The 13 Republicans who made torture possible

The 13 Republicans who made torture possible
On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

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

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

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

Media ignore question of whether Congress was briefed on torture dissent

Media ignore question of whether Congress was briefed on torture dissent
SUMMARY: Reporting on the CIA document detailing briefings members of Congress and staff received about harsh interrogation techniques, media outlets have largely ignored whether members were told there was significant disagreement within the administration regarding their legality and efficacy.



Media outlets have repeatedly reported on the recently released CIA document detailing briefings members of Congress and staff received about harsh interrogation techniques, including what and when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other congressional Democrats knew about those techniques, but have largely ignored whether members were told there was significant disagreement within the administration regarding the legality and efficacy of these techniques. The issue is crucial to assessing whether congressional Democrats consented to the methods, as prominent Republicans and media conservatives claim. In the absence of full information, there can be no consent, a point the media have largely ignored in their coverage of the issue. If, as the evidence suggests, Congress was not told that experts within the administration strongly disputed the legality and efficacy of the methods, then the alleged failure on the part of members of Congress to object is irrelevant, and culpability for their alleged failure to respond lies with those who denied them information crucial to making a judgment about whether the administration was acting in the best interest of the nation.

For example, in its coverage of Pelosi's May 14 press conference, The Washington Post did not note that, during the press conference, Pelosi stated that Congress was not provided with "contrary opinions within the Executive Branch [that] concluded that these [enhanced] interrogation techniques were not legal." Moreover, according to a Media Matters for America review* of the Post's coverage over the past month of what Pelosi knew about these techniques, the Post has not reported on, or raised, the question of whether Pelosi was informed of any dissent within the administration over the use of these techniques. Those who dissented include legal experts from the FBI and military who contested the Justice Department's determination that these EITs were legal; FBI and CIA counterintelligence experts who had reportedly expressed opposition to, and disputed the effectiveness of, the methods; and experts from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program who similarly expressed concerns about the efficacy of subjecting detainees to harsh interrogation techniques modeled after ones used in the SERE program. Media Matters has previously documented a recent pattern of the media minimizing the Bush administration's role in the torture debate.

LEGAL OBJECTIONS

In a May 15 Washington Post article on Pelosi's press conference, staff writer Paul Kane wrote that Pelosi's critics "contend that top Democrats were aware that CIA interrogators were using waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and that their support waned only after its use became public and led to an outcry from human rights activists." Similarly, in a May 15 Post analysis, national political correspondent Dan Balz wrote, "Conservatives say that, if Pelosi was so opposed to torture, she should have spoken out forcefully when she learned that these techniques were being employed. Her failure to do so then leaves her in a weakened position to protest now, they argue." But Kane and Balz did not note that, during her press conference, Pelosi stated that she was not told "there were other opinions within the executive branch that concluded that these interrogation techniques were not legal."

According to a May 2008 report from the Justice Department's office of the inspector general, following a meeting with FBI counterterrorism assistant director Pasquale D'Amuro "in approximately August 2002," FBI Director Robert Mueller determined "that the FBI would not participate in joint interrogations of detainees with other agencies in which harsh or extreme techniques not allowed by the FBI would be employed." D'Amuro recommended that the FBI not participate in part because "the use of the aggressive techniques failed to take into account an 'end game.' " D'Amuro added, "[E]ven a military tribunal would require some standard for admissibility of evidence. Obtaining information by way of 'aggressive' techniques would not only jeopardize the government's ability to use the information against the detainees, but also might have a negative impact on the agents' ability to testify in future proceedings." Additionally, in a November 27, 2002, legal analysis, FBI deputy director Marion Bowman wrote that several of the enhanced techniques -- including "[u]se of wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of drowning" -- "are not permitted by the US Constitution" and may violate the federal torture statute.

Further, a November 20, 2008, Senate Armed Services Committee report, released jointly by chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), documented concerns the military services expressed, including that the enhanced techniques -- requested for use at Guantánamo Bay and authorized by Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002 -- could not withstand legal scrutiny. On November 1, 2002, the Air Force commented on the request by expressing "serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques." The Marine Corps stated in a memo that "several of the Category II and III techniques arguably violate federal law, and would expose our service members to possible prosecution," and that the Corps "disagree[d] with the position that the proposed plan is legally sufficient." The Army, in turn, replied that it "interposes significant legal, policy and practical concerns regarding most of the Category II and all of the Category III techniques proposed." The committee report stated that a legal review subsequently initiated by Capt. Jane Dalton, legal counsel to the Joint Chiefs chairman, was "[q]uashe[d]" by Department of Defense general counsel Jim Haynes.

