Tortured Times: The Shame of Mukasey, Schumer, Feinstein, Scalia & McCain
No one in their right mind would believe that the last year of the Reign of Bush would be any less tendentious than previous years. There are, for example, the latest flurry of presidential signing statements and the lame duck’s insistence that telecoms be granted retroactive immunity for embracing his initiatives to spy on their customers.
But you would have to go far to top the shame team of Michael Mukasey, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Antonin Scalia and John McCain with their embrace of torture as an official instrument of Bush administration policy.
Long story short: Human dignity is trumped by political expedience.
Mukasey is the attorney general who was going to put things to rights after the disastrous tenure of his predecessor, but now embraces the extralegal excesses of the Dear Departed Gonzo and his thugs at arms, including Steven Bradbury, who acknowledged this week that torture may be illegal but because the Justice Department hasn’t ruled as such then it isn’t.
Senators Schumer and Feinstein, symptomatic of the lack of Democratic due diligence in Congress, are responsible for greasing the skids for the approval of Mukasey’s nomination after they let him off the hook by not having to explain what he really thought about torture.
Supreme Court Justice Scalia, a judicial pop-off without peer, defended the use of torture this week. Employing the pretzel logic that has made him such a right-wing darling, he asserted that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment didn’t cover cruel and unusual interrogations. Clever, eh?
McCain, the victim of torture himself as a Navy pilot who was shot down and imprisoned in a North Vietnamese POW camp for six years, has now flip-flopped back into the pro-torture camp as he cements his frontrunner status in the Republican presidential race.
My feelings for McCain have been mixed for years: A war hero and a man of principle who nevertheless held some political views that I could not abide. Until Wednesday, I believed that depending upon how things shook out I could conceivably vote for him in November.
But that was before McCain joined 44 other senators to vote against a bill prohibiting the CIA from using waterboarding and other Nazi-like torture techniques banned by the Army’s Field Manual. Some 51 senators — including Schumer and Feinstein, many days late and many veto-proof votes short — voted for the bill.
Noted the Los Angeles Times:
“Underscoring the complexity of the political currents . . . McCain led earlier efforts in the Senate to ban cruel treatment of prisoners, and has denounced waterboarding in presidential debates. But preserving the CIA’s ability to employ so-called enhanced interrogation methods has broad support in the party’s conservative base.”
Dick Polman captured perfectly the corner that McCain has painted himself into:
“The problem is that, by flip-flopping so blatantly, he undercuts his image as a man of conviction (to the delight of Democrats who fear his appeal) – without even mollifying his conservative critics, some of whom seem to believe that today’s pandering can never erase yesterday’s heresies. He could be saddled with this dilemma well into autumn.”
Yes, presidential candidates have to be mindful of their political base. Yes, they sometimes have to pander. But we’re talking torture here, not pork, and for me McCain’s betrayal is now complete.
A man whom I have hugely admired, now 35 years from the Hanoi Hilton and comfily ensconced in the chambers of the Greatest Deliberative Body in the World, betrays himself as someone who will grovel at the feet of his new captors — the people he needs to be elected.
9 Responses to “Tortured Times: The Shame of Mukasey, Schumer, Feinstein, Scalia & McCain”
I agree with you about McCain. It's disappointing, particularly since he himself argued that the military standards should become the guidelines for the government.
I must say, I think he'd have done more for himself by courting the moderates than by pandering to the right. They are likely to see this as one more indicator that he can't be trusted.
In some ways, this has opened my eyes. Delving more into his recent career, I can see that he is no longer a moderate if he ever was.
Many people are ignorant of the details. The problem isn't “waterboarding” but all that has been happening as a reaction to it. To quote McCain from a piece by a critic of what McCain has done:
“It is unfortunate that the reluctance of officials to stand by this straightforward conclusion [McCain believes that 'waterboarding' is clearly illegal and that the federal government should publicly recognize this fact] has produced in the Congress such frustration that we are today debating whether to apply a military field manual to non-military intelligence activities. It would be far better, I believe, for the Administration to state forthrightly what is clear in current law – that anyone who engages in waterboarding, on behalf of any U.S. government agency, puts himself at risk of criminal prosecution and civil liability.
We have come a long way in the fight against violent extremists, and the road to victory will be longer still. I support a robust offensive to wage and prevail in this struggle. But as we confront those committed to our destruction, it is vital that we never forget that we are, first and foremost, Americans. The laws and values that have built our nation are a source of strength, not weakness, and we will win the war on terror not in spite of devotion to our cherished values, but because we have held fast to them.”
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily…
Nice job DLS, but you take AS post completely out of context, and you don't address McClown's perceived flip flop. This paragraph makes his vote sound like pandering to the base to me.
No, I don't, Rudi. I never take things out of context, but zero in on the key elements. I even moved McCain's earlier words about waterboarding being wrong into brackets and changed them to apply them correctly within the key quote to clarify his position on waterboarding and what the feds should do about this practice. I even made it clear that this was from a piece by a critic of McCain (did you neglect to read that?). The key issue here to the discerning reader, of course, is why he was against the legislation, not that he was “for” waterboarding or has changed his position on this, as so many critics wrongly believe.
[...] Boy, that’s a lot of hand-wringing over something that happened exactly three times in 2002 and 2003 and lasted about five minutes. [...]
[...] and New York’s equally “liberal” Chuck Schumer, and poor tortured John McCain all approve of and/or vote for waterboarding and other forms of torture to be named [...]
Hey Shaun, thanks for the thoughtful piece.
I have always voted for Feinstein but after some of her votes from last year it was evident that she placed politics above protecting the US Constitution. I will no longer give her any support.
I never believed that Mukasey would “right the wrongs” and I wanted to wring my hands and break my fingers
when he was confirmed.
McCain's recent actions have disappointed my but I don't feel betrayed by him. I do feel betrayed by DiFi, because I held her to higher standards and she is my Senator. I expected the person I voted for to stand up to Bush and protect my rights (and everyone else's) as a citizen and as guaranteed under the US Constitution.
My “feeling” about McCain is that during the time he was campaigning, and he was running behind most of the other candidates, he could say what he wanted- he didn't have anything to lose.
Unfortunately he is now feeling pressure from the Republicans (and is it some power game by the RNC or does he feel he has to placate some other group?) to support more conservative views- and he is more than happy to do it because he's within spittin' distance of being the Rep. nominee. It's interesting how quickly he changed once power became within his grasp.
Obama seems to have the most consistent record of anyone running for Pres. He has said some politically dangerous statements (his “grown-up” speech to the autoworkers in Detroit, for one example and (as another example) his statement about wanting to go into Pakistan and fight the terrorists even if the US didn't have tacit approval from the Pakistanis). It's nice that there is someone out there who is mostly consistent in his views. That's another reason why I'm disappointed in McCain, i sort of thought that in his way, McCain was Obama's equivalent for the GOP. Not the youth vote and energy, but McCain's straight talk express and his unwillingness to play games just to get elected. I thought McCain wanted to be president to help the country. But the events of this past week show otherwise.
You nailed it again Shaun. I actually voted for McCain in the 2000 Michigan primary, but that seems like a world away now. I used to admire the man for his integrity, even though I didn't agree with all his views. Now I see him as a major disappointment.