Justice And Blood

In Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” Jamie Foxx portrays a slave named Django (“The D is silent,” he tells another character) who frees his wife from a sadistic plantation owner. (Spoiler alert!)  In the process he kills every white person on the farm, including the owner’s unarmed sister. Among Django’s victims is Tarantino himself, appearing as a minor character so debased and irredeemably stupid that I’m sure even the Pope would say he deserved to die.

I can’t account for everyone’s reaction to the half-hour of airborne intestines at the end of “Django Unchained.” Priest of God and follower of the Prince of Peace, I was rooting for Django all the way. You know the feeling when the bad guys are getting what they deserve. If filmmakers have done their jobs, few in the audience are hoping the suspects will be read their Miranda rights and given the opportunity to reflect on their poor decisions. Something deep in us aches for instant justice. We want to see righteous vengeance in the flash of steel and gunpowder. We want blood.

If you really want to see a bloody mess, ask screenwriter and director Tarantino to justify Django’s mayhem in the context of the Newtown massacre. In one TV interview in early January, he refused to answer. But a few weeks before, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he made a useful distinction. The worst moments in “Django Unchained” are depictions of savagery against slaves. They’re not stylized, and Tarantino doesn’t dwell on them. It’s this documentary violence, the vicious reality of slavery, which provokes Django and his friend, played by Christoph Waltz, into an orgy of what Tarantino called “the fun violence.”

Fun violence is the concept I’ve been wrestling with since seeing Tarantino’s entertaining movie (not suitable, in my perhaps too conservative view, for most under 15 or 16). Some think that his movies could inspire real-life attacks by sick people. Others just believe they’re in poor taste. But most critics miss the point, which is that the blood lust is in us already, an integral aspect of our nature. Tarantino is showing us exactly what we’ve come to see, which is also what we came to see when Bruce Willis battled terrorists in "Die Hard" and Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. Fictional violence against the unquestionably evil gives our animal instincts a chance to bubble deliciously to the surface under carefully controlled conditions.

Owning our instincts, including our taste for violence, is vital to our formation as Christians. Especially as we prepare for Lent and Good Friday, it helps us understand how we might have been persuaded to add our voices to those who shouted “Crucify him!” Jesus’s antagonists concocted a narrative about his blasphemy and pretensions to kingship that triggered the audience’s craving for a spectacle of torture and death. During the long era of public executions in the U.S., people also gave themselves permission to enjoy watching someone die.

It’s up to the experts to say what came first, our hunger for righteous payback or for sheer blood, and how they’re intrinsically bound. But understanding how deeply we want vengeance can help us make better decisions about dilemmas in the world and our lives. Do we ever catch ourselves rushing to judgment, deciding too quickly who’s right and wrong so some sentence can be speedily pronounced? We leave behind the vivid colors and moral clarity of a Tarantino movie and rediscover gray areas and stubborn facts. In a complicated world, give me “Django Discerning” on the judicial bench and in corridors of power, hungry for justice but with a lust for due process.

Movie violence can also deepen our understanding of biblical violence – the massacre of the priests of Baal by God’s prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel as depicted in 1 Kings or, as described in Exodus, God’s killing of the Egyptian firstborn to free his people from slavery. In their time, these events were portrayed not as fun but as good violence, leading to righteous worship in 1 Kings and freedom in Exodus. God’s role in bloody biblical acts is a question for another time. But God does say this much to his violence-prone people: “Promote justice. Strive to walk in peace. Vengeance is mine, and never yours.”

This post was first published in the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios.

Presidents Are Acting Not Illegally More And More

When Richard Nixon told David Frost in April 1977, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal," he was talking not about political burglaries and campaign dirty tricks (though his operatives did all that, too) but a leader's sovereign powers during wartime. That Ron Howard and his screenwriter, Peter Morgan, suggested otherwise in "Frost/Nixon" was one of the few disappointments in an otherwise fine movie. Continuing his argument, Nixon said:

[I]t has been...argued that as far as a president is concerned, that in war time, a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we’re all talking about.

Tom Campbell, Chapman University's law school dean, battled President Clinton over Kosovo when he was serving in Congress. He argues that when presidents grasp for broader foreign policy and war-making prerogatives, judges and Congress wax timid, and especially so since Sept. 11. On the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, John Dean, who turned on Nixon during the the Watergate investigations of 1973-74, says recent presidents have widened the realm of "not illegal" far more than 37. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Executive orders issued by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11 claimed power for the Oval Office to ignore U.S. laws and international treaties.

