Newshoggers.com

Time for a Blogger's Ethics Panel

By Fester:

Time for a blogger ethics panel as there is no invinsible wall between editorial and business functions at this and many other blogs. The Newshoggers recently received a paid advertisment from the ACLU that advocates Twittering Against Torture. Once BlogAds takes their cut, we may be able to afford a pint of good Kentucky whiskey to split amongst everyone. The ACLU advertised on the 'Hog because they consider the writers and by implications our audience to be a receptive audience to their message that torture is an inherent bad and should not be condoned. Our opinions as writers made us notable and potentially valuable to an advertiser. Time for an ethics panel...

If this Politico Report is to believed, the Washington Post really needs a Bloggers' Ethics Panel:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors....

 

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders …

 

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

 

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion....

 

Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ..

Of course we know it is the job of the national print media to star-fuck.  Why would that raise any ethical concerns at all.  And why would this raise any credibility concerns when it is so difficult to get decent steaks with an appetizer, desert and a pair of drinks for two for less than $20,000, they barely are making any money on this at all.  There is nothing suspicious here.  Nothing at all besides the complete confirmation of the malleability of the Washington Post’s editorial stances for deep pockets. 

But there is no need for an ethics panel as Tom in Comments at Balloon Juice wins quote of the week on this story with this line:

So we have now come to the point where a health care lobbyist is more ethical than the Washington Post.

Wow!

"Out, America out!"

By Steve Hynd

The Washington Post today has a piece on the Iraqi celebrations I mentioned yesterday which are happening in advance of the formal pullout of US troops from their cities which is on schedule to conclude today.

"Out, America, out!" a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns.

Across town, the virtual absence of American troops and helicopters, the cheerfulness of Iraqis in military uniform, and the cries of joy gave this scarred, bunkered capital a rare carnival-like atmosphere. Iraqi police and army cars were decked with ribbons, balloons, plastic flowers and new flags. A few Baghdadis drove under the sweltering midday sun honking horns as passengers hung out the windows waving flags and yelling euphorically.

In Basra, the sentiment was inscribed on walls with spray paint: "No No Americans." Another graffiti artist instructed: "Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty."

Yet, despite the celebrations, as Spencer Ackerman points out, this is a withdrawal in name only.

Milestones don't always mark what they should. Tomorrow all these things are true: there are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; procedures and circumstances and contingencies pertain whereby urban security will still be a U.S. mission; there is a U.S. combat mission, by binding diplomatic accord, for an additional 13 months; another year will pass after that before U.S. troops depart; there is ever-present danger in Iraq, if not necessarily strategic peril; and the scope and contour of a U.S.-Iraqi relationship on January 1, 2012 remains to be determined, and may feature a small U.S. military advisory presence.

What these Iraqis are celebrating isn't this shadow of withdrawal, it's the idea of returned sovereignty, the concept of withdrawal. If I were Tom Friedman I'd probably write they were celebrating the platonic ideal of an end to their occupation.

Let's not forget that it is an accidental and mismanaged occupation -  one never planned for - which the whole world knows was born from outrageous lies. And that even so, as US officials and officers talked about helping Iraq find its feet again these past six years, they've continually betrayed those promises by looking out for often petty and mean U.S. national interests instead of Iraqis. Neither should we forget that there have been only minor convictions for all the brutality, torture and abuse, and mostly minor sentences even then.

But if Iraqis are celebrating the first flavor of an end to that occupation, they're not celebrating reconstruction or reconcilliation. They're not celebrating peace. Tom Ricks and others are correct that there will be a spiral of upward violence as the U.S. stiffener departs the Iraqi central government's backbone. (Although Ricks is a special case as he pleads that Petraeus and Odierno are geniuses for the Surge even while he argues the Surge didn't work.) There will be some level of civil war in Iraq yet, whether it's between Shia and Sunni, Kurd and Arab, Shia money-grabbers in the oil-rich South or a combination of all three.

