin's departure, if true, should disappoint anyone concerned with insightful political analysis. Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president's proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and on Bush-era torture revelations. Froomkin was one of the media's most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions.

To how many people in the establishment media can that last sentence be applied? Very, very few -- and, as of yesterday, one fewer.

This is how warped and broken our establishment media is, and it is a big part of why it is dying. Froomkin was one of the very few journalists in the establishment media who practiced real journalism rather than banal stenographic servitude to the political establishment , and for that reason was disliked by Post functionaries like John Harris; considered a leftist, biased ideologue; and deemed someone who undermined their imaginary "credibility." How many other columnists does the Post have whose firing would spark the level of anger or even interest that Froomkin's has? And how can The Post justify firing one of its most popular and unique commentators when it continues to serve as a factory of trite, extremist neoconservative propaganda?

At the Post, Froomkin stated when government officials were lying; applied skepticism to claims from politicians; believed journalists should do more than mindlessly recite what each side claims; and treated politicians on all sides equally. In a minimally healthy political culture, those would be the bare requirements for being called a "journalist." In the establishment media culture we have, those traits disqualify you from the term and, if they persist, get you fired. Ask Ashleigh Banfield (if you can find her). Or Tim Russert's perfect replacement.

* * * * *

I'll have a podcast discussion with NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen later today on what the Froomkin firing reveals about the Post and establishment journalism. It will be posted here when ready.

UPDATE: Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander -- who bills himself as "giving voice to reader concerns about the Post" -- jots a tepid, empty little note about Froomkin's firing in which he doesn't bother (a) to quote or even reference a single reader complaint (and I know he received a large number, since I was cc:'d on many) or (b) express even a little bit of an opinion about what actually happened. Instead, he just mindlessly recites vague and perfunctory management claims about the firing, without assessing or even confirming those claims.

Alexander describes Froomkin as writing "an often-irreverent online column" (Beltway journalists are so full of reverence that it's notable when one isn't), and then includes this very revealing (and typical) passage:

That slant seemed to attract a large and loyal audience during the Bush administration, but it may have suffered when Barack Obama became president. Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, whose stable of contributors includes Froomkin, said late Thursday: "With the end of the Bush administration, interest in the blog also diminished. His political orientation was not a factor in our decision."

His audience "may have suffered" since Obama became President? What does that even mean? Did it suffer? Alexander doesn't bother to say. And what does Hiatt's "interest in the blog also diminished" mean? Interest among whom? Alexander is in standard Washington media mode: passing on what he was told by officials without bothering to confirm if it's true, like a good stenographer. How does Froomkin's traffic compare to other columnists and bloggers who the Post isn't firing? What is really behind his firing? Alexander has no idea and no interest in finding out, despite its being an obvious concern among many Post readers (see his comment section if you doubt that).

Also: regarding how Post reporters tried to marginalize and dismiss Froomkin as a "liberal opinionist" rather than a real journalist, see Atrios and Jane Hamsher for some very important insights on that issue. That all relates to my discussion with Jay Rosen (Rosen's comments on this are interesting in the extreme), which I'll post very shortly.

Finally, note that the normally mild-mannered Atlantic Editor -- James Fallows -- excoriates the Post's decision as "insane" and "a self-inflicted wound" (see Item 3):

Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with?

Read Fallows' whole paragraph on this, including his discussion of the Post's long-standing neocon agenda.

Post writers disliked Froomkin because he pointed out the radicalism and deceit of the Bush presidency and (both with his words and actions) highlighted their profound failure to do so, and because the neocon-Right complained about him to the Post. As Brad DeLong put it: "The 'why' is easy: he made too many people at the Post who were busy writing about how Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or how there is more sea ice than there was a generation ago or how 'opinions on shape of earth differ' look foolish." Fred Hiatt was one of the most extreme enablers of Bush radicalism, and so it is hardly surprising that he fired Froomkin despite its being completely contrary to the efforts of the Post to survive as a financially sustainable entity.

UPDATE II: My podcast discussion with NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen and author of the PressThink blog (including this excellent piece on the 2006 John-Harris/Froomkin controversy) is roughly 25 minutes in length and can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below. Rosen makes a lot of very interesting observations on what this episode reflects about the media, and he's well worth listening to (before listening, read this quick post from Atrios on the distortion of the term "Liberal" -- a point that resonates for me personally). ~~A transcript will be posted shortly~~ The transcript is now here:

UPDATE III: From a reader, via email:

As of this moment the post on the WaPo Ombudsman's blog about Froomkin has 395 comments (most in support of Froomkin). His previous post, on Howard Kurtz, has 9. The post before that has 25. The one before that 0, as in none [and the 3 posts prior to that have 3 each, and the one prior also has zero]. Genius of the WaPo to get rid of the writer who readers are most passionate about.

