Later On

Good short review of the top three headsets. In California, you must have a hands-free way to use a cellphone. The Wife’s Prius has Bluetooth and phone controls built in, but my 1996 Nissan doesn’t, so I have to use a headset.

A friend just reminded me: when was the last time you saw onionskin paper?

That is, if we decide to enforce the law. Excellent article by the redoubtable Marcy Wheeler in Salon, which begins:

On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

The Torture 13 exploited the federal bureaucracy to establish a torture regime in two ways. First, they based the enhanced interrogation techniques on techniques used in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. The program — which subjects volunteers from the armed services to simulated hostile capture situations — trains servicemen and -women to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confessions if captured. Two retired SERE psychologists contracted with the government to "reverse-engineer" these techniques to use in detainee interrogations.

The Torture 13 also abused the legal review process in the Department of Justice in order to provide permission for torture. The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) played a crucial role. OLC provides interpretations on how laws apply to the executive branch. On issues where the law is unclear, like national security, OLC opinions can set the boundary for "legal" activity for executive branch employees. As Jack Goldsmith, OLC head from 2003 to 2004, explains it, "One consequence of [OLC's] power to interpret the law is the power to bestow on government officials what is effectively an advance pardon for actions taken at the edges of vague criminal statutes." OLC has the power, Goldsmith continues, to dispense "get-out-of-jail-free cards." The Torture 13 exploited this power by collaborating on a series of OLC opinions that repeatedly gave U.S. officials such a "get-out-of-jail-free card" for torturing.

Between 9/11 and the end of 2002, the Torture 13 decided to torture, then reverse-engineered the techniques, and then crafted the legal cover. Here’s who they are and what they did: …

Continue reading.

Excellent news in this NY Times story by John Broder:

The Obama administration will issue new national requirements for the emissions and mileage of cars and light trucks in an effort to end a long-running conflict among the states, the federal government and auto manufacturers, industry officials said Monday.

President Obama will announce as early as Tuesday that he will combine California’s tough new auto-emissions rules with the existing corporate average fuel economy standard to create a single new national standard, the officials said. As a result, cars and light trucks sold in the United States will be roughly 30 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016.

The White House would not divulge details, but environmental advocates and industry officials briefed on the program said that the president would grant California’s longstanding request that its tailpipe emissions standards be imposed nationally. That request was denied by the Bush administration but has been under review by top Obama administration officials since January.

But Mr. Obama is planning to go further, putting in place new mileage requirements to be administered by the Department of Transportation that would match the stringency of the California program.

Under the new standard, the national fleet mileage rule for cars would be roughly 42 miles a gallon in 2016. Light trucks would have to meet a fleet average of slightly more than 26.2 miles a gallon by 2016.

“This is a very big deal,” said Daniel Becker of the Safe Climate Campaign, a group that has pushed for tougher mileage and emissions standards with the goal of curbing the heat-trapping gases that have been linked to global warming. “This is the single biggest step the American government has ever taken to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Industry officials spoke on condition of anonymity about the program because they said they did not want to comment publicly in advance of the White House announcement.

The current standards are 27.5 miles a gallon for cars and about 24 miles a gallon for trucks. The new mileage and emissions rules will gradually tighten, beginning with 2011 models, until they reach the 2016 standards.

The auto industry is not expected to challenge the rule, which provides two things they have long asked for: certainty on a timetable and a single national standard…

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I’ve commented on the liberal use of –cides (pesticides, herbicides, fungicides) by industrial farming. Now look what they’ve done. Julia Scott in Salon:

Gene Brandi will always rue the summer of 2007. That’s when the California beekeeper rented half his honeybees, or 1,000 hives, to a watermelon farmer in the San Joaquin Valley at pollination time. The following winter, 50 percent of Brandi’s bees were dead. "They pretty much disappeared," says Brandi, who’s been keeping bees for 35 years.

