Even George Will is appalled by Cheney

Thought you might enjoy George Will’s response on “This Week” when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Dick Cheney’s accusation that President Obama, by taking his time before deciding on a strategy in Afghanistan, is “dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.” Here’s how Will began:

A bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. For a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action.

Good stuff, although a few caveats are in order. First, though Will is a conservative, he’s not a neoconservative, and he’s been notably less enthusiastic about foreign adverturism over the years than his neobrethren. Second, he came out against the war in Afghanistan weeks ago. Third, Will has never been much taken with the Bush clan or its minions.

But still. With the war-mongering Laura Ingraham fulminating on the same set today (and when is she going to enlist?), it was heartening to hear a sane conservative call out Cheney’s posturing for what it is.

Obama’s Nobel Prize

I should be reading the papers and getting ready for class, but I just want to get this out there first. No doubt the topic will inspire a long string of comments, and probably a few of you will have more coherent thoughts than I do.

President Obama is a leader of extraordinary promise. I think he’s already accomplished a lot. His policies helped steer the worst economic crisis since the 1930s into something like a normal recession. He’s come closer to enacting comprehensive health-care reform than any previous president.

And, yes, his approach to foreign policy has combined pragmatism, cooperation and an orientation toward negotiation and peace that stands in stark contrast with the belligerent Bush-Cheney team. I’m also glad he’s rethinking his original desire to escalate in Afghanistan.

That said, I’m puzzled, to say the least, by his winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I think Obama might well have been Nobel-worthy in a couple of years, depending on what he’s able to accomplish with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Iran and its nuclear aspirations, with the Afghanistan-Pakistan mess and with North Korea. And that’s assuming he can find willing negotiating partners.

For the Nobel committee to award its most prestigious honor to Obama at this early stage of his presidency, the members must have been thinking one of two things:

• He deserves it for all sorts of symbolic reasons: he’s the first African-American president, he represents a clean break with George W. Bush and he’s reached out to the international community in a variety of ways.
• He doesn’t really deserve it, but he should get it in order to give him ammunition (oops; bad word) against his critics and to provide some momentum to his peace-making efforts.

I don’t think either of those reasons are good enough.

Conservatives, needless to say, are going to have a field day with this, comparing it to previous Nobels they think were undeserving, such as those given to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. By contrast, I think Gore and especially Carter were very deserving recipients who received the honor on the basis of many years of hard work.

Many liberals are going to be thrilled that Obama won, although the early buzz on the left, based solely on my monitoring of Twitter, is that at least some liberals are as perplexed as I am.

Not that Obama is the worst selection ever. Certainly there have been much more undeserving recipients, such as Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. (Despite what some conservatives are claiming on Twitter, Adolf Hitler did not win the Nobel. Try looking it up, folks.)

Anyway — there you have it. Discuss among yourselves.

Spying on the antiwar movement

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at a disturbing, underreported revelation: that a public-records request in Washington State revealed an antiwar activist was, in fact, a military spy whose activities may have been a violation of federal law. And I argue that President Obama can no longer ignore calls to investigate the Bush-Cheney White House.

NPR ombudsman Shepard responds

NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard has responded to my item of last week in which I criticized her for defending NPR’s policy of refusing to refer to waterboarding as “torture.” She writes:

Yes, President Obama and AG Eric Holder have said that waterboarding was torture. I’d personally call it torture. But if you were an editor at the Globe, would you say that someone tortured another person? Or would you want to use a direct or indirect quote, i.e., “John Smith said the guard tortured him”?

I’m not trying to say what is and is not torture, but is every abuse classified as torture now or are there degrees? When a police officer throws a suspect to the ground and handcuffs them, is that torture or simply abuse?

Would it be better to, say, describe the technique and then say some call it torture? I do not think enhanced interrogation techniques is acceptable either. That’s why I come down on describing the technique and adding that some call it torture.

Shepard asks, so I’ll attempt a few answers.