Republicans Blamed the CIA, Now They Hide Behind The CIA and Blame Democrats

Republicans Blamed the CIA, Now They Hide Behind The CIA and Blame Democrats
To the consternation of Republicans and the media – including CBS News and The Politico among other who have gleefully ran what sounds like something directly written from an RNC PR release - Democrats claim CIA out to get them. Democrats, also continue drive the media and Conservatives crazy by refusing to play good little lap dog. Now Republicans like cry-me-a-river baby House minority leader Republican Rep. John Boehner are f reigning some outrage – how dare Democrats question the word of the CIA, Rep. Boehner: Now and Then

John Boehner Now

John Boehner: “I’ve dealt with our intelligence professionals for the last three-and-a-half years on an almost daily basis, and it’s hard for me to imagine that our intelligence area would ever mislead a member of Congress. [Boehner Press Availability via The Hill, 5/14/2009]

John Boehner Then:

December 9, 2007:

Wolf Blitzer: “Are you suggesting, as I think you are, that you don’t necessarily have confidence in this new NIE?” (NIE- the CIA’s national Intelligence Estimate)

Rep. John Boehner: “Either I don’t have confidence in what they told me several months ago or I don’t have confidence in what they’re telling me today.” [CNN, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, 12/9/2007; emphasis added]

It was literally just a few months ago that Republicans were point blank accusing the CIA of being out to get them and Bush. The editors at the far right National Review, CIA Run Amok, May 8, 2006

The reasons for Porter Goss’s abrupt departure as CIA director are shrouded in mystery. But its effect is not. It gives the impression that there has been a coup by the CIA insiders who have waged a covert policy war against the Bush administration for five years. The White House must act quickly to correct the impression that the renegades have won.

[ ]..During the Bush presidency, however, the agency has not been content with subtly pushing its own agenda while underperforming its nominal mission. It has run amok. In fact, it worked assiduously—though unsuccessfully—to depose the administration in the 2004 election, and since then has continued brazenly undermining Bush’s foreign policy.

In a post by a far right Conservative blog called the Strata-Sphere, Rogue CIA Fires Back? May2, 2006 that engaged in some wild speculation of the motivations by the CIA in the investigation in the Rep Randy Cunningham’s (R) bribery scandal and echoing the thoughts of Drudge and a rabid right blogger called Macsmind, wrote,

Mac Ranger predicted the roque CIA agents trying to destroy this country through leaks would create some bizarre news. Sometimes we need to spell things out for the liberal puppets on the left, so I must point out again that the tools available to the CIA to gather information illegally and use it against people can be used by more than the President.

[ ]..The news that ex-CIA agents are talking to ABC News about an investigation into links between CIA contracts and Rep Randy Cunningham’s (R) bribery acts leads me to believe Cunningham may have been outed by some ex-CIA agents to send a message to the Reps and Bush.

John (AssRocket) at Powerline( once Time magazine’s blog of the year) wrote The CIA Comes Out of the Closet,September 7, 2004 Posted by John

Many people are unaware that the CIA is, and always has been, a liberal organization, its ranks dominated by Democrats.

[ ]..The CIA’s liberal orientation has been painfully evident over the last four years, as the agency has engaged in a virtual war with the Bush administration; its officials have been available 24/7 for anti-Bush leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Many of these Republican editorials are are fact free, never the less, the accusations that the CIA was a far left organization out to get Republicans and Bush in particular were a common theme as late as recently as last year.Stephen F. Hayes who was a political consultant to the Bush 43 administration in a column for neocon Bill Kristals Weeekly Standard, Paul Pillar Speaks, Again – The latest CIA attack on the Bush administration is nothing new (02/10/2006)(Linked to by multiple right-wing sites)

Think about that: A senior, unelected CIA official–Paul Pillar–was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, 2004, presidential election. That Pillar was among the most strident of these frequent critics–usually in off-the-record speeches to gatherings of foreign policy experts and business leaders–was well known to his colleagues in the intelligence community and to Bush administration policymakers. His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election. Pillar, who had complained to a CIA spokesman that someone had violated the ground rules by providing his name to Novak, simply got caught.

