Does Anyone Believe This Statement?

The fact is this Gonzales or anyone associated will be a rubber stamp for bush...period. That's why they're there. Period. If not, they don't last. Period.

..."when you start looking at torture statutes and you look at ways around the spirit of the law, you're losing the moral high ground." ... "once you start down this road … it is very hard to come back. So I do believe we have lost our way, and my challenge to you as a leader of this nation is to help us find our way without giving up our obligation and right to fight our enemy."

THE SECOND TERM AGENDA
Think Rushmore
President Bush needs to carve out his place in history.

BY THOMAS SOWELL
Friday, January 7, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Now that President Bush has twice gotten himself to the White House, the question is whether he wants to try for Mount Rushmore. One of the luxuries of a second term is an opportunity to think about the long run, not simply for one's own "legacy," but for the future of the nation as a whole.
Even during his first term, George W. Bush's long-run strategic view, exemplified by the war on terrorism, contrasted sharply with former President Bill Clinton's preoccupation with short-run political tactics, though this contrast seemed to be little noticed in most of the media.

What are the biggest long-run problems? The biggest is of course national survival in an age when international terrorist networks and rogue nations developing nuclear weapons raise possibilities too chilling to contemplate.

If the time ever comes when this president, or any future president, has to hesitate in the face of a mortal threat looming on the horizon, because of fear of the word "unilateral" and the howling of critics at home or abroad, this great nation is lost.

President John F. Kennedy said it all long ago: "We dare not tempt them with weakness."

Already we have had Osama bin Laden warning us that we had better vote his way or face massive retaliation. When Spain caved in to terrorism and changed governments in response to terrorist violence, it opened a new and deadly chapter in international politics.

Domestically, our biggest long-run challenge will be to rescue the voting public's right to govern themselves from activist judges who not only invalidate policies they don't like but even dictate new policies to elected officials.

Vacancies on the federal courts, including new vacancies expected on the aging Supreme Court, offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn around the drift toward judicial despotism.
Those who favor judicial activism have long appreciated how high the stakes are with nominees to the federal bench in general and the Supreme Court in particular. After the orchestrated character assassinations of Judge Robert Bork and Judge Clarence Thomas, there is no excuse for those who want to end judicial activism to be unaware of what a brutal fight lies ahead if they mean to restore the rule of law instead of the rule of judges.

Whatever the short-term solution to the problems created by the Senate Judiciary Committee, a longer-term solution must put a stop to the practice of publicly savaging nominees to the courts. Vote against them if you don't like them, but do not make this a snake pit that high-quality people, who have many other options, will avoid.

Within living memory, judicial nominees did not even appear in person before the Senate for confirmation. A system that produced giants like Oliver Wendell Holmes is surely better than one which has produced pygmies like David Souter.

Some institutional changes, such as getting the TV cameras out of the committee hearings, or having nominees submit their records without appearing in person, need to be explored and some solution imposed despite the inevitable howling of the liberals and their media allies.

Many other areas need institutional change for long-run results. Even something as apparently innocuous as the Census Bureau needs a broader focus than studies incessantly comparing one group with another, featuring pie charts and "gaps"--and ignoring or downplaying the great progress in material well-being of all Americans, including those in the bottom 10% or 20% in income.

Census data on family and household income are grossly misleading when families and households are getting smaller over the years. When two working members of a household today earn as much as three working members earned a generation ago, that is not a "stagnation" in income-- as the media love to report it-- but a 50% increase in per capita real income that has enabled one member to go set up another household.

Robert Rector of the Heritage has made devastating criticisms of these and other misleading Census studies over the years. But despite many years of conservative Republican administrations, neither he nor people who have his perspective have replaced those in the Census Bureau whose liberal vision shapes the way so many issues are presented in the media and in academia. That kind of influence should not go by default to those with one political viewpoint.

The area in which many Americans feel most betrayed by both political parties has been in those parties' refusal to take control of our borders. Fear of the Hispanic vote is no doubt one factor and fear of media demonization is another. But the guys on Mount Rushmore didn't get there by ducking tough fights.

When you consider what a private citizen like Ron Unz has done to get rid of so-called bilingual education in California, for example, it must be clear that you can talk sense to both the general public and the Hispanic population as well, if you make the effort and do not let the political and media chorus intimidate you.
Not all Hispanics are thrilled at open borders, any more than they all were dedicated to bilingual education. But the Republicans' greatest failing on this and other issues, going back through several administrations, has been an unwillingness to take their case to the public. On Social Security, for example, they need to spell out that privatization means more total investment, creating more future income from which to pay future pensions.

Too often Republicans have been willing to make backroom compromises with the Democrats, instead of going to the public, as Ronald Reagan did. With the Democrats becoming ever more obstructionist, it is long past time for Republicans to try Plan B.