I’m not sure what Shepard thinks there is to gain by skiing down the slippery slope from waterboarding to getting rough with a suspect during an arrest. In my original item, I strictly limited my remarks to waterboarding, recognized as torture by just about everyone on the planet.

The opinions of Obama and Holder are entirely unnecessary to determining whether waterboarding is torture.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, the United States executed several Japanese military officers for waterboarding American prisoners of war after World War II. And as I wrote last week, if NPR really can’t bring itself to use the T-word, perhaps it can describe waterboarding as “an interrogation technique once considered so heinous by the United States that it hanged Japanese officers for doing it to Americans.”

So yes, if I were an editor at the Boston Globe, you’re damn right I would refer to waterboarding as torture. That seems about as solid as referring to oil as a fossil fuel, or baseball as a sport. By eschewing the term “torture” to describe a practice that the entire international community regards as such, NPR is not being neutral. Rather, it is embracing a euphemism that places the network squarely on the side of the torturers and their enablers.

NPR should not use enhanced interrogation techniques on the English language.

Thursday update: I was not as precise as I wanted to be when I wrote about “everyone on the planet,” as I was in a rush and had lousy Internet access. Last week, Bob Garfield of “On the Media” interviewed Shepard and made the point I was trying to make:

The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that waterboarding is torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross have called what the U.S. did “torture.” Waterboarding is unambiguously in violation of the International Convention on Torture, which has been ratified by 140-some countries.

The United States is among those 140 countries, but, as the Associated Press reported in 2002, the Bush administration sought to block enforcement of the measure when inspectors wanted to visit Guantánamo.

Torture is not only a moral problem, but it has a precise legal meaning that most definitely encompasses waterboarding.

David Brooks almost gets it right

David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times is smart and useful in its treatment of the similarities between the national-security policies of President Obama and those of George W. Bush after 2003 (though I think a more reasonable date to pick would be 2005), and of the differences between the Bush team and Dick Cheney during the waning years of the Bush White House.

But Brooks misses entirely why Obama has been more successful in selling those policies. It’s not just that Obama is more skillful at it, and understands public leadership better than Bush ever did. More than anything, it’s that when Bush finally moved away from the abject failures of the Bush-Cheney years, they were his failures.

Bush may have begun doing the right thing — or, at least, he may have begun doing the wrong thing less often — but he no longer had any credibility. Thus, by the time Condoleezza Rice had begun moving foreign policy in a less-insane direction, Bush had already irretrievably cast himself as a malleable tool.

Nor are the choices Obama is making today — on Guantánamo, on torture photos, on military tribunals — the sorts of things that will gain any real support on their own merits. Rather, most reasonable people see them as the least-bad decisions he could make given the “mess” that he inherited from Bush, as he put it yesterday.

Again, not an argument Bush could have made.

How to avoid prosecuting Bush and Cheney

Prosecuting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others for torture-related war crimes would be madness, and President Obama clearly doesn’t want to do it. But torture is serious business. What should we do?

At ThePhoenix.com, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate shows us the way out.

David Gregory grooves one for Rice

Could David Gregory have possibly done a worse job in his interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on “Meet the Press” Sunday? More than anything, what stood out was the moment when he made her own false point for her, sparing her the trouble of having to do it herself:

GREGORY: Let’s talk about Iraq. The president’s final visit there as president happening just a week ago today, and what became, obviously, the most noticed image of that trip was this press conference with the prime minister and a member of the press throwing his shoes. As the president pointed out, as you’ve pointed out, certainly a sign of freedom in Iraq.

RICE: Yes.

GREGORY: You got a press corps that can speak its mind and act the way it wants to act.

Notice that the Gregory quotes contain several English-like phrases, but that he is not actually speaking English. But to my point: Gregory cites the shoe-throwing incident as “a sign of freedom in Iraq,” following up with: “You got [sic] a press corps that can speak its mind and act the way it wants to act.”