That's not an argument for extending the occupation, though. It was always an argument for shortening it. Imagine if the U.S. and it's allies had never invaded but an act of God or Alien Space Bats had destroyed Iraq's Saddam-era leadership, devastated the nation's infrastructure, killed thousands and displaced millions anyway. Of course there would have been a multi-sided civil war. Without Saddam's repression keeping a lid on and with those other stresses to society, the fractures and imbalances in Iraq would have split wide open exactly as they did - the only difference being no U.S. occupation to focus a goodly portion of those stresses upon, to magnify and perpetuate them. The same conditions will obtain after the US leaves, whenever that is, and would have obtained at any time in the last six years.

The point, blindingly obvious to jubilant Iraqis celebrating some meagre sovereignty today, is that all of that is their problem, never ours. The Pottery Barn Rule was never "you broke it, you own it". It was always meant to be "you broke it, pay for it, and get the f**k out of our store before you make things worse!"

Democrats' "radical, pro-war agenda" on anti-war money

By Steve Hynd

My friend Derrick Crowe, who blogs at Return Good For Evil and HuffPo, is pissed. He has a truly righteous rant today over the actions of Dem leaders on the Hill and at the White House, who have, he writes, sought to "wrap themselves in the flag" and jettison "the contrary arguments they employed during the last several cycles" in a shameful copying of past Republican tactics of pandering to the public for support for a pro-war agenda under cover of claiming to "support the troops".

Read the whole thing. Derrick points to the new DCCC ad campaign which mirrors previous GOP camapigns against principled anti-war Dems, and goes on to highlight how the Dems are using a heavy hand to browbeat their own anti-war members, threatening to ostracize and defund them unless the voted to fund Obama's continuation of Bush's wars. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) told the HuffPo that the White House and Dem leadership had threatened Dem freshmen "We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," although an administration spokesman denied the charge. There were also rumors of about "Rahm Emanuel cutting deals with Republicans to go easy on them in the 2010 elections in exchange for votes" on the funding bill.

Thus, Derrick observes:

funds solicited from donors on the premise that they will be used to elect more Democrats and defeat more Republican incumbents are actually being used to ensure the election and incumbency of House members who will vote to support war funding.

As a prior Democratic donor and highly active volunteer, I am absolutely disgusted. I know I’m not alone.

And he concludes:

Incredibly, despite five policy reviews in six months, the President who ran on a platform of finishing the fight in Afghanistan presides over a military campaign now wandering into neighboring countries, adrift in the exhibition of qualities for which he once decried the policies of President Bush: “undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

At moments like this, we desperately need a Congress and a congressional leadership team with the spine to check the listlessness and violence of the executive’s actions overseas. The actions of House leadership and their political campaign operation down the street have revealed that we have no such thing. Rather, what the war funding vote and its aftermath revealed is the further infiltration and dominance of the official structures the Democratic Party by a radical pro-war caucus, perfectly willing to sell out their constituents and their donors in the name of out-of-control militarism and continued, highly profitable mass murder overseas. This radical caucus running the party in the House flexed its muscles just this past week, teaming with Republicans to defeat legislative language to require an exit strategy from Afghanistan, despite the fact that the majority of rank-and-file Democrats supported it and despite its similarity to the exit strategy for which Democrats agitated for Iraq under President Bush. Until we force changes, expect more of the same on future votes.

I encourage every anti-war DCCC donor to close your checkbooks and put your debit cards away until we see a party worth another penny. Right now, the Democratic party isn’t. In fact, I’d like my money back.

Righteous.

Obama, Like Bush, Wrong On Indefinite Detention

By Steve Hynd

A Pro-Publica report for the Washington Post which says that the Obama administration is drafting an executive order to reassert Bush's claimed presidential authority to lock up detainees forever without trial.

It's generating a lot of blogger comment, with rightwing posts being mostly along the lines of "see, we told you Bush was right" and leftwing posts being critical of Obama's plans and the very notion of indefinite detention.

The report is being described as a "trial balloon". Not to see if people will accept the idea of indefinite detentions - Obama has already said explicitly those will happen - but to see if doing an end-run around Congress to proclaim the right to do so by executive fiat will upset too many very important people.

I've nothing really to add to Glenn Greenwald's post on this report, and in particular this:

A government that will give you a trial before imprisoning you only where it knows ahead of time it will win -- and, where it doesn't know that, will just imprison you without a trial -- isn't a government that believes in due process.  It's one that believes in show trials.

This move is an abuse of authority and immoral at every level.

