Later On

And, speaking of Greenwald, today’s column criticizes Obama for emulating Bush:

I wonder how many people from across the political spectrum will have to point this out before Obama defenders will finally admit that it’s true.  From Harvard Law Professor and former Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith, systematically assessing Obama’s "terrorism" policies in The New Republic:

Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence.  But there is a different problem with Cheney’s criticisms: his premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. . . .

[A]t the end of the day, Obama practices will be much closer to late Bush practices than almost anyone expected in January 2009.

Most important, Goldsmith expresses admiration for Obama’s rhetorical and symbolic changes — such as Obama’s emphasis on obtaining Congressional support for Bush’s policies while highlighting his deep concern for "civil liberties" — because Goldsmith believes that Obama’s rhetoric vests Bush’s policies with more credibility, ensures more bipartisan and Congressional support for these policies, makes them more palatable to Democrats, and thus ensures that those policies will endure in a stronger and longer-lasting form:

The new president was a critic of Bush administration terrorism policies, a champion of civil liberties, and an opponent of the invasion of Iraq. His decision (after absorbing the classified intelligence and considering the various options) to continue core Bush terrorism policies is like Nixon going to China. . . .

If this analysis is right, then the former vice president is wrong to say that the new president is dismantling the Bush approach to terrorism. President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run. Viewed this way, President Obama is in the process of strengthening the presidency to fight terrorism.

What’s most striking about the denial of so many Obama supporters about all of this is that Obama officials haven’t really tried to hide it.  White House counsel Greg Craig told The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage back in February that Obama "is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency."  It was in that same article where Savage — a favorite of Bush critics when Bush was president — warned that after the first week of Executive Orders, "the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda."

Notably, Savage’s article was written almost three months ago, well before Obama’s announcement that he was adopting many of the most extreme Bush policies.  At the time of 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)."  But as it turns out, it was Savage who was clearly right.  As Politico‘s Josh Gerstein recently wrote about Obama’s Terrorism policies:  "A few, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, have even hurled the left’s ultimate epithet — suggesting that Obama’s turning into George W. Bush." …

Continue reading.

Eric Boehlert has a good profile of Greenwald in Salon today, excerpted from his book. Worth reading.

It also reminds us of Obama’s 180-degree reversal on the FISA destruction and telecom immunity. While campaigning he pledged to oppose the bill and even to filibuster it. We quickly learned the worth of his pledge: he totally reversed himself. (As he did, again, on the court-ordered release of additional torture photos.) Obama is doing many good things, but he clearly cannot be depended on uncritically and he clearly believes that the powerful can in some cases break the law with impunity.

From Boehlert’s article:

When Greenwald, who had blogged 300 to 400 items about the larger issue of Bush wiretapping during a 30-month span, opened his email on June 20 to read Obama’s much anticipated statement regarding wiretapping and retroactive immunity, his expectations were low. Yes, Obama had been a forceful FISA ally during the primaries. But just looking at the politics in play, Greenwald thought it unlikely that as the Party’s nominee Obama would now break on FISA with Democrats in the House and Senate. Greenwald suspected there had been some sort of behind-the-scenes signal that Obama would be okay if Democrats gave Bush what he wanted in terms of wiretapping and retroactive immunity, and that Obama would not bitterly oppose it. In fact, he might even quietly support the policy initiative.

Still, Greenwald, who remained agnostic during the Clinton-Obama primary battle, was startled when he clicked on the email and read Obama’s statement. In it, the candidate not only walked away from his previous statements denouncing wiretapping as well as from his commitment to thwart retroactive immunity, but he actually embraced specific Republican talking points when discussing the national security issue of electronic surveillance. "Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people," Obama announced.

Furious, Greenwald tore off the gloves and excoriated Obama in a way no neutral, big-name blogger had done during the entire campaign:

What Barack Obama did here was wrong and destructive. He’s supporting a bill that is a full-scale assault on our Constitution. What’s more, as a Constitutional Law Professor, he knows full well what a radical perversion of our Constitution this bill is, and yet he’s supporting it anyway. Anyone who sugarcoats or justifies that is doing a real disservice to their claimed political values and to the truth.