Well, yes, for those members of the press who are willing to pay the consequences. The reporter who threw his shoes at Bush, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, was reportedly beaten so badly after the incident that there was blood on the floor.

Al-Zeidi was then hauled off to jail, where he sits to this day. He is scheduled to go on trial on Dec. 31, and could face as much as 15 years in prison, although such a harsh sentence is reportedly not likely.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. You can’t assault the head of state from another country, standing next to your prime minister, and face no consequences. For that matter, if an American reporter had stood up at a White House news conference and thrown his shoes at the president, he’d be in trouble, too.

But Gregory, rather than make those common-sense observations, chose instead to say something completely untrue, making the interview even easier for Rice than it otherwise would have been.

Then again, Gregory had scored the first major interview with the secretary of state since Vice President Dick Cheney publicly bragged about his role in promoting torture and in going to war regardless of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And Gregory didn’t ask Rice about Cheney’s statements, either.

Gregory is not off to a good start in his new role.

Darth Vader returns

In my latest for the Guardian, I express my shock and horror at Dick Cheney’s interview with ABC News, in which he (1) defended torture on the grounds that it’s not torture unless he says it is and (2) all but mocked President Bush on the decision to go to war with Iraq. Give him this: the man is not a hypocrite.

The final word on McClellan’s book

Given the ever-accelerating nature of the news cycle, I suppose this was bound to happen someday. Today is the official release date of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” And, as a news story, it’s already over.

But since I gave up two and a half hours on Saturday night so I could skim through an advance copy I’d been able to buy (and you thought your social life was pathetic), I’m going to share a few of my thoughts before the book slips under the waves once and for all.

1. There is nothing in “What Happened” that is interesting beyond the identity of the person who wrote it. As press secretary, McClellan was the slow-talking, dull-witted stooge who knew little and said less. Unlike his predecessor, the sharp and disdainful Ari Fleischer, or his successor, the sharp and combative Tony Snow, McClellan’s very presence came across as a way of telling the media that they didn’t matter — to “de-certify” the press, as Jay Rosen has written.

Thus it is of passing interest that McClellan has come to see that he was used; that the cool kids he thought were his friends were snickering behind his back and lying to him, as he says Karl Rove and Scooter Libby did regarding their roles in the Valerie Plame matter. But his book — which should have been titled “What Happened?” — is simplistic and unoriginal in its analysis.

2. McClellan swallowed a lot for a long time. A number of observers have pointed to McClellan’s claim that George W. Bush, during the 2000 presidential campaign, said he couldn’t remember whether he’d ever snorted cocaine as evidence that McClellan had spent way too much time looking the other way. But I was struck by a different anecdote.

As a spokesman for then-Texas governor Bush in the late 1990s, McClellan says he had to defend Bush’s use of the death penalty, despite his own opposition to capital punishment. McClellan writes:

My thinking is grounded in a moral belief. I’m deeply troubled by the idea that even one innocent person could fall through the system and be put to death for a crime that he or she did not commit. [p. 42]

Trouble is, McClellan was flacking not just for a run-of-the-mill pro-death-penalty governor, but for the executioner-in-chief, a man who never met an inmate he didn’t want to kill. So memorably callous was Bush that, in 1999, he mocked the last moments of Karla Faye Tucker — who’d become a cause célèbre because of her born-again Christianity — in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

McClellan has a strong stomach, to say the least.

3. It’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. But of course. To the extent that “What Happened” has an idea behind it, it is that Bush allowed the “permanent campaign” — the subordination of governing to a state of constant political gamesmanship — to destroy the nation’s post-9/11 unity and to ram through support for the war in Iraq. (McClellan cites a 2000 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann called “The Permanent Campaign and Its Future,” but does not mention Sidney Blumenthal’s better-known book, “The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives,” published some 20 years earlier.)