President Obama has retained some of those extraordinary wartime powers, and his use of drones to attack terrorist suspects has drawn accusations of international law violations.

"I don't think Richard Nixon, in his darkest hour, would have authorized torture," said Dean...

Friendly Fire

Tim Naftali, the former director of the Nixon library, has enough of secular outlook that he didn't know (or perhaps jokingly claimed not to) that he had inherited his surname from one of Jacob's fractious sons. Still, his Yorba Linda years comprised a wilderness experience of Hebrew Testament proportions. As he sometimes reminded me, I was the one who first beckoned him into the trackless wastes. I also helped give him his toughest challenge: Replacing the private library's relentlessly pro-Nixon Watergate exhibit. I'm sorry about the times I made his work unnecessarily difficult and grateful that he beat disgraced Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman's boys and finished what history had called him to do.

No public historian since the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian Institution had a harder challenge. He was uniquely qualified for it. He was a highly regarded, non-ideological scholar of Nixon's defining crisis, the Cold War. A few years before he came to Yorba Linda, Tim and I had worked together a little on presidential tapes, by which Nixon's historical reputation is utterly bound and tied, for better and worse. Tim wasn't a Nixon booster, and I think he ended up deeply discouraged about Nixon's character as a result of his forced curatorial march through the Watergate swamp. Yet he and the last elected moderate Republican president would have disagreed on relatively few domestic or foreign policy issues. Perhaps most important given the odds he faced, he displayed the quality Nixon prized most of all. It turns out that Tim Naftali was tough as hell.

The archivist of the U.S., Allen Weinstein, was so excited by the idea of making Tim our first federal director (the library opened in 1990 as a private institution) that he offered him the job a few days after my call. When things were going well at the library, Weinstein would stress that Tim was his man. When things got rocky, he'd remind me that it had all been my idea. Tim and I labored together for over three years, rarely disagreeing about substance but having a series of pitched battles about Tim's independence vs. the Nixon foundation's right to be consulted on exhibits and programs, space use on our shared campus, and even Tim's lower-case library logo, which he thought invoked the '60s and '70s, when Nixon was president, but we thought unstatesmanlike.

We got important work done anyway. I permitted him to open foundation-owned records to scholars and funded his oral history interviews with Nixon policy heavyweights and White House operatives. Our disagreements never became public nor interfered materially with our shared mission of establishing the federal Nixon library as the successor of a private museum and archive that had earned something of a reputation of partisanship (which, if it was a fair criticism, was no one's fault but mine). Tim's bosses at the National Archives fully embraced the same mission -- Weinstein, of course, and his deputy Sharon Fawcett, who had both worked hard to bring Nixon's library in from the cold.

Having bargained with them for hundreds of hours to launch the federal library, Kathy O'Connor (shown here with Fawcett), Nixon's longtime aide and last chief of staff, and I would sometimes call or write Weinstein and Fawcett to complain about Tim. We never got anywhere. They backed him unequivocally. The most I could pry out of the avuncular Weinstein was his theory that Tim and I were brothers at heart who clashed because of unacknowledged similarities in temperament and outlook. After we each had stated our grievances, he would smile and send us back to Yorba Linda to work it out. While I never fully accepted that I was Dan to Tim's Naphtali, Kathy and I both loved Tim's mother, Marjorie, a delightful Anglican from his home town of Montreal (Tim's late father, a builder, was Jewish). One problem may have been that I was having trouble letting go after spending two decades planning and running the library. By the same token, we felt that Tim, in his actions and public statements, was trying too hard to put distance between himself and the ancien regime, namely us. We didn't become close until I left to begin full-time ministry in February 2009, which, now that I think about it, is often the way with siblings.

Thanks to Kathy, my able successor as head of the Nixon foundation, relations with Naftali and NARA quickly improved. But her journey toward the promised land of happier collaborations with our federal colleagues was interrupted and cruelly ended by the Haldeman renaissance. After Tim invited Nixon White House counsel John Dean to give a speech in June 2009, Nixon's White House and CREEP aides (including some involved in Watergate or Watergate-related activities) and their friends, thanks to enablers on the foundation board, surged to positions of influence or even fiduciary authority.