Greenwald wasn’t looking to proclaim Obama unfit to be the Party’s nominee. But as he searched around the blogosphere looking for some early signs of life from a community that had just been dissed by the most famous Democrat in America, he found mostly silence. Rather than straight talk in response to Obama’s FISA proclamation, Greenwald saw creeping timidity, with portions of the blogosphere expressing concern that openly criticizing Obama’s FISA stance might damage the Democrat’s chance for a White House win.

For Greenwald, that was too much. Partisan cheerleading was not why the liberal blogosphere was created. There were already plenty of Beltway institutions that would applaud Democratic politicians no matter what they did. The netroots, he thought, ought to oppose Democratic complicity and capitulation just as forcefully as the netroots battled GOP corruption and media malfeasance. All three were of equal importance; none of them should be discarded for the sake of a campaign.

Michael Lind summarizes them in Salon:

Last Tuesday, just before the release of the annual Social Security trustees report, I predicted that no matter what the report contained the perennial enemies of America’s most effective and efficient universal social insurance program would cite it as proof that Social Security needs to be means-tested, privatized or both. The report is in, and its contents are far from dramatic. The (dubiously) estimated date at which, absent changes, the trust fund dries up and Social Security shifts to a pay-as-you-go program paying most, but not all, promised benefits has moved up slightly from 2041 to 2037. But to listen to the critics of Social Security on the right you would think that Godzilla was blocks away from the Fulton Fish Market.

Posting at the libertarian Cato Institute’s Cato@Liberty blog, Michael Tanner claims to be alarmed that Social Security’s “unfunded liabilities — the amount it has paid beyond what it can actually pay — now total $17.5 trillion. Yes, that’s trillion with a ‘T.’ That’s $1.7 trillion worse than last year.”

Is the government really going to have to come up with $17.5 trillion in the next year or two to pay for Social Security, as more baby boomers retire? Undoubtedly that is what some opponents of Social Security want to frighten their fellow Americans into thinking. What Tanner neglects to tell his readers is that this big, scary number purports to measure Social Security’s unfunded liabilities over an infinite time horizon and assumes there are no changes made between now and eternity. Any number of relatively minor changes, from lifting the cap on the Social Security payroll tax to infusing general revenues, could preserve the program in its present form into the 22nd century without insolvency or harm to the U.S. economy.

The “unfunded liabilities” argument is misleading for another reason. It is only applied to programs that, like Social Security and Medicare, are paid for by a dedicated tax like a payroll tax. The projected gap between future revenues and future outlays from this special-purpose tax is the “unfunded liability.” Why do we never hear of the “unfunded liabilities” of Pentagon spending — the third of the big three spending programs (Social Security, Medicare, defense) that take up most of the federal budget? Defense spending comes out of general revenues, not a dedicated tax.

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Good post by John Edgell in Congressional Quarterly:

Last week was action-packed for those fans keeping score in the game that is health care reform.

First, there was the strategic placement of a memo prepared by pollster Frank Luntz for Republicans in the House. Luntz, the political equivalent of Donald Trump when it comes to gaining media attention for himself, presented a 26-page memo and Power-point presentation of 10 easy-to-digest message points for those seeking to undermine any substantive health care proposal in Congress.

The Luntz memo should be viewed as an excellent road map of the upcoming barriers likely placed in the next several months by opponents of large-scale changes in our current health care delivery system

Luntz was not circumspect at all in his advice to his conservative colleagues, signaling a message campaign centered largely on scare tactics about the perceived rationing of access to patients’ choice of doctors and hospitals. “The health care horror stories from Canada & Co. do resonate, but you have to humanize them,” the memo proposes.

Read the rest of this entry »

This sounds interesting:

An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides
by Anne Carson

A review by Emily Wilson

Aeschylus’ Oresteia, composed and first performed in 458 BC, is the only complete dramatic trilogy we have from ancient Athens. Not all Athenian trilogies were fashioned from related stories, but the Oresteia was: it tells what happens to the family of Agamemnon when the great general returns home to Argos, victorious from the Trojan War, with his concubine, Cassandra, and spoils from the conquered city. In the first play, Agamemnon, the general arrives with blood on his hands: that of the victims in Troy and that of his daughter Iphigeneia, whom he sacrificed to the gods so that the winds would blow his fleet to war. Agamemnon, along with Cassandra, is killed in turn by his wife, Clytemnestra, with the help of her lover, Aegisthus. In the second play, Choephoroi, these murderers are killed by Orestes, Clytemnestra’s son, with the help of his sister Electra. The house of Agamemnon is again defiled.

