Sen. Graham compares torture at Gitmo to McCain’s long, boring talks about birds

In speaking to David Kirkpatrick for a piece in the New York Times’ ongoing (and going, and going. . .) series “The Long Run,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) contributes to the ever-growing list of leading Republicans’ attempts to dismiss the illegal abuse of detainees at Guatanamo Bay as little more than a mild discomfort or a puckish hazing ritual.

[McCain] likes trading jokes about colleagues with a small group of friends that includes Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. . . . Entertaining guests at his property in Sedona, Ariz., [McCain] invariably drags them for long walks to indulge his passion for bird watching. “If you took all the people at Gitmo, put them in the cabin for the weekend and made them listen to John talk about the birds, they would all spill their guts.” Mr. Graham said.

I will agree with Lindsey Graham on one point: listening to John McCain speak is unfailingly tedious—however. . .

While some former detainees have commented on the intense boredom experienced during their long incarcerations, it is often the least of their complaints. The ritualized torture that makes up what Bush Administration officials call “enhanced interrogation”—reverse-engineered from a decades-old report about resisting Communist Chinese “brainwashing” techniques—includes the use of stress positions, intense heat and cold, sleep deprivation, routine beatings, and controlled drowning, commonly referred to as “waterboarding.”

The Times’ Kirkpatrick lets Sen. Graham’s comment stand without counterpoint or comment. From the context and structure of the paragraph, I can only assume that Republican Presidential candidate McCain—once a victim of torture himself—shares his colleague’s humorous take on detainee abuse (oh, right, we already know that he does). And perhaps the news division of the New York Times does, too.

To date, none of the torture techniques used by American interrogators have produced a single piece of information that could stand up in US court as permissible evidence. If Senators Graham and McCain believe that they have a better method for extracting vital facts that could convict terrorists or protect Americans, then perhaps they should push for legislation to replace the torture sanctioned by the 2006 Military Commissions Act (a bill the supposedly anti-torture McCain helped pass*) with personal appearances by Arizona’s most famous avian aficionado. In fact, I’m sure Bush’s new BFF McCain could pull some strings, dispense with the legislation, and get the President to let him bring his “passion” to Gitmo posthaste.

The security of the nation may depend on it. . . only time will tell. It appears likely that the Times will not.



*This sentence, which appears toward the end of the Times article, not withstanding:

In 2005 and 2006, for example, he spearheaded battles to prod the administration to sign laws banning the use of torture on military detainees.

That one-liner, presented as a matter of fact, is not really accurate in-and-of itself, and it is most certainly incomplete. Though Senator McCain did initially speak in favor of a so-called “torture ban” in 2006, he eventually accepted a much-watered-down “compromise.” When President Bush then issued a signing statement for the MCA that essentially reiterated the administration’s assertion that it could continue to treat prisoners however it saw fit, regardless of the language of the law, McCain remained eerily silent.

The Times also completely fails to continue the McCain/torture narrative into this election cycle. In February, McCain voted against a Democratic effort to apply Army Field Manual strictures to interrogations conducted by the CIA.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Happy “Law Day”

I know, you thought it was May Day, but, as a New York Times editorial reminds us:

President Dwight Eisenhower established May 1 as Law Day to co-opt the biggest day on the socialist calendar. While much of the world marked May Day with critiques of capitalism and parades celebrating working men and women, the United States would honor, President Eisenhower declared, the “national dedication to the principle of government under laws.”

A dumb beginning, true, but as the Times points out, in the age of King George 43, “not a bad idea.” And they add this interesting fact:

Law Day proved to be a boon to international law, which was seen during the cold war as a check on communism. In his proclamation creating the holiday, Eisenhower emphasized law’s role “in the settlement of international disputes.” On Law Day 1959, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, grandfather of the current president, urged, remarkably, that international conflicts be settled by the World Court.

Which makes it all the more ridiculous and sad that while the editorial staff was acknowledging that

. . . for six years now, the rule of law has been under attack. An array of doctrines has emerged to undermine it, like the enemy combatant doctrine, which says people can be held indefinitely without trial. . .

Times reporter Linda Greenhouse and her editors on the news pages could barely be bothered to note the latest developments in the enemy combatant saga and the continued trampling of our Constitution by the Bush Administration and its puppet-dominated Supreme Court:

In another action, the court turned, without comment, down the latest appeals by two Guantánamo detainees, Salim A. Hamdan and Omar Khadr. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, and Stephen G. Breyer dissented, as they had earlier this month. The case was Hamdan v. Gates, No. 06-1169.

Those three sentences are the last paragraph—and the only mention of this—in a long article about Monday’s Supreme Court business that mostly concerns itself with the (also horrible) decision to find for the police in reckless car chases.

While I’m happy to see that case covered, the unfathomably short shrift that Greenhouse and the Times give this latest turn in the Hamdan case and the challenges to the US Constitution raised by the Military Commissions Act show that while some at the paper have come to praise the rule of law, the news czars still choose to bury it.

Shame—on the Supreme Court. . . and the New York Times.


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)