Pretty much standard rhetoric from the Right when it became known that Bush and surrogates such as Hayes told lies repeatedly in defense of lies about Iraq intelligence, WMD and non-existent al-Queda connections. The anti-Bush CIA was out to get the neocons. Hayes was and as far as I know continues to defend the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq in 2003 as a couldn’t-wait-considering-the-urgent threat cheerleaders. laughable now to most Americans in hindsight, but a commonly repeated bit of propaganda at the time.

Neocon and plagiarist of fascist writers, Michael Ledeen at The National Review,Sixteen Words, Again
The myth of a great sin lives on, April 10, 2006 ( again, linked to with great approval by multiple right-wing outlets)

The consensus at CIA was highly critical of these reports (most CIA officials were against the war and didn’t want to be blamed for it), but the White House, understandably very suspicious of the quality of CIA’s information and analysis, had pushed hard to get more information.

The Bush administration was using torture to produce false links between Iraq and al-Queda, thus Leeden and the Right accused anyone up to and including the CIA of being pro-terrorist. Leeden also managed, in the same column, to mangle and lie about every known fact concerning Joseph Wilson and the Niger yelllow-cake claims in one of the Right’s lamest attempts to smear Wilson and the CIA. He even gives more credit to some iffy French intelligence service reports then the CIA.

John McCain(R-AZ), who was against water boarding before he was for it is often given credit from moderates or condemnation from the freeper crowd for the charade known as the Detainee Treatment Act ( which Bush promptly arranged a photo-op then ignored via yet another signing statement) also thought the CIA was out to undermine the neocon agenda,

“McCain would be an absolute disaster,” says a second recently retired senior US intelligence operations officer. “He is prejudiced against the CIA. The day after the 2004 election when Bush won, McCain came on TV and gave an interview in which he said something to the effect of, ‘The CIA tried to sabotage this election. They’ve made their bed and now they have to lay in it.‘ I used to like McCain, but he is inconsistent.” Columnist Robert Novak quoted McCain in November 2004 as saying, “With CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization.”

McCain is influenced by a circle of hardline Republican legislators and congressional staff as well as disgruntled former Agency officials “who all had these long-standing grudges against people in the Agency,” the former senior intelligence officer said. “They think the CIA is a hotbed of liberals. Right-wing, nutty paranoia stuff. They all love the military and hate the CIA. Because the CIA tells them stuff they don’t want to hear.”

Many in the media want to portray Democrats as paranoid. If they keep at and cross their fingers and hope that most American’s memory is as long and credible as John Boehner’s that tactic may work. On the other hand if anyone in the media wants to use Lexus-Nexus or Google for fifteen minutes they’ll find that until recently as far as most Republicans were concerned the CIA were all radical leftists out to get them. This year’s fashions have changed. Now that the CIA has issued some memos gathered from from memories of some nameless faceless sources, it is Democrats who are allegedly paranoid. The CIA is in many ways like a large corporation that employs thousands of people whose personal politics vary as much as any work place. There are probably factions within department and the entire agency that differ in opinion about how things should be run. Now, one gets the impression that more then a political left-right agenda they’re probably just looking out for their own, much like large police departments are known to have tense relationships with their internal affairs departments. A Truth Commission in which the CIA, former Bush officials including Bush and Cheney, and even Speaker Pelosi and former Senator Bob Graham – all under oath. Then let the truth fall where it may, but that is exactly what the former Republican CIA haters do not want, thus the continuing battle of media sound bites and editorials rather then testimony,

“What struck me(former Senator Graham)…was the fact that in that briefing, there were also two staff members,” he said. “As you know, the general rule is that the executive is to brief the full committees of the House and Senate Intelligence committees about any ongoing or proposed action. The exception to that is what is called “covert action,” where the president…only briefs the Gang of Eight, which is the four congressional leaders and the four intelligence committee leaders. Those sessions are generally conducted at an executive site, primarily at the White House itself. And they are conducted with just the authorized personnel, not with any staff or any other member of the committee…. Which leads me to conclude that this was not considered by the CIA to be a Gang of Eight briefing. Otherwise they would not have had staff in the room. And that leads me to then believe that they didn’t brief us on any of the sensitive programs such as the waterboarding or other forms of excessive interrogation.”

The remarks made by Graham bolster the comments offered by Pelosi on Thursday. The Speaker told reporters that during her briefing session in the fall of 2002 she was not just kept in the dark about the issue of waterboarding, she was assured that it had not been used.

“Yes, I am saying that the CIA was misleading the Congress,” she said.

