Re: Give me a Break

Not sure how I missed this, but John Cornyn asked Eric Holder Noah Feldman’s ticking time bomb question at yesterday’s hearing: 

Cornyn: I just want to propose a hypothetical for you, lets say that as Attorney General you find out there are terrorists who have access to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and that you have a detainee who is in possession of information that if disclose would prevent those weapons from being detonated in the United States and thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of innocent people being killed. You would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding which, under my hypothetical, would save tens of thousands of lives?

Holder replies that waterboarding is not the only interrogation technique. Hilarity ensues:

Cornyn: Assume that it was.

HOLDER: I think your hypothetical assumes a premise that I’m not willing to concede.

CORNYN: I know you don’t like my hypothetical.

HOLDER: No, the hypothetical’s fine; the premise that underlies it I’m not willing to accept, and that is that waterboarding is the only way that I could get that information from those people.

CORNYN: Assume that it was.

HOLDER: Given the knowledge that I have about other techniques and what I’ve heard from retired admirals and generals and FBI agents, there are other ways in a timely fashion that you can get information out of people that is accurate and will produce useable intelligence. And so it’s hard for me to accept or to answer your hypothetical without accepting your premise. And in fact, I don’t think I can do that.

Words do not do this exchange justice. You simply must watch it for yourself:

Highlight of the video: everyone in the chamber laughs after Cornyn asks, for a second time, that Holder except his hypothetical that waterboarding is the only interrogation technique that could save lives in a ticking time bomb scenario. 

They’re not laughing with you Senator. They’re laughing at you.

Give me a Break

The New York Times asked 5 legal academics to pose questions they wish they could ask Eric Holder at his confirmation hearing. 

This is the best distinguished Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman could come up with:

What may American military and law enforcement do to extract information from terrorists, especially in a “ticking time-bomb” case?

Come! On! Really?! Isn’t it common wisdom at this point that the scenario imagined by the ticking time bomb thought experiment virtually never occurs in real life? It would be laughable that something so wildly implausible keeps getting dredged up by America’s purported “top minds” were it not the fact that it has been used to justify acts of evil at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and at other U.S. military prisons. 

Seems Feldman got a little too excited about the 4-hour series premier of 24 and was jerking off to Jack while writing his question. 

                                                                      

Quote of the Day II

“I certainly respect the Constitution, but we have some issues that are much bigger than the Constitution.”–Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Frank Melton.

McCain’s #1 Demographic

U.S. districts where John McCain had higher vote totals than George W. Bush did in 2004:

U.S. districts where native southern whites comprise more than 65% of the population:

Courtesy of The Monkey Cage

Dead Tree Still Kicking

Get ripped off for an Obama inauguration paper! In advance!!

For only $40, one enterprising young ebayer offers the following:

IN THIS LOT YOU WILL 100% SURE  GET A NEW YORK TIMES COPY OF OBAMA ENOGORATION !! THIS PAPER IS SURE TO BE A GREAT EDITION TO ANYONES COLLECTION. THE PAPER WILL BE SHIPPED 1-22-09 , IT WILL COME WITH A TRACKING NUMBER AND BE MAILED IN A FLAT MAILER . HURRY ONLY A LIMITED AMOUNT AVAIABLE. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE ASK ME ; THANKS AND ENJOY

618Morris has a 99.6% approval rating, so you will get what you pay for.

Better buy quick! Time is running out.

Panetta and Torture

Is Leon Panetta really the anti-torture absolutist he has been portrayed as? Eli Lake reports:

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for CIA director, Leon Panetta, served as White House chief of staff during the time the Clinton administration accelerated a practice of kidnapping terrorist suspects and sending them to countries with records of torturing prisoners, human rights organizations and former U.S. officials say.

Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will question Mr. Panetta, chief of staff for President Clinton from 1994 to 1997, about what, if any, role he played in shaping the policy known as “extraordinary rendition,” a Republican aide on the committee said. Mr. Panetta’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Jan. 27. The aide asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

You just had to know this was coming. Nothing in politics is absolute. Even when it comes to torture. But Panetta is about as close to an absolutist as they come. 

One can argue that rendition is a slippery slope that led to direct torture in the Bush administration, but then again, what in life–particularly in the intelligence world–is not a slippery slope? Interrogation is a slippery slope to torture too. Should we categorically refuse to verbally intimidate suspects? We have to draw the line somewhere–even if it does seem a bit arbitrary from a moral standpoint.

Quote of the Day

“Contrary to popular belief, we don’t see Russia from most of Alaska”-Freshman Alaska Senator Mark Begich.

He just couldn’t resist…

Elbridge Would be Proud

Slate has put together a slideshow of the most gerrymandered districts in the country.

The Official Portrait

Rock Bottom?