They were wrong about Dean's appearance, which was inevitable and also appropriate as part of the library's transition to public control. The self-described lynchpin of Watergate, he is pivotal historical figure. Tim and we had already played host to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Bob Woodward visited in 2011 without incident or controversy. The actions of Haldeman's acolytes weren't based on what was best for the library, the public, or Nixon's reputation. They lashed out because they despised Dean for helping send fellow operatives to jail for Watergate crimes and then grasped for power because they believed it was their right and their turn. As Naftali told the Los Angeles Times, "It's a very special tribe that has never accepted the nation's verdict on Watergate."

By the fall of 2009, Tim had been at work for two years on the library's new Watergate exhibit, which Weinstein and Fawcett had ordered him to undertake, also at my suggestion. It was part of complex deal in which the feds paid millions to build an archives wing for Nixon's vast collection and agreed to take over the library in May 2007 and move the records from College Park, Maryland. Shaking hands with our federal partners, we and the Nixon foundation board had promised both our acquiescence in an exhibit that would be acceptable to historians and in library-controlled public programming, including appearances by Nixon critics.

But once under the control of Haldeman's tribe, Nixon's foundation broke its promises. Most of their harsh if ultimately impotent actions are part of the public record. They denounced Naftali publicly for inviting Dean. An operative wrote on the foundation web site that he should go run a museum for traitor Alger Hiss. They recruited Sen. Lamar Alexander (right), a former Nixon aide, to put a secret hold on the nomination of a new U.S. archivist to pressure or get rid of Naftali. They assembled a Watergate truth squad including convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin and attacked Tim's Watergate exhibit draft, calling for friendlier treatment of Haldeman and trying to prevent the public from seeing videotape in which operatives discussed dirty tricks and counting Jews in the federal government. A former foundation employee who'd opposed the NARA handover wrote a column associating Tim with "the left." Another operative filed a FOIA request to read Tim's e-mails. Yet another accused him publicly of sending coded signals about his sexual orientation. His wife publicly accused Tim of leaking prejudicial Nixon tapes to the media.

When Tim offered one of Nixon's daughters a tour of the library's new quarters, she accepted only to denounce him in front of her fellow foundation leaders and demand that he leave. He was shocked that his adversaries had gone that far. As I had learned over a decade before, when Nixon put me instead of his family in charge of his estate, the withdrawal of the favor of political offspring is a powerful weapon. Lucky for Tim, it's not quite as potent when the taxpayers rather than the offspring are paying your salary. Though the massive assault on his professionalism and character must've been upsetting and sometimes dispiriting, it can't help but have reassured Tim that he was on the right track.

Besides, his colleagues at NARA must've had his back. Officials in Washington and around the country, especially at other libraries, had to be aware of what he was up against as he did the difficult job the archivist of the U.S. had given him. When all Nixon's men went to war against a federal director in the last battle of Watergate, the blue coats would obviously know where their loyalties belonged.

Not so much, astonishingly. At some point, the Weinstein-Fawcett hard line weakened. After the public learned of the Haldeman truth squad's critique in the late summer of 2010, there were signals from Washington that it was receiving a respectful review. That's right: The National Archives, custodian of documents signed by Thomas Jefferson, was paying serious attention to a Watergate narrative co-signed by Dwight Chapin.

And it gets worse. I remembered Weinstein and Fawcett's stony imperviousness to Kathy's and my minor complaints as I read historian Maarja Krusten's reference to Tim being cussed out not by a Haldeman operative or Nixon family member but by one of his fellow presidential library directors. Someone had figured out how to reach deep into the government and enlist a taxpayer-paid NARA official for a flanking attack on Tim Naftali. Which director was it? What was the official trying to accomplish? Was it part of an effort to get Naftali out of the Nixon library or alter the content of the Watergate exhibit? Did top NARA officials know about or sanction it?

It's hard to imagine Barack Obama's new archivist, David Ferriero, doing so, especially after the senior senator from Tennessee held up his nomination. Besides, I agree with Krusten that he's a stand-up dude. As for Fawcett, I'd always found her to be a straight shooter. But we know from press reports late last year that she'd sided against Naftali and that the Nixon foundation offered her a consultancy after her retirement. All the library directors, including the one who dissed Tim, had reported to her. It's also important to know if Haldeman's operatives played a role. In 2009, the Nixon foundation tried unsuccessfully to get the other presidential foundations to join it against Naftali. Lamar Alexander isn't the only current or recently serving government official with ties to the Haldeman clique.