Amazingly, McClellan casts this as a matter of Bush’s failing to live up to his promise of not being like Clinton. McClellan:

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, members of the Clinton administration should feel deeply flattered when they look at the Bush administration. In our own way, we built on the art form the Clinton White House established and took it to a higher level. [p. 311]

Thus does McClellan compare Clinton’s overly cautious but largely successful record of governance with the Bush-Cheney disaster. To point out the obvious: Clinton lied about his reprehensible personal life. By McClellan’s own telling, Bush lied about his reasons for going to war in Iraq, fearing the public would not support his misguidedly idealistic vision of forcing democracy on the Iraqis whether they wanted it or not. Not the same thing.

4. It doesn’t matter whether McClellan is being disloyal or not. No, McClellan is not a loyalist. Maximum loyalty would have required him to keep his mouth shut at least until after Bush had left office. This might make McClellan a dubious choice for a best friend. It does not make him an unreliable reporter. What Bob Dole said may be right, but it’s also beside the point.

On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Tim Russert was at his mindless worst. The entire interview consisted of observing that McClellan had said one thing then and another thing now. It’s bad enough when Russert does it to a politician whom he wants to portray as a flip-flopper. In McClellan’s case, though, it was ludicrous.

The entire point of “What Happened” is that McClellan believed one thing when he was press secretary, and has come, through the course of writing his book, to believe something else entirely. McClellan explains this well in the preface. If Russert had focused less on “you changed your mind” and more on “why did you change your mind,” it would have been a far more valuable exercise.

5. Just as we thought, he really was out of the loop. McClellan tells us that, as press secretary, he was excluded from Karl Rove’s “strategery” meetings (Rove’s comic term), National Security Council meetings, even the daily communications meetings with Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney, Andy Card, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes and, later, Dan Bartlett. McClellan writes:

Over time, I realized that the reason the press secretary was treated this way had nothing to do with who occupied the position but rather was rooted in distrust of the national media. Neither the president nor most of those in his inner circle of advisers placed any great value on the national media, including the White House press corps. [p. 155]

Gee, you think?

There are numerous problems with craft and logic in “What Happened.” On page 121, for instance, McClellan writes that, in 2002, a majority of the public “erroneously” believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, yet he fails to grapple fully with the administration’s own role in spreading that belief. There are numerous instances of re-created dialogue between him and Bush, some of it going back years.

McClellan also blames Rove and company for politicizing every issue they dealt with, yet he himself sees the failures of Katrina largely in political terms. McClellan dwells at absurd length on Rove’s less-than-brilliant idea to have Bush photographed while looking down on New Orleans from the luxury of Air Force One. A bad PR move? Sure. But it would have been quickly forgotten had Bush not so completely bungled the government’s response.

But enough. “What Happened” will be forgotten within days. What matters is that Scott McClellan, of all people, has turned truth-teller, at least to the extent that his limited abilities allow. The most poignant section in the book comes early:

I frequently stumbled along the way and failed in my duty to myself, to the president I served, and to the American people. I tried to play the Washington game according to the current rules and, at times, didn’t play it very well. Because I didn’t stay true to myself, I couldn’t stay true to others. The mistakes were mine, and I’ve suffered the consequences. [p. x]

McClellan couldn’t have prevented the mistakes of the past seven and a half years, but he could have spoken up earlier. He could have resigned as a matter of principle. Instead, he’s written a book that few will read, but that has considerable symbolic value nevertheless. That’s not only better than nothing. It’s also quite a bit more than we had reason to expect.

Beyond sweets and flowers

Listen in as Dick Cheney tries, in September 2002, to persuade Dick Armey that going to war against Iraq is a good idea:

We have great information. They’re going to welcome us. It’ll be like the American Army going through the streets of Paris. They’re sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will be so happy with their freedoms that we’ll probably back ourselves out of there within a month or two.

I happen to think Cheney and President Bush actually believed this stuff. I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse than the alternative explanation.