This administration faces challenges and dangers that few, if any, have had to face in our history. But these challenges and dangers, at home and abroad, are also historic opportunities.



Mr. Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. This is adapted from the Hoover Digest.


Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

AT WAR
Too Nice for Our Own Good
Democrats undermine efforts to gather information from captured terrorists.

Too Nice for Our Own Good
Democrats undermine efforts to gather information from captured terrorists.

BY HEATHER MAC DONALD
Saturday, January 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Senate Democrats decided to turn the confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales into a referendum on the war on terror--specifically, on the Bush administration's decision that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda terrorists. They implied that the denial of prisoner-of-war status to al Qaeda fighters resulted in the torture of prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

This "torture narrative" is gospel truth among elite opinion-makers, yet it is false in every detail. It relies on ignorance of the actual interrogation techniques promulgated after 9/11. However spurious, the narrative has had a devastating effect on interrogators' ability to get intelligence from detainees.

Soon after the Afghanistan fighting began, Army interrogators realized that their part in the war on terror was not going according to script. Pentagon doctrine, honed in the Cold War, held that 95% of prisoners would break upon straightforward questioning. But virtually no al Qaeda or Taliban detainee was giving up information--not in response to direct questioning, and not in response to Army-approved psychological gambits for prisoners of war.
Some al Qaeda fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, they had learned, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture--a sign, al Qaeda said, of American weakness. Even if a prisoner had not previously studied U.S. detention policies, he soon figured them out. "It became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to have them sit there," explains an Afghanistan interrogator. "They realized: 'The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they'll draw lines on the floor showing us where to pray, we'll get three meals a day with fresh fruit . . . we can wait them out.' " Traditional appeals to a prisoner's emotions, such as playing on his love of family or life, had little effect. "The jihadists would tell you, 'I've divorced this life, I don't care about my family,' " recalls an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Frustrated interrogators across the globe concluded that their best hope for getting information was to re-create the "shock of capture"--that vulnerable mental state when a prisoner is most uncertain and most likely to respond to questioning. Many argued for a calibrated use of "stress techniques"--prolonged questioning that would cut into a detainee's sleep schedule, for example, or making a prisoner kneel or stand.

A crack interrogator from Afghanistan explains the psychological effect of stress: "Let's say a detainee comes into the interrogation booth and he's had resistance training. He knows that I'm completely handcuffed and that I can't do anything to him. If I throw a temper tantrum, lift him onto his knees, and walk out, you can feel his uncertainty level rise dramatically. He's been told: 'They won't physically touch you,' and now you have. The point is not to beat him up but to introduce the reality into his mind that he doesn't know where your limit is." Grabbing someone by the top of the collar has had a more profound effect on the outcome of questioning than any actual torture could have, this Army reservist maintains. "The guy knows: You just broke your own rules, and that's scary."

Such treatment, though far short of torture, probably would violate the Geneva Convention's norms for lawful prisoners of war, who must be protected from "any form of coercion." But terrorists fail every test for coverage under the Geneva Conventions: They seek to massacre civilians, they conceal their status as warriors, and they treat their own prisoners to such niceties as beheadings. President Bush properly found that terrorists do not qualify as Geneva-protected prisoners of war.

In April 2003, the Pentagon finalized the rules for questioning unlawful combatants in Cuba, following a fierce six-month debate. The approved techniques were in many respects more restrictive than the Geneva conventions themselves. Providing a detainee an incentive for cooperation--a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich or a Twinkie, say--was forbidden unless specifically cleared by the secretary of defense, because not every prisoner would receive the goodie. Other longstanding Army psychological techniques, such as attacking a detainee's pride or the classic good cop/bad cop routine, also required a specific finding of military necessity and notice to Donald Rumsfeld.

The only nonconventional "stress" techniques on the final Guantanamo list are such innocuous interventions as adjusting the temperature or introducing an unpleasant smell into the interrogation room (but only if the interrogator is present at all times), reversing a detainee's sleep cycles from night to day, and convincing a detainee that his interrogator is not from the U.S. And those mild techniques could only be used with extensive bureaucratic oversight and medical monitoring to ensure "humane," "safe," and "lawful" application.

