The Annual Liberal Blog Post - Richard Cohen checks the box

I'm no fan of the Washington Post's Richard Cohen - he of supporting torture and state sanctioned terror (as long as America practices it). I believe Mr. Cohen serves no agenda but his own -which is undersatndable in a town that hastruly lost any ablity to conceive of real public service.

Yet today he makes some sense (in what is sure to be his annual "See, I'm really a liberal columnist who has to fight off all the big, bad conservatives" column).

This fatuous infatuation with the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment, is clearly the work of witches, wiccans and wackos. It has nothing to do with America's real problems and, if taken too seriously, would cause an economic and political calamity. The Constitution is a wonderful document, quite miraculous actually, but only because it has been wisely adapted to changing times. To adhere to the very word of its every clause hardly is respectful to the Founding Fathers. They were revolutionaries who embraced change. That's how we got here.

He even manages (sort of) to point out that President Obama's Liberal credentials are, at best, strained:

Similarly, only a spell can explain why much of the Republican Party insists on calling Obama a socialist. To apply this label to the very man who saved Big Finance, who rescued Goldman Sachs and the rest of the boys, who gave a Heimlich to the barely breathing banks, can only be explained by witchcraft or voodoo or something like that. It has caused the GOP to lose its mind. Obama did something similar to the American auto industry, saving it from itself. He did not let it fail or nationalize it, as a socialist would have done, but pumped cash into it so that -- this is me speaking -- it can fail later on.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Almost a defense of liberal policies in a town where the policies, and their defenders get few and far between as the weeks drag on.

My problem with believeing this, of course, extends to Mr. Cohen's fetish for defending the indefensible:

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives -- and maybe were -- and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs -- not time-stampers who take no chances.

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went
right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done -- back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

Its a great place Mr. Cohen live in, where we as a nation can break our own laws, destroy probably innocent lives (on both sides of the torture chamber) and then run around calling the people who did it great patriots. And as long as Cohen stand by these words, I can't stand by him as a liberal.

So thanks for your annual broadside at consrvatives. It happens to all be true. Sadly, it does nothing to buff your images with real liberals.

Richard Cohen talks out of both sides - and his generation needs to stop it.

In today's Washington Post, Richard Cohen - he of torture defense and Iraq ballyhooing - laments how the really difficult decisions about Vietnam his generation grappled with have been sullied recently:

But his most appalling lie was to turn a complex truth of that era into a simple matter of shame. It was obscene to send young men into a war that had lost its purpose and was being opposed by major political and intellectual figures in the United States. Opposition to the war was not merely a matter of avoiding duty but an agonized grappling with a hideous moral dilemma. I am not ashamed that I did not fight. I am not ashamed, either, that I did not want to fight. Neither do I denigrate those who did. I admire their bravery. I am humbled by their courage. I am mourning their deaths -- and I will never stop asking: Why?

Memo to Mr. Cohen - my generation is going through the same thing over Iraq and Afghantistan. We are asking WHY the very same way you did, and we thought your generation, having had an "agonized grappling with a hideous moral dillema" would have handled these two present wars differently - which is to say you all would have run screaming away from them as quickly as possible. That you and your generation, who now purport to "lead" our nation did not, says you have forgetton the hard lessons of your youths, and you are no more fit to preach to us in righteous indignation then you are to preach to a fellow generational member who extends his real service record to score political points.

Stop being such Hippocrits!

Defending Torture - Richard Cohen, Volume Two

Richard Cohen is at it again – trying to defend torture while running around claiming its indefensible. At least he’s being consistent. I’m not the only one who sees his doublespeak – and calls him out for what he’s saying. Early in the Article he writes:

This business of what constitutes torture is a complicated matter. It is further complicated by questions about its efficacy: Does it sometimes work? Does it never work? Is it always immoral? What about torture that saves lives? What if it saves many lives? What if one of those lives is your child's?

It’s a nice fiction, but it doesn’t wash. Despite the increasingly desperate claims of the most recent former Vice President, there is not yet one single shred of evidence that any of the information about America’s torture regime has saved a single life. Leaving that issue aside, how can a country that adopted the U.N. Convention on Torture as its highest law (as I detail here) even be thinking about discussing the morality of torture? We’ve long ago declared it illegal, so the morality play part of all this is really moot.

Cohen further writes:

No one can possibly believe that America is now safer because of the new restrictions on enhanced interrogation and the subsequent appointment of a special prosecutor. The captured terrorist of my fertile imagination, assuming he had access to an Internet cafe, knows about the special prosecutor. He knows his interrogator is under scrutiny. What person under those circumstances is going to spill his beans?

Having lived overseas as a kid, I can’t believe that anyone would think that torture of foreigners would make us safer. The Muslim world, in particular, already has along list of perceived and real grievances against the U.S. – why give them one more? For that matter, if we do torture, have we not already begun to dismantle the free-state that is so abhorrent to al Quaeda in the first place?

