Maine Owl

Torture hearings with Feith and Sands

The House Judiciary Committee convened to discuss torture on Tuesday. KPFA billed it as a hearing on "the role that Bush Administration lawyers played in creating and implementing interrogation policies that have resulted in the widespread abuse of detainees in US custody." Naturally, it was nearly derailed by constant Republican obstructionism and a very poor, disorganized approach on the part of the Democrats. I'll cite Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison for a horrible performance, at one point called "badgering" by a Republican. Unfortunately, the Republican was right. You can listen HERE and HERE.

Phillipe Sands was attacked by Feith during the hearing, as Feith weaseled around his central role in denying detainees human rights, even though many of them have turned out to be completely innocent with no knowledge of terrorism and simply caught up in American round-ups. Maine Owl has four relevant recent posts:

• Friday, June 13, 2008 Republican obstructionism
• Friday, May 02, 2008: Ticking bombs?
• Friday, April 11, 2008: White House torture group
• Thursday, January 31, 2008: Five years ago in war...
  Bush and Blair at the White House, 1-31-2003; The secret memo

The obvious obfuscation by Feith and the Republicans now clothed in great concern for international law are striking in light of voluminous evidence of the torture paradigm ushered in by maladjusted characters like Cheney, Addington, and Feith in the wake of 9/11. The books by Sands and a new one, "The Dark Side" by Jane Mayer provide a view of torture planning as it was practiced at the top. (Mayer describes the severe internal penalties for bucking Cheney, going so far to suggest that certain figures chafing under the illegalities not only had their careers ended, but actually feared physical harm!)

A question that has bothered me for a long time is this: Why has such serious lawbreaking proceeded without discernible political opposition? As I said above, the Democrats since taking power have preferred disorganized, ineffective opportunities to posture rather than the impeachment hearing that Bush and Cheney deserve.

Glenn Greenwald addressed this Tuesday evening in "The motivation for blocking investigations into Bush lawbreaking". He writes,

GREENWALD: As we witness not just Republicans, but also Democrats in Congress, acting repeatedly to immunize executive branch lawbreaking and to obstruct investigations, it's vital to keep that fact in mind. With regard to illegal Bush programs of torture and eavesdropping, key Congressional Democrats were contemporaneously briefed on what the administration was doing (albeit, in fairness, often in unspecific ways). The fact that they did nothing to stop that illegality, and often explicitly approved of it, obviously incentivizes them to block any investigations or judicial proceedings into those illegal programs.

Greenwald has much more. But the main point is that Democrats have been compromised by select intelligence committee members who have been privy to and thus implicated in the cover-up of torture and warrantless wiretapping. The result has been passage of immunity provisions in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the recent FISA revision immunizing telecom companies.