the weird turn pro

A couple of months ago I finally let my Wall Street Journal subscription lapse. I had subscribed for 34 years, since I was a sophomore in college. But it had become increasingly redundant. The New York Times has significantly upgraded its business section over the years (David Leonhardt is a favorite), while Murdoch has been trying to morph the Journal into more of a direct competitor to the Times. For business and financial news, I find myself these days reading Bloomberg and the FT online along with a dozen or so financial blogs. But ultimately it boiled down to the fact that I couldn’t stand providing financial support to Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. It was like cutting a check to FOX News.

So I was feeling much better last week when I read this brief post on Paul Krugman’s blog (“Secrets of the WSJ”):

This morning’s Wall Street Journal opinion section contains a lot of what one expects to see. There’s an opinion piece making a big fuss over the fake scandal at the EPA. There’s an editorial claiming that the latest job figures prove the failure of Obama’s economic plan — something I dealt with in the Times. All of this follows on yesterday’s editorial asserting that the Minnesota senatorial election was stolen.

All of this is par for the course; the WSJ editorial page has been like this for 35 years.

Nonetheless, it got me wondering: what do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth — one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed.

The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?

He makes an interesting point. Certainly the editorial board of the WSJ doesn’t believe all the stuff they write. For one thing, so much of it is contradictory (e.g., deficits don’t matter during Reagan and Bush administrations but threaten the Republic during Clinton and Obama administrations). In the past they at least made an effort to sound credible and maintain a certain consistency if not necessarily from year to year at least from month to month. But increasingly they seem to think their readers don’t have a memory that goes out beyond a week or so (or, perhaps, are so blinded by ideology and partisanship they don’t care).

Take just one of the editorials Krugman cites – the one on the Minnesota Senate race. They assert, “Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election.” Here are the facts: The recount that gave Franken his victory was undertaken by the five-member Minnesota State Canvassing Board, which included the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court (appointed by the Republican governor Pawlenty), another state Supreme Court Justice (also appointed by Pawlenty), one member appointed by former Independent governor Jesse Ventura, and one non-partisan member elected by the voters. The only Democrat on the panel was the Secretary of State. The board was unanimous in all its determinations. Similarly, the three-judge panel chosen to hear Coleman’s court challenge consisted of a Republican appointee, a Democratic appointee and an Independent appointee, and it too was unanimous in all its determinations. Finally, the state Supreme Court (including three other Pawlenty appointees) unanimously rejected Coleman’s appeal, 5-0. Bi-partisanship (or non-partisanship) and unanimity prevailed at every step. But the Journal simply asserts that the election was stolen.

(The Journal cites the 2004 governor’s race in Washington State as another election stolen by a Democrat. But when Washington State Republicans challenged that election before a Republican judge in one of the most conservative counties in the state, the judge found not merely that the Republicans failed to present convincing evidence of fraud – he found that they provided NO evidence of fraud. None whatsoever. He even gave additional votes to the Democrat. And this is from the only judge in state history to have previously overturned an election. So thorough was the judge’s rejection that state Republicans didn’t even bother to appeal the case to the Washington State Supreme Court.)

But apparently the Journal believes this stuff serves a purpose. Like FAUX News, they are providing an alternative reality for their partisan audience. Accuracy is irrelevant. (As Brad DeLong notes, they don’t strive to make the best case for their point of view, just the most persuasive case.)

Most of us came to the conclusion during the Bush years (if we hadn’t previously) that it was actually important that the people running our government be hitched to reality and base their policies on actual facts. I know this may sound unduly partisan, but it seems increasingly that Republicans believe that anything can be true if you just want it badly enough to be so.

Am I being unfair? Earlier today, in writing about Iran, I quoted John Bolton urging, essentially, that we go to war with that country. But I wasn’t just taking a cheap shot at some crazy blogger. This guy was US ambassador to the UN under the administration that just left office less than five months ago. And he was writing in the Washington Post, not in his pajamas in his parents’ basement (actually, to be truthful, I don’t know what he was wearing or where he was when he penned that piece).

As Matthew Yglesias explains:

It’s actually true that neocon bashing is a bit on the tiresome side. That said, I think it really has to be understood as a vital social necessity. Adherents of a deranged and sociopoathic “neocon” conception of America’s role in the world continue to be tremendously influential in our society. They have columns at The Washington Post and dominate the foreign policy coverage on Fox News. They have The Weekly Standard and Commentary and a healthy slice of The New Republic. [Ed. Note: And the WSJ editorial page.] And most important, as best as anyone can tell their ideas remain utterly dominant in the Republican Party. Their intra-party critics like Colin Powell, rather than winning intra-party arguments seem to be simply drifting out of the GOP coalition.

This is a dangerous situation. In the United States, the opposition party is always one ill-timed recession or political scandal from taking power. So a set of ideas that dominates one such party is something you need to keep a watchful eye on, no matter how marginalized that party may seem at any particular moment.

OK, so I have to mention Sarah Palin. Who knows, a couple of Pastor Wright eruptions and a six month delay in the financial meltdown and she could have been one angry, cancerous heartbeat away from the presidency. Even with all the craziness of the past few days, the mainstream media is framing it all in the context of how it might affect her chances of securing the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. In a country of over 300 million people, is there any rational reason anyone would be talking about Sarah Palin as a potential candidate for the position of the leader of (still) the most powerful country in the world four years from now? Apart from the fact that, despite everything we have learned about her over the past 10 months, she is still hugely popular among members of a cult called the “Republican Party.” Not just popular, she is their single biggest draw among the faithful.

You’d think, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, when monetary policy had already reached the “zero bound” that constitutes its practical exhaustion as a policy tool, that the notion of some fiscal stimulus from the federal government would be “not uncontroversial” (as Bush’s top economist, Greg Mankiw, put it in 2003). Yet every single Republican member of the House of Representatives voted against the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package (which, as it turns out, was only half to a third as big as it should have been). Not a single Republicans voted for a true no-brainer (heck, if nothing else, it was the biggest two-year tax cut in US history – and Republicans couldn’t embrace that?).

And as if that wasn’t enough, three Republican governors tried to reject the federal stimulus money – during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The common thread among the three leaders of this stimulus-rejection effort was that they are (or were) all considered prospective Republican presidential candidates – Rick Perry of Texas, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Sarah Palin. But their “crazy base” is so crazy, they apparently felt compelled to reject economic aid for their respective states – in favor of laying off teachers and health care workers when the economy is still in free fall.

I will leave Sanford alone, except to urge you to watch this Jon Stewart takedown and to note that the federal money he tried to reject (the legislature overruled him) would have gone to help the unemployed in the state with the second worst unemployment rate in the country.

And, then, there is Palin.

You really must read the entire transcript of her resignation speech (or whatever you want to call it) to appreciate the full magnitude of her craziness. This was obviously not something that was long in the works – more like she woke up that morning and thought, “Heck. Think I’ll resign as governor today.”

Gail Collins had a great piece on the subject (she has become a true treasure – smarter and funnier than Maureen Dowd and nowhere hear as obnoxiously snarky). Here is a bit:

“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time ... to BUILD UP.”

Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.

Bruce Reed had a pretty good piece in Slate:

"It may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down [and] plod along," Sarah Palin said Friday, in an attempt to suggest that serving her full term as governor would add to the nation's apathy. "That's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out." Sarah Palin is no quitter. That's why she's quitting.

Reed makes a good substantive point:

Time after time, quitting has turned out to be the "worthless, easy path" that Sarah Palin insists it isn't. What makes her sudden resignation especially troubling, though, is not the flawed strategy so much as her jubilation and relief in putting the statehouse in her rear mirror. Palin's resignation is a symptom of what's crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.

