Why Cert Always Pushed the Bush Administration:
This excerpt from Jack Goldsmith's new book is fascinating. Among other things, it seems to explain why the Bush Administration always responded to the prospect of Supreme Court review of terrorism cases by tempering its previously hard line: the significant prospect of Supreme Court reversal in the near term was just about the only thing that would persuade David Addington to compromise, and David Addington's view nearly always prevailed.
UPDATE: In case you haven't had enough of Jack over the last few days, here's a video interview of him by Dahlia Lithwick. It's very much worth watching.
UPDATE: In case you haven't had enough of Jack over the last few days, here's a video interview of him by Dahlia Lithwick. It's very much worth watching.
Causing me to realize that I don't know the Latin phrase for "you are known by the company you keep."
Goldsmith makes some interesting remarks about the hindisght of history and how the President would be judged harshly should we have another major terrorist attack. That may well be true, though I think in typical White House self-centeredness it overstates the situation. More importantly it doesn't answer why the Administration has allowed itself to be identified with torture.
As we can see from Iraq, there are literally thousands of jihadists who are willing to die for their ideology and I doubt if torture would force all or even many of them to reveal whatever secrets they might be holding. So I just don't get how the torture business can be effective against extreme ideologues. Torture is a tactic of interrogation not a strategy of national defense.
My only surmise is that torture had some sort of appeal because it is an easy and cheap approach; It ignores the ideological basis of jihadism and makes the defense against it into a mano-a-mano fight in which the Administration can display its manliness through others' pain. That might satisfy the WH but I wouldn't count on it to deter someone who wishes to destroy America.
As an aside, Goldsmith pretends to great respect for the intelligence of Addington but it was not believable.
But I would also add (7): fear.
Of course -- one of our people is hurt -- we want to hurt back, very very hard. So I can relate to revenge as a motive for wanting to torture.
But I think we ought to also consider "weak male-image overcompensation" as well. Glenn Greenwald's blogged about it here:
http://tinyurl.com/2dts42
You didn't see a man like Churchill -- or the senior Bush, closer to home -- men who had both shown real personal courage in battle -- making torture a centerpiece of their administrations and wars. They'd proven that they had balls.
I think that the torture thing and the glorification of authority might have something to do with the fact that there are very few men at the high reaches of this administration who have actual military much less battle experience. (Rumsfeld was a jet pilot -- a ballsy activity to be sure -- but it was in peace-time.)
But I guess we'll never really know for sure why torture was so important.
I found Goldsmith's description of his difference with John Yoo over war powers to be especially interesting, and commented about it on an earlier thread. Basically, I think, Goldsmith honors Jackson's Youngstown framework, while Yoo ignores it.