The final play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, is named for its extraordinary Chorus. The “Eumenides” means the kindly ones, the euphemistic, apotropaic name for the Furies, who appear onstage in the play. They must have been an amazing sight, dressed in black, snakes in their hair. Divine agents of vengeance who stand opposed to the gods of the upper world, the Furies yearn for blood and defend the bonds of family over the newfound bonds of society and political allegiance. The Furies curse Apollo, protector of Orestes: they claim that the blood of Clytemnestra demands that Orestes must die. The cycle of killing seems ceaseless.

But then, in an extraordinary conflation of myth and history, the setting of the play shifts from Argos to Athens, to the court of the Areopagus, where murder trials were judged. The court was near the Theater of Dionysus on the Acropolis. The goddess Athena appears as representative of Zeus, to judge the trial of Orestes for matricide. Athena insists that the case be judged by a jury: democratic due process seems to have been introduced as the solution to the endless round of revenge. The jury is evenly split, and Athena, a goddess who has no mother, casts her own vote to acquit Orestes.

The Oresteia tells a story about political and cultural stasis and transition. What happens when the crimes and mistakes of one generation seem to repeat themselves in the next? After a long history of oppression, marginalization or victimization of one group by another, can equality be restored? Can justice be upheld without revenge? Can a bad inheritance be overcome? At the same time, Aeschylus’ trilogy moves from a system of private justice to one of public law; from the family to politics, tyranny to democracy, matriarchy to patriarchy; and from perplexing signs to revealed truth, as the shady, densely metaphorical and ambiguous language of the Agamemnon yields to the clarity of the Eumenides, and deep metaphysical and theological doubts are answered by the manifestations of gods onstage. In each case, the change is represented as progress. The Oresteia is a great work of art but also a dangerous piece of social propaganda that suggests that the only way to create a safe state society is to limit and suppress the power of women and the family.

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This thing sounds a little cool, a little weird, and rather too expensive. But still, it’s interesting. Take a look at the Cool Tools review.

ThinkProgress’s Lee Fang notes:

Last week, the health insurance lobby met with President Obama and pledged to “work together” to provide quality, affordable coverage and access for every American. In less than five days, the insurers not only broke that promise, but the Washington Post reports that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has drafted ads aimed at smearing the President’s proposed public health insurance plan.

The Post obtained a copy of the story boards for the ads attacking the public plan. The description for one ad depicts a woman trapped in a hallway of locked doors:

[The mother's hand tries another door, as her child begins to get visibly anxious and restless. Still no luck. In rapid-fire succession, we see their hands trying a series of doorknobs. The pair is seen making their way to the next door, as the tension builds. It seems as if their search may be fruitless.]

While “innocent-sounding piano music, vaguely reminiscent of a nursery rhyme” plays in the background of this increasingly dramatic scene, the narrator intones:

“We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system.”

Rather than being an honest partner in the debate on health reform, the health insurance industry appears to be launching a campaign of misinformation aimed at sinking any serious prospect for change. The leader of the trade group representing the health insurance lobby, Karen Ignagni, made headlines earlier this year when she promised to the President, “you have our commitment, to play, to contribute and to pass health care reform this year.” Curiously, the date on the ad storyboard is May 9th, meaning that at least one major health insurance company has been secretly planning to assault health reform for several weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I watched Serpico for the first time. I don’t know how I missed it. It’s a great movie, though one feels strongly the frustration that Frank Serpico felt. It shows how difficult it is to root out corruption once it’s become established (cf. Congress). But it does offer the hope that improvement is possible.

The Wilkinson shave stick is much kinder to my skin than the Erasmic, FWIW. And I like the blue of the soap. The lather comes up white, of course, and a very good lather it was, thanks in part to the Rooney Style 2. The Gillette English open-comb Aristocrat is one of my favorite razors, and this morning it did its usual great job with a PolSilver blade—used, but still sharp. And a splash of Paul Sebastian aftershave on my smooth visage was a fine finish.

Just back from my first visit. Lots of very fresh produce, organically grown, at good prices. I’m delighted. Now to cook my enormous artichoke and some baby potatoes.