Doesn’t the Tennessee Speaker of the House imbroglio speak volumes about the state of the Republican party right now?

And now, the Republican Party’s self-annointed knee breaker, none other than Erick Erickson of Redstate, has outdone himself by concocting perhaps the most moronic method to punish heterodix pols ever. Yes, it involves silly putty (his letter to the “RedState Army of Activists” after the jump): 

In Defense of Geithner

Noam Scheiber makes a critical point:

no one should cry for Geithner–he’s done perfectly well for himself financially, certainly better than 90-plus percent of Americans. On the other hand, had he come from Wall Street, he would probably have made millions per year.

Why is this relevant to his tax screw-up? Because people who make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year probably hire a single, middlebrow accountant to do their taxes, and these people are hardly fool-proof. On the other hand, people who make millions of dollars a year probably get the most exquisite accounting and tax-lawyering around. The end result is that the latter don’t have obvious, embarrassing mistakes on their tax returns. But what many of them do have are extremely sophisticated tax shelters that undercut the spirit if not the letter of the law. (Come to think of it, they don’t even need sophisticated tax shelters. This scam allows them to pay a 15 percent rate on income that you and me and Geithner would pay 35 percent on. And it’s all perfectly legal!)

If the choice is between an upper middle-class career civil servant who makes the occasional goof on his taxes, and a longtime hedge fund manager or investment banker who’s taxes are exquisitely lawyered and loopholed, I’ll happily take the former. 

Tim Geithner’s failure to pay taxes was undeniably boneheaded, but it in no way impacts his ability to steer us out of the financial crisis. Remember the grave situation we are in here. If Geithner is truly the best person to save our markets, as a broad consensus of influential minds seem to think, than it would be beyond moronic for Republicans to try to deep-six him to score early tactical points against President Obama. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re beyond considering it. Since when has Congress put country before a good territorial pissing contest?

Best campaign ad ever?

…or advert as they say in Brit-land:

Adorable baby + sweet British narrator warning of a miserable future for said baby in brilliantly snarky fashion (“Dad’s nose. Mom’s Eyes. Gordon Brown’s debt”)= David Cameron is a genius.

Yoo too Young?

Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman on John Yoo:

While John Yoo did most of the staff work for Bybee, Yoo was barely 35 years old—and his memos showed it. They not only took extreme positions; they were legally incompetent, failing to consider many of the most obvious counterarguments.

Gee, I guess the law is very different than math, where your intellect is said to peak in your twenties…

Orin Kerr is incredulous.

I Hate, Hate, Hate, Hate

the counterfactual game. It is the crutch of the intellectually lazy pundit–abstract speculation unsupported by factual evidence, thereby allowing any argument to be freely contorted in whichever direction the pundit’s own worldview dictates. 

Ross Douthat is one of the most brilliant young minds out there. He should know better than to let himself be drawn into a three-way blog debate with Megan McArdle and Stephen Walt held entirely in counterfactual land:

I actually think the Irish example tends to weaken Walt’s counterfactual.   The major point of the thought experiment was Walt’s insinuation that a Jewish Hamas wouldn’t be denounced as terrorists in Washington the way the Arab Hamas gets denounced – because of the influence of the Israel Lobby, presumably. And the example of Northern Ireland suggests precisely the opposite. Yes, even a stateless, terrorism-prone Jewish group in the Holy Land would doubtless have sympathizers in the United States, just as the Irish Republican Army did in the 1970s and ’80s. But despite the sympathies of some Irish Americans for the rebels in Northern Ireland, and the dalliances of the occasional American politician with Gerry Adams and Co., the IRA was on the State Department’s list of, yes, terrorist organizations until the Good Friday Accords. And it’s pretty easy to imagine how the American government would have responded if Catholic nationalists had taken power in a swathe of Northern Ireland and started launching missiles across the Irish Sea into Scottish and English townships. (It’s also worth noting, as long as we’re drawing analogies, that the IRA’s charter was just slightly less objectionable than Hamas’s …)

Ross makes an insightful point to be sure. Comparing the IRA to Walt’s hypothetical Jewish Hamas strikes me as sensible. Of course, just attempting to summarize the comparison underscores the absurdity of this exercise. No one wins on points in a counterfactual debate when each opinion posited is an assumption-based house of cards. 

Quote for the Day

Senator Barbara Boxer to Hillary Clinton:

President-elect Obama has sent a message that world peace and
stability trumps politics and ego. And I think by accepting this
position, Senator Clinton, you are sending the same message, because
you are working with your toughest rival and you’ve set your ego aside
for world peace, world stability and for the good of the country.

Heh. What could be more selfless than accepting an offer to craft “world peace” and “world stability” in the limelight without any direct foreign policy experience? It’s not like it would ensure her legacy in American history or anything…

Hasn’t this always been about Clinton’s ego?