Since the advent in 2006 of colony collapse disorder, the mysterious ailment that continues to decimate hives across the country, Brandi has grown accustomed to seeing up to 40 percent of his bees vanish each year, simply leave the hive in search of food and never come back. But this was different. Instead of losing bees from all his colonies, Brandi watched the ones that skipped watermelon duty continue to thrive.

Brandi discovered the watermelon farmer had irrigated his plants with imidacloprid, the world’s best-selling insecticide created by Bayer CropScience Inc., one of the world’s leading producers of pesticides and genetically modified vegetable seeds, with annual sales of $8.6 billion. Blended with water and applied to the soil, imidacloprid creates a moist mixture the bees likely drank from on a hot day.

Stories like Brandi’s have become so common that the National Honeybee Advisory Board, which represents the two biggest beekeeper associations in the U.S., recently asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban the product. "We believe imidacloprid kills bees — specifically, that it causes bee colonies to collapse," says Clint Walker, co-chairman of the board.

Beekeepers have singled out imidacloprid and its chemical cousin clothianidin, also produced by Bayer CropScience, as a cause of bee die-offs around the world for over a decade. More recently, the same products have been blamed by American beekeepers, who claim the product is a cause of colony collapse disorder, which has cost many commercial U.S. beekeepers at least a third of their bees since 2006, and threatens the reliability of the world’s food supply.

Scientists have started to turn their attention to both products, which are …

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Jonathan Landay reporting for McClatchy:

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true.

Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration’s case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I’m aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

He said he was unaware of the origins of the directive, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official has told McClatchy that Cheney’s and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s offices were demanding that information in 2002 and 2003. The official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter, requested anonymity.

During the same period, …

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Why? Because they do not support Democratic values but in fact are indistinguishable from Republicans—Sen. Blanche Lincoln, for example. Phil Mattingly and Bart Jansen point out the shenanigans of these pseudo-Democrats in the Congressional Quarterly:

When Harry Reid has trouble getting a bill through the Senate, Republicans are usually the main obstacle. But not last week.

Legislation (HR 627) that would limit credit card interest rate hikes and place other new restrictions on the industry languished through a week of quorum calls as Democrats lined up dozens of amendments that threatened to upend a compromise — or at least considerably slow progress — on a bill that supporters want signed into law before the end of the month.

Despite an overwhelming vote in favor of new industry regulations in the House, broad public support and the rallying cry of President Obama, Senate Democratic leaders struggled to get colleagues to either withdraw proposed changes, offer them for up-or-down votes or negotiate agreements on the language. The sum of a week’s work: roll call votes on five amendments.

Majority Leader Reid, D-Nev., decided to schedule a cloture vote for Tuesday to limit debate on a substitute amendment that would replace the contents of the House bill with the Senate’s earlier compromise language. If 60 senators agree, the move strips away amendments that aren’t germane to the bill, which would greatly reduce the number pending.

It was a role reversal for Democrats, who are more used to trying to overcome GOP amendments and stalling tactics.

Congressional leaders want swift action on the bill, both because it won’t take effect until nine months after it becomes law and because they are trying to complete the supplemental appropriations bill (HR 2346) and a bill to combat financial fraud (S 386) before the Memorial Day recess.

While senators pushing for changes say they are trying to strengthen and broaden the bill, Banking Chairman Christopher J. Dodd , D-Conn., saw things differently.

“We run the risk of losing this bill,” an exasperated Dodd said May 14. “I wouldn’t have said that a day or so ago, but we are getting precariously close to that outcome, pushing this off until next week.” …

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The brouhaha over what Pelosi knew and when is a sideshow, and if she’s smart she’ll demand an investigation of the entire torture program and who knew what when. In the meantime, Jeff Stein makes a good point in Congressional Quarterly:

One thing you can say about Nancy Pelosi : She’s slow to anger.

Put aside the Speaker’s stumbling over what the CIA told her and when about “harsh interrogation techniques.”

