House of Eratosthenes

Dick Morris on the connection between Barack Obama’s new administration, and the Warren Court of the 1950’s and 1960’s…and other stuff. “Emasculating intelligence”:

President-elect Barack Obama’s new head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen, called the legal reasoning which gave the president broad powers to authorize “rough” interrogation of terrorists “shockingly flawed…bogus…outlandish.” She said it allowed “horrific acts” and demanded to know “Where is the outrage? The public outcry?” This is the person who will decide how to interrogate terrorists.
:
Doesn’t [Obama] realize that without warrantless FISA wiretaps we could never have uncovered the plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge (how could we have gotten a warrant for conversations about the bridge when we didn’t yet know that al Qaeda had it in its sights?) Has he forgotten that we only found the name of the operative who was tasked with destroying the bridge because we subjected Kahlid Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11, to “rough” interrogation techniques? Does he really mean to leave us vulnerable to terrorist attacks?

Yes he does. Not because he is callous or fiendish, but because the new president seems to carry the thinking that animated the decisions of the Warren Court on defendant’s rights over into the battle against terror. When the Warren Court first ruled that all defendants deserved free lawyers, that they had to be explicitly told of their right to remain silent, that evidence not obtained through warrants was inadmissible as were any “fruits of the poisonous tree” it occasioned great controversy (enough to help Nixon get elected president). Law and order types said that these decisions would lead to the release of thousands of criminals who would otherwise be in prison and would cause tens or hundreds of thousands more innocent people to become victims of serious crime. And they were right. The decisions of the Warren Court had exactly this effect.

The Warren Court is a fascinating little pearl in the big, fleshy oyster of American history. This is the chapter in which it became obligatory for our system of justice, and therefore our government, to pretend one thing was true while it knew, beyond doubt, that a contrary thing was true. Whether you believe the infectious condition in our country’s intellect is terminal, or not, this is the moment where we caught the bug. We decided material success was a loathsome thing in 1932, and then in the early 1960’s we decided it was a grievous sin to actually know something. “Rules” had to be followed, and if the rules weren’t followed you had to pretend not to know what you actually knew.

Throwing around words like “Constitution,” I’m sure, seemed so harmless at the time. That’s where the Warren Court was getting its authority, so it was mandatory to use that word, right? Trouble is, the C-word carries with it an implication of non-negotiability, at least to the atrophied mind. Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan found this out…make this one guy’s day unpleasant, or let nine planeloads of people burn to death? I’ll take the latter, please, Alex.

PAT BUCHANAN: Let me ask you a couple questions. This Bojinka plot that was going to bring down nine airliners over the Pacific at one time, apparently that was broken by the fact that enhanced interrogation techniques were done in the Philippines on people they caught there. Was that immoral, to use these on an individual, which you might constitute torture if it saves nine passenger planes from going down over the Pacific?

[KRYSTIA] FREELAND: Do you think it would be immoral to preemptively kill someone who hasn’t committed a crime yet?

BUCHANAN: Let me tell you something — it would be moral to take Khalid Shaikh Mohammed out and say here, and shoot him in the head, but it’s immoral —
FREELAND: For what he’s done already.

BUCHANAN: Exactly. But it’s immoral to water board him three minutes?

FREELAND: I’m asking you.

BUCHANAN: I’m saying it’s moral to kill him and given what he’s done and what you know he’s done, it is moral to impose physical pain upon him, excruciating pain, to get information to save lives, yes.

FREELAND: I disagree. I think there’s a very, very clear line.

The tragedy involved in these arguments is that people end up shouting at each other about what’s moral. At that point, it’s clear to everybody no minds are going to be changed.

But they also — both sides — occasionally bob back into the land of where you talk about what will happen if we do this, and what else will happen if we do that. This, unlike morals, is “provable” or at least can be subject to the objective commentary of history.

On the other hand, the “waterboarding is immoral” people aren’t really headed there, they’re just providing the illusion of doing so. Nobody opposed to wiretapping, or waterboarding, really wants to get into a prolonged discussion of what happens if we repeat the Warren Court days, and just build taboo upon taboo to prove what good people we are. They don’t wanna go there.

Because what’s the first question you ask? Where’s-the-benefit. Who, back in the halcyon days of the Warren Court inventing one new “right” for criminals after another, looked to America from around the world and said to themselves, “ah…what a nice, bright, beacon of civilization for us, the rest of the world’s countries, to admire.” Who did that? Who’s ready to do that now? It comes down to that, doesn’t it…who’s ready to love us all to pieces, when our government promises never to do any wiretapping and never to do any waterboarding — who hates us today? There is nobody. Hating the country is a strategy, used by its enemies to get what they want; to peel back the armor.

If, God forbid, this nation does come crashing down in our lifetime, it will be the conclusive event to a madcap vicious-cycle fools-errand of trying to prove what good people we are, to nameless faceless strangers around the world who will never, ever, in a million years, no matter what, ever recognize it. We’ll prove ourselves to death this way. And we’ll do it without becoming better people.

As Morris pointed out, we’ve done it before. It didn’t lead to a Golden Age of worldwide opinion smiling upon America’s wonderful, wise, benevolent Government. It led to the exact opposite, in fact. People talk of that time as emotionally frayed, a vast landscape of wreckage devastated by “Vietnam and Watergate.” But the wreckage came from men not knowing if their wives and children would come home from wherever they were, each night, alive and intact. It was a triangle of unholy forces consisting of Vietnam, Watergate and Warren Court justice — that endless deadly-good cycle of proving, in futility, how decent you are. That suicide pact that somehow isn’t thought of as a suicide pact, even though it is that and is little else.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Deadly-Good PeopleWednesday, January 14th, 2009

Deadly-Good People
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009