Exactly. When your whole ideology is anti-government, actually governing is inconvenient, to say the least. If nothing else, it requires attention to things like “facts.” A stubborn refusal to accept “reality” can result in … well, the Bush administration. Why accept those constraints?

But my favorite observations on the Palin meltdown were from Paul Begala in Huffington Post (it’s short – worth reading the whole thing):

I wish Hunter S. Thompson had lived to see this.

As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin … has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.

… Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like "TO," "HELP," and "AND," and the first letter of "Troops."

Gov. Palin's official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old's review of the Jonas Brothers' album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents' refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: "Murray's Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!") She put her son's name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?" Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don't even know what to make of a sentence that reads:

*((Gotta put First Things First))*

Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin's editor.

I'm no latter-day Strunk & White, just a guy who was struck by Palin's spectacularly rambling and infantile prose. It bespeaks a rambling and infantile mind. But perhaps not. …But does anyone believe that's why she's resigning? No, there's more to this story. And Ms. Palin's resignation only increases the chances that we will all know the rest of the story soon. Or, as she might put it:

We will all KNOW the "rest of the Story" *((SOON!))*

Alas, the weird have, indeed, turned pro. And they have their own political party and media apparatus. And, as you might expect, after a few hours of sharing a “WTF” moment with the rest of us, the usual crew of FOX News types set about to explain why Palin’s resignation in the middle of her first term as governor of a state of less than 700,000 people is a brilliant tactic in her quest to lead the free world. You can always count on Bill Kristol to answer the call, no matter how challenging:

Bill Kristol, a conservative columnist who's been one of Palin's biggest cheerleaders, says the governor is making a "high-risk move" in an attempt to position herself for 2012.

"This does give her a chance to travel the country and campaign for Republican candidates," said Kristol, who played a key role last summer in convincing John McCain to tap the junior governor as his running mate.

"I think she could have a very strong year and a half here ... she's really just getting out there and it's going to depend on her talents and her abilities. She now feels she can get out and be on her own."

Bill Kristol, you might recall, was given a prime editorial page column in the New York Times, which mercifully lasted only a year. Which raises the question, just how consistently wrong does someone have to be in order to lose all credibility and no longer be part of the mainstream pundit dialogue? After the New York Times dumped him (a truly horrible one-year experiment in giving a right-wing lunatic an even larger audience than he gets with merely FOX News, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard), the Washington Post picked him up. Is there really anyone in the country who wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I wonder what Bill Kristol would have to say about that?” Forget ideology or partisan leanings. It should simply be a requirement for any pundit in any major media outlet that he or she has been generally more right than wrong over his or her career (or, heck, in just the recent past). And to the extent he or she has been wrong, there should be some evidence that he or she has acknowledged that error and understands why he or she went wrong. In other words, there should be some reason for us to care what he or she thinks. Instead, we get this polarized, “shape of the world, views differ” attempt at some kind of ostensive ideological “balance” that continues to give a forum (or multiple forums) to guys like Kristol and John Bolton who are consistently, objectively wrong about EVERYTHING.

The weird have, indeed, turned pro.

Let’s just enjoy the fact that they are no longer running the country – at least for a while.

iran's green way

Continuing developments today in the evolving story out of Iran: The New York Times reports (“Leading Clerics Defy Ayatollah on Disputed Iran Election”) that one of the most important groups of religious leaders in Iran “called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.” In another story today, the Washington Post reports that the opposition candidate, Mousavi, has released a 24-page document on his Web site detailing accusations of election fraud. And the editor-in-chief of the state newspaper, and an advisor to Supreme Leader Khamenei, has accused Mousavi of treason and called for him to be tried. This story isn’t over.

I have been meaning to write a long piece on recent events in Iran. But I don’t need to now. Robert Dreyfuss has done it for me in The Nation: Iran’s Green Wave. This is the best piece I have read on Iran; it makes most of the points I had intended to make. Read the whole thing. Don’t rely on these excerpts:

[T]he opposition's leaders are not exactly revolutionaries. The coalition ranged against Khamenei and Ahmadinejad is a kind of counter-establishment representing a huge split within Iran's secular and clerical elites. It includes the reformists, led by Moussavi, who served as prime minister during the tumultuous and violently repressive 1980s, and Mehdi Karroubi, a cleric and former speaker of Parliament, both of whom ran against Ahmadinejad. It includes relatively moderate, pragmatic conservatives and the wealthy business elite, typified by the behind-the-scenes role of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the wily billionaire mullah and wheeler-dealer who was president in the 1990s. And it includes many hardline conservatives from the
so-called "principlist" faction, which previously lined up behind Ahmadinejad but this time rallied behind opposition candidate Mohsen Rezai, a founder of the IRGC, who has been bitterly critical of the president and who at least initially claimed election fraud.

But there's no denying that for the first time since the1978-79 revolution, which led to the Islamic Republic, Iran's leadership is confronted with an explosive and unpredictable challenge: from below, a mass movement whose street energy and high-tech organizing savvy spread from Tehran to Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad and other cities. And within the elite there is a swelling wave of dissatisfaction with the narrow-minded radicals in power, who are blamed for having squandered the country's oil wealth, mismanaged its economy and forced Iran into a crippling regime of sanctions that have walled it off from the technology and foreign investment it desperately needs.

As a result, Iran is at a crossroads.

In one direction is a slide toward greater xenophobia and ultra-nationalism, in part because the radical forces stirred up among Ahmadinejad's electoral base will be hard to put back in the box. The broad consensus behind Iran's system of rule-by-clergy has been shattered, and the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime has lost its legitimacy. To shore up support, it's blaming various greater and lesser satans in the United States, Europe and Israel for Iran's troubles, making it exceedingly difficult for the country to re-establish ties to the West. At best, Iran will remain embroiled in the stalemate it has faced since 2005, with the economy continuing to unravel. At
worst, it could fall into North Korea-like isolation, with fundamentalists and the security establishment preaching that subsistence-level economic privation must be endured for the sake of Islamic purity.

At the very least, the clergy-run, quasi-democratic Iranian state has been replaced by something that looks a lot more like a military dictatorship. Since his election in 2005, Ahmadinejad has installed scores of ex-commanders from the IRGC throughout government ministries and as governors and local officials in all thirty provinces. Ahmadinejad's cronies have created a powerful clique loyal to Khamenei but, at the same time, encircling the office of the Leader. The conventional wisdom--that the Leader is the all-powerful commander in chief, while the president is an elected figurehead with little real power--may be tilting, if it has not already been
turned on its head.

In the other direction, a victory by the opposition--as unlikely as it appears in the wake of the regime's crackdown--might let in a lot of fresh air. It could smooth the path for an accord with the West, pave the way toward greater cultural and civil liberties, and reverse the downward economic spiral. Under this scenario, Iran could still cling to much of its current form of government, though it would be less rigid. But what scares many conservatives, and no doubt much of the establishment, is that this time it might not be so easy to stuff the genie of reform back into its bottle. A large number of those supporting Moussavi--it's impossible to know how many--want far more than reform. They want an end to the very idea of an Islamic Republic. Their hero is Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who nationalized Iran's oil in 1951, challenged the shah and was toppled in a coup by MI-6 and the CIA in 1953. Reform in Iran is a slippery slope, and once reforms get started the very fabric of the Islamic Republic could unravel.