Senator Lindsey Graham's Twinkie Defense

Senator Lindsey Graham's Twinkie Defense
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina loves the law. Nuts about it. We know this because he tells us this many, many times at this morning's Senate subcommittee hearing on "What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration." We know he loves the law because he says "[t]he fact that we embrace the rule of law is a strength" and that "the only way is to operate within the law," and he says these things mere seconds after he explains that in the desperate days after 9/11, when the lawyers were crafting legal arguments to legalize conduct that was illegal, they did so because "they saw law as a nicety we couldn't afford."

So the real question for the committee, the one we never get to, is how much rule of law can we afford, and what happens to the rule of law when you're getting it for 10 cents on the dollar?

Graham dismisses today's hearing as a "political stunt" because "we would not be having this hearing if we were attacked this afternoon." What this really means is that for all his talk of legality and law and the rule of law, in his view the law means one thing "in the quiet peace of the moment" and something entirely different in the immediate aftermath of a terrorism strike. It's sort of like a national Twinkie defense, but Graham is willing to strap a saddle onto that Twinkie today and ride ... and ride and ride.

Former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow is also thinking about how we will all go crazy after the next terror strike when he testifies: "We could be hit again and hit hard. But our decision to respect basic international standards does not appear to be a big hindrance in this fight. ... Others may disagree. They may believe ... that America needs an elaborate program of indefinite secret detention and physical coercion in order to protect the nation. The government, and the country, needs to decide whether they are right. If they are right, our laws must change and our country must change. I think they are wrong."

So it's really very simple. If torture and indefinite detention and wiretapping are justified, says Zelikow, we need to make them legal now, before the next attack. But nobody-not even Graham-is willing to say that these things are justified. Graham is at pains to say water-boarding is abhorrent. When another witness, Professor Jeffrey Addicott of St. Mary's University School of Law, testifies that "it's just propaganda that we tortured people," Sen. Graham shuts him down. When Addicott insists that it's "insane" to close Guantanamo because it would be "sending a message to the world that we have something to apologize for," Graham cuts him off to concede that America does indeed have an "image problem." Nobody is allowed to undermine the rule of law-except Graham, of course.

All morning, Graham clings to the argument that he believes in the rule of law. And as he does so, he explains that the lawbreaking that happened with respect to torture: a) wasn't lawbreaking, b) was justifiable lawbreaking, c) was lawbreaking done with the complicity of congressional Democrats, d) doesn't matter because al-Qaida is terrible, or e) wouldn't be lawbreaking if the Spanish police were doing it.

Graham asks Zelikow, who argues for closing Guantanamo, how many released detainees have rejoined the battlefield. Zelikow hazards that the number is about a dozen. "What if your son or daughter was killed by them?" parries Graham.

Zelikow produced a legal memo in 2006 disputing the constitutional underpinnings of the torture regime. That memo was disappeared and never heard from again. Zelikow says it's now been located and is undergoing review for declassification. As he puts it, on receiving that memo, the White House could have said, "Let's take another look at this," and see whether there was any validity to the different opinion, or "This shows how rusty you are in practicing law. We need to tell you why you've misunderstood this area of the law." But the White House did neither. They just buried it and "shut down challenges even from peers inside the government."

The highlight of the hearing was supposed to be former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who was going to testify to the fact that abusive interrogation was "slow, ineffective and unreliable" and that Bush administration claims about critical information that was elicited through torture were "half truths," since most of the information they cite was gleaned by other methods. Soufan testifies from behind a panel for security reasons, and photographers are purged from the room, which is all very Get Smart, but Graham won't give the man a chance to speak. Time and again, Soufan-the only man present who has ever conducted an interrogation-begs to speak. But Graham keeps hollering at him about how dare he purport to speak for all interrogators everywhere. (Erm. He didn't.)

Ethics expert David Luban testifies that the Office of Legal Counsel memos were an "ethical train wreck" that "read as if they were reverse engineered to reach a predetermined outcome." Luban's main point is that if your 4-year-old Googled "water board," they would discover a 26-year-old appellate opinion repeatedly referring to the technique as "torture." But somehow this "single most relevant case in American law" was never even mentioned in the torture memos. Graham's masterful cross examination of Luban ranges from accusing the man of never having met Jay Bybee or John Yoo, accusing him of calling another panelist-Addicott-unethical since he also believes water-boarding is not torture, and accusing him of misleading the panel for failing to cite a case. The net effect of this performance is to establish conclusively that shouting at, browbeating, and humiliating someone is unlikely to produce any useful intelligence. Such subtlety would be lost on Sen. Graham.
© 2009 Slate
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Hey America the Pundits Blame You for Bush and Cheney's Torture Policies

Hey America the Pundits Blame You for Bush and Cheney's Torture Policies
What is it about torture that is so seductive to our mainstream media?