However it happened, a federal official with a six-figure salary was carrying Watergate for Nixon's men. Maybe this inside move against Naftali was just further proof (as if it were needed) of the wisdom of the scriptwriter who put the words "follow the money" in Watergate leaker Mark Felt's mouth in "All the President's Men." Krusten writes that the director told Naftali, "You're going to ruin it for the rest of us." Perhaps he was speaking on behalf of cash-strapped presidential libraries from Simi Valley to Boston, where private foundation money can still buy a considerable amount of hagiography for the entertainment of credulous museum-goers. Too many balanced and thorough museum exhibits -- torture, Monica Lewinsky, Iran-contra -- and the gravy train might dry up as ex-presidents' rich friends tire of underwriting an undesirable degree of objectivity. For creating (and in March 2011 successfully opening) the Watergate exhibit that his bosses and historians had demanded and that the public deserved instead of the one Dwight Chapin wanted, Tim Naftali had become the ultimate skunk in the Rose Garden.

Naftali Is Not The New Graboske

Tomorrow's opening of a new Watergate exhibit at the Nixon library in Yorba Linda should bring to an end a generation of courtroom and backroom wrangling over the residue of modern history's most comprehensive political scandal. In the 1980s, the argument was about what scholars and researchers would see in the archives instead of what the public would see in presidential museums. But in both cases, the same principle may well hold. Full disclosure for Nixon might end up facilitating full disclosure for his successors, and what prudent president would want that?

In the late 1980s, historian Maarja Krusten (shown below) was part of a team at the National Archives headed by Fred Graboske that prepared Nixon's White House tapes to be opened to the public. As they finished their work, NARA was under pressure from President Nixon and his lawyers (I was then his chief of staff) to slow down the process. Our argument was that, new laws and regulations notwithstanding, Nixon had a moral right to expect his materials to be handled more or less like those of predecessors such as Kennedy and Johnson, whose more controversial records, including tapes, remained under tight family control.

We were fighting a losing battle. Most in the federal government, the media, and academe seemed to believe that Watergate, Nixon's resignation, and congressional action had made him sui generis when it came to how his records would be processed.

That all changed in 1989 in the George H. W. Bush administration under archivist of the U.S. Don Wilson and his presidential libraries deputy, John Fawcett, a veteran of the LBJ library in Austin. We were assured that Nixon did deserve some grace after all, that the new laws and regulations actually did permit him to have something approximating the latitude that pre-reform presidents and their families enjoyed when it came to his most sensitive and controversial records.

To say that we were pleased is an understatement. And yet in politics, good news for one person is almost always bad news for someone else. The government's policy change had come at an awkward time, since Graboske's team had completed its work on the tapes, the most explosive records of all. You can study the nuances at Krusten's blog, NixoNARA, but the upshot seems to be that rather than saying to the award-winning Graboske and his colleagues that they'd done well but that the brass had decided to put the tapes back on a shelf for a decent interval, NARA officials decided the tapes needed to be re-reviewed. In other words, the tape review team, it was suggested, had done an inadequate job.

A few years later, after University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler had sued Nixon and NARA to pry loose additional so-called abuse of power tapes that processors had identified, court proceedings as analyzed by Krusten show that the government wasn't entirely on the government's side:

Not only did the government not admit in 1992 that it had considered the Graobske-era processing final, despite contemporaneous documents showing it repeatedly used that term, lawyers working for the George H. W. Bush Department of Justice (DOJ) made selective use in their pleadings of information gathered in the discovery phase of the litigation. They rarely if ever quoted witnesses such as I, who had stated under oath that Graboske displayed no prejudice or bias against Nixon and never had said the president “has no privacy.”

Looking back, I've found it astonishing how solicitous the first Bush administration was toward 37, who had almost no policy or political leverage outside of his trademark issue of foreign policy. I doubt that it was an act of friendship by an incumbent to a former, since the Nixon-Bush relationship struck me as cordial but cool. Another possibility -- and here is where journalists and historians must go where bloggers rarely tread -- is whether the Bush administration had come to the natural-enough conclusion that slowing down the train delivering former President Nixon's records to scholars might have been a helpful precedent for future formers.

