Serious fun

Torture? Yes, it was, says former Bush State Department lawyer

A former State Department lawyer responsible for Guantanamo-related cases said Friday that the Bush administration overreacted after 9/11 and set up a system in which torture occurred.

Vijay Padmanabhan is at least the second former Bush administration official to publicly label “enhanced interrogation techniques” as torture. He said the administration was wrong in its entire approach when it sent detainees to the remote Navy base and declared it out of reach of any court.

“I think Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration,” Padmanabhan told The Associated Press. He said other overreactions included extraordinary renditions, waterboarding that occurred at secret CIA prisons and “other enhanced interrogation techniques that would constitute torture.”

“The idea that you’re going to be able to hold someone and detain someone where there is not an applicable legal regime governing their detention, rules, treatment, standards, etc. is, I think, foolish,” he said.

The criticisms from Padmanabhan, the department’s chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation, are among the harshest yet made by a former Bush administration insider

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h/t  Andrew Sullivan

The Paranoid Style

In a number of posts earlier here, I’ve referrenced or quoted the work of American historian Richard Hofstadter, notably his “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” and his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”.  I’ve done so because Hofstadter’s observations can be uniquely illuminating as regards facets of American culture and politics.

George Packer, writing in the New Yorker also finds Hofstadter’s work of great value.

POPULISM AND PARANOIA

Step out of the A.I.G. bonus frenzy, the bailout conundrum, and other matters of the moment to think a bit about American history. It’s all related.

Last year, Vintage reissued Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1965 essay collection “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The title essay has joined the American political lexicon, partly because (as Sean Wilentz points out in his introduction) Americans keep living up to it. Among Hofstadter’s examples of paranoid rhetoric from the early sixties, here’s an Arizona gun owner testifying against federal control over mail-order firearms: “a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government.” These days, the apocalyptic rhetoric of the lone gun nut has become the staple political analysis on Fox News (for example, try to watch this recent performance by Glenn Beck, which displays every pathology from Hofstadter’s essay).

The modern American right, which is congenitally vulnerable to paranoia, gives into its own tendencies most readily when Democrats are in power and its own sense of dispossession is greatest. The John Birch Society thrived under Kennedy; talk-radio demagogues and the militia movement came into their own during the Clinton years; the prospect of a big Democratic win last year had a lot of conservative pundits and some Republican candidates describing Obama as a radical, a socialist, or worse. In some quarters the language has gotten more intemperate since he took office and started governing like the center-left politician that he’s always been. It isn’t just language that’s symptomatic of the paranoid style. It’s the certainty of a conspiratorial hand behind every decision; the evangelical fervor that sees every political dispute as an ultimate contest of good against evil.

Lately, the media has seized upon the word “populist” with all the mindless fury of a mob of…populists. To restore some meaning to the word besides popular outrage, turn to Hofstadter again…

…For example, the (populist) idea that Timothy Geithner is too close to Wall Street to protect the taxpayers could eventually turn into the (paranoid) idea that Timothy Geithner was appointed in order to protect the bankers at the expense of the taxpayers.

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And Packer addresses some criticisms leveled against the piece above:

more paranoia

h/t Andrew Sullivan

Tedisco/Murphy special election battle

Ire at Wall St Bonuses Is Now Factor in House Race

This story points to the narrative the RNC will be pushing – “Dems are the party of Wall St” – particularly if anger at Wall St continues or grows.

The Obama administration’s reliance on top Wall St figures and the Clinton administration’s complicity in deregulation makes this easier to sell than it ought to be.  The drive to deregulate and the ideological justifications for the huge disparities in wealth since the Reagan administration are fundamentally and overwhelmingly Republican creatures.

But this narrative serves two purposes.  First, it reflects the omni-present and knee-jerk PR/propaganda device of associating the opposing party with whatever people are mad at.  But second, it hides the causality of Republican ideology, particularly deregulation, in the present mess.   Hiding or glossing over the centrality of deregulation in the crisis will be an attractive prospect for the financial sector and much of the corporate world and we should expect a lot of funding to pour into forwarding this narrative and others that might work to the same ends.