Dan Gillmor: Blog

Glenn Greenwald: Whether it’s the war in Iraq or illegal surveillance or the abolition of habeas corpus and now the systematic use of torture, it’s the Bush administration that conceived of the policies, implemented them and presided over their corrupt application. But it’s Congressional Democrats at the leadership level who were the key allies and enablers, never getting their hands dirty with implementation — and thus feigning theatrical, impotent outrage once each abuse was publicly exposed — but nonetheless working feverishly the entire time to enable all of it every step of the way.

When the historians mark turning points in America’s decline, these deeds will be key evidence.

Also, from Andrew Sullivan:

This is not to say that there is no difference between the parties, with the GOP shamefully defending war crimes the United States once prosecuted as such. The Democrats, for the most part, have been their usual selves on this: still in a defensive crouch against any notion that they might be soft on terror, and implicitly adopting the fallacious logic that somehow opposing torture means being soft on terror. Au contraire. Torture has weakened the West’s war against barbarism by blurring the critical lines needed to win the long war, and by injecting into intelligence the falsehoods, exaggerations and lies that always come from the tortured.

And, finally, it’s worth noting that not a single U.S. newspaper that I can find is referring to what was on the tapes in accurate language. All are using the administration’s “harsh interrogation techniques” lingo or something close to that. Folks, it’s torture. Period. We prosecuted Japanese soldiers for war crimes — and got convictions — for exactly this stuff. The Independent in London is one of the non-U.S. papers telling it honestly in an article entitles, “Call for criminal inquiry as CIA destroys torture tapes” — why won’t our own press? Why won’t even one paper?

The same reason that Democrats are so spineless? Is there any other explanation?

In this New York Times story, “McCain Finds Sympathy on Torture Issue” we find the following paragraph:

Democrats are largely opposed to torture, and while the Bush administration has said it does not engage in torture, it had previously reserved the right to use aggressive interrogation techniques in questioning terrorism suspects. And the leading Republican candidates, with the exception of Mr. McCain, are refusing to rule out certain techniques that others would deem as torture.

It’s a classic example of the problem with today’s journalism. News organizations accurately quote people, but flatly decline to point out the truth — that one side is lying.

The truth in this case is that the United States, by any measure, does torture people. “Aggressive interrogation techniques” like “waterboarding” — designed in perfect Orwellian lanauge to sound like a theme park ride — are the kind of torture that was bad enough to convict Japanese soldiers of war crimes.

No one has begun to contradict the truth of what — among others — Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism expert and former Navy instructor in how to resist interrogation, wrote here and told Congress. Here’s a lengthy quote:

1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.

2. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.

Call it “Chinese Water Torture,” “the Barrel,” or “the Waterfall,” it is all the same. Whether the victim is allowed to comply or not is usually left up to the interrogator. Many waterboard team members, even in training, enjoy the sadistic power of making the victim suffer and often ask questions as an after thought. These people are dangerous and predictable and when left unshackled, unsupervised or undetected they bring us the murderous abuses seen at Abu Ghraieb, Baghram and Guantanamo. No doubt, to avoid human factors like fear and guilt someone has created a one-button version that probably looks like an MRI machine with high intensity waterjets.

3. If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives. The Small Wars Council had a spirited discussion about this earlier in the year, especially when former Marine Generals Krulak and Hoar rejected all arguments for torture.

Yet the New York Times can’t bring itself to simply explain the reality. It does stenography, repeating the lies from one side.

So disappointing. Yet also so standard for the Paper of Record.

Clark Hoyt, the paper’s public editor, notes the NY Times’ continuing publication of pieces by Henry Blodget, one of the Internet bubble’s most notorious characters. In “Taint by Association” Hoyt asks two key questions:

One is whether The Times properly identifies Blodget when he writes for the paper. I don’t think so. His name was big in financial news at one time, but many readers do not know him.

