Saint Ronnie??

Greenwald (as usual) has a point:

The views that Ronald Reagan not only advocated, but signed a treaty compelling the U.S. to adhere to, are ones that are now -- in the view of our dominant media narrative -- the hallmarks of The Hard Left: torture is never justified; there are "no exceptional circumstances" justifying it; it must be declared to be a serious criminal offense ; and -- most of all -- the U.S., as Ronald Regan put it, "is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution." Reagan's explicit view that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" permits signatory nations (such as Spain) to prosecute torturers from other countries (such as the U.S.) is now considered so fringe that it's almost impossible to find someone in mainstream American debates willing to advocate it.

If you now believe about torture and prosecutions exactly what Ronald Reagan advocated in 1988 -- or what Israel today advocates -- then, according to our establishment narrative, you are, by definition, a member of the Hard Left.

He also references the Pew poll released today:

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.

Andrew Sullivan comments:

So Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people wonder why atheism is gaining in this country.

Notice the poll does not even use a euphemism like "coercive interrogation" - forcing Allahpundit to substitute it. (Even HotAir, it seems, finds it difficult to write the sentence: "Evangelicals are more likely to be conservative and conservatives are more likely to support torture.") But it remains a fact that white evangelicals are the most pro-torture of any grouping. Mainline Protestant groups were the most opposed. A mere 20 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics believe that torture is never justified.

I agree with Amanda Marcotte

...an Austin blogger over at Pandagon. This is pretty interesting:

I get email

This one is from Michael Steele, head of the Republican National Committee:

Dear dan,
I hope Arlen Specter's party change outrages you. It should for two reasons:

First--Specter claimed it was philosophical--and pointed his finger of blame at Republicans all over America for his defection to the Democrats. He told us all to go jump in the lake today.

I'm sorry, but I don't believe a word he said.

Arlen Specter committed a purely political and self-serving act today. He simply believes he has a better chance of saving his political hide and his job as a Democrat. He loves the title of Senator more than he loves the party--and the principles--that elected him and nurtured him.

Second--and more importantly--Arlen Specter handed Barack Obama and his band of radical leftists nearly absolute power in the United States Senate. In leaving the Republican Party--and joining the Democrats--he absolutely undercut Republicans' efforts to slow down Obama's radical agenda through the threat of filibuster.

I'll say it as well. Republicans, go jump in the lake. Then have a picnic by the lake. Maybe tell some jokes. It's time for the grownups to clean up your mess.

Sincerely,
Radical Leftist (a.k.a 68% of Americans)

Fitting that on day 99...

... Arlen Specter becomes 59 of 99...paging Senator Franken.

What Digby Said

Read this:

Kilmeade's belief that nobody should be allowed to have an opinion backed up with experience or knowledge tracks perfectly with the conservative movement, on a variety of subjects. We shouldn't listen to scientists on climate change, or health professionals on health care, or weapons inspectors on Iraq. The plural of data is not anecdote.

BTW - the plural of data is...data.

Torture

The torture story is unfolding pretty quickly. the liberal blogosphere is really doing an outstanding job of putting the pieces together as well as advocating for investigation. For the most part, the best I can do is link to some of the better analysis (as well as old fashioned news reporting) from time to time.

I suggest starting with this from Daily Kos:

So much information about the Bush administration's torture policies and rationales has surfaced in recent days that, contrary to the secrecy meme of those days, we are now in danger of suffering from TMI - too much information.

So I thought it would be helpful to put together a timeline of known facts, reports and claims to try to give some chronological perspective to it all. As with any such collection, the selections are somewhat subjective, but I have tried to be fair (but not balanced; this isn't a sporting event) in including what is known, admitted or reasonably validated. And - for once - I will leave speculation to the comments.

Digby

All day I've been seeing torture apologists all over TV frantically trying to block this particular line of inquiry. They know that it's potentially the most explosive revelation of all. If the White House ordered torture to try to get the prisoners to falsely confess to links between al Qaeda and Iraq ... well all bets are off.

Marcy Wheeler

Whether you believe Obama is impeding investigation or playing 11 dimension chess to set it up without looking like the bad guy, his policy on FOIA has already begun to open up the floodgates that may enable public opinion make this happen.

Marcy Again

But, as we know, that's not how waterboarding was done in practice.

The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04, and also that it was used in a different manner. See id. at 37 ("[T]he waterboard technique ... was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator ... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real--and is more poignant and convincing.") [my emphasis]

They got approval for SERE techniques. But they had already formally decided to far exceed the guidelines used in SERE.

Greg Sargent

Robert Mueller, who was appointed by Bush in 2001 and remains FBI director under Obama, delivered that assessment at the end of this December 2008 article in Vanity Fair on torture:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

That stands in direct contrast to Dick Cheney’s recent claim that torture has been “enormously valuable” in terms of “preventing another mass-casualty attack against the United States.”

You’d think that this sort of thing would throw a bit of a wrench into the Bushies’ campaign. But as Charles Kaiser notes, these types of statements haven’t really broken through the media din.

And finally from the Washington Post:

But several top Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, are pushing back. A day after they sent a letter to Obama arguing that any investigation criminalizes political differences on national security, McCain and several colleagues applied more pressure on the White House through a round of interviews on TV news programs.

(emphasis added)
You have got to be kidding me. First off, what does "criminalizing policy differences" even mean? It sounds to me like they're saying that American and international law is just an opinion to be considered and discarded at will. I think there's a real chance that McCain would have been a worse president than Bush. Of all people, I would have expected him to have moral clarity on torture...

Funny thing about liberals

My observation so far is that conservatives will fall in line behind their leader no matter what he does or says. Liberals or progressives on the other hand are convinced that their leaders will sell them out at the earliest opportunity and interpret actions and words in the most negative way possible. While I get a little tired of all the cries of "traitor" and "sellout", it pretty much negates the argument I get from conservatives that I don't know the "real truth" because I only get info from the "Obama-loving liberal media" (hmm...[blank]-lover! where have I heard that before?).

I won't go into a diatribe about how the news media in the US is owned by large corporations and how that biases their product to the benefit of those corporations (such as profiting from war, via government contracts). But, I will say that there is a striking difference between watching Fox continue to cheerlead for the last administration's torture policies and watching Olbermann or Maddow take President Obama to task for not calling for criminal investigations into those policies. I think that a lot of the angst on the left is a product of getting their asses handed to them by the conservatives for most of the last 40 years, but the instinct is correct: question authority.