It's that scenario that Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their IRGC and Basij allies are determined to resist at all costs. And they're prepared to unleash Tiananmen Square levels of violence to make sure it doesn't happen. …

It was clear by nightfall on election day, June 12, that something was wrong. Across Tehran, troop transports rumbled out of the IRGC's fortified bases. Before the polls had even closed, Tehran took on the air of an occupied city. Later that night, ominously, my cellphone went dead, like everyone else's. Not long past midnight, the Interior Ministry declared Ahmadinejad the victor, crediting him with nearly two-thirds of a record turnout, having accomplished the near-magical feat of counting tens of millions of paper ballots in a couple of hours. Later that day, as outrage over what was widely seen as a manipulated result rippled across the city, Khamenei confirmed Ahmadinejad's win. Hundreds of thousands poured into the streets in protest.

"Moussavi and Karroubi had earlier established a joint committee to protect the people's votes," Ibrahim Yazdi, who was foreign minister in the early days after the revolution and who now leads the suppressed Freedom Movement of Iran, told me. "Many young people volunteered to work on that committee. But the authorities didn't let it happen. Last night [election night] the security forces closed it down." Describing what the regime did as a "coup d'etat," he said, "The security forces occupied the offices of many newspapers, to make sure their reports on the election were favorable. They changed many headlines." Over the next days newspapers were closed, Internet sites blocked or disabled and opposition campaign offices attacked and shuttered. Hundreds of officials, journalists and dissidents--perhaps as many as 2,000--were arrested, including Yazdi.

Some analysts argue that Ahmadinejad may have won, citing his populist appeal, but that's farfetched. An analysis prepared by Chatham House in London argues persuasively that the vote was skewed, comparing it with the totals for 2005. It showed that, in at least ten provinces, in order to have amassed the totals given him, Ahmadinejad would have had to win all the voters who backed him in 2005, all the voters who last time voted for Rafsanjani, all the voters who last time sat out the election and didn't vote at all, and--varying by province--up to 44 percent of the voters who in 2005 backed the reformist slate. Other analyses piled up similar anomalies. One employee of the Interior Ministry told reporters that the ministry "didn't even look at the vote" but made up the numbers. Said Yazdi, "The counting of the votes took place in the personal office of the minister of the interior, with only two aides present." …

As recently as May, Mir-Hossein Moussavi--an architect, artist and president of the Iranian Academy of the Arts, who speaks Farsi, English, Arabic and Turkish fluently--could not have imagined himself leading a throng of followers, some of them calling for the downfall of Khamenei. …

With impeccable establishment credentials honed during his stint as prime minister, Moussavi took sides in a left-versus-right split among the Iranian elite, including the clergy, that resulted in the creation of two broad factions at the end of the 1980s. The left-leaning Association of Combatant Clergy, also known as the Roohanioon, quit the more conservative Association of Militant Clergy, known as the Roohaniyat, which was loyal to the newly inaugurated Ayatollah Khamenei, who succeeded the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic. Among the Roohanioon leaders were Moussavi, Mohammad Khatami and a group of relatively progressive, open-minded thinkers who became known as Iran's "reformists." In 1997, at the end of Rafsanjani's presidency, the reformists' first choice to run for president was Moussavi. When he demurred, Khatami ran and--to the surprise of everyone--won overwhelmingly. Moussavi was a key adviser to President Khatami.

The hard right, egged on by Khamenei, counterattacked. It used death squads, vigilantes, secret intelligence units, the Guardian Council and the judiciary to cripple Khatami's presidency. In 2005, with the backing of the IRGC, the hardliners rallied behind the candidacy of Ahmadinejad, who after his election promptly launched a political, cultural and economic reversal. The IRGC itself became Iran's most powerful institution. Alongside its military might, it acquired a vast economic empire, from oil and construction to cellphone technology. Suddenly its personnel were everywhere. "The IRGC commanders, both active and retired, act as a kind of fraternity or freemasonry, wielding power that goes far beyond their official positions by virtue of the informal network they operate," an Iranian insider told me, looking to his left and right to make sure he wasn't being overheard in a busy Tehran lounge.
When Moussavi decided to run for president this past March, almost no one believed he could get traction. …

Several factors combined to make Moussavi a viable candidate. First, with organizational and financial support from the Rafsanjani family and wealthy mullahs and businessmen tired of Ahmadinejad's cronies running the economy, Moussavi built a formidable countrywide campaign machine. Second, the brilliant Green Wave strategy, designed by a 27-year-old whiz kid named Mostafa Hassani, caught fire, and soon green ribbons, armbands, headbands, scarves and flags festooned Iranian cities. "I wanted something simple, something that could be replicated even by poor people in remote villages," the long-haired, lanky Hassani told me, sitting in Moussavi's cluttered campaign headquarters during election week. And then, on June 3, Moussavi electrified Iran during an unprecedented televised debate with Ahmadinejad. With the president sitting across from him, Moussavi called Ahmadinejad a liar and accused him of pushing Iran toward "dictatorship." The next day, green-wearing crowds began chanting, "Death to the liar!" and "Death to the dictator!" Nothing like it had ever been seen in Iranian politics.

Moussavi had another not-so-secret weapon: his wife, Zahra Rahnavard. A noted intellectual and sculptor, Rahnavard campaigned alongside her husband, sometimes holding his hand. Clearly a liberated woman, she called for an end to the much-despised harassment of women by the cultural police and backed equal rights for women. At a vast rally in downtown Tehran, I watched her mesmerize the crowd. "We are going to make a revolution in the revolution!" she cried. "We are going to make it modern and up-to-date!" As one, tens of thousands of people chanted: "Moussavi! Rahnavard! Equal rights for men and women!" Women in pink lipstick and with blond highlights in partly uncovered hair shouted beside women in black chadors.

And then there was the Obama factor. Countless Iranians watched his June 4 Cairo speech, and its transcript was parsed word by word. By offering to respect Iran rather than locating it in the "axis of evil," Obama appealed to secular nationalists, activists seeking greater individual freedom and businessmen hungering for an end to the sanctions strangling Iran's economy. Nearly everyone I spoke with during the ten days I was in Iran brought up Obama, whether I asked or not. At a frenzied Moussavi rally in the city of Karaj, west of the capital, I met a campaign organizer, Hojatolislam Akbar Hamidi, 48, a distinguished cleric who's known Moussavi for more than twenty years. "I listened to Obama's speech, and it made me very happy," he told me. "But we're afraid that some Iranian authorities do not understand the positive message of Obama." In interviews at polling places on election day, dozens of voters praised Obama's opening to Iran. At a Tehran mosque where hundreds of people were lined up to vote, several dozen crowded around as I asked an older woman why she supported Moussavi. When I suggested, "Perhaps Moussavi and Obama might meet someday soon?" the crowd, translating for one another, erupted in cheers, laughter and thumbs-up signs.

More prosaically, many plugged-in Iranians told me that nearly the entirety of Iran's business class is fed up with Ahmadinejad's bellicose rhetoric, and they want to put an end to sanctions. Saeed Laylaz, an economist and former official at the Ministry of Industry, said that as a result of sanctions critical sectors of the economy--including computers and information technology, oil and natural gas, and civil aviation--are suffering badly. "Ahmadinejad's is the first right-wing government since the revolution, and it has been a catastrophe," he said. "You cannot run the government with populism. You need experts. You need technocrats. You need planners." (Laylaz was arrested days after the election; he's still in detention.) To get a sense of what the business community thinks, during election week I attended a forum packed with executives at the offices of Etelaat, a liberal newspaper, where eight former ministers of oil, industry and mining slammed the government over its incompetence. Later, at Moussavi's campaign office, one of them, Mohammad
Reza Nematzadeh, who was minister of industry under Khatami, told me that he'd
put his business on hold to travel across the country working for Moussavi. "I'm
a businessman, and I've been reluctant to get into politics," he told me over
several cups of tea. "It's the desire of most of us in the business community to
rebuild relations with the United States," he said. "It doesn't mean that we have to give up our independence or our dignity."