First, our leading (and often "liberal") commentators and analysts, writing in supposedly respectable publications such as Newsweek and The Atlantic, tried to appear as tough-minded believers in realpolitik by siding with such REALLY tough-minded believers as Dick Cheney when he led our country over to "the dark side."

Then multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Friedman -- ever consistent and persistent in his excuse making for the powerful -- hailed, in a recent column, Barack ("Split the baby") Obama's "torturous compromise" to expose, but not prosecute, those responsible for violating our Constitution and international law by torturing in our names. This despite the fact that, as Friedman accurately noted, "more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials."

Then Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, agreed with Friedman's contention that there should be no torture prosecutions because we had all "acquiesced" in the Bush-Cheney Torture Agenda; we were all "the President's accomplices," and thus "pursuing criminal charges would be too hard legally and politically and too easy morally.' According to Weisberg's twisted morality and logic, "Prosecuting Bush and his men won't absolve the rest of us for what we let them do."

His explanation for this astounding conclusion is simply that "everyone knew" about the torture -- so no one should be prosecuted for it:

"Congress was informed about what was happening and raised no objection. The public knew, too. By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture on those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention. This is part of what makes applying a criminal justice model to those most directly responsible such a bad idea. The issue we need to come to terms with is not just who in the Bush administration did what but how we were collectively complicit in their decisions."

Unfortunately, seeing and hearing leading and allegedly liberal media figures such as Weisberg and Friedman blame the rest of us for the Bush-Cheney moral failings -- and then claim that prosecuting senior officials who break the law will "rip our country apart" -- has now become as common as seeing and hearing the likes of Newsweek Senior Editor and NBC News correspondent Jonathan Alter, or The Atlantic's National Correspondent Mark Bowden, say things like "In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to torture," which can "be morally sound," as Bowden wrote. "It may be clear that coercion is sometimes the right choice."

"Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap?" Alter demanded. "How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings?"

As Bowden explained in the formerly august pages of The Atlantic, "The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matterTorture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced."

That makes US accomplices? I think not - remember, the same media figures told us, falsely, that "Some torture clearly works," that "we need to keep an open mind" about it, and that "we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical." After all, my fellow "accomplices," as Alter wrote in his Newsweek column shortly after 9/11: "Nobody said this was going to be pretty."

But nobody ever said it would get this ugly, either! As if the calls for torture and the claims that prosecution will "be too hard legally and politically and too easy morally" weren't infuriating enough, we now find the latest media/torture depredation: The Philadelphia Inquirer has had torture architect John Yoo on its payroll as a columnist since last year!

As revealed by Will Bunch in his excellent Attytood blog, the Inquirer now "defends the indefensible" with its warding of a monthly column to Yoo, author of the infamous 'torture memos' that in 2002 and 2003 gave Bush and Cheney "the legal cover to violate the human rights of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, based on the now mostly ridiculed claim that international and U.S. laws against such torture practices did not apply." As Bunch noted, "Working closely with Dick Cheney, Cheney's staff and others, Yoo set into motion the brutal actions that left a deep, indelible stain on the American soul."

Not deep enough, however, to prevent Bunch's "colleagues upstairs at the Philadelphia Inquirer" from signing Yoo up for a regular monthly column. "The Inquirer thus handed Yoo a loud megaphone on what was once a hallowed piece of real estate in American journalism," Bunch pointed out. "To write on the very subjects that have now led Justice Department investigators to reportedly recommend disbarment proceedings against Yoo and has led international prosecutors as well as millions of politically engaged Americans" to consider him worthy of charging with war crimes.

"Yoo's immoral guidance," Bunch says, "aided the United States in sanctioning the torture practice known as waterboarding -- used in the Spanish Inquisition, by despots such as Pol Pot and by Chinese Communists in the Korean War to obtain false confessions from Americans -- as well as slamming detainees into walls, part of a harsh interrogation regime that has been linked to the deaths of at least a dozen U.S. detainees and possibly more. But apparently the Inquirer didn't get the memo on Yoo."

Or maybe they did - and that's why they hired him. After all, defending torture -- and the torturers -- is now a long accepted practice in American journalism, one that brings you much acclaim and access to power, bylines, headlines, prestigious awards, and lucrative contracts.