Let’s say she read about the CIA’s simulated drowning of al Qaeda suspects — two of them 266 times alone — in The Washington Post.

What did she do then? Did she call up George Tenet, CIA director until Porter Goss replaced him in 2004, and howl? Did she ream out Goss?

Did she call either up and say, “Listen, you SOB, you lied to me”?

As far as I can tell, she did nothing.

Well, not completely nothing. She let Rep. Jane Harman , top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, write a letter to the CIA, without the added throw-weight of her own signature.

And, as her beleaguered spokesman Brendan Daly says, “What she did was to lead Democrats to take control of Congress so we could pass a law banning torture, which we did,” although President Bush vetoed it.

Talk about a delayed fuse — seven years if you believe CIA and Republican claims that Pelosi and other wired Democrats were first briefed on details of the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” in September 2002.

Pelosi’s awkward parsing last week of what she knew and when she knew it came in for well-deserved ridicule by Jon Stewart, who likened the Speaker’s emotional response to CIA subterfuge — they certainly didn’t tell her that they had water-boarded two al Qaeda captives 266 times alone — to a “‘Don’t Cancel Chuck’ petition.”

Then again, back in those worrisome, post-9/11 days, maybe Hill Democrats now howling about torture did, as one former senior CIA officer told The Washington Post’s Paul Kane, “question whether we were doing enough.”

But that makes sense only if …

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Very interesting profile by Charles Homans of Henry Waxman in Washington Monthly:

It’s a drizzly spring evening on Capitol Hill, and an Indiana congressman has placed himself in an unenviable spot: between Representative Henry A. Waxman and the tobacco industry.

At issue tonight on the floor of the House of Representatives is a piece of legislation that Waxman, a Democrat from California, has been pursuing, Ahab-like, for a decade and a half: a bill that would place cigarettes under the regulatory authority of the Food and Drug Administration. Waxman’s opponent, Republican Steve Buyer, is on the floor pressing for a more industry-friendly alternative: the creation of a new agency called the Tobacco Harm Reduction Center, which would encourage smokers to begin quitting by moving from cigarettes to, say, smokeless tobacco. "You see," Buyer explains, "it is not the nicotine that is killing people—it’s the smoke! It’s the smoke! It’s the smoke that’s killing people." Someone coughs in the back of the room. Buyer doesn’t miss a beat. "I heard somebody coughing," he says. "It’s the smoke! I’m telling you."

Waxman, a former smoker himself, is unfazed. He has been fighting the tobacco wars since Buyer was in law school. His bill is the end point of years of machinations aimed at battering the tobacco industry’s credibility and clout, piece by piece. It was Waxman who, in 1994, hauled seven tobacco-company CEOs before his subcommittee to testify that they did not believe nicotine to be addictive. (Their company scientists, who testified later, said otherwise.) And it was Waxman and his investigators who extracted damning internal documents, one after another, from R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, showing that cigarette manufacturers had knowingly concealed the hazards of what they were selling, documents that set the stage for the multibillion-dollar judgments the companies were forced to pay out a decade ago.

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Very good point raised by Zachary Roth in TPM Muckraker:

There’s another part of Lawrence Wilkerson’s widely circulated blog post from yesterday that hasn’t been given the attention it deserves.

Wilkerson, the former US Army colonel who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, wrote:

My investigations have revealed to me—vividly and clearly—that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering "the Cheney methods of interrogation", simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.

What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama’s having shut down the "Cheney interrogation methods" will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?