The bigger question is whether The Times should be publishing him at all. Like Nocera, I believe in second chances, and Blodget seems to be doing fine establishing a new career. But why would The Times give a former analyst who lied to investors a platform to write about financial markets? If he wanted to write about how investors can spot phony reports by analysts, that would be one thing. But each time the newspaper uses Blodget as it has, it is conferring greater expert status on him.

These deals work two ways. The Times’s luster may help Blodget. But some of his taint rubs off on The Times.

Hoyt has it exactly right here. The newspaper is sullying its own name by lending Blodget its columns.

(Note: I own a small amount of stock in the company.)

I have a piece in today’s Boston Globe called “Net gains” — some suggestions on how to improve politics in the digital age, specifically political debates. Here’s what the Globe ran. In another posting I’ll amplify, as promised, one one part of the piece.

On Thursday night, most of the Democratic presidential candidates will travel to Las Vegas for the latest in this election cycle’s “debates.” The quotes around that word are deliberate, because political debates are stuck in a world of television sound bites, after-the-fact spin, and almost blatant contempt for voters.

Mass media, the communications technology that became supreme in the 20th century, has ruined debates. The Lincoln-Douglas confrontations in 1858 and other verbal contests were once among the deepest and most revelatory of conversations. They revealed intellect and passion, and illuminated the issues of their day. Today’s mass media, reflecting a cultural short attention span, elevates shallowness.

This year’s endless series of events, with so many candidates aiming for the nominations, have been especially puerile, little more than mini-press conferences and spin sessions. Even when the questions are serious, the time limitations on answers puts a premium on regurgitating canned, semi-clever lines that entertain instead of illuminate. These things are to real debating what motel room art is to Picasso.

But technology can also help restore the debate. The Internet and digital tools - search, blogging, online video, wikis, interactive games, and virtual worlds - are made to order for serious conversations. The collision of technology with media offers an unparalleled chance to hold debates that would illuminate our problems and opportunities and give us true insight into the people who want us to elect them.

The role of technology in politics has always been prominent, notably in communications. The pamphleteers of America’s Revolutionary era, and newspaper people later on, knew how powerful the printing press could be. The telegraph sped the news. Telephones, a one-to-one device, transformed personal communications. Radio and then, even more, television became the ultimate tools: one-to-many megaphones of unparalleled power.

The Internet subsumes all that came before, and adds a many-to-many capability. The democratization of media means that anyone can publish; that what we publish is available to a potentially global community; and that creation naturally leads to conversation and collaboration.

The Net has, of course, already made itself felt on the campaign trail. Howard Dean’s 2004 team innovated with blogging and online fund-raising ideas. Former senator George Allen lost his 2006 reelection race in part because of an unflattering video posted on YouTube. In this cycle, the presidential candidates are all over the Internet map, and so are their supporters - witness the now-famous “I’ve got a crush on Obama” video and Mitt Romney’s invitation to his supporters to create advertisements, among countless other efforts.

We’ve seen some modest attempts to make the Internet part of the debate process. The CNN-YouTube Democratic event during the summer (a Republican version is scheduled for Nov. 28), demonstrated at least one thing of value: Regular folks can ask questions that are at least as penetrating, or vapid, as the ones posed by journalists in more typical settings. But post-event chatter focused, to a major extent, on what questioners looked like - and whether CNN and YouTube should have let the audience, not just the journalists, select the questions posed to candidates (the answer is obviously yes). Still, this was a sideshow. We learned almost nothing useful about the candidates or their views.

Meanwhile, Slate and Yahoo joined forces a few weeks ago to offer a slightly more innovative, roll-your-own version. Voters could select specific questions and issues, and get a brief video lineup of candidates’ views. Yahoo says visitors to the site stuck around for an average of seven minutes, a long time on the Web but a pathetic span for serious voters. Perhaps they’d have delved more deeply had the site included more truly interactive features.

Better still is 10Questions.com, created by the TechPresident site working with The New York Times and MSNBC, a site that lets regular folks ask video questions and vote on the ones that get posed to candidates. Then the candidates answer, and the regular folks vote on whether the candidates actually answered.