Number of comments isn't a perfect barometer of interest, but when the disparities are that large, it is certainly probative. The bottom line is that I'd be willing to bet anyone that Froomkin generates more outside traffic to The Post than the overwhelming majority of Post blogs that remain.

To listen to this discussion, click PLAY on the recorder below:

Glenn Greenwald: My guest today is Jay Rosen, who is a journalism professor at NYU, and also author of the popular and influential media blog PressThink. Jay, thanks very much for joining me again.

Jay Rosen: Thank you for having me on this subject which is a passion of mine, and a passion of yours.

GG: It is. I'm going to ask you in just a second a very open-ended question, which is to invite you to tell me and anyone listening what you think about the firing of Dan Froomkin and what it means, and have you highlight what you think are the most important parts of this episode.

But before I ask you that, I want to ask you to just summarize the controversy that arose several years ago involving John Harris, the then national political editor of The Washington Post, and Deborah Howell, the ombudsman, and Froomkin as well, since you wrote about that rather comprehensively; you interviewed the various players and I think you argued yesterday on Twitter - and I think you're right - that it provides a context for what happened and is independently interesting in its own right. So, if you could just describe what happened then, and then we can talk about recent events.

JR: Well, the fuse that exploded this week in letting Dan Froomkin go, was lit in December of 2005 when the national staff and the people who do White House news for The Washington Post newspaper, started complaining - I'm not exactly sure to whom they started complaining - but their complaint eventually reached the ombudsman and she wrote a column about how Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing was causing complaints, and the complaints were that people thought he was a White House reporter, and this was confusing, and that he should be called an opinionated columnist - so a kind of tension within The Washington Post leaked out through this coded ombudsman column. Then there was tons of response to the column because Froomkin has a lot of fans in the blogosphere, and in the 'news-o-sphere,' and then The Washington Post political reporters, the national staff, started to feel they were misunderstood.

So they took to my blog, and I interviewed Harris, who was the editor of the politics team at the national staff of The Washington Post newspaper. And he presented the case at my blog, and Froomkin replied. And Jim Brady - who was the editor of washingtonpost.com, the online operation which was at that time run by a separate 'king', Jim Brady - he replied as well.

So, essentially what Harris said is, we're getting a lot of complaints about Froomkin; they come, yeah, from Republicans, conservatives, but some liberals too, who say he has an agenda, he's got a standard liberal view, and his column, White House Briefing, can be confused for a report, and I meet people all the time who are confused. So there is an attempt to re-brand him, which eventually led to his column being renamed White House Watch, and him being reclassified as an opinion columnist, and it was actually from the opinion section that was axed by Fred Hyatt when he started out as a creation of Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. So he represented a kind of online format and sensibility as well, and that too is involved in this clash.

So the upshot was, Brady says, protecting his turf - because Froomkin was at the time one of the most popular columnists on washingtonpost.com, one of the big traffic generators - and he says he's not going anywhere, and maybe we'll re-describe what he's doing, but we're not going to do it under pressure, and it fought it to a stand still. And Dan prospered, for quite a while, as a washingtonpost.com columnist. But then with the firing or letting go of Jim Brady, he lost his protector, the washingtonpost.com operation began to be merged into the Post newsroom. Most people see that as a triumph of the old guard, and you can see this week's events as related to that. So, he lost his protector; since he was classified as an opinion columnist, he was seen as of value because he presented a kind of opposition stance to Bush, but now that's gone because Obama, he's not going to be oppositional to, and I'm sure that contributed as well.

So that's what happened in December '05. Brady argued back, said maybe what he does is perfectly appropriate, and he's protected for a while, but then he lost that protection, and so he's gone.

GG: One of the things I found so interesting in going back and reading your account and of the interviews you did, and I linked to it today and I'll do so again, is that the argument that Froomkin was making back then, is that actually he wasn't a liberal at all.

JR: Right.

GG: That what he was doing was acting adversarially to the party in power, which is what a reporter is supposed to do, and that happened to be a Republican administration spouting lots of lies, and he said, if it had been a Kerry administration that won in 2004, another Democratic administration, he would be doing exactly the same thing. And John Harris, in your interview with him, said, well, I - he sort of doubted it, so I guess we can't know for sure until it happens, but he seems to have a liberal viewpoint to me.