Obama has already foreited my (always sceptical) support - over his claims to secrecy, his abysmal Af/Pak non-plan, his denials of habeas rights and his continued torturing of the facts about Iran's nuclear program. My original fears have been proven justified, he's America's Tony Blair. Yes, he's better than John McCain or Hillary Clinton would have been in the Oval Office; that's a pretty low bar though, and not one that should garner progressives' uncritical support for a president who simply isn't very good at all.

The Farah Airstrike Coverup

By Steve Hynd

A report by the UK's Channel Four News, via the Real News Network, alleges a coverup over May 4th airstrikes in Farah province, Afghanistan, which the US military says killed scores of Taliban fighters and "only" 26 civilians and local villagers say killed around 140 innocents. The report includes previously unseen footage, taken by a cellphone, showing at least a score of children's bodies recovered from the rubble.

The US military had originally tried to blame Taliban grenades for civilian casualties, despite the utter devestation caused by dropping 2,000 lb bombs. Villagers who survived insist that by the time the bombs fell the Taliban had already fled the area.

Gareth Porter also accuses the US military of "covering up the most damaging facts surrounding the incident", and for much the same reasons as the Channel Four report.

The declassified "executive summary" of the report on the bombing issued last Friday admitted that mistakes had been made in the use of airpower in that incident. However, it omitted key details which would have revealed the self-serving character of the U.S. command’s previous claims blaming the "Taliban" – the term used for all insurgents fighting U.S. forces - for the civilian deaths from the airstrikes.

...the report indicates that the airstrikes referred to as the "second B1-B strike" and the "third B-1B strike" caused virtually all of the civilian deaths. The report’s treatment of those two strikes is notable primarily for what it omits with regard to information on casualties rather than for what it includes.

It indicates that the ground force commander judged the movement of a "second large group" – again at night without clear identification of whether they were military or civilian – indicated that they were "enemy fighters massing and rearming to attack friendly forces" and directed the bombing of a target to which they had moved.

The report reveals that two 500-pound bombs and two 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on the target, not only destroying the building being targeted but three other nearby houses as well.

In contrast to the report’s claim regarding the earlier strike, the description of the second airstrike admits that the "destruction may have resulted in civilian casualties". Even more important, however, it says nothing about any evidence that there were Taliban fighters killed in the strike – thus tacitly admitting that the casualties were in fact civilians.

The third strike is also described as having been prompted by another decision by the ground commander that a third group moving in the dark away from the firefight was "another Taliban element". A single 2,000-pound bomb was dropped on a building to which the group had been tracked, again heavily damaging a second house nearby.

Again the report offers no evidence suggesting that there were any "Taliban" killed in the strike, in contrast to the first airstrike.

By these signal omissions, aimed at avoiding the most damaging facts in the incident, the report confirms that no insurgent fighters were killed in the airstrikes which killed very large numbers of civilians. The report thus belies a key propaganda line that the U.S. command had maintained from the beginning – that the Taliban had deliberately prevented people from moving from their houses so that civilian casualties would be maximised.

Despite admissions that the military's own rules of engagement were not followed in the airstrikes - particularly in not checking whether targets were civilian or not, no one has been held culpable in any way. Yet by not checking, then bombing civilians, a clear war crime was committed.

Bagram, the new Guantánamo

By Steve Hynd

Clive Stafford Smith at the Guardian responds to the BBC report of abuse and torture at Bagram prison in Afghanistan that I mentioned earlier.

President Obama told us that this sort of thing has stopped. Well, it hasn't.

Sadly, the Obama administration is up to the former administration's familiar tricks, attempting to block the world from the truth. In April, a federal judge in Washington DC ordered that prisoners in Bagram should be allowed counsel, and the right to be heard in court; the Obama administration refused to comply, and appealed the judgment. People being beaten up in Bagram should, apparently, grin and bear it.

The US is spending $50m on a new prison for Bagram, housing more than 1,000 people – to add to the 600 who are already there. Of these, many (including all those in the recent Washington case) were not originally captured in Afghanistan at all, but in other countries. The US then rendered them into Afghanistan.