Ali Frick of ThinkProgress reports:

Today, ThinkProgress’s Matthew Yglesias (who is celebrating his birthday today) wrote a column for the Daily Beast arguing that the right wing’s sideshow on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) only furthers the case for a full investigation into torture. When host Norah O’Donnell asked him about Newt Gingrich’s call for Pelosi’s resignation, Yglesias reminded her who was ultimately responsible for Bush’s torture policy:

YGLESIAS: You know, Newt Gingrich knows a lot about saying stupid things and being forced out of the job as Speaker. … But one way or the other — I mean, I wasn’t in the room, you weren’t in the room, Newt Gingrich wasn’t in the room. None of us know exactly what happened there. But whatever it is Nancy Pelosi knew about, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, they knew more. And ultimately, when we have a thorough investigation of what happened, the bulk of the blame has to lie with the architects of the policy, not with a member of the opposition party.

Watch it:

O’Donnell insisted, “There’s not going to be an investigation,” in part because — according to O’Donnell — Pelosi doesn’t want one. In fact, Pelosi repeated her calls for a full accounting for Bush’s torture policies as recently as Thursday: “Until a Truth Commission comes into being, I encourage the appropriate committees of the House to conduct vigorous oversight of these issues.”

Via John Cole of Balloon Juice, this post by Radley Balko:

In 1992, a Phoenix man named Ray Krone was convicted of murdering a cocktail waitress named Kim Ancona. The crime was brutal. Ancona had been sexually assaulted, stabbed multiple times, and bitten on her breast and neck. Krone was indicted after a local dentist named John Piakis, who had received all of five days of forensic training, told police and prosecutors that Krone’s crooked teeth created the marks on Ancona’s body.

At trial, a more experienced bite-mark analyst from Las Vegas named Ray Rawson confirmed Piakis’ findings: The bite marks on Ancona’s neck could only have come from Krone. Rawson included a 39-page report with his testimony. It must have been convincing, because the jury convicted Krone despite no other physical evidence linking him to the crime. He was sentenced to death.

In 1995, Krone was given a new trial after an appeals court threw out his conviction over an unrelated legal technicality. Rawson testified again. And Krone was convicted again. After the second trial, however, the judge refused to sentence Krone to death, writing, "The court is left with a residual or lingering doubt about the clear identity of the killer."

The judge’s misgivings proved prescient. Over the strenuous objections of prosecutors, who maintained that Rawson’s testimony was in itself sufficient to affirm Krone’s conviction, Krone’s attorney Christopher Plourd succeeded in getting a court to force the state to turn over biological evidence from the crime for DNA testing. The testing proved Krone was innocent. It also provided a match to Kenneth Phillips, a man who arguably should have been a suspect from the start. Phillips lived less than a mile from the crime scene, was already on probation for assaulting a female neighbor, and was arrested three weeks after Ancona’s murder for sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl. Several witnesses had described a man fitting Phillips’ height, weight, and complexion to police near the crime scene the night of the murder.

After 10 years in prison, including two spent on death row, Ray Krone was exonerated and released from prison in 2002.

But Krone’s lawyer wasn’t quite finished.

Continue reading.

Mary Kane in the Washington Independent:

The investigation into disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme is taking a new turn, as the Securities and Exchange Commission begins investigating whether some of Madoff’s biggest “victims” actually were in on the scam, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Some of the victims apparently were able to state the size of the annual returns they wanted from Madoff. Their accounts soon would reflect those returns, some of which regularly reached as high as 100 percent. The Journal cites people familiar with the investigation as its source.

That’s not quite the way investing works for most of us, which is why the SEC must be interested.

Here are some of the victims — who may not be victims after all — according to The Journal:

Jeffry Picower and Stanley Chais, two philanthropists who invested heavily with Mr. Madoff, and Carl Shapiro, one of the money manager’s oldest friends, are among at least eight Madoff investors and associates being scrutinized by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Lots of people have wondered how Madoff got away with his scheme for so long. If these allegations are true, it gives a clearer picture of how it happened. And, if proven, it also means that Madoff wasn’t the only criminal behind the scheme.

Matthew DeLong in the Washington Independent:

Over at TWI’s sister site, The Michigan Messenger, Todd Heywood caught up with House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), who had some surprising things to say about the potential nomination of Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.) to the Supreme Court.

U.S. Rep. John Conyers told a gathering of progressive activists gathered at the Cobo Convention Center on Saturday that he has withdrawn his support for Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Obama.