Now, as it turns out, there haven't been very many more vigorous and persistent critics of Barack Obama since the inauguration than Dan Froomkin on many, many counts. He has constantly identified reasoning coming from the White House that he thinks is inconsistent or unpersuasive, or even misleading. He's criticized him for failing to live up to campaign promises. He wrote the other day that he's become an active participant in a cover-up of Bush crimes; he's criticized him for being too beholden to the financial industry in the regulations he's advocating. So it turns out that Dan Froomkin was right, clearly, when he was saying that he would be doing the same thing if there were a Democratic or liberal administration.

What does that mean in terms of how these reporters think about, or these newspapers and media outlets think about what is and is not a partisan, or an ideologue, or what objectivity is?

JR: Well, to answer that, Glenn, I have to go back to your question you said you were going ask, how do I interpret these events. And here is the explanation that occurs to me after three or four years of blogging about this general subject, and well over 20 posts written about the larger story here, which is, what happened to the press under Bush. The way I view it now, it comes down to this: the entire contraption of professional, elite-level political journalism, and especially White House reporting, which is an entire system brining together the political players, the journalists, the media system and the audiences, was not built for, and didn't anticipate, and did not know how to cope with what happened when an outlier occupied the White House.

And when Bush came to power, this is essentially the situation our press faced, because Bush in his agenda for the expansion of executive power, in what I call the opacity agenda that followed from that, which is while you're expanding executive power, you're pulling a curtain over the government in as many ways as you can, and by increasing opacity, that itself is an expansion of executive power. As well as the roll back of the press itself, to a greater distance so that it can't see as well as the triumph over Congressional oversight. The radical agenda that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson talks about as a former aide to Colin Powell. That whole thing presented an outlier to the Washington press, and it needed, in order to respond to something that big and that dramatic of a departure from White House press relations, imaginative moves of its own.

And essentially what happened, Glenn, is that the White House press, the Washington press, and The Washington Post staff, never came up with that response. And Froomkin came along, in the wreckage of that, and from a position way on the wing, as a columnist for washingtonpost.com, this new entity which to the guys downtown at The Washington Post didn't even matter at first, came along and he basically picked up the signals from that event, and started to write it up, and started to bring that story, that whole narrative of the radicalism of the Bush years, into The Washington Post. And the truth is, that the Washington press corps, and the people at the White House themselves, helped to normalize Bush; they normalized a radical move. They didn't know what to do in the case of an outlier. All the things they would have had to do to respond, they failed to do. And Froomkin was reminding them of that. And that is ultimately why he was let go.

GG: When you say that Froomkin was reminding them of that, and that was ultimately why he was let go, do you think - there were lots of columns where Froomkin would, one of the things that made him so unusual was that he would write explicit criticism of how the media was behaving. He criticized Tim Russert very harshly, he would criticize other reports for mindlessly and uncritically passing along or amplifying Bush claims.

JR: Right.

GG: Do you think it was that explicit head-on media criticism that made them dislike his column so much, or was it just that fact that he was acting in a way, as a journalist, that they weren't, and his example was highlighting what it was they were failing to do?

JR: He was picking up on a story that was eluding them, and to understand why, you have to go back to how Dan did his job. He, unlike the duties of the reporters on the beat, wasn't tracking what the White House was doing every day, wasn't there at the White House himself, didn't have to show up at events, wasn't a reporter on foot, wasn't calling sources all the time. Instead, his day started when he gathered all the coverage of the White House beat, from around the Web, which he could do, and started to sift through it, right? Like a blogger. When you do that, of course, and you bring it all together, which the reporters aren't necessarily doing - they're following their thing, they're following their competitors, but they're not looking at the beat as a whole. And that's how he did his job.

So he was able to take what the coverage as a whole was asking, look at what Bush was doing, and he would notice that certain things that Bush was doing would drift from the coverage, would fall into the cracks, were a much bigger deal than the press was making them out to be. And so he would remind people of that, he would show it, he would be able, he was bringing to White House reporting, all the virtues of blogging, and yet it doing it from within the empire itself. And so in that sense, he was acting as a better journalist, because he was taking this one-step-removed view.