The British government should have a sense of familiarity with this story: in February, Defence Minister John Hutton admitted that British personnel had taken two Pakistani men prisoner in Iraq in 2004, and had subsequently handed them to the Americans. The men were rendered to Afghanistan, where they have now been held – and, if the latest BBC report is anything to go by, presumably beaten – for five years. They have never been charged. The US argues that it is too dangerous to allow them lawyers – and yet, like so many others, the first time they went to Afghanistan was when the US took them there.

...Bagram is the evil twin of Guantánamo Bay, if rather more cut off from the world, and all things we consider civilised.

And, make no mistake, the Obama administration bears ultimate responsibility for what is happening there now. Back in March, Amnesty International issued a plea to Obama:

Amnesty International has urged the new administration not to repeat its predecessor's use of secrecy to conceal from the public its response to the judge. Transparency, essential to accountability and detainee protection, must be central to US detention policy. As President Obama has himself instructed his administration, "transparency promotes accountability".

The need for transparency was illustrated late last month when the UK government revealed that two individuals it handed over to the USA in Iraq in 2004 had subsequently been transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, where they remain five years later.

Amnesty International has asked the US government to confirm whether the two are held in Bagram and to provide further information on their cases. The organization has raised the possibility that the USA's transfer of these individuals to Afghanistan constituted a war crime.

Amnesty International continues to call for the Bagram detainees to be granted access to an independent court to challenge the lawfulness of their detentions, to effective remedies in relation to their treatment and conditions of detention, and to meaningful access to legal counsel for such purposes. At present, the detainees have no access to lawyers or courts.

Obama has shown no sign of listening: even as he continues to hold his administrations actions on Gitmo up as a premier policy change, his administation continues following the same criminal course in another, more secret, location. 

Prison Rape and Hobbesian Disorder

By Fester

Eli Lehrer at the National Review's Corner has an excellent piece on the practice of prison rape as a means of prison control and the need for systemic changes to make rape a crime in all circumstances:

Anyone who looks at the problem can’t react with anything other than horror. According to the Bureau of Justice Statics, over 60,000 prisoners — the great bulk of them male — fall victim to sexual abuse in prison each year. A fair number of these men are “punks” who are subject to frequent, even daily, male-on-male rape for years on end.

But the nation’s prison-rape problems can’t go away overnight for at least two major reasons. To begin with, the racial supremacist gangs that control many prisons use rape as a tool for keeping other prisoners in line and, in some cases, prison officials may turn a blind eye towards sexual abuse when it keeps prison populations more orderly. Second, the understandable widespread social distaste for people in prison has lead to a widespread attitude that’s frankly inhumane. It is one thing to say that prison shouldn’t be fun and quite another to say that detainees “deserve” rape. Nobody does. But, somehow, prison rape remains a perfectly acceptable topic for sitcoms, widely trafficked websites, and late-night comedians.

The American prison system is theoretically a means of protecting both the non-imprisoned population and rehabilitating individuals who society has deemed to be dangers to the rest of  society.  The danger that prisoners pose is that they have committed acts of disorder to the social structure that are either severe, repeated or both.  Behavioral changes are the desired result of a rehabilitative incarceration and probation system.  The environment and the social norms of the prison will have a direct bearing on whether or not rehabilitation is possible or if prisoners perceive that the only control and power that they can access are the controls and powers that they can create outside of societal rules. 

Prison rape, and most rapes are acts of domination and exertion of power of one or more individuals over another individual.  Widespread prison rape that does not result in a high probability of rapid and predictable punishment for the offenders and protection for the victims leads to the very reasonable assumption that the greater mores of society do not apply in prison nor are prisoners protected by those societal norms.  Instead, prison is a Hobbesian environment of predation and pack behaviors for short term mutual protection.  Instead of creating a structured environment with positive behavioral modelling and learning for rehabilitive purposes, the American prison system is an exemplar of systemic disorder. 

And we wonder why the American recidivism rate is so high?  The individuals who have spent significant time in prison have been accultured to behavioral norms that may be locally adaptive but are completely inappropriate outside of prison.  This is in addition to systemic re-integration issues, economic dislocation, employment problems, limited transferable job skills and co-variated concentrations of poverty and criminal activity. 

Another part of the solution in addition to the excellent suggestions that Mr. Lehrer may be to reduce the number of prisoners in prison so as to reduce overcrowding and under-supervision of inmates. The reduction in the number of prisoners being held could be achieved by either reducing the number of people who are sent to prison or by reducing sentences. The most likely and socially plausible diverted inmates would be non-violent offenders who would agree to fairly intensive non-prison supervision modelled on programs like HOPE.