Besides reformists, students, women and businessmen, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are losing their core constituency: the clergy. And given that Iran is a state run by the priestly class, that might prove their undoing. I spoke to a dozen or so clerics, from low- to mid-ranking mullahs to a few who'd attained the rank of hojatolislam, just below ayatollah. There are hundreds of thousands of mullahs in Iran, perhaps a hundred or more who have attained the rank of ayatollah, and just two dozen or so who have developed sufficient reputation and following to be called grand ayatollah. And more and more of them, including many grand ayatollahs, have joined the opposition. "After the television debates with Ahmadinejad, a large number of mullahs who'd been undecided went over to Moussavi," one hojatolislam told me. They were offended, he said, by Ahmadinejad's insulting attitude toward
Moussavi--particularly his rhetorical assault on his wife, Rahnavard, whom he
accused of falsifying her academic credentials--and his accusations against
Rafsanjani and Khatami. "A president should be polite," the cleric told me. "Impolite behavior and ugliness cannot be accepted."

Another cleric, who campaigned for Moussavi in dozens of Iranian towns and cities, said that the majority of mullahs had abandoned the president. "There is a big gap between Ahmadinejad and the clergy," he told me. "Many of the grand ayatollahs are angry, because the president has taken many actions without consulting with them. They are especially unhappy because he has shown an aggressive face of Islam to the world, and Islam is not aggressive. It is a religion of peace." Some three-quarters of the grand ayatollahs in Iran support Moussavi, he told me. Ten of them sent a joint letter to Ahmadinejad, but he ignored them, he said. Several others have openly castigated the regime for its treatment of protesters.

A very well-connected mullah I talked with said that he is a friend and follower of Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. Back in the late 1980s, Montazeri was the designated successor to Khomeini as Iran's Leader, but hardliners--including Khomeini's son and a circle around Khamenei--ousted him, he told me, because of his liberal views and installed Khamenei. Through this mullah and several other intermediaries, both Moussavi and former president Khatami keep in close contact with Montazeri, as well as with many in the clerical establishment in Qom. In the wake of the election Moussavi and his supporters began organizing what they hoped would be a broad consensus among senior ayatollahs to force Ahmadinejad out or, if it comes to that, to replace Khamenei himself. "Khamenei does not deserve the position that he has," the mullah told me. "He has become a politician, and as a politician he has been corrupted." Describing Khamenei in these terms is extremely unusual, and indicates how much the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei axis has lost its legitimacy. "Khamenei has lost the support of many high-ranking clergy in Qom," declared Ibrahim Yazdi in my interview with him.

Trying to pull together this opposition is Rafsanjani, who so far has stayed behind the scenes but according to numerous reports from Iran is playing a critical role in efforts to counter both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. The former president is chair of the Assembly of Experts, a group of more than eighty clerics who have the power, under Iran's Constitution, to appoint or dismiss the Leader. "Rafsanjani has convinced the majority of the Assembly of Experts and several dozen clerics in Qom to support an effort to overturn the election results," a well-connected Iranian told me. According to Yazdi and several other Iranian activists and analysts, at least some of the clergy want to replace Khamenei with a far more moderate, less political council of ayatollahs as a way of restoring consensus in the leadership [see Sarfaraz,
"Iran's New Revolutionaries," in last week's issue]. It would in effect be the end of the Khomeini doctrine of velayat-e-faqih ("rule of the jurisprudent"), which is the underpinning of the notion of a Supreme Leader, a concept invented by Khomeini that is far outside mainstream Muslim, and even Shiite, thinking. …

Obama's earlier outreach undercut the hardliners and gave a psychological boost to Iran's reformists and to millions of Iranians who saw Moussavi as a vehicle through which to improve US-Iranian relations. If Obama wants to support the opposition, the best thing he can do is to continue to extend his open hand to Iran.

Read it all here.

The protests that started in response to the stolen election now threaten the whole system of clerical rule. This appears to have been essentially a coup by the Revolutionary Guard, led by Ahmadinejad and with Khamenei acquiescing. And they appear to have won the first round. But the downfall of the Shah unfolded over about a year, so it is still too early to call this fight. I think Khameini’s credibility as Supreme Leader is shot. Clerical rule in Iran, if it survives, will never be the same.

I was surprised how many in the US (mainly conservatives) were quick to buy into the idea that Ahmadinejad might have legitimately won the election. Just one example was George Friedman at the Stratfor newsletter (no free link) who announced almost immediately after the election (“Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality,” June 15, 2009):

“… Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.”

This view was typically premised on the notion that reformers consisted entirely of young liberals from “North Tehran” (sort of the Iranian equivalent of our own “San Francisco liberals”). The “Real Iranians”, supposedly, were rural fundamentalists who voted for Ahmadinejad. There are a couple of problems with this narrative. Iran is a highly urbanized country, with roughly 70% of the population living in urban areas. And 70% of the population is under age 30. Combine that with half the population that is female, and the old, rural male is a distinct minority in Iran. There is not some massive rural population that resulted in Ahmadinejad winning almost two-thirds of the national vote.

(American conservatives seem to be projecting on Iran their own notion that the “real America” consists of rural whites. In fact, less than 20% of the US population is now considered “rural” according to the US Census. And whites now account for only roughly 65% of the US population – but are less than a majority in the most populous state, California, as well as in Texas and New Mexico. Whites are getting close to falling below majority status in Nevada, Maryland and Georgia. Even then, the rural vote in the US is not some kind of conservative monolith – Obama won 45% of the rural vote.)

In fact, Ahmadinejad actually lost the rural vote in 2005, which includes large non-Persian populations. And these days a lot of rural voters in Iran are upset about the lousy state of the Iranian economy. Yet, this time around, the official results had Ahmadinejad winning all provinces with remarkably consistent percentages, despite pronounced ethnic and regional differences in past elections. For example, the official election results had Ahmadinejad beating Mousavi in the capital of his home province, Tabriz, by 57% to 42% -- this in an Azeri region that tends to be anti-Persian and supportive of its native son. Similarly, the official results had one of the other opposition candidates, Karroubi, receiving only 5% of the vote in his home province of Luristan, down from 50% in 2005. All implausible in the extreme.

Indeed, the only time a non-reformist candidate has won the presidency in Iran was Ahmadinejad in 2005 when the turn-out was only 48% due to a de facto boycott by supporters of the reformers. This time around, the turn-out exceeded 85%, which should have reflected a landslide for the reformers. For more analysis of the election results, check out this paper by the Chatham House of the UK, cited in the Nation piece above.

There was a highly misleading, but widely quoted, op-ed in the Washington Post shortly after the election which noted that in a poll three weeks before the election Ahmadinejad led Mousavi by a 2 to 1 margin. But the op-ed inexcusably failed to note the actual poll numbers – Ahmadinejad’s lead was actually only 34% to 14%. It’s hard to see how an incumbent gets from 34% to over 60% in three weeks. Juan Cole analyzes the poll and concludes (here and here) that it supports the view that Ahmadinejad lost decisively.

Fareed Zakaria has done a great job covering this story – a couple of his pieces here and here are worth reading. And Eurasianet, a part of George Soros’s Open Society project, has had some good analysis, such as this piece.

American neocons have had trouble dealing with the turn of events in Iran. As the election approached and it was becoming apparent that Mousavi might win, perhaps even in a landslide, some neocons went so far as to publicly express their hope that Ahmadinejad would win, the better for keeping up the drumbeat for war with Iran. One widely-noted example was Daniel Pipes, who wrote (in a blog post entitled “Rooting for Ahmadinejad”):

[W]hile my heart goes out to the many Iranians who desperately want the vile Ahmadinejad out of power, my head tells me it's best that he remain in office. …[B]etter to have a bellicose, apocalyptic, in-your-face Ahmadinejad who scares the world than a sweet-talking Mousavi who again lulls it to sleep …

And so, despite myself, I am rooting for Ahmadinejad.