“[Obama] had no doubt she would make a good Supreme Court justice and I don’t either. But I am not supporting somebody who is — especially when she is waiting to be considered as a possible nominee for the highest court in the land — she can write a letter telling us some U.S. attorney has done a good job when everyone in the state knows that he hasn’t,” Conyers said in an interview with Michigan Messenger following his address at Cobo.

And just who is this failed federal prosecutor?

The attorney is question is a current U.S. attorney, but Conyers could not recall his name. Calls to members of the congressman’s staff to clarify which of Michigan’s two U.S. attorneys Conyers was referring to were not immediately returned.

Sounds like a pretty solid case against Granholm.

Aaron Weiner in the Washington Independent:

The markup session for the landmark Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill is underway in the House Energy and Commerce Committee (live webcast from C-SPAN). And it’s sure to be one hell of a show.

Ranking member Joe Barton (R-Texas), who promised to wage “sneaky,” “crafty” “guerrilla warfare” on the legislation, just delivered his opening statement. He said of the bill, “We know the cost is significant; we know the environmental benefit is practically nonexistent.”

And so he’s offering a Republican substitute bill, which he said “wouldn’t wreck the economy, would have some economic benefits and wouldn’t do any environmental harm.” If that language seems less than aggressive in combating global climate change, that’s because it is. Says Joe Romm, “You can’t really call it an alternative climate bill, since it doesn’t stop US greenhouse gas emissions from rising and the words “climate change” and “global warming” hardly appear in it at all — except to strip any authority from the EPA to address the problem.”

Barton also pledged to introduce a number of amendments to improve the legislation. In fact, he’s got 450 amendments up his sleeve, and I’ll give you a sense of their general thrust. Numbers 10 to 148 take this form:

• #30: “Suspends the act should more than 1,000 jobs in Indiana be lost due to the implementation of this Act.”
• #31: “Suspends the act should more than 2,000 jobs in Indiana be lost due to the implementation of this Act.”
• #32: “Suspends the act should more than 5,000 jobs in Indiana be lost due to the implementation of this Act.”
• #33: “Suspends the act should more than 10,000 jobs in Indiana be lost due to the implementation of this Act.”
• #34: “Suspends the act should more than 50,000 jobs in Indiana be lost due to the implementation of this Act.”

Swap in the names of 19 other states (no idea why the remaining 30 are excluded), and you get the general idea. You also start to understand Barton’s remark to Politico last week: “This is not going to be one of those gentlemanly, pro forma markups. We’re prepared for it to take weeks or months.”

OK, maybe it won’t be THAT fun to watch. Fortunately, TWI will provide updates and save you the trouble. Stay tuned.

Be sure to read the entire post. It begins:

Based on its transcript — here at the Washington Post site, oddly not yet in any obvious place at WhiteHouse.gov — Barack Obama’s Notre Dame commencement speech was another extraordinary performance. "Extraordinary" meaning that it was like his speech last year in Philadelphia about race relations, his speech last month in Prague about nuclear weapons, and, only slightly less impressive, his speech last month at Georgetown University laying out his long term economic plan. Or, on a small scale, his answer in Strasbourg about "American exceptionalism."

What made these presentations extraordinary was not any single phrase or sentence, nor any paragraph-long flight of fine language. Indeed, I can hardly remember any phrase or sentence from any speech Obama has ever given. (Phrases or sentences are to be distinguished from campaign slogans, like "Yes we can" or "not ‘red states’ or ‘blue states’ but the United States of America.") Instead the power of those speeches comes from the quality of their thought — from the ideas and truths the speaker is trying to grapple with.

In the case of the race speech, the different burdens and resentments Americans of all background held, and why we had to face and work through them. In the nuclear speech, the dangers that remained long after the Cold War had ended, and America’s special opportunity and responsibility to find a solution. In the Notre Dame speech, the difficulty of resolving, in an open democracy, differences of moral certainty that are fiercely held on all sides. And so on.

This kind of eloquence is different from what I think of as rhetorical prettiness — words and phrases that catch your notice as you hear them, and that often can be quoted, remembered, and referred to long afterwards. "Ask not…" from John F. Kennedy. "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat" from Winston Churchill. "Only thing we have to fear is fear itself" from FDR. "I have a dream," from Martin Luther King. Or, to show that memorable language does not necessarily mean elevated thought, "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" from the early George C. Wallace.

