Tag: Bush

It’s not torture if I say it’s not torture

The New York Times yesterday revealed the existence of two memos that contradicted Bush administration claims that it was not engaging in torture.

From the story:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

The revelation has Congress — well, actually, Democratic lawmakers — calling for copies of the memo as a prelude to a potential investigation.

That would be a start. But given that the memos appear to condone behavior that violates the Geneva Convention — and, therefore, United States law — it is imperative that we go beyond simple investigations and put the I-word (you know: impeachment) on the table.

If we are to value the governmental structure we’ve created, one that shares powers among equal branches and that values the rule of law, then we cannot allow this kind of imperial attitude to stand.

Neal Katyal, who represented several Guantanamo detainees before the U.S. Supreme Court, told Keith Olbermann last night that the memos are more evidence of a White House that views itself as above the law.

He shouldn’t be. And we shouldn’t allow him to be.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Take that, you obstreperous children

Seven years in and the president has vetoed four bills — including one today that denies health coverage to about 10 million children of low- and moderate-income families. The bill would have reauthorized and expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, to cover an additional 3.4 million kids (from 6.6 million).

But according to our fearless leader, this was not about denying coverage but about a “philosphical divide.” The nearly two thirds of House members and more than two thirds of Senators apparently believe their responsibility was to cover as many children as they could; the president believes in private insurance.

The policies of the government ought to be, help poor children and to focus on poor children. And the policies of the government ought to be, help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that’s where the philosophical divide comes in. I happen to believe that what you’re seeing when you expand eligibility for federal programs is the desire by some in Washington, D.C. to federalize health care. I don’t think that’s good for the country. I believe in private medicine. I believe in helping poor people — which was the intent of S-CHIP, now being expanded beyond its initial intent. I also believe that the federal government should make it easier for people to afford private insurance. I don’t want the federal government making decisions for doctors and customers.

Customers. Apparently patients are no different than car buyers — except that many are sick and most are scared and confused.

The president’s answer, as it has been for most issues, is to play with the tax code:

That’s why I believe strongly in health savings accounts or association health plans to help small business owners better afford insurance for their workers. That’s why I believe we ought to change the federal tax code. You’re disadvantaged if you work for a small business and/or an individual trying to buy insurance in the marketplace — disadvantaged relative to somebody working for a large company. If you work for a large company, you get your health insurance after tax. If you buy insurance you have to pay — no, you buy your insurance after taxes as an individual; you get your insurance pre-tax when you’re working for a large corporation. You’re at a disadvantage if you’re an individual in the market place.

So I think we ought to change the tax code. I — my view is, is that every family ought to get a $15,000 deduction off their income taxes, regardless of where they work, in order to help people better afford insurance in the marketplace.

Nothing wrong with altering the tax code to make medical expenses an automatic, pretax deduction. But that won’t fix the problem.

Providing coverage and getting the insurance companies out of the mix just might.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Corzine steps upand applies Band-Aid

New Jersey, at the direction of Gov. Jon Corzine, is ready to take on the president over health care.

The state is suing the federal government over new rules that would cut thousands of children off from state health-care subsidies — a move the Corzine administration rightly calls “incomprehensible.”

The program — the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP — is jointly funded by the federal and state governments and is designed to provide health care coverage to families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but no more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

States have some flexibility under the program that allows them to raise the income threshold and cover more kids — which is where the lawsuit comes in. The Bush administration wants to place limits on this expansion, either through legislation or via administative order.

But Congress in a bipartisan vote is preparing to extend the program and allow for greater flexibility at the state leve — a move the administration is threatening to veto. An override is likely, but shouldn’t be necessary. Read my Dispatches column on SCHIP from Sept. 20 to see why .

In the end, as I write here, SCHIP is just a Band-Aid and should be made redundant by a single-payer, universal health care system. That should be the goal, because it is the only way to ensure that every uninsured and underinsured American, child and adult, get a baseline of care.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

History lessons

As Ronald Reagan might say, there he goes again.

President George W. Bush has once again shifted rhetorical course in Iraq, finally acknowledging this ugly war’s connections to a past American debacle, but doing so with a selective approach to history that reduces the United States’ 20-year history in Southeast Asia.

Our exit from Vietnam led to defeat and violence, he said, during a speech yesterday at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ”

This, of course, is an absurd reduction of the historical record, which included nearly a million American soldiers losing their lives in an unwinnable and unpopular civil war that fractured this nation and poisoned our politics for more than a generation.

Matthew Yglesias, blogging for The Atlantic magazine, offers this analysis:

He’d like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America’s collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.

Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds — emboldened — were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.

It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.

But this is too nuanced an explanation of history (for a fuller explanation of what happened and what went wrong, I’d suggest reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest) and, besides, the president wasn’t interested in a history lesson anyway. The president (or at least his advisors and chief speech writers) was attempting to tap into this poisoned legacy of division with his speech, hoping to marginalize his opponents by reminding Americans of the nation’s loss in that war. That’s been a longstanding GOP tactic — to use U.S. failures in Vietnam to question the patriotism of war opponents and the competency of Democrats on national defense matters.
It’s a cheap shot from a man who has lost all credibility — and one that is likely to backfire, I think, because acknowledging the connections between the two wars can only underscore the futility of our remaining in Iraq. Staying will not lead to stability there, anymore than remaining in Vietnam until the mid-1970s led to stability in Southeast Asia.

More than anything, the speech underscores how deluded this president has become.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.