For other US conservatives they fact that the face of the reform movement on the street has tended to be well-educated, young urbanites and independent women – well, somehow it just can't be legitimate.

And, then, there was John McCain who, as with Georgia last summer (“we are all Georgians now”), couldn’t wait to escalate US involvement in this conflict … because, after all, this is really all about us (or, specifically, him).

But with Ahmadinejad appearing for the time being to have consolidated his hold on power, the right wing in this country seems to have settled back down to the conclusion that … we should (of course) encourage Israel to attack Iran. Because, after all, you can’t have too many wars. We are now seeing in Afghanistan and Pakistan the disastrous consequences of having diverted our attention and resources to Iraq (I found this story last week particularly disturbing: “In Refugee Aid, Pakistan’s War Has New Front”). And our military is overstretched already with two wars. But why not start another? John Bolton, our former UN ambassador with the dead rodent above his lip and a serious anger management problem, argued for that in the Washington Post this week (“Time for An Israeli Strike?” – the question mark is redundant): “Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable.”

Pop quiz: With the hardliners in Iran trying to blame recent protests on the US and the UK, an attack on Iran by Israel with the approval of the Great Satan would, a/ strengthen the hardliners, or b/ strengthen the reformers? What happens in any country under attack by a foreign enemy?

It’s hard to believe that less than five months ago these guys were actually running the United States government. That is Change We Can Believe In. Let’s hope our brothers and sisters in Iran succeed in their own Change.

obama in cairo

Don’t rely on the summaries and spin of other people, take an hour and watch and listening to Obama’s Cairo speech and form your own judgments. I found it extraordinary.

He’s changing peoples’ hearts, which as we’ve learned is how you change the world. It won’t happen over night. But how much better the world would be now if this speech had been given by the US president as part of our immediate response to the events of September 11, 2001.

the new new deal

Former New York Senator and UN Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Increasingly, it seems, Republicans are trying to create not only their own facts but their own reality. This is particularly problematic when the mainstream media treats every issue as some kind of polarized “Crossfire” debate, with “balanced” treatment of “both sides.” Hence, we can end up with mainstream media “debates” over things like evolution, global warming and even torture.

A few years back Paul Krugman commented on the media desire for “balance” over objectivity. As an example he said that if Bush proclaimed the world was flat, the headline in the New York Times the next day would be “Shape of The World, Views Differ.” Indeed, that would be a “balanced” portrayal of the “debate” over the shape of the Earth. But objectively, the world is spherical. Stating that fact is not “bias” (except to the extent reality is a bias). Even if a large group of people – like the entire remaining rump of the Republican Party – disputed that fact, the New York Times would be doing its readers a disservice to give the impression that there was any credible, objective basis for the dissenting view.

At the Future in Review Conference in San Diego last year, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic. He replied, “Five.” (He also told an amusing anecdote about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error.) That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “hoax.”

I’m not even going to waste time with evolution. If you think there is a legitimate debate over evolution, don’t even bother to read further.

And I’ve already commented at length on the “torture debate.” (Is it torture to shackle someone naked to the ceiling of a cold cell in an excruciatingly painful position so he can’t sleep for eleven days? “Views differ.”)

Another Republican myth that seems to have become entrenched in their alternative reality in recent months is actually the revival of a classic from … oh, fifty or sixty years ago: The New Deal was a failure. As is typical with these kinds of things, there is the weak form and the strong form. (Like the idea that tax cuts result in gushing tax revenue. The weak form of this Republican myth is that tax cuts merely pay for themselves – or maybe just almost pay for themselves. The strong form is that they will result in a big increase in tax revenue that will actually balance the budget.) The weak form of this one is that the New Deal didn’t do much of anything to help us recover from the Great Depression. The strong form is that the New Deal actually caused the Great Depression.

Then there is the crazy form. For this, I give you Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), the Sarah Palin of Congress. From a speech on the House floor last week (here is the video):

“[T]he recession that FDR had to deal with wasn't as bad as the recession Coolidge had to deal with in the early '20s. Yet, the prescription that Coolidge put on that, from history, is lower taxes, lower regulatory burden, and we saw the roaring '20s where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we never seen before in the history of the country.

"FDR applied just the opposite formula -- the Hoot-Smalley Act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions, and then, of course, trade barriers and the regulatory burden and tax barriers. That's what we saw happen under FDR. That took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost 10 years under that kind of thinking."

Now there are just a few problems with this narrative. Primarily, there is the notion that FDR “took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression.” During the Great Depression, unemployment reached its peak of 25% in 1933, the year FDR took office. Similarly, GDP bottomed out in 1933 at almost 33% below its peak in 1929 and began rising thereafter. (More on this below.)

It is probably also worth pointing out that the “Roaring ‘20’s” (“where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we never seen before in the history of the country”) were what we call a “bubble,” with wild speculation in the financial markets that resulted in … the CRASH of 1929. Michelle actually stumbles upon a decent point here. The Republican laissez-faire economic policies of the ’20’s, resulting in an unsustainable speculative bubble, can probably be seen as a historical parallel to the de-regulatory policies that reach their peak under George W. Bush.

The crazy humor in this speech, however, is the bit about the “Hoot-Smalley Act” which she attributes to FDR. There is a nice little bit of Palinesque gibberish: “Hoot-Smalley” was a “tremendous burden on tariff restrictions.” Huh? Oh, and the act was actually the “Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.” Which was named after its two Republican sponsors, Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon). And then there is the fact that the act was signed into law in 1930 by the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, almost three years before FDR took office.

The Republican rediscovery of the New Deal as an economic boogeyman has certainly been fueled by the constant references in recent months to our current financial crisis being “the worst since the Great Depression” as well as by President Obama’s energetic response, which is similar to the FDR’s economic activism. But the Bible of this revisionism is the book “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes, which takes the view that the New Deal was counterproductive and prolonged the Great Depression. Shlaes, a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, is not an economist and the book, which is largely anecdotal, has few actual statistics in it. It has drawn fire from economist Paul Krugman, among others. But Republicans can’t get enough of it.

From Politico (“Why GOP is Devouring One Book”):

Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession.

“There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide Mike Ference, whose boss, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, invited Shlaes to join a group of 20 or so other House Republicans for lunch earlier this year in his Capitol suite.

“Republicans are gobbling it up — and so are other lawmakers — because it tells you what they did, what worked and what didn’t.”

“It’s been suggested as required reading for all of us, I think,” said Erica Elliott, press secretary for Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) — who himself notes that his chief of staff “stole” his hardback copy, so he had to purchase a paperback.

Garrett said the book “is a good read” that details, among other things, “how FDR engaged in vitriolic demonizing of Wall Street and Big Business to advance his agenda.” …

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who invited Shlaes to address the Conservative Opportunity Society earlier this year, uses words like “definitive” when referring to the tome, noting that Shlaes wrote it before the economic meltdown and that he read it “before we saw this even coming.”

“I think it’s conclusive when you read the book, although I don’t believe she said so, that the New Deal was actually a bad deal, and today we have a president who believes that the New Deal was a good deal, and would have been a far better deal if FDR would have spent a lot more money,” he said.

Shlaes builds her case largely around the fact that unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout the Depression, a fact she exaggerates by disregarding official unemployment statistics and coming up with her own that subtract all the government jobs created during the New Deal. Now it is true that unemployment was slow to decline from its peak during the Depression. But Shlaes goes further and argues, in effect, “The New Deal didn’t create many jobs if you don’t count the jobs it actually created.”