After wrestling for a paragraph with his supposedly simultaneous desires for absolute security and abhorrence of torture, Cohen closes with this:

The questions of what constitutes torture and what to do with those who, maybe innocently, applied what we now define as torture have to be removed from the political sphere. They cannot be the subject of an ideological tug of war, both sides taking extreme and illogical positions -- torture never works, torture
always works, torture is always immoral, torture is moral if it saves lives. Torture always is ugly. So, though, is the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.

As with so much else in the torture apologists’ playbook, Cohen overlooks the facts. The United States, by ratifying the U.N. convention on Torture has had a definition of action which constitutes torture since 1994. Hardly “what we now define as torture.” And, given that all the other apologists are indeed sucking both the victims of torture and the torturers into the ideological battle for our nation’s soul, Cohen’s professed concern for the whole thing is far too little, far too late. If he wants to ask a serious question, here’s one – what does the U.S. have to gain by being a nation that tortures anyone in clear contravention of our highest law and Constitution?

Defending the Torturers - the Richard Cohen Story

Like so many in the media establishment in the D.C area, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen thinks we shouldn't prosecute American civil servants or politicians who engaged in or authorized torture in the Bush Administration. His argument, similar to his Post colleague David Ignatius (and many others in politics here) is that lives may well have been saved, and post-9/11 we all wanted to be safe. So, a few bad guys got really messed up psychologically and physically? So what if the U.S. finally came out of the closet as a harsh, potentially totalitarian state, like many of our “allies.” If we have to do something, a blue ribbon commission will find the truth, set us free, and that should be the end of that.

Well sir, your lengthy career not withstanding, you have it wrong. You are looking at this through the lens of the D.C. national political establishment (where you are an elitist who enjoys certain kinds of privileged access), instead of the lens of the big picture. And you are either ignoring, or are ignorant of the real damage those actions, and their actors have done to the United States.

First, there is really no line between torturing foreigners whom you believe to be a threat, and torturing your own citizens who dare to disagree with you. I know, there is no evidence that American civil servants or military personnel tortured anyone who can claim U.S. citizenship, but there is plenty of evidence that those same officials thought Americans were a threat unto themselves. How else do you explain warrantless wiretapping programs that, even now, are shielded from the public’s scrutiny? How else do you explain the arrogance of telling the American people “So” when it is pointed out to you that 70% of them disapprove of what you are doing supposedly in their name? Among the many things it has left behind, the Bush Administration has left a serious disregard to both American laws, and American institutions.

Second, and perhaps more important, is the legal side of the issue. Our constitution says (in Article Six) “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” It is remarkably straightforward language, especially since it was written so long ago – and basically says that America, once she enters into a treaty relationship that is duly and properly ratified by Congress, must take that treaty law and act upon it as if it had been passed by the Congress itself and signed by the President.

Where that gets sticky for the Bush Administration, and Mr. Cohen’s defense, is the Geneva Convention. The four parts (adopted between 1864 and 1949) expressly govern the treatment of combatants in all types of conflicts. For our purposes, the “war on terror” certainly falls into the definition of the second convention as an international war with involvement of at least one “Higher Contracting Party” – namely the U.S. The second convention has specific requirements for humane treatment, including expressly forbidding torture. And, as a treaty fully ratified and adopted by the Congress, it is the highest law of the land in the U.S.

Thus, anyone torturing in the name of the U.S. and anyone authorizing or directing torture in the name of the U.S. is in violation of the Convention, and the U.S. Constitution, since the later clearly directs the former to be the highest law of the land. A generation ago, we forced a President to resign because he had broken other U.S. laws, though none of the legal issues raised in Watergate were of this caliber.

Yet now, with mounting evidence of a significant breach of U.S. law, Mr. Cohen (and too many others) labor intensively to tell we the people that we should just look the other way. We should not open this wound, prosecute these men, because it will make us unsafe – and potentially take away tools that might save lives later (though there is no specific evidence ever presented to back this claim). Well sir, you are wrong. The best and highest tool we have to defeat terrorists is the Constitution, and the civil liberties and protections it contains. Anything that weakens that Constitution, anything that subverts our laws, is a victory for those who seek to bring us down. And I, as a citizen, refuse to let the Constitution be weakened. Further, I refuse to let it be weakened so that folks like Mr. Cohen can continue to hide from the hypocrisy of claiming to love and support our nation, while all the while destroying it from within just so they can maintain their “elite” status in the fish bowl that is D.C.

UPDATE:
As usual, this is an issue that resonates across new media. Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald for this quote from Thomas Jefferson, which summs up the situation nicely:

"I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269

UPDATE 2:
I hate it when others jump on my band wagon. Ok, Not really.

UPDATE 3:
Apparently, the judiciary is now weighing in - and their take might just surprise you.