What the reporters should have done is said, this is great, because we have somebody looking at all of the coverage - this will allow us to fine tune and alter our coverage so that we can be ahead of the pack. But instead what had began as a contest of authority - and this is why the Froomkin story is so important, because the people who should have incorporated what he was doing into a better, tougher and more accurate narrative, instead saw this as the heathens, the march of ideology into their profession, the invasion of the blogosphere, and they were able to moralize and basically marginalize Froomkin as an opinion columnist giving his liberal take on events, and so that's why when Hiatt assumed command of Froomkin, he could be expended as basically a bad, dull, liberal columnist, which is a complete lie.

GG: Let me ask you this: I imagine if Fred Hiatt were here, he would make the following defense, adopt the following response, which is - and he's already said this actually in his very vapid and meaningless form statement - oh, no, our firing of Froomkin had nothing to do with his political views, and in fact the proof of that - he didn't say this, but I'll make this argument for him - is that we have plenty of liberals at The Washington Post, we have Eugene Robinson, and E.J. Dionne and we just hired Ezra Klein as a Washington Post blogger, they hired Greg Sergeant away from TPM. So what is it about Froomkin that, in your view, made him intolerable to Fred Hiatt whereas those other individuals I just named at least as of yet are still there?

JR: Because he's not a liberal columnist. That was a complete lie, a description that sticks to him by Harris, the national staff, and ultimately by Fred Hiatt. He's an accountability journalist who practices his craft at the level that the Web makes possible.

GG: And why does that get viewed as being liberal, how does that end up --

JR: Because of what I told you, Glenn. We had an outlier in the White House doing amazing, astounding, incredibly dangerous things. And the press normalized that White House.

GG: And those who refused to, or those who just described, would end up being viewed as liberal? Got dismissed as liberal?

JR: Because the easiest way to deal with the disruptive force of what Froomkin was putting out, is to call it opinionated, liberal mind-set, and predictable mush, which is exactly what John Harris did. He said, I think if you look at Froomkin's work over time, it's the pretty standard liberal take on Bush, you see? So you have Froomkin saying from the washingtonpost.com, you guys are missing this huge story, and I'm trying to put it together for you, and they're able to say back to him, well that's just the standard liberal view of Bush being articulated by an opinion columnist, and that's not what he is, he's an accountability journalist.

GG: What's the difference between those two things? A liberal columnist and an accountability journalist?

JR: An accountability journalist is comparing what the President is doing to commonly held norms that are the basic values of journalism. Truthfulness, a standard of civility, and honor, and accountability of the government to the people, and to the public record - all of these things that are part of the cardinal virtues of journalism. And Froomkin was able, because he was outside the conventions of news writing as a daily beat thing, and of news analysis as it has come to be practiced, because he had looser constraints on him, was able to get more of the story of Bush into his column than they were working in the trap they had created for themselves. That's the resentment that was coming from Harris.

GG: Right. Now, one of the points that Harris emphasized and Deborah Howell emphasized, and he particularly highlighted it in his interview with you, is that what the presence of Froomkin was doing was causing, essentially providing grist for the right-wing mill.

JR: Yes.

GG: To be able to complain that the media is in fact this biased liberal instrument that they constantly claim it was, and I think Harris described it as leading with their chin, that they essentially feared the complaints being made by conservatives about what Dan Froomkin was doing. Do you think - two parts to that - do you think that was a legitimate concern that they had, and are there instances ever where they cite liberal complaints about what they're doing as a reason for changing their behavior? Did they care as much about liberal complaints as they do complaints from the right?

JR: I haven't seen much evidence of that, but I thought it was a fascinating argument that Harris makes. If you know the background here, you know that what Eric Alterman eventually called working the refs, is an outcome of cultural war strategy that really started with Agnew in 1969, where you had politicized complaints about the liberal bias of Washington reporters as a way of making them back off, and what Harris is saying there is, look, now there's a whole bunch of people who believe this about us whether it's true or not, you know? And what we can't do is feed them red meat, and that is what Dan Froomkin is.

Well, if Dan Froomkin was simply an intellectually honest accountability journalist able to put forward a larger story of what the Bush radical White House was doing, then you would expect Bush's defenders to try and do that. And so, Harris had assimilated this notion of friction as bias, and Froomkin was saying, there's friction alright between me and them, but it's not bias, it's you have to figure out what this White House is doing, and ultimately the break-down was Froomkin gets thrown to the liberal bias wolves.

GG: You alluded earlier to the fact that Froomkin became a very popular columnist in the blogosphere, a traffic generator. Some of the most recent evidence that I saw was from Mediabistro which posted the top 10 most trafficked Post columns from 2007, and Froomkin had 3 out of 10.