Plus there are all the reader benefits to consider as well! As editorial page editor Harold Jackson's stated, Inquirer readers now "have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary."

Oh good -- just what we need from our leading media - further discourse on why torture is a good thing from a columnist who is also America's top defender of the practice. And of course let's remember, while we're at it, never to prosecute Yoo for actions that have shredded our democratic values. After all, we're all his accomplices if you believe the media!

Weisberg, Friedman and their ilk should be ashamed of themselves. Kudos instead to Will Bunch, who had it right when he concluded:

"For a much-honored newspaper like the Inquirer to pay someone like Yoo to write a regular column is surely the exclamation point on a dark period in which most of my profession flunked its greatest moral test. As an American citizen, I am still reeling from the knowledge that our government tortured people in my name. As a journalist, the fact that my byline and John Yoo's are now rolling off the same printing press is adding insult to injury."

Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor is the author of "Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio" (AlterNet Books, 2008). O'Connor also writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

Between 2002 and 2007, the United States lost 43,603 real farms

Between 2002 and 2007, the United States lost 43,603 real farms
When the Agriculture Department released its 2007 census recently, the news appeared surprisingly good: For the first time since World War II, the United States did not lose farms, it gained them -- 75,810, to be exact, for a total of 2.2 million.

But on closer inspection, the numbers aren't so hopeful. The discrepancy stems from this tricky question: What is a farm? The census has changed its definition nine times since 1850, most recently to "any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year."

This loose definition is meant to err on the side of inclusion, but ultimately it just errs. Take, for example, the four chickens I keep in my back yard. I sometimes sell eggs to neighbors, and at the going rate I could make $500 a year. If I got four more hens, my suburban home could qualify as a farm.

Silly, right? But where do you place the lower limit -- or the upper limit? The Cargill feedlot in Lockney, Texas, consists of 60,000 cattle kept in dirt yards and fattened on feed grown elsewhere. Is that a farm? While the census says yes, most Americans would say no.

So then, what is a farm? To answer that, we must first ask: Why do we care? Really, why is it good news when farms -- and, more importantly, the farmers who run them -- increase?

There are sentimental reasons, of course, but there is also a practical reason. Farmers are valuable because they bring human scale to our massive food system. Think of how many people, in the wake of each new salmonella scare, turn to the farmers market. We do so because we know that farmers bring oversight and ethics to food production, contributions that only individual humans can offer.

In the future, farmers' importance will only grow. Their intimate, human-scale knowledge of the land is what will allow agriculture to adapt to climate change. And as the cheap energy that industrial agriculture depends on disappears, it is farmers, with their small-scale innovation and sheer manual labor, who will feed us. Why do we care about having more farmers? Because deep down we know they are essential to a functioning food system.

So I offer this new definition of a farmer: someone who grows crops in sufficient quantity to be a true commercial entity, yet is still close enough to the ground to bring human scale and values to the process. Not the backyard chicken enthusiast, nor the corporation behind the feedlot, but the individual human on the land, growing our food.

Revisit the census with this definition, and the good news vanishes. The USDA's reported increases occurred exclusively in farms with yearly sales of less than $2,500 or more than $500,000 -- that is, the backyard operations and the corporate-scale businesses. In every other category, the numbers dropped or, in one case, stayed the same. Between 2002 and 2007, the United States actually lost 43,603 real farms.

To stop this hemorrhaging, we must shift from blindly encouraging production to investing in a system that values farmers and propagates them. We need to help new farmers obtain markets, land and credit.

Big Business Gearing Up for a Fight Against Obama's Environmental Program

Crying Wolf Again: Big Business Gearing Up for a Fight Against Obama's Environmental Program by Donald Cohen & Peter Dreier
In its first 100 days, the Obama administration did more to address global warming and the environmental crisis than the Bush administration did in eight years.

The new president is moving on many fronts. So far, Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider California's request to regulate pollution from auto emissions. He directed the Department of Transportation to finalize new fuel-efficiency standards. He made environmental progress a key feature of his first proposed federal budget by including tax breaks for clean energy research and eliminating a host of oil and gas industry tax breaks. The savings, along with revenues from Obama's proposed cap and trade policy, will generate billions for renewable energy projects. And, he restored science to its rightful place in the formulation of environmental policy.

Obama knows, though, that the big environmental battles are still to come. In a interview last month, Lisa Jackson, Obama's EPA administrator, anticipated how opponents would attack the president's environmental reforms. "If you look at the history of environmental laws in this country, " she explained, "every time ... the lobbyists say, 'Oh, this will shut down the American economy. Every last one of you will lose jobs.' It's always these overblown, doomsday scenarios that overlook ... the fact that you can indeed build an economy towards green energy."

Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Bush EPA violated the Clean Air Act by refusing to regulate greenhouse gases. Until he left office, Bush stonewalled, failing to take action. But in April, Obama's EPA reversed course. It declared carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that endanger public health and welfare. This was the needed step to allow the EPA to develop regulations to address some of the most significant causes of global warming, such as auto emissions or power plants.

As Jackson predicted, the fear mongers and doomsayers are crying wolf once again. Corporate polluters, their political allies, and their policy apologists argue that government action to prevent potentially devastating impacts of global warming will wreak economic havoc. Sen. Christopher Bond, a Missouri Republican, charged that the EPA declaration on greenhouse gases "will do more to endanger families, farmers and workers with new energy taxes and lost jobs than it does to protect the environment."

The toxic business lobby is gearing up for a major political battle. The 50 largest electric utility companies spent a total of $51 million in the last six months of 2008 on lobbying expenditures -- $12 million more than the same period in 2007. This is just a downpayment on their political warchest to stop real environmental progress.

The sky-is-falling coalition is already using the same rhetoric it has used for every effort to address air pollution and global warming.

Crying Wolf about fuel standards

For decades, the auto industry fought every effort to increase fuel standards and reduce emissions. The car companies and their political flunkies claimed that the industry would face ruin, that consumers would lose choices, and that autos would become unsafe for drivers and passengers.

Scientists have long understood the connection between auto pollution and public health problems. Auto emissions have been linked to increased risk of asthma, lung cancer, leukemia and other ailments. According to the American Lung Association, air pollution from motor vehicles is responsible for from $40 billion to $50 billion in annual health care costs and as many as 120,000 unnecessary or premature deaths each year.

In the early 1970s, when the EPA was considering whether to require the installation of catalytic converters, Ernest Starkman, a General Motors VP, charged that "[I]f GM is forced to introduce catalytic converter systems across the board on 1975 models...[i]t is conceivable that complete stoppage of the entire production (system) could occur, with the obvious tremendous loss to the company, shareholders, employees, suppliers and communities."

In 1975, Congress -- reacting to the shock of the 1973 oil crisis, long lines at gas station pumps, and nascent environmental consciousness -- passed the Energy Policy Conservation Act. For the first time, the federal government established CAFE (mileage) standards for passenger cars and light trucks and called for doubling passenger vehicle fuel efficiency - to 27.5 miles per gallon - by 1985. Industry execs repeated the same Crying Wolf arguments that they'd used before. For example:

* General Motors President E.M. Estes argued in 1975 that CAFE standards would bring about a world in which "...absent a significant technological breakthrough...the largest car the industry will be selling in any volume at all will probably be smaller, lighter and less powerful than today's compact Chevy Nova."

* A Ford executive claimed that the law would "...result in a Ford product line consisting either of all sub-Pinto-sized vehicles or some mix of vehicles ranging from sub-sub-compact to perhaps a Maverick."

* Alan Loofburrow, Chrysler Vice President of Engineering, warned in his testimony before Congress that the new law would "...outlaw a number of engine lines and car models including most full-size sedans and station wagons. It would restrict the industry to producing subcompact size cars-or even smaller ones-within five years."

Even before the auto companies began producing mega-cars like the Hummer, industry execs argued that Americans wanted them to produce gas guzzling SUVs, while the rest of the world was predicting and adapting to the obvious need for a more environmentally-friendly fleet of cars.

Chrysler met Congress's CAFÉ fuel efficiency goals within a decade, but Ford and GM had still not reached the required mandate. Rather than work harder to comply, they poured their resources into pressuring Congress to roll back the standards. In what has become a Cry Wolf mantra, the auto giants threatened the Reagan administration that if they didn't get relief from the mileage standards, they'd move more jobs overseas.

* GM Chairman Roger Smith warned: "...[W]ith the CAFE running on up, we could close some plants. There's no question about it."

* "Ford Vice President Helen O. Petrauskas, testifying before a Senate subcommittee, claimed: "...[H]igher CAFE standards will divert industry resources from work on other national goals."

After GM and Ford threatened to export jobs, Congress blinked, granting the two automakers rollbacks for the next several years.

