Idiot Wind--Tortured Daze

The week was spent with the duelling speeches on national security by President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney and all the media hype with surrogates for the nomenklatura weighing in on everything from closing Gitmo to torture. The GOP claims they have finally secured the upper hand on the first issue of the Obama administration, pointing to the overwhelming defeat by the Senate of funds to close Gitmo and move the detainees to facilities in the United States. Interestingly, the GOP claims that this all was a deliberate strategy and one wonders how much Karl Rove and Dick Cheney mapped this out together. The RNC brought back my youth with a retooled version of the infamous daisy commercial LBJ ran against Barry Goldwater but this time intersplicing sayings by Obama on Gitmo. With cheezy music in the background, we are finally led to the moment with the nuclear explosion heard off camera as in the commercial of old. Reassigning the detainees to supermax prisons where 150 of their comrades are presently serving time somehow will encourage a nuclear attack by someone.

But support for President Obama came from unusual circles--Douglas Brooks writing in the New York Times and Jack Goldsmith writing in the New Republic. Brooks pointed out the obvious that Dick Cheney was arguing for a policy that had long been abandoned by the Bush Administration. That Cheney had lost the bureaucratic debate as early as 2004 on torture and on Gitmo by 2006. He was in fact fighting an old bureaucratic battle that he had lost and by big margins. CIA directors starting in March 2003 and a report by the CIA Inspector General in 2004 basically ended the days of waterboarding because of the lack of concrete results. Throughout the second Bush term, administration officials were trying to close Guantanamo,pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners and even begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil.

Jack Goldsmith, currently a professor at Harvard Law School and an assistant Attorney General in the Bush Administration and no fan of torture, in his New Republic piece writes at great length about each issue where the Obama Administration mirrors but improves on the past Bush policies. Goldsmith's portrayal of the Bush policies are those without the Cheney domination of 2001-2003.

Most of the Republican talking heads act oblivious to the fact that Cheney's speech at AEI was a radical approach to the issue of terrorism just as his interpretation of the Constitution is a radical and highly unorthodox view held only be a select group of his synchophants and a radical fringe of the Federalist society. Over the last few weeks as the Rove-Cheney strategy took shape it was impossible to avoid noticing that the Republicans had virtually no one supporting the Cheney Doctrine, who were actively serving in the military or who had actually conducted interrogation of the detainees.

The Obama Administration actually had a star-studded roster of people urging the closing of Gitmo: Tom Ridge, Colin Powell, John McCain, Bob Gates, Admiral Mullen, General Petraeus among others. Virtually all professional interrogators appeared on television denouncing the Cheney belief that torture produced reliable,actionable intelligence. But this did not deter Republican politicians and spokespeople like Newt Gingrich from speaking out about how Obama was weakening the defense posture of the United States by abandoning torture.

On Fox News,Greta Van Sustern tried to get McCain to take a potshot at Obama but she failed. McCain reiterated that waterboarding is torture, is against the Geneva Conventions and has been sanctioned throughout our history. He also concurred with all the military supporters for closing Gitmo that the prison was the biggest recruiting weapon for Al Qaeda. He spoke about an Al Qaeda member he met in Afghanistan who pointed out that Gitmo was one of the reasons Al Qaeda could recruit thousands new militants from neighboring countries.

By week's end , the waterboarding is not torture school was dealt a mortal blow when a conservative talk show host out of Chicago was waterboarded and only lasted 6 seconds, proclaiming it was drowning--which it is.

But we have experienced an unprecedented campaign by a former Vice President against a sitting and popular President of the United States. Karl Rove claimed it was because the Obama Administration had attacked the Bush years first. Liz Cheney, the Vice President's daughter, claimed that it was Dick Cheney's fear of persecution of him and other Bush officials that led him to speak out.

I suppose it makes tactical sense for the Republicans to make this a side issue since they have been uniformally obstructionist on anything having to do with the reform of our economic system. For Obama,this constant hammering may deflect his Administration's efforts to secure passage of a health reform bill this year--a defeat that would prove to be devastating for the country, the Democrats and ultimately Obama himself.

But with no election coming up until 2010, it's hard to see the payoff for Republicans unless they wish for another attack on the United States and believe the country would turn to them in its time of need. I believe this is so. Republicans are trying to regain their lost advantage in national security. How else to explain the strange TV-hopping of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich fomenting the argument between Nancy Pelosi and the CIA?

There are problems in Obama's approach from a civil libertarian point of view to be sure but the public sided with him by almost 2 to 1 against Dick Cheney. I'll deal with a number of problems in the Obama approach to terror next week but one has to be more sympathetic than progressives have been to the mountain of problems and the entrenched interests of the nomenklatura on this issue--as well as economic problems.