JR: Right.

GG: Now, the ombudsman of The Washington Post had this very substance-free piece about the Froomkin firing in which suggested that quote-unquote "traffic might have declined for Froomkin," without saying whether it actually did, and Fred Hiatt was quoted as saying quote-unquote "interest had decreased since Obama was inaugurated" - I don't know what that means. I don't believe - don't know if traffic has decreased or not in absolute terms, but I can almost guarantee based on my own knowledge of the blogosphere and how traffic is generated, that Froomkin compares very favorably to other Washington Post bloggers in terms of just pure numbers, in terms of traffic, just based on the links he gets and the people who cite him.

Would it surprise you if Froomkin were still one of the most heavily trafficked of the Post bloggers, and they fired him anyway? How important is on-line traffic to what The Washington Post is attempting to accomplish?

JR: Oh, I'm sure he does quite well, still, in terms of raw traffic. But it goes way beyond that, Glenn. Froomkin was one of the first editors of washingtonpost.com. He is in the 99th percentile in web literacy among mainstream professional journalists. He's an ambassador between The Washington Post, and I must say, an important part of the political blogosphere which is right in the center of Post's core readership. He is completely up to speed with open source journalism and the possibilities of using the falling costs for people who share an interest to share their information, and incorporating that into how journalists do their work. He not only understands it, he has done his own version of is with his column, and among journalists at The Washington Post, would be completely in the leading edge of something they themselves know they have to learn how to do. So it's not just that you're firing a popular columnist - it's way beyond that.

Froomkin is as comfortable writing learned essays for the online journalism review, blogging at Huffington Post or Firedoglake, or writing a news story for The Washington Post. You need people with that kind of literacy now. So you're expelling somebody who's helping you transition to a new platform.

GG: Let me ask you this as the last question, and a couple of readers asked me to ask you once I indicated I was going to be doing an interview with you, a discussion with you about this topic later today. Both in terms of these issues, the way that the Bush era has affected political journalism as you just described it in several of your earlier answers, as well as the financial events that are shaping the professional journalism and how it's perceived, what is the mind-set of journalism students with regard to I guess the function of political journalism? Has it changed in the past several years? Is the way that political journalism is practiced affecting how journalism students think as they study and enter the profession? I realize that's pretty broad, but what are your thoughts on that, in terms of people who are studying journalism?

JR: I don't really have a good answer for you on that, because I don't actually get a lot of students interested in political journalism at NYU. For whatever reason, they don't seem to come to us, or at least they don't in my classes - I actually have a lot of trouble getting our students excited about it. We have a lot of people who want to go into magazine journalism here, and their interests tend to be more on the cultural side. So, I'm sure that there have been shifts of opinion, but I don't really feel I have a good pulse on that.

GG: Okay. A question for someone else, then. Well, this has been, as expected, very interesting. I think the meaning of the Froomkin firing is something that can be dug through for quite a while.

JR: Yes.

GG: I wonder how - I guess that last thing I'd ask is, how much do you see it as a by-product of specific internal divisions at the Post, versus a broader reflection of what the media has become?

JR: Well, I don't know what exactly triggered the decision at The Washington Post. I don't have any source inside the newspaper that would tell me that. But looking at it in the larger narrative of establishment journalism coming to grips with both Bush and the Web, two subjects that have obsessed me over the years, to me it's about the 'Church of the Savvy,' as I call it, coming to grips with events that shook its foundations, and with the kind of failure that really hasn't been worked through by the profession. You know, Glenn, we had the 9/11 Commission to study what happened that day. We've had the Senate Intelligence Committee, we start to go through what happened with the decision to go to war. We haven't had anything like that of kind of accounting in journalism.

And I believe that was a drastic mistake that the political press made in refusing to undergo any kind of big accounting like that, a mistake in the small number of self-critiques that have been done as a kind of exorcism. It wasn't, but they haven't gone back and looked at their performance. And I see an echo of that failure, and I see an echo of the failure to come to grips with a outlier administration, and the way the Bush people changed the game on the press, knowing the press was incapable of changing its game. Dan Froomkin simply came along and noticed that, and began to write it into the news, and it is the sharpness of that conflict, and the magnitude of the failure that I read into these events this week.

GG: Jay Rosen, thanks very much - very interesting and I appreciate your taking the time.

JR: My pleasure.

[Transcript courtesy of Thames Valley Transcribe]