When we spoke to Wilkerson yesterday, he confirmed this point, and went further. He said he was now being told that the beginning of the end for the torture program may even have occurred far earlier. Wilkerson said he believes that a "chain reaction" was set off when Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel who was investigating detainee abuse, first told William Haynes, the Pentagon’s general counsel, that the DOD had, in Mora’s view, illegally authorized torture. That occurred in December 2002 — though of course we know that torture continued into at least 2003 and was practiced on detainees captured during the invasion of Iraq, both at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

What’s the significance of all this? If, as Wilkerson says — and we know of no evidence that refutes him — the Bush administration didn’t torture during its second term, Dick Cheney’s alarmist claim that President Obama is putting Americans in danger by refusing to torture becomes even more nonsensical. After all, the Bush administration, it appears, didn’t torture for essentially its latter half. Was it, too, putting Americans in danger during that time — even though there were no successful attacks on the American mainland in that period?

Not that we necessarily needed further proof of Dick Cheney’s dishonesty and moral bankruptcy. But this seems like a point that’s worth keeping in mind when the former veep gives his next well-publicized interview.

Eisler continues to ruminate about what makes people think torture is a good thing for the government to do:

Last week, I posted a set of pro-torture talking points sent to me by a persistent torture apologist, along with my responses. The talking points were extensive, by not comprehensive. There are plenty more to enumerate, but today I’d like to talk about the one favorite technique and the most frequent recourse of all torture apologists: the resort to theory over reality. The details of the apologies will vary (it wasn’t torture, it saved lives, you would have done it too, it was only in the panicky aftermath of 9/11, it’s kept us safe ever since, etc., etc.), but the one point apologists will always return to is The Ticking Bomb Theory of torture.

Why all this theory? Because the reality is so damning. Apologists hope that if they can get you to focus on a fantasy ("if you had to torture someone to save a city, would you do it?"), you’ll overlook that the Bush administration tortured terror suspects not just in the panicky aftermath of 9/11, but for years afterward, and did so in significant part not to defuse ticking bombs, but rather to establish a nonexistent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Don’t believe the three reports linked above that Bush and Cheney ordered torture not just to save others’ lives, but to cover their own political asses? There’s more. Yesterday, …

Continue reading. The fact is that once a government believes it has the right to torture some particular group, the torture gradually expands to includes others that the government deems "troublemakers." The prudent—and fair and moral and ethical—course is to enforce an absolute prohibition of torture, require video records of all interrogation sessions, maintain those records for (say) twenty years, and investigate all allegations of torture and prosecute those who gave the orders as well as those who carried them out. Doing that should once again stamp out torture in the US.

Jeffrey Toobin has an excellent profile of Roberts. From that profile:

Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.”

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

Read the whole thing.

Interesting notes from the Center for American Progress:

"President Barack Obama’s push for a climate-change law this year has set off a lobbying boom on Capitol Hill, where companies are registering to weigh in at a rate of about one every business day." So far this year, 82 firms, trade groups, and companies have signed up to lobby on climate change, which is four times as many as are registered to lobby on the Employee Free Choice Act. – [And I doubt that these lobbyists are trying to advance the attempts to rein in climate change, despite the following note. – LG]

A growing number of coal users, like Alcoa Inc, "one of the world’s biggest aluminum smelters," have come to acknowledge that "with the right tweaks," President Obama’s plan to address climate change "would not only help the environment but boost their profits." Climate legislation "will assist in restoring growth and provide the means for America to be the global leader in low-carbon technology," Alcoa’s global issues director said last month.

From the Center for American Progress:

Two studies released Friday by UCLA’s Williams Institute show that marriage equality in Massachusetts has resulted in "clear economic gains" for the state. Since 2004, the state has seen an increase in young, highly-educated, "creative class" professionals in same-sex relationships. "Creative class individuals in same-sex couples were 2.5 times more likely to move to Massachusetts in the three years after marriage equality than in the three years before." The second study finds that same-sex marriages "have given a significant boost to the state’s economy," with surveys showing that a typical gay or lesbian couple spends $7,400 on their weddings in Massachusetts — resulting in a cumulative $111 million economic boost.  The studies indicate "that other states allowing gay couples to marry — including Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and Maine — will see similar economic gains." Similarly, a 2008 study by the Williams Institute found that legalizing same-sex marriage in California "could create hundreds of new jobs and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into" the state’s economy. The fact that states could see an economic boom from marriage equality discredits Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s recent argument that same-sex marriage would be a burden on the small businesses and the economy." "Now all of a sudden I’ve got someone who wasn’t a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for," Steele said. "Who pays for that? You just cost me money."