At rare moments in history, language that goes beyond prettiness to beauty is matched with original, serious, difficult thought to produce the political oratory equivalent of Shakespeare. By acclamation Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is the paramount American achievement of this sort: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…"

The reason to distinguish eloquence of thought from prettiness of expression is that the former tells you something important about the speaker, while the latter may or may not do so. Hired assistants can add a fancy phrase, much as gag writers can supply a joke. Not even his greatest admirers considered George W. Bush naturally expressive, but in his most impressive moment, soon after the 9/11 attacks, he delivered a speech full of artful writerly phrases, e.g.: "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." Good for him, and good for his staff.

Rhetorical polish, that is, can be a staff-enhanced virtue. The eloquence that comes from original thought is much harder to hire, or to fake. This is the sort of eloquence we’ve seen from Obama often enough to begin to expect.

The passages that struck me from this speech were the same ones Andrew Sullivan just highlighted: …

Continue reading.

James Fallows has had it up to here with the boiled-frog analogy. (Putting the frog in cold water and gradually turning up the heat—a tired trope indeed.) His suggestion:

The kitty-litter box analogy, as so brilliantly laid out by Don Rose in the Chicago Daily Observer a few months ago. You have cats in your house; you think everything is great; then visitors walk in through the door, reel back in horror, and say, “What is that godawful smell?”  And I say this as a lover of cats. Or as Rose put it, in a column about the colorful ex-governor Rod Blagojevich:

Out of towners often ask me how it is that folks in Chicago and Illinois put up with all the hanky and panky that goes on in our political snakepits.

I tell them about my cat litter box.

Currently I have two cats—once I had nine. In any case, I used to think I kept their potty clean and odor free. Then, every so often someone would come to the door, sniff the air and whisper in confidence, “I think your cat box needs changing.”

They were right, of course. They came from cat-free environments and could sense a drop of urine at 30 paces, while I had grown so desensitized to the aroma that my schnozz would tell me I was romping through a fresh pine forest.

So it is with the denizens of our city and state.

And so it should be with us all. As recently as a few hours ago, I was impressed by Obama’s use of language. And now….

Ryan Powers reports at ThinkProgress:

A newly-disclosed 2005 memo, authored by then-State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, then-Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, and then-Deputy Assistant Secretary for Detainee Affairs Matthew Waxman, gave President Bush “clear and unequivocal advice encouraging a detainee interrogation system that followed humane practices that adhered to US and international law.” The memo was authored as the Bush administration was seeking a “fresh approach” handling terror detainee and just weeks after the OLC issued its second round of torture memos.

In the memo, the three Bush administration officials argue that the President should appoint a “special board” to “review general U.S. government detainee policy and operations” and “evaluate issues of effectiveness and intelligence value.”

While that review was taking place, the authors recommended that U.S. forces treat detainees in the so-called war on terror as if they were “civilian detainees under the law of war.” “This is the system generally being used by our forces in Iraq. Adopting this interim approach allows us to handle the detainees on a well understood basis that gives our forces clear, unambiguous guidelines for conduct,” they wrote, adding:

WE ARE NOT SAYING THAT THESE DETAINEES ARE, NECESSARILY ENTITLED TO THIS STATUS. TO BE CLEAR: WE ARE GIVING THEM A TEMPORARY STATUS THEY DO NOT DESERVE. BUT WE ARE NOT DOING THIS FOR THEM. WE ARE DOING IT FOR US.

Their approach would have harmonized detainee treatment procedures in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Jane Mayer explained in The Dark Side that the differing guidelines for detainee treatment in the three different theaters had, in part, lead to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

As the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman explained in his account of the Cheney vice presidency, Angler, the memo was a “top-to-bottom assault on the Cheney-Addington legal model. Its authors proposed to seek legislation, acknowledge secret prisons, give the worst of the terrorists Geneva rights, and bring them back within the full jurisdiction of American courts.” But the memo’s arguments were not well received. As Gellman writes, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice showed the memo to an “intrigued” President Bush, it was shown to other high-level administration officials:

England, Rumsfeld’s deputy, brought the paper to his boss…Rumsfeld reacted coldly. He had not authorized this. … Rumsfeld directed that all copies be withdrawn from circulation and shredded. (p. 349)

National Security Adviser Steve Hadley canceled a discussion of the document upon hearing about its contents from Cheney’s office. Zelikow explained his goal in writing the memo last week in testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee saying that he wanted to “effectively prohibit ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading’ treatment of detainees.”