But we can do even better, using a variety of media and techniques. Consider two approaches, different in character but both aimed at greater understanding.

First, the candidates should agree to hold lengthy, one-on-one debates and then put the results online for the public to slice and dice. Rather than having journalists and/or YouTubers ask the questions, we should leave the questioning to the candidates themselves. Give the candidates time to provide substantial responses, and give them full freedom to follow up on their opponents’ remarks. Moderators could help keep the debate on track and civil.

The videos should be posted online and made freely available. Media organizations, party organizations, interest groups, and private citizens could use increasingly inexpensive digital editing tools to help us sort through the mass of video; for example, someone who cares about healthcare could create a comparison of what each candidate said about the topic.

Then let voters decide what they want to watch. A few will watch everything. Many more will watch several debates, or parts of many.

Certainly this system would ask a great deal of the candidates, including perhaps more of their time than they might wish to spend. It would also demonstrate the utter shallowness of the so-called debates that broadcasters and interest groups sponsor today.

A second approach would be even more ambitious: A debate that would unfold online over the course of days, or even weeks and months. Imagine that one candidate takes a position and poses a question. The opponent would answer with a written response of some predetermined length, but with the help of staff, experts, and the general public. Then the first candidate, again with the help of anyone who wants to join the process, would dissect the response and reply with (we’d hope) a truly nuanced update. Continue this process at length - and repeat it with many other topics.

What would the site look like? What technologies would we use? I have my own ideas, and have posted them on my blog (citmedia.org/blog), but I’m just one person; we need a collective effort to figure this out, using much the same iterative process. The specific tools are less important than the willingness to deploy them.

Indeed, we’d start with an inventory of what people are already doing. Nonpolitical online conversations are already achieving remarkable depth and breadth using a variety of methods.

But before we finish yet another campaign cycle in the traditional way, let’s resolve to bring debating into the new century. We have the ability to turn top-down, sell-the-candidate methods of electioneering into edge-in conversations among candidates and the electorate. I’ll happen eventually. Why not this time?

SF Chronicle: Feinstein backs legal immunity for telecom firms in wiretap cases. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday that she favors legal immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly shared millions of customers’ telephone and e-mail messages and records with the government, a position that could lead to the dismissal of numerous lawsuits pending in San Francisco.

So what if these companies flagrantly committed felonies, says our feckless senator.

Again, she’s delivered a slap in the face to her constituents. Unsurprising, sadly, given her record.

She’s nearly completed her morphing into a right-wing Republican — that is, someone who thinks civil liberties are outmoded. (No doubt the Chronicle editorial page will find some excuse to explain this decision, too, as they’ve done so many times with Feinstein.)

Once, she was someone who believed in the rule of law, or at least pretended to. Now she’s become one of the people who makes clear, through actions that are unmistakable, that she has no time for it.

If liberty dies in this nation, it will not be just the fault of people like Bush and Cheney. It will be the equal responsibility of their enablers.

Dianne Feinstein, United States Senator, will vote to confirm Mukasey, a man who shares Bush’s hostility to civil liberties. Utterly contemptible, but in keeping with her previous positions.

She’s a disgrace to California.

As Glenn Greenwald observes in his Salon colum, the pending immunity for telecommunications companies that committed felonies by acceding to the Bush administration’s wiretap lawbreaking is beyond disgraceful:

By definition, our Beltway establishment does not believe in the rule of law — at least not for them. They are creating a completely segregated, two-track system where high Beltway officials and their corporate enablers arrogate unto themselves the power to decide when they can break the law. They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals — who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.

The Republicans have made it entirely clear that they hold the Constitution increasingly in contempt. But to see the Democrats remain such pathetic wimps on fundamental liberty, and the rule of law itself, is deeply depressing.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein will certainly vote for this travesty. I hope Barbara Boxer upholds her oath of office, but in these days — when the rule of law is an discardable inconvenience to the people who write the laws — it’s hard to be optimistic.