Unemployment actually fell pretty impressively during FDR’s first term, from 25% in 1933 to 14.3% in 1937. But in 1937, FDR reacted to concerns about the growing federal budget deficit by cutting spending too much, too soon, which plunged the country back into a “recession within the Depression” in 1937 and 1938, with unemployment rising back up to 19%. Federal spending actually declined by over 26% during those two years. Rather than taking from this experience the lesson that you shouldn’t slam the brakes on prematurely when the economy is still weak, Shlaes cites the state of the economy at the end of 1938 as evidence that the New Deal failed.

Shlaes uses the Dow Jones Industrial Average as her primary metric for gauging the state of the economy at any given time during the Depression – a rather dodgy metric. She pretty much avoids discussion of GDP altogether. And it’s obvious why. Because GDP grew impressively under FDR. Indeed, you can probably refute the New Deal revisionists with just this one graph:

[click to enlarge]

Between August 1929 and March 1933, GDP declined by almost 33%. It hit bottom just after FDR took office and exceeded the previous high three years later in 1936 (growing by over 14% that year).

So, according to this new Republican narrative, what was it that finally brought an end to the Great Depression? Because it did eventually end, right? Here the revisionist narrative merges (sort of) with mainstream economics. Both agree that it was World War II that finally ended the Great Depression once and for all. (Technically, the Depression ended in 1933, we just didn’t return to full employment until WWII.) I received an email a while back from a prominent Seattle investment advisor who slipped this little bit of partisan punditry into his commentary on the Obama stimulus: “[M]any economists are rethinking whether the massive federal spending [during the New Deal] helped bring an end to the depression, or whether WWII was the true catalyst for economic recovery.”

Think about that for a moment. How does World War II ending the Great Depression refute the notion that “massive government spending” doesn’t help stimulate economic recovery?

What happened during WWII? Federal spending and the deficit exploded. Federal spending increased to $97 billion in 1944, up almost fifteen times from $6.5 billion in 1940. But tax receipts only increased about fivefold, leaving a gargantuan deficit. The national debt increased six fold from $43 billion in 1940 to $260 billion at the end of the war. As a percentage of GDP, the national debt increased from 52% in 1940 to 121% in 1946 (see graph below), a level never reached before or since.

[click to enlarge]

Now, I know Republicans think we should always increase military spending, even if we are already spending more on our military than the rest of the world combined. (Just as we should always cut taxes, even if we are fighting two wars and running record budget deficits.) But is there something about spending to fight a war – blowing things up and killing people – that is inherently more stimulative (let alone productive) than, say, developing alternative energy sources, or building a national high-speed rail system, or bringing medical records into the 21st Century? From a spending standpoint, World War II was just the New Deal on steroids and seems to support the view that FDR’s spending programs were too modest during the Great Depression.

The post-War prosperity was built on the foundation of the GI Bill that sent a generation to college and encouraged home ownership. How is that support for neo-Hooverist policies? And why do we need a war to provide the kind of stimulus required to get us back on a path of robust economic growth? (We already have two wars going on, of course, but from a spending standpoint they can’t hold a candle to WWII.) Why not spending on building the national infrastructure required for us to exert global economic leadership well into the 21st Century? Is anything more important than a new energy infrastructure (that frees us from the Saudis, Hugo Chavez, Iran and Dick Cheney, and propels us into the lead in the technologies that are going to drive economic growth for decades), fixing our health care system (which, by almost any metric, costs vastly more and produces woefully worse results, than that of any other major developed country), and bringing our schools (uniformly) back up to global standards. Is military spending somehow a better use of funds? If this crisis – with vast portions of our economy idle or under-employed and the risk of a major global implosion – isn’t enough to prompt a major national effort to re-build, what will it take?

Alas, to have a conversation of this sort assumes everyone shares at least a certain factual baseline – some means of judging the quality of various propositions.

But, then, why unnecessarily constrain ourselves. After all, everyone is entitled to his own facts. Let the “debate” continue.

the "torture debate"

The phrase “torture debate” is one I never thought I would use in the context of US domestic politics. It is fair to say that until a few years ago, it would have never occurred to any significant element of the US population to openly support torture by our own government. Our unequivocal opposition to torture is even enshrined in our founding document, the US Constitution, which (in the Eight Amendment) prohibits the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishment.” Yet, incredibly, we now have the leaders and rank-and-file of one of our two major political parties almost unanimously arguing – not in the shadows or in defensive, apologetic terms, but publicly and stridently – in support of torture.

As recently as 2003, at the time of the capture of Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush said:

“For the vast majority of Iraqi citizens who wish to live as free men and women, this event brings further assurance that the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever.”

Invoking torture was the harshest possible condemnation of Saddam’s regime – the implication being that any leader who engages in state-sanctioned torture forfeits his legitimacy. Who knew that at the very time Bush was speaking those words, his own administration was engaged in torture (and operating secret prisons). (Psychologists have a word for this: Projection.)

When Bush was in power, the right abandoned almost all limitations on the executive in favor or an almost unfettered authoritarianism. It now appears they have also abandoned all moral bearings. The party that proclaims itself to be “pro-life” and in favor of “small government” has chosen to define itself by asserting the right of the executive to torture – in secret, of course, with no oversights by courts, Congress or the public. (I saw one piece in recent days that actually referred to the Bush administration’s torture practices as a “moral imperative,” presumably on the basis of some sort of narrow utilitarian calculus. Cheney is proclaiming that torture works! Talk about “moral relativism.”)

One right-winger who has included me on his email distribution list was out among the teabaggers on April 15th, declaring Obama’s proposal to increase taxes by 3% on the top 5% richest taxpayers to be tantamount to “fascism.” And only a few days later, he was directing his free-floating, middle-aged, white male, right-wing anger toward Obama’s discontinuation and (partial) exposure of Bush’s torture policies. Who says irony is dead?

There was no “torture debate” during World War II, which resulted in almost a half a million US deaths. As President Obama noted in his press conference yesterday:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, "We don't torture," when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.

And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

Nor was there a “torture debate” during the Cold War when an evil foe had thousands of nuclear warheads trained on us, haunting us with the specter of sudden nuclear holocaust. But 19 guys with box cutters cause us to abandon everything we stand for? Those bearded fanatics managed to accomplish something neither the Nazis nor the Soviet Union was ever able to do – cause us to voluntarily abandon what it means to be American. How did we manage to survive as a country for over 200 years without state torture?

Just to be clear: Torture is illegal. Period. No exceptions. It is illegal under US law and under treaties that the US has signed and ratified. That is a legal stance shared by all civilized countries. We are a nation of laws and no one in government – not even Dick Cheney – is free to disregard those laws. So the “debate” should end there. If Republicans REALLY want to torture, they should go about it legally, and get Congress to pass and the president to sign a new law or laws that repeal current prohibitions on torture.

During the period in question Republicans controlled both Congress and the executive. If they wanted to legalize torture they could have attempted to make it legal. (Of course, such an attempt to legalize torture would almost certainly be unconstitutional under the Eight Amendment. A Constitutional amendment would have been required.) Instead, the Bush administration insisted at the time that we DON’T torture.

Bush told the American people on multiple occasions (and long after his administration had begun to engage in torture):

"No American will be allowed to torture another human being anywhere in the world...."

"This country doesn’t torture, we’re not going to torture."

So Bush & co. not only broke the law, they lied to the American people about it. The justifications for torture only came about after it became undeniable that we had engaged in it and that it was official policy, approved at the highest levels of our government (not just the rogue behavior of “a few bad apples”).

