A depressing view of a journalist's job

David Brooks had an uncharacteristically off-base comment about tonight's Democratic debate:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

Wrong, David. Though the journalist's job often entails making politicians uncomfortable in a variety of ways, this sort of gotcha-game is not the journalist's job per se.

It is not helpful to "expose" a "contradiction" of some candidate when there is nothing at stake besides making the candidate look momentarily foolish; there's got to be some substantive and pressing issue that the interrogation is leading up to, some civic payoff. Thus, grilling Hillary Clinton about her sniperfire remarks is fine but only if it's leading up to some hard questions about just what her claims of experience amount to; and hammering Obama on the Wright issue is appropriate so long as it serves as an entry point into what Obama's views of race are. But lingering for 45 minutes on this stuff with no substantive upshot is nothing more than the fetishization of insider campaign politics.

"History will not judge this kindly"

The internets are a-buzz over a big report from ABC News that reveals that people at the highest levels of the Bush administration gave detailed instructions to the CIA as to which methods of torture could be used against detainees:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News....

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding....

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

What's more, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and the Justice Department withdrew what had been the legal sanction for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture), Rice went ahead and approved the techniques anyway for a suspect being held in Asia:

A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield -- that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."

There is absolutely nothing in the ideology or history of American conservatism or the Republican Party that condones the unilateral use of torture by the executive branch of the government. Republicans and Democrats should therefore feel free to unite in their condemnation of the Bush administration's excesses in a way that transcends the partisan squabbles of the moment and re-asserts the American people's basic sense of decency and humanity.