In 1990, Senators Richard Bryan (D-NV) and Slade Gorton (R-WA) sponsored a bill that aimed to lift fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks by 40% over the next decade. The auto industry along with industry funded think tanks, geared up again:

* Ford Chairman Harold Poling predicted in 1991 that a boost in CAFE standards would mean that "You would see large cars pretty much go away. You might see a few Taurus and Sable sizes, but not many."

* Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute on CNN's Crossfire: "CAFE is the real blood-for-oil policy-it will spill blood on the highways of this country."

* The industry lobby used its campaign warchest to pay for TV ads in key Congressional districts, seeking to frighten voters into equating stronger environmental standards with lays offs and a lower standard of living. According to the Washington Post, "The television advertisement shows a huge car smashing a tiny one to smithereens. After the collision, the voice-over says: 'While smaller cars can save gas, they could cost you something far more precious.'"

The industry's propaganda and lobby effort paid off. Although the bill passed 14-4 in the Commerce Committee, industry-friendly Senators filibustered on the Senate floor, killing the legislation. Had the bill passed, CAFE standards would have reached 40 miles per gallon for cars and 29 miles per gallon for light trucks by 2001.

Crying Wolf about global warming

The auto industry's fanatic fear-mongering has been a consistent part of the public debate over the environment and public. The car companies fight efforts to acknowledge the reality of global warming and then battle to kill legislaiton to reduce it. In 1997 when other nations began embracing the Kyoto Protocol, pledging to reduce their pollution to below 1990 levels over the next 10 to 15 years, the U.S. auto industry lobbied American elected officials to keep our signature off the document, warning that doing so would bring economic devastation:

* Parroting the industry line, Sen. Chuck Hagel, (R-Nebraska) said "The economic impact would be devastating for the United States. We would see the loss of millions of jobs, entire industries would flee to other countries, our people would face higher fuel costs, higher taxes, leading to lower productivity and a lower standard of living."

* Similarly, in 1999, Michigan Republican Rep. Knollenberg charged at a Republican-controlled congressional hearing of the subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs entitled "Kyoto Protocol: Is that Clinton Gore-Administration selling out Americans?", that the treaty would "cause energy prices to soar and the standard of living in our country to plummet." He said it would result in the elimination of over 2.4 million American jobs by the year 2010.

* In 1997, Andrew Card, the former chief of staff for President George W. Bush who was then president of the American Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said that the Clinton administration's proposal for the Kyoto conference would cause "soaring production costs and significantly higher driving costs -- the rationing schemes, energy taxes or other mechanisms with comparable effect."

* Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican, testified in 2003 that "Kyoto is an economic weapon designed to undermine the global competitiveness and economic superiority of the United States."

By now we know that these claims, repeated over and over again in these and many other legislative battles, we're just plain wrong. In 1973, just two months after successfully getting the EPA to delay the requirement for catalytic converters, the automakers announced that they would install them anyway in every car. And they acknowledged that converters would generate fuel economy gains of up to 20%.

Contradicting predictions of massive job loss, a study released last October by David Roland-Holst, a University of California at Berkeley economist, found that California's energy efficiency policies actually created nearly 1.5 million jobs. The study found that consumers were able to reduce their energy spending and divert those savings to other parts of the economy, creating demand for addtional jobs in the grocery and consumer goods sectors.

If fact, had the auto industry not been so short-sighted, and embraced earlier calls to make more environmentally-friendly vehicles, they wouldn't be in the mess they're in now. Tough fuel and safety standards would have helped the industry strengthen its global competitiveness, as gas prices increased and consumers fled from gas guzzling SUVs and pickups in the last two years.

The auto industry's resistance and fear mongering has helped bring us far too close to an environmental precipice. Had the U.S. stepped up and become a leader in the global challenge, our cars would be more fuel efficient, we would be more energy independent, our skies would be cleaner, our public would be healthier, and our economy would be stronger.

But the political clout of big business, including the auto industry, backed up by industry-funded think tanks and front groups that deny the reality of global warming, has harmed the economy and threatened our planet.

The auto industry and its allies have been consistently wrong whenever they've warned that tougher standards will destroy car company's profits and kill jobs. Yet they continue to roll out the same misleading arguments to undermine Congressional support for up-to-date regulations. Why should anyone believe them now?

President Obama needs to and will go much further to reduce America's carbon footprint and aggressively retool and regulate where necessary to meet the challenge of global warming. Industry resisters will likely continue to Cry Wolf as they have in the past at each and every step. When they do, we should just use Ronald Reagan's famous and dismissive phrase "there they go again" and then do the right thing.