There is no “commander in chief” exception to US laws, as the Bush administration and its supporters among the authoritarian right have argued. The Founders put the executive branch in Article II of the Constitution. Article I is the legislative branch. That is because we are a country of laws and those laws – passed by Congress and signed by the president – dictate what the executive branch can and cannot do. The Founders made it clear in the Constitution. Article II says that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Yes, the president is commander in chief of the armed forces. Which means only that he is at the top of the military chain of command. But Congress is given the power to make the rules for our armed forces. Article I in enumerating the powers of Congress lists, “To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces”. Nothing in the Constitution even remotely suggests that the commander in chief authority somehow gives the president the right to disregard any law he wants as long as he does it as the head of the military (that would, after all, make us essentially a military dictatorship). Just the opposite – the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate the military. (It’s ironic that “conservatives” who are always insisting on a “strict construction” of the words of the Constitution are willing to take the commander in chief authority and expand it to override everything else in the Constitution, giving the president unfettered power.)

It is worth noting, by the way, that most of the torture – or at least the worst of it – appears to have taken place under the auspices of the CIA – a civilian branch of government – not the military. So it is pretty hard to argue that the president’s power as commander in chief of the military gives him the power to order civilian branches of government to break the law. But that is the argument that Republicans are making these days.

[click to enlarge]

[See the Tom Tomorrow cartoon archive here.]

We’ve had a lot of information about our torture practices come out in recent weeks – it’s hard to keep track of it all. There was the leaked Report of the Red Cross (which is the entity charged with monitoring compliance with the Geneva Conventions) on US detention practices, which concluded, “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture”. And the infamous Torture Memos from the Bush “Justice” Department. And the unclassified version of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody released last week.

I’m not going to even begin to attempt to summarize all we have learned in recent weeks. But I will offer some observations.

To really appreciate our loss of moral bearings, just look at the language that’s being used – euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And “stress positions.” Sounds like you’re trying to figure out if you can get out of work on time to pick up the kids before day care closes. But what it ACTUALLY means is being bound in excruciatingly painful positions for unbearably long periods of time. In other words, it means TORTURE.

Or “sleep deprivation.” Sounds like a night of too much scotch and cocaine (e.g., Dubya when he was “young and irresponsible” – meaning, before he entered politics). But what it ACTUALLY means is being forced to stay awake for as long as eleven days. That’s right – ELEVEN DAYS. It’s right there – explicitly – in the 2002 torture memo signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee (who was rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals – one notch below the Supreme Court).

What do you have to DO to a person to keep him awake for ELEVEN DAYS? Nothing completely destroys a person’s psyche more thoroughly than sleep deprivation. That is WHY it is used as a means of torture. Because it is one of the most extreme and destructive methods of torture. Sadists over the centuries have learned its effectiveness.

And according to the torture memos while you are at it, you can destroy the individual’s sense of dignity and autonomy by imprisoning him NAKED. Just to make it clear he has NO POWER, maybe douse him with freezing water. Because, ultimately, torture is all about POWER.

According to the Bush “Justice” Department you can combine all these torture techniques. And you almost HAVE to. About the only way to keep a guy awake for ELEVEN DAYS is “stress positions.” Want an example? Look at the last panel in the cartoon above. That is taken from the Red Cross Report.

Philip Zelikow was executive director of the 9-11 Commission and a top aide to former Secretary of State Rice. He writes in Foreign Policy that the “focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program”:

…[w]hich is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time.

The plan employed the combined, cumulative use of many techniques of medically-monitored physical coercion. Before getting to water-boarding, the captive had already been stripped naked, shackled to ceiling chains keeping him standing so he cannot fall asleep for extended periods, hosed periodically with cold water, slapped around, jammed into boxes, etc. etc. Sleep deprivation is most important.

Let’s drop the euphemisms. This is what our right-wing authoritarians are defending:

Read the descriptions military personnel provided of prisoners' reactions to "enhanced interrogation": "Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning.... Yelled for Allah. Urinated on himself.... Trembled uncontrollably."

In the Los Angeles Times today, a co-counsel for one detainee, Abu Zubaydah, describes his treatment in US custody. (At the time, and even now, Zubaydah is described as a top al Qaeda leader. Subsequent reporting in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and by Ron Suskind in his book, "The One Percent Doctrine," describe Zubaydah as a minor logistics man, a travel agent, or a personnel clerk.)

He was the first prisoner in the "war on terror" to experience the full gamut of ancient techniques adapted by the communists in Korea and, 50 years later, approved by the Justice Department in Washington. He was the first prisoner to have his interrogations captured on videotape -- a practice the CIA ended in late 2002. Two years later, the agency destroyed 90 videotapes of Abu Zubaydah's interrogations, which resulted in a criminal investigation of government officials connected with the program.

Many questions about his interrogation remain unanswered, but two legs of the three-legged stool are firmly in place.

First, they beat him. As authorized by the Justice Department and confirmed by the Red Cross, they wrapped a collar around his neck and smashed him over and over against a wall. They forced his body into a tiny, pitch-dark box and left him for hours. They stripped him naked and suspended him from hooks in the ceiling. They kept him awake for days.

And they strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to "produce the sensation of suffocation and incipient panic." Eighty-three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture. I am content with the self-evident truth that it was wrong.

And as for water-boarding (which has been considered torture since Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition), the specific methods we used were adopted intact from the methods used by North Korea during the Korean war and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Those methods were not devised to elicit accurate information. They were designed to elicit false confessions … and basically just maximize sadistic pleasure without actually killing the victim. They were then used in SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) training for US servicemen to let them know the kind of thing our enemies might subject them to. Those SERE methods were then adopted by the CIA for … torture. They were not devised from experience or theory as methods designed to prove effective in eliciting reliable information. These techniques went from North Korean/Khmer Rouge > US military resistance training > adoption intact as US interrogation methods. We have become our enemy.

Speaking of Zelikow, he is something of an expert on the law as it relates to torture and made an attempt to point out to members of the Bush administration that the legal logic of the torture memos was deeply flawed and shouldn’t be relied upon:

At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.

[Rachel Maddow has a long interview with Zelikow: Part 1/Part 2.]

It is pretty clear that with torture, as with just about everything else, Bush, Cheney and those around them made aggressive efforts to ensure that no information that challenged their ideology and their actions ever saw the light of day.

As I said, torture is all about POWER. If you can torture someone under your power, you can do ANYTHING. Yes, including murder.

In June of last year, the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that over 100 detainees have died in US custody with up to 27 of them having been ruled to be homicides.

Then there are the “disappeareds.” According to Human Rights Watch, 35 suspects known to have been held in secret prisons as far back as 2001 are still unaccounted for. The name of one of those missing prisoners, Hassan Ghul, was apparently accidentally included unredacted in one of the torture memos:

According to the memo, Ghul was one of 28 CIA detainees at the time who had been subjected to the agency’s "enhanced interrogation techniques." Specifically, the memo says he was subjected to "facial hold," "facial slap," "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," a technique called "walling," in which a detainee’s shoulders are repeatedly smashed against a wall, and the "attention grasp [8]," in which the detainee is placed in a choke-hold and slapped.

Until this 2005 memo was released last week, the last time Ghul was heard from was 2004.

Thanks largely to Dick Cheney, who claimed last week that our torture was a “success,” the “torture debate” has now turned to the question of whether torture “works”.

Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post frames the issue correctly:

Yes, people break under torture and tell what they know, along with what they don't know and what they think their torturers want to hear. But there is no way to be certain that the valuable information wouldn't have been extracted through traditional -- and legal -- methods of interrogation.

Even if experts have differing views about torture's effectiveness, there is one point on which they cannot disagree: It violates U.S. and international law.

This is similar to President Obama’s response in his press conference yesterday:

[T]he public reports and the public justifications for these techniques, which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques, doesn't answer the core question.