The decision to exclude terrorists from Geneva coverage and the interrogation methods approved for unlawful combatants in Cuba had nothing to do with the Abu Ghraib anarchy. Military commanders in Iraq emphasized repeatedly that the conflict there would be governed by the Geneva Conventions. The interrogation rules developed for Iraq explicitly stated that they were promulgated under Geneva authority. Except for the presence of dogs, none of the behavior in the photos was included in interrogation rules. Mandated masturbation, dog leashes, assault, and stacking naked prisoners in pyramids--none of these was approved (or even contemplated) interrogation practice in any theater of conflict.
The Abu Ghraib abuse resulted rather from the Pentagon's failure to respond adequately to the Iraq insurgency and its inability to maintain military discipline in the understaffed facility. As the avalanche of prisoners taken in the street fighting overwhelmed the minimal contingent of soldiers at Abu Ghraib, order within the ranks broke down as thoroughly as order in the operation of the prison itself. The guards' sadistic and sexualized treatment of prisoners was just an extension of the chaos they were already wallowing in with no restraint from above. Almost all the behavior shown in the photographs occurred in the dead of night among military police, wholly separate from interrogations. Most abuse victims were not even scheduled to be interrogated.

Equally irrelevant to the prisoner abuse scandal is the infamous torture memo written by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee in August 2002. The CIA had asked him for guidance in interrogating al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. Mr. Bybee responded that a U.S. law against torture forbade only physical pain equivalent to that "accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" and that anti-torture conventions may not even bind the president during war. The Bybee opinion had no effect on interrogation practices among Pentagon interrogators in Afghanistan, Cuba or Iraq. Army interrogators were perfectly ignorant of executive-branch deliberations on the outer boundaries of pain and executive power, which were prepared for and seen only by the CIA.

In the wake of the Abu Ghraib disaster and the ensuing media storm, the Pentagon has shut down every stress technique but one--isolation--and that can be used only after extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests permission to question a detainee into the night could be putting his career in jeopardy. Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all the way up through the Pentagon by bureaucrats who have never conducted an interrogation in their lives.

To succeed in the war on terror, interrogators must be allowed to use carefully controlled stress techniques against unlawful combatants. Stress works, say interrogators. The techniques that the military has used to date come nowhere near torture; the advocates can only be posturing in calling them such. These self-professed guardians of humanitarianism need to come back to earth. Our terrorist enemies have declared themselves enemies of the civilized order. In fighting them, we must hold ourselves to our own high moral standards--without succumbing to the utopian illusion that we can prevail while immaculately observing every precept of the Sermon on the Mount.

Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose Winter issue this is adapted.

If I was a repubican I would not be bragging about Bush being elected a second term as though that means that half the nation approves of the way he handlles things. His approval rating is now 40%.

Congress may very well pass his nomination. I personally have little or no respect for those in congress on either side anymore, nor do I have any respect for all those who has allowed all these things to take place in the last three years. Nor do I have respect for all those who continue to support and defend all these actions of the last three years.

Go ahead and put him on mount rushmore, it would be right in keeping with everything else.

Clinton pulled himself up by his bootstraps and you bushlickers find him to be evil personified so I wouldn't bandy that argument around because it obviously only has merit to you when applied to one of your masters lap dogs.

Bi-Polar Bear wrote:

Clinton pulled himself up by his bootstraps and you bushlickers find him to be evil personified so I wouldn't bandy that argument around because it obviously only has merit to you when applied to one of your masters lap dogs.

Actually, I supported Clinton in the impeachment to the extent of writing to him twice to tell him that I thought it was unfair, and was even answered once, so stop guessing what I think.

Gonzales may have risen from a scummy drug neighborhood in DC or from a background of severe child abuse on the planet Xna. Great narratives for PR purposes, but hardly relevant to any question regarding his fitness for this post, or the quality of his legal positions. Unless we wish to mandate that henceforth, all positions of trust and responsibility in government fall only to those who come from poor families.

Gonzales may have risen from a scummy drug neighborhood in DC or from a background of severe child abuse on the planet Xna. Great narratives for PR purposes, but hardly relevant to any question regarding his fitness for this post, or the quality of his legal positions.

In which case I'm your next President

Fortunately the adults are back in charge of The Ship of State.

The Pentagon is debating whether to set up elite hit-squads to target leaders of the Iraq insurgency in a new strategy based on tactics used against leftist guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago, Newsweek magazine reported on Saturday.

One proposal would send U.S. Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads of hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, Newsweek said, citing military insiders familiar with the discussions.

The squads may operate across the border in Syria, Newsweek said on its web site, but added it was unclear whether they would assassinate leaders or be involved in "snatch" operations.

The magazine said the plan is being called "the Salvador option" after strategy instigated during the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s...

blatham wrote:

Gonzales may have risen from a scummy drug neighborhood in DC or from a background of severe child abuse on the planet Xna. Great narratives for PR purposes, but hardly relevant to any question regarding his fitness for this post, or the quality of his legal positions.

And further on that thought would be that it is what he has done since starting his career in the law that we should be focusing on. If pulling yourself out of some troubled past is the main qualification, then there would be so many eligible people for anything. Besides making for good copy, it serves nothing except to show his determination to make a better life for himself...kind of like that old American dream, now isn't it?