The GOP warns that Obama has made the United States fiscally ineligible for membership in the European Union — not that we would want that sort of thing, because we’re the United States of America. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Saturday Roundup.
A new poll finds the American public closely divided on torture, with a narrow majority in favor of investigations. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Sunday Roundup.
The federal government has declared what DHS Secretary Napolitano urges Americans to view as a “declaration of emergency preparedness”, which allows the government to move doses of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu to parts of the country with potential swine flu outbreaks, release monies and take other preparedness steps.
A continuing mystery is why the apparent swine flu infections in the US appear to be much less virulent than the one in Mexico.
Late Update: Let me take a moment to reemphasize the ‘appear’ and ‘apparent’ in the sentence above. There are various hypotheses as to why there might be such a difference, as this Times article explains. But it’s important to note that whatever spread there is of swine flu in the US seems much earlier along than in Mexico. And the sample size of cases in the US is exceedingly small. So we simply do not have enough data yet to judge what the difference in the virulence in the two countries is or whether there’s any difference at all. I strongly recommend reading the Times article linked above.
Jeff Stein at CQ brings us more on the story of the Harman’s wiretapped conversation …
Former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert says he learned from a CIA-connected “whistleblower” in 2006 that Bush administration officials were suppressing the existence of a wiretapped conversation between Rep. Jane Harman and a suspected Israeli agent.
John D. Negroponte, former head of the then newly established Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), had blocked then CIA Director Porter J. Goss from briefing Hastert, according to the account the whistleblower gave the former Republican House speaker.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden , who became CIA director upon Goss’s forced resignation in May 2006, also had not informed Hastert about the wiretap, according to what the whistleblower told Hastert’s aides.
The Times‘ Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson debut a lengthy and much anticipated profile of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Is the decision to release Bush administration terrorist interrogation memos and potentially prosecute those responsible for drafting them simply reading the page before we turn it or turning America into a banana republic? We look for the answer in today’s Sunday Show Roundup …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
Oh, boy. That June 10 deadline to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraqi cities? Well, we’re going to fudge it in Baghdad by declaring our bases are technically not in the city limits. Presto! That and the day’s other non-flu news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
It looks like swine flu may be pushing the torture controversy from the headlines. But before it gets put to the back burner, there was one point I wanted to touch on, which strikes me as one of the oddest aspects of the debate. There’s a ‘tough enough to make the tough calls’ conceit behind almost all the pro-torture advocacy. Put in Dick Cheney terms, the courage to go to the dark side. But this conceit seems wholly belied by the unwillingness of the torture advocates to actually call it ‘torture’, as opposed to the various euphemisms about ‘harsh’ or ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods?
In conversations I’ve had with people who say torture was either necessary or useful, my instinctive response has been to say that I’m not even willing to entertain the conversation unless they’re willing to at least call something like water-boarding torture. (Long before we got into the torture business, it was always my understanding of ‘torture’ that it was precisely actions that created much more suffering than permanent damage. After knee-capping or breaking legs is less torture than just beatings.) It’s sort of the minimum price of admission to any real debate.
In response to my earlier post on torture, a number of readers have written in to say that it’s not a matter of Cheney et al. being squeamish about using the word ‘torture’. It’s that there are specific statutes on the books in the US and internationally that make ‘torture’ a crime, with serious penalties. Everyone recognizes that; and they don’t want to be prosecuted. But I think my earlier point includes this reasoning behind the reluctance to identify torture as ‘torture’.
Being bold means taking responsibility for being bold. As I’ve argued before, I think the answer to the ticking time bomb rationale for torture is this: that in the extremely unlikely circumstance that government officials ever found themselves in that position of having a ticking time bomb ticking away, they might have to make the decision to break the law. Not fudge it or keep their actions hidden, but take the decision on their own responsibility that it was the best thing to do in the situation — despite it being wrong as a general matter — and then bring their decision to attention of the people and law enforcement authorities and throw themselves on the mercy of the public. Thomas Jefferson explored a similar question and argument for the position a president could find himself in when faced with extra-constitutional or even unconstitutional actions.
In any case, if your patriotism is such that in an extreme situation you’d risk your own liberty to defend the lives of Americans, that’s courage. But nothing else really cuts it.
More realistically, if these folks are really that tough, why not simply come and call for the repeal of American laws banning torture and the US withdrawal from international agreements doing the same?