Which is, could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these
techniques? And it doesn't answer the broader question, are we safer as a consequence of having used these techniques?

There appears to be a break between the FBI and the CIA when it comes to the question of whether torture “works” – understandably, since the FBI refused to participate in torture while the CIA did. From the New York Times:

In an interview with Vanity Fair last year, the F.B.I. director since 2001, Robert S.
Mueller III, was asked whether any attacks had been disrupted because of
intelligence obtained through the coercive methods. “I don’t believe that has been the case,” Mr. Mueller said. (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller, John Miller, said on Tuesday, “The quote is accurate.”)

One FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan, in a New York Times op-ed, writes about the successful efforts of the FBI and CIA in gaining “actionable intelligence” from Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002 using conventional interrogation methods (i.e., not torture). He disputes the claim that subsequent torture of Zubaydah produced anything of value:

Defenders of these [torture] techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and [Jose] Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.

Most of the specific claims of success using torture have similarly been refuted. It is worth taking the time to review this excellent timeline of some key events relevant to the “torture debate”. In addition to refuting claims of effectiveness for torture, the timeline also refutes some of the “ticking time bomb” justifications for torture – that in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 we didn’t know if another strike was imminent.

For example, the torture memos revealed that two prisoners, Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, were waterboarded a total of 266 times. In the case of Zubaydah, that happened in August 2002 – almost a year after 9-11. In the case of KSM, it happened in March 2003 – a year and a half after 9-11. This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario always posited by torture advocates and fans of “24”. In the case of Zubaydah, as Soufan notes, we learned a lot of useful intelligence from him – in March through June of 2002 when the FBI interrogated him with conventional (i.e., non-torture) methods. The torture started thereafter.

Karl Rove and FOX News, among others, have claimed that torture prevented a “West Coast 9-11.” They claim that CIA waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave authorities information used to foil a plot to hijack an airplane with a shoe bomb and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles. But as Timothy Noah in Slate and Daily Kos TV have documented, the Rove timetable just doesn't add up. While KSM was arrested in March 2003, the Los Angeles plot was stopped in February 2002 -- more than a year earlier. Rove's tale is a blatant falsehood.

The New York Times had an article this week on how an ABC News interview in 2007 with a former CIA official skewed the “debate” over waterboarding:

In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”

Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. “I think it was sanitized by the way it was described” in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group.

During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other
techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But
lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand
knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in
Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters
in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field. …

“It works, is the bottom line,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the next day. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

The Los Angeles Times had an article earlier this week on how the CIA avoided efforts to evaluate whether torture was actually effective in gaining actionable intelligence:

The CIA used an arsenal of severe interrogation techniques on imprisoned Al Qaeda suspects for nearly seven years without seeking a rigorous assessment of whether the methods were effective or necessary, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.The failure to conduct a comprehensive examination occurred despite calls to do so as early as 2003. That year, the agency's inspector general circulated drafts of a report that raised deep concerns about waterboarding and other methods, and recommended a study by outside experts on whether they worked. …

But neither the inspector general's report nor the other audits examined the effectiveness of interrogation techniques in detail or sought to scrutinize the assertions of CIA counter-terrorism officials that so-called enhanced methods were essential to the program's results. One report by a former government official -- not an interrogation expert -- was about 10 pages long and amounted to a glowing review of interrogation efforts."Nobody with expertise or experience in interrogation ever took a rigorous, systematic review of the various techniques -- enhanced or
otherwise -- to see what resulted in the best information," said a senior U.S.
intelligence official involved in overseeing the interrogation program.

As long as there is no definitive evaluation of the effectiveness of torture, you can claim anything, right?

Matthew Alexander was a highly-successful former interrogator who led the team that obtained the intelligence resulting in the capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (described in the book, “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq “). Writing in the Washington Post last November, Alexander also refuted the idea that torture is effective and describes part of the downside:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans. …

We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations --
and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

What is particularly shameful is that it is become increasingly clear (for example, from the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week) that much of the worst torture done in our name was undertaken because the Bush/Cheney administration was trying to come up with an Iraq-al Qaeda link to justify the Iraq war, not to protect us from some imminent threat. From a McClatchy article last week:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report
tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to
prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them. …

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration. …

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

The Bush administration’s determination to make the world conform to their ideology and rationalizations is truly astounding.

It has become increasingly apparent that most of the “detainees” seized in the “war on terror” were completely innocent. The vast majority were handed over by warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan in return for generous bounties. Some were bad guys, but some were just people the bounty recipient didn’t like – or, indeed, were handed over by a genuine bad guy to cover his own tracks. Since we didn’t capture the guys ourselves, and don’t speak the language or understand the culture, we were really pretty clueless as to the ultimate innocence or guilt of these people. As is typical with bureaucrats everywhere, our government officials didn’t want to admit their mistakes – especially if it would make them appear weak or, God forbid, someone who was released subsequently actually did something bad. The ultimate CYA – lock them up in a lawless black hole and try to forget about them.

As Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson, writes:

There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.

The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.

This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get he bastards to the interrogators".

It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces. …

[Another unreported dimension of the debate] is the ad hoc intelligence
philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot. …

So innocents were knowingly kept in detention to avoid having to admit mistakes and because they might have some information about something that, when combined with a lot of other stuff, might prove useful.

And these are the people Rumsfeld called, “the worst of the worst”.

Karl Rove recently said on FOX News (as shown in this great Daily Show clip): “All these techniques have now been ruined.”

This is my favorite argument against letting the American people know that their government has been torturing people. Rove nails it. Now our enemies will know we might torture them so they can train themselves to resist – as a result, the “techniques have now been ruined”. How, exactly, does one “train” to resist ELEVEN DAYS of sleep deprivation brought about through excruciatingly painful “stress positions”? And waterboarding has been a well-known favorite of sadists through the centuries and apparently that hasn’t diminished it continuing popularity. But put that aside. What I like is the premise of Rove’s objection – that we want our government to continue torturing people. Rove, and others like him, have actually stated the best reason FOR a full, public investigation of these torture practices – TO MAKE SURE THIS STUFF NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.

Personally, I think trying to prosecute people for this stuff would be counterproductive. As soon as a special prosecutor was named and a grand jury empanelled, all further releases of information would probably come to a halt because “it is the subject of a criminal investigation.” And I think it would be very hard to secure a conviction given the legal cover provided by the torture memos. It would be Hellish partisan warfare. Better to create an independent Truth Commission that has the power to grant immunity in return for testimony, as was done in South Africa. With immunity, no one can invoke his or her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. And if they lie or hide evidence (as Cheney’s office did in the Valerie Plame affair), they can be prosecuted for perjury or obstruction of justice (as Scooter Libby was). So EVERYTHING comes out. Let’s put Cheney to the test. If he claims that “torture works,” let’s find out. Get all the facts on the table. At least we can ensure that a truthful historical record is created and that the perpetrators live with their public infamy. And it might help ensure that this type of thing never happens again – at least not in this country.

(I do feel strongly, however, that Jay Bybee, now a Ninth Circuit Appeals Court judge, should be impeached. A war criminal should not hold a lifetime appointment to the second highest court in the land.)

I find it incredible that people who don’t trust the government to deliver the mail would be willing to give the government the power to torture people. In secret, of course. It must be kept secret. Because letting “the enemy” know our methods would “ruin” them.

Do we really want to give any government that power? Including our government?

Trust us. Trust BIG GOVERNMENT. We wouldn’t abuse our secret powers. Just trust us.

The fact that one of our two major political parties is almost unanimously supporting torture is staggering. History will not view this positively

Good thing these people are out of power.