From Bloomberg news:

As many as half of the 450,000 subprime borrowers whose mortgage payments increase in the next three months may lose their homes because they can’t sell, refinance or qualify for help from the U.S. government.

No one can take joy at the family turmoil that is about to become real after these years of marketplace fantasy. But it’s a huge stretch to make a case that most of these borrowers — many of whom put no money down, or signed up for loans on which they paid only the interest for several years, or used what equity they did have as a piggy bank to spend on other things — own the property at all. Legally, yes. In reality? No.

Calling it home ownership when someone has zero equity (or less) is absurd. Some of these people are not victims in the slightest, except of their own greed or foolishness, or both.

Which isn’t to deny that there’s been some major-league sleaze going on in executive suites. I’m all for going after the sleazeballs who engaged in things like forging documents, etc., or who lied outright to borrowers. There are undoubtedly many of them.

And we should come down hard on the mortgage industry, top to bottom, which helped engineered this bubble in ways guaranteed to cause such woe. But the fact that the game came to an end does not — in the slightest — make me want to let people off the hook for some incredibly bad decisions.

(Of course, the Fed’s latest rate cut is going to bail out the people at the top of the housing food chain, and leave the ones at the bottom just as screwed as they were. That’s scandalous, too, rewarding the financial engineers for their recklessness.)

But I’m not feeling much sorrow for the people who signed for loans that they had to at least suspect were going to be risky at best — loans that would make sense only if property prices continued to rise indefinitely and consistently. Maybe, shedding all common sense, they bought a line of bull from the media (and probably their neighbors and definitely the mortgage industry) that prices would never stop rising. But they were willing participants in making this mess, not passive bystanders or victims in any standard sense.

The bailout proposals in Congress are crazy. We should give people taxpayer subsidies to pay down loans they never should have qualified for in the first place? Insanity.

A lot of these folks are victims of their own greed and/or willingness to believe the impossible. They have my sympathy if they’re forced to leave the houses they never really owned, because that’s a disruptive situation for anyone. But they don’t qualify as victims in my book.

Meanwhile, the media will continue get this story wrong. Nobody cares, apparently, that you can’t logically own something when you have a negative equity and no plausible way of paying down the principal. But never mind. The meme is being well-established — victimhood for a new class of people who, by any rational standard, don’t deserve it.

Look. The system is absolutely rigged against the people in lower incomes, particularly the working poor. No question. Let’s change the tax system. Let’s make opportunities more level. But let’s not encourage speculation from top to bottom. It’s bad for everyone.

UPDATED

UC-Irvine has rescinded the hiring (LA Times) of a new law school dean who holds well-known views on key legal issues, because, the chancellor claims, “he felt the law professor’s commentaries were ‘polarizing’ and would not serve the interests of California’s first new public law school in 40 years.”

UPDATE: He’s now been rehired — but the school officials still won’t explain why they rescinded the hiring in the first place.

This doesn’t pass the smell test. Erwin Chemerinsky, the not-dean who has been teaching at Duke University, says the real reason was conservative pressure. Chancellor Michael Drake’s reasoning is, if you read it carefully, a non-denial denial.

As another law school dean noted, the Erwin Chemerinsky, the not-dean who has been teaching at Duke University, is well known for liberal views: “That’s been true for as long as I’ve known him. It’s rather like discovering that Wilt Chamberlain was tall.”

Chemerinsky’s positions aren’t the relevant issue. This would be just as outrageous if UC Berkeley (where I have a part-time gig) fired a conservative scholar for nothing more than holding views deemed polarizing. What does matter is the university’s cowardly decision. It’s shameful.

Glenn Greenwald: Think about how amazing this is. McConnell clearly described that in 1978, we enacted a law prohibiting warrantless eavesdropping; the Bush administration broke that law repeatedly; and the telecommunications companies actively participated in that lawbreaking. And now — as a matter of national security — the Bush administration is demanding that Congress pass a new law declaring that telecom companies are immune from any and all consequences — both civil and criminal — in the event they are found to have violated the law. It is hard to imagine open contempt for the rule of law being expressed more explicitly than this.