This time it’s healthcare reform. The Center for American Progress:

Congress continues to work on a compromise health-care reform proposal, focusing on whether to offer a government-financed public health insurance plan. Last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) suggested that "Republicans were open to considering a public plan as an option…as long as it operated under the same rules as private plans." During a press conference on Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) emphasized that Democrats were open to all options — even politically rife ones like raising taxes — in order to achieve health care reform that would cover every American. "We’re putting everything on the table," she said, though she noted that much of the financing could come through spending "more wisely, in terms of prevention, in terms of early intervention, in terms of information technology." Indeed, Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, pledged that the Obama administration’s health care plan would be "self-financing and also brings down costs over time both for families and for the federal government." Yet as progressives seek to expand coverage and hold down costs, conservatives and lobbying groups are stonewalling on reform.

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Just back from getting a haircut. The Son is tying the knot is a little less than two weeks, so everyone wants to look spiffy for the wedding (and photos). Probably light to no blogging during the trip. I’ll let you know.

Now I have to clean up the kitchen at some point—this afternoon sounds like a good time.

Squawkfox has a good roundup of blogs that are helpful in stretching your money further. Take a look.

31 min 59 seconds, including taking the recycling bins back down to behind the apartment ("down" because the apartment sits on a hill that slopes steeply down to the Bay). And I went two blocks farther. I think the better pace is because it’s cool and overcast, in contrast to yesterday’s hot and sunny midday walk.

And there’s certainly a great pleasure in having it done with.

As I look at all the new spring buds and flowers, I realize I should have a small camera that’s easy to carry on my walk. Many plants out here that I never saw elsewhere.

Institut Karité shaving soap is 25% shea butter and very nice for the skin. This morning I just picked up the puck of soap and used it as I would a shave stick: rubbing the edge, not the face, of the puck against the grain of my two-day beard. I got plenty of soap and the Simpsons Emperor 3, becoming once more a favorite, worked up a fine lather. The Hoffritz Slant Bar with a Swedish Gillette blade did a great job and left my face perfectly smooth. A splash of Booster Aquarius, and I’m ready for a walk!

More voices are being heard calling for investigations into the possible war crimes that were committed and prosecution in those cases where evidence warrants. For example, both Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd had strong columns in the Sunday NY Times on the necessity of such a process, Rich emphasizing that as facts dribble out and stay in the news, Obama will eventually have to address the issue just to get on with other things; and Dowd ending her column by pointing out:

The more telling news last week was the suggestion about Cheney’s reverse-engineering the Iraq war. Robert Windrem, a former NBC News investigative producer, reported on The Daily Beast that in April 2003, after the invasion of Baghdad, the U.S. arrested a top officer in Saddam’s security force. Even though this man was an old-fashioned P.O.W., someone in Vice’s orbit reportedly suggested that the interrogations were too gentle and that waterboarding might elicit information about the fantasized connection between Osama and Saddam.

In The Washington Note, a foreign policy blog, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at State, wrote that the “harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 … was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

Josh Marshall said in his blog: “More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism. Even if it only makes one ambitious congresswoman pay more attention in some future briefing about some future secret technique that is “uniquely” designed to protect us, it will be worth it.

And on Friday on CNN David Waldman made a cogent case for such a process—so it’s not just in the print media that the idea is being spoken. Watch the video and see how powerfully the case comes across.

We’ll see if the beat picks up. If the families and friends of those killed or maimed in Iraq start to understand that the war was totally bogus and that the most urgent reason for the torture was to get a false confession of a link between Al Qaida and Iraq—well, in that case things will happen: an angry citizenry catches Congress’s eye pretty quickly.