If so, the records battle was finally lost (or won, depending on one's perspective). We settled the Kutler lawsuit after Nixon's death in 1994, paving the way for the tapes to be opened by the early 2000s (they'll finally be entirely open in 2012). Presidential records are now managed according to congressional and agency mandates, and while there will always be judgment calls and controversies, the process has been largely regularized for presidents both Republican and Democratic.

But that still leaves the curatorial side of presidential libraries' work and the possible perceived precedent of the no-holds-barred Watergate exhibit that former archivist of the U.S. Allen Weinstein commissioned from the first federal director of the Nixon library, Cold War scholar Tim Naftali. In 2009, the Nixon foundation approached the other private library foundations and tried to get them to criticize Nixon's federal director for inviting Watergate figure John Dean to give a speech. The obvious intent was to panic friends of other formers into thinking that Uncle Sam's John Dean event in Yorba Linda presaged a keynote by special prosecutor Ken Starr in Little Rock and other post-White House horrors. As Naftali proceeded with planning the Watergate exhibit, did those controlling Nixon's foundation try yet again to rally the post-presidential faithful by raising fearful specters of worst-case museum cases: Displays featuring Monica's dress at Clinton, even more room for Iran-contra (a worse scandal than Watergate, some believe) at Reagan, and alleged Bush-Cheney torture policies at Texas's newest presidential library?

If so, then one can imagine that considerable pressure may have been brought to bear on Naftali over the last couple of years. But at least we can say that he's not the new Graboske, because the exhibit's opening tomorrow.

Who Was So Soft On Abortion, Taxes, Gun Control, Torture, Military Intervention, And Arms Control That Sean Hannity Would Have Laughed In His Face?

40.

The Revenge Of Richard Nixon

I posted the little fantasy below on Sept. 3, 2008 at The New Nixon. I thought of it while reflecting on Sarah Palin's recent comments about the crisis in Egypt.

I can imagine RN sitting thoughtfully in the chair in the corner of his office, his feet on the ottoman, yellow legal pad on his lap. He’d already have written notes of support to Gov. Palin and Sen. McCain, perhaps dictated a page or two (or ten) of advice for her acceptance speech. He’d be outraged, if not especially surprised, by the brutality of the attacks against her.

At the same time, his mind would drift back to news reports saying that McCain had hoped to pick Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge but had been dissuaded at the last minute by fears that a pro-choice VP would further discourage conservatives. A callow aide might reply what, so conservatives would rather have Sen. Obama? RN would smile a little sardonically and spin his reading glasses in his right hand while tugging on an ear stem with his lower lip. The aide wouldn’t need to say anything. He’s know. Many of our friends on the right would rather be right than President.

Just before noon, the President would go home for lunch with Mrs. Nixon. In his out box, we’d find a clipping (it’s still the old days in this fantasy; RN actually would clip things out of the newspaper — not that he subscribed to the Denver Post, but hey, it’s my fantasy) with the final paragraph underlined in blue fountain pen ink:

The more she is criticized and mocked, the more the red-meat faction will adore her. It will make their case that only the snobs of the chattering class could possibly question the fitness of the hard-charging reformer who is governor of America’s largest state and commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard.

McCain knows how this game is played, after all, and Palin fits well into the winning pattern of Republican vice presidential candidates. The more she is criticized, the more the base loves her — and the more he’s stuck with her.

And he’d have written in the margin: “They’re stuck with her, too.”

RN didn’t go in much for armchair-and-ottoman psychoanalysis. But imagine the frustration of John McCain these last 18 months, dragging his war hero status and 100% pro-life voting record from one end of the country to the other only to be denounced as a liberal apostate because of tax cuts, campaign finance reform, and ANWR. We must’ve heard Sean Hannity say it 100 times.

Securing the nomination nonetheless and preparing to try to win undecideds and independents, his mind first goes to his friend and colleague Joe Lieberman, 1000% solid on national security, one of the toughest, brightest people in politics and one of the most popular independent politicians in the country.

Or he thinks about that big state over there that Obama couldn’t win, the one next to Ohio with the popular ex-governor who literally invented Homeland Security.

But McCain sits in meeting after meeting