Progressive Realism And Iran

By Steve Hynd

In my last post, I gave my opinion that Iran 2009 will be more like the repressed damp squib of Tiananmen 1989 than the revolutionary tsunami of Tehran 1979.

So what next? Is Obama's talk of negotiating even with America's enemies dead in the water? Matthew Yglesias thinks so.

The hope behind an engagement strategy was that the Supreme Leader might be inclined to side with the more pragmatic actors inside the system—guys like former president Rafsanjani and former prime minister Mousavi. With those people, and most of the Iranian elites of their ilk, now in open opposition to the regime, any crackdown would almost by definition entail the sidelining of the people who might be interested in a deal. Iran would essentially be in the hands of the most hardline figures, people who just don’t seem interested in improving relations with other countries.

Under the circumstances, the whole subject of American engagement may well wind up being moot.

Yglesias explicitly endorses Robert Farley's view that

the repression has opened greater opportunity for what might be termed a non-interventionist coercive strategy; this is to say that more and tougher sanctions against the regime are on the table now than was the case two weeks ago.

And Kevin Drum agrees.

I agree with my friend Robert Farley that more and tougher sanctions are probably going to be the kneejerk result of American foreign policy thinking after these Iran elections - but I disagree that sanctions can be described as "non-interventionist" when they invariably impact the poorest and disenfranchised, not the rich elite. Especially when US foreign policy interventionists from both left and right always see more and tougher sanctions as merely a necessary step along the path to military action.

And I definitely disagree with Yglesias's implication that more and harsher sanctions would be a good idea. Ygelsias, who originally supported the invasion of Iraq and now broadly supports Obama's benchmarkless, Bush retread of a plan for the Af/Pak theatre, is almost certainly echoing the listserve-discussed views of others he shares a generally interventionist view with at think-tanks like the Center for American Progress, Center for a New American Security and the National Security Network - all of whom have provided key national security or foreign policy staff and policy planning to the Obama administration.

In arguing against the incrementalist interventionism implicit in saying before the fact that "American engagement may well wind up being moot", I'd cite - as many already have, including Obama - the simple truth that whether a regime is repressive or not it's still better to talk than not. Indeed, over the years America has negotiated with many other nations, including both the Soviet Union and China, when they were at their most repressive, totalitarian and recalcitrant.

Moreover, I'd argue that engagement is exactly the strategy needed. In 2006, Robert Wright set out the beginnings of what has become to be known as "progressive realism" in a seminal piece for the NY Times entitled "An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With" in which he wrote that "It’s now possible to build a foreign policy paradigm that comes close to squaring the circle — reconciling the humanitarian aims of idealists with the powerful logic of realists." Shortly thereafter, he sent an email to Kevin Drum in which he outlined a progressive realist stance that's very applicable to Iran now. In that email Wright acknowledges that there's going to be a lot of anti-American sentiment fuelling geopolitics for decades to come, no matter how much America changes now. That's something that short-term thinkers like Thomas Jocelyn use to argue for more interventionist policies - if we’re going to get blamed for it anyway, we might as well do some stuff in support of the opposition - but Wright correctly characterises a longer term solution.

America's security will best be served if all nations are by then free-market democracies, because ... the entanglement of such nations in the global economy strengthens their incentive to preserve world order and their inclination toward international cooperation — including, crucially, highly intrusive arms control.

...Making free-market democracy pervasive is only crucial to America's interest in the long run, over decades. Hence: no need to rush into, say, the Iraq war.

...Progressive realists (unlike neocons) believe that economic liberty strongly encourages political liberty. So (a) America should economically engage, rather than isolate, countries like Iran and North Korea, and (b) more generally, economic engagement offers a path to peacefully fostering the free-market democracy that neocons are inclined to implant via invasion.

In other words, the correct answer is less sanctions and more engagement, not the obverse. Wright ended his email to Drum:

I reject the "premise common in Democratic policy circles lately: that the key to a winning foreign policy is to recalibrate the party’s manhood — just take boilerplate liberal foreign policy and add a testosterone patch." The problem is more subtle than that, and Democrats aren’t doing America a service when they fuel a Democratic-Republican arms race on the macho front.

Now that Democrats hold power, that macho race has become even more of a problem instead of less - perhaps a measure of the perennial fear Democratic leaders have of losing the next election because they've been painted as "weak", perhaps simply a reflection of their belief that they don't have to pander to their "peacenik" base any more. Whatever the reason, kneejerk incrementalist interventionism has always been the order of the day among the VSPs and the wannabe-VSPs are now following suit.

Obama's statement today is a careful bit of fence-sitting that could be used to justify either engagement as planned or a turn towards a more hostile policy towards Iran. I'm not optimistic that, given the pressures for hostility, we'll see a progressive realist strategy as the outcome. But we should.

Ex Gitmo Prosecutor: "Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it"

By Steve Hynd

Yet another voice raised for prosecution of Bush era war crimes - former Gitmo prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who joined ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero in an op-ed for Salon (h/t Turkana):

Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it. Those are two indisputable facts. Given the mountains of evidence already in the public domain, any effort to deny or soften that harsh and devastating reality is either disingenuous, uninformed or a result of the human instinct to avoid painful truths.

...To date, the evidence that U.S. officials engaged in widespread and systemic torture and abuse of detainees with the authorization of the highest Bush administration officials comes from a wide range of sources. There are congressional reports, journalistic investigations, detainees’ own accounts, and even -- astonishingly -- boastful admissions by some of the highest officials of the Bush administration, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been aggressively forthright in his defense of torture methods including waterboarding.

...But notwithstanding all this evidence that domestic and international laws were violated, there are still those who would reduce these crimes to discretionary policy decisions subject to legitimate debate. There is even a robust public discussion about whether "torture works" -- a jaw-dropping debate to be having in the United States of America -- as if that could be reliably determined, and as if that would make it OK.

This cannot be the way forward in a country committed to the rule of law that applies to everyone, regardless of status or position. We have a Department of Justice for a reason, and now it’s up to Attorney General Holder, the nation’s top law enforcement officer, to do his job and appoint an independent prosecutor to follow the evidence where it may lead. In this country, we investigate crimes and, when appropriate, we prosecute them. Once we start compromising our principles and laws because it is too messy, too inconvenient or even too painful to enforce them, we render them meaningless. This is not a political issue, but a moral and legal one.

It's a sucinct wrap up of the argument for a special prosecutor and, I think, an entirely compelling one unless you are willing to subjugate morality to political gamesmanship.

KSM: I Lied To Stop Torture

By Steve Hynd

Yet more evidence that torture doesn't work because even when the victim squawks, they'll say anything to just stop the torture.

"I make up stories," Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "Where is he? I don't know. Then, he torture me," Mohammed said of his interrogator. "Then I said, 'Yes, he is in this area.' "

Mohammed also appeared to say that he had fingered people he did not know as being Al Qaeda members in order to avoid abusive treatment. Although there is no way to corroborate his statements, Mohammed is one of the militants whom the CIA repeatedly subjected to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The Bush administration's torturers also mistook a low-level fixer for Al Qaeda's al-Qaeda's chief of operations, and later apologized to him...after torturing him. That man, Abu Zubaida , was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House and remains the most cited individuals in defenses of Bush-era torture.

These revelations come from fragments of CIA documents ordered released by a Federal judge. But as Dan Froomkin notes:

nothing in the newly un-redacted portions supports the earlier, Bush-era decision to keep them secret. And there are still vast portions being kept from the public -- now by the Obama administration -- for what look like equally specious reasons.

As I wrote last week, President Obama appears to be blatantly violating his promise not to "protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government." And as I wrote yesterday, his position appears to be rooted not in legitimate national security concerns -- nor even in misplaced loyalty to holdovers in his administration -- but in the cold miscalculations of his political advisers.

What makes them miscalculations is the near-certainty that, bit by bit, most of this stuff will come out eventually. Whether that happens thanks to Obama or despite his willing and active participation in a cover-up is the only thing that's really in doubt.

The only sentence I'd disagree with is the last one. Obama seems to have been entirely captivated by the privilege, literally private law, of being President and is engaged in as wide a variety of cover-ups and kneejerk secrecy demands as his predecessor.