The internet is watching

One thing about this brave new world of communications technology that we don't hear much about is the almost ubiquitous, distributed surveillance that results from the fact that everyone carries around a handheld video recorder. So when Condoleezza Rice has a rather testy exchange with a Stanford student after some event:



...it can eventually find its way into an editorial of the nation's paper of record:

Consider a recent chat at a college reception between a student and Condoleezza Rice, who as White House national security adviser was deeply involved in the development of the authorization of brutality and torture.

Among the many absurd things Ms. Rice did was to offer this argument that waterboarding is legal: “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Pretty neat. And incidentally, I've always thought of this "distributed Big Brother" phenomenon as a good thing, giving us the benefits of surveillance (people get punished for doing bad things) without the accompanying specter of government abuse. Be good: society is watching you!

On a separate note, Rice's behavior in the video made me rise an eyebrow or two. When you accuse someone of stealing bread, and that person starts talking about how hungry they were at the time of the theft, that person starts to sound pretty guilty. Likewise, if you accuse someone of authorizing torture, and that person starts talking about how dreadful 9/11 was, it sounds like this is a person who, as a matter of fact, has authorized torture, and who is basically pleading for mercy given the circumstances.

Anybody else would have done the same thing! You don't know what it's like to go hungry! I had children to feed--I had to steal it!

And I'll tell you something. Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11^th, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans....If you were there in a position of authority, and watched Americans jump out of 80-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people, then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.

"We are governed by fools"

John Derbyshire at the conservative blog site The Corner laments:

There are some spectacles that are at once tragic and farcical. One such has been the sight of Georgian troops scuttling back from assisting us in whatever it is we imagine we are doing in Iraq, to help defend their homeland, while Condoleezza Rice stamps her foot, George W. Bush watches a basketball game, and John McCain says that he will do such things, what they are, yet he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.

We are governed by fools. At least Putin knows what he wants, and how to get it. If only freedom had such leaders!

Always interesting to watch grandiose internecine battles being played out between the different elements of the conservative camp. I think it's a testament to the Bush administration's sheer political power in the early 2000s that they were able to steer the nation onto the radical and reckless course of world-domination-for-democracy over the objections of liberals and a large swath of conservatives (the so-called "foreign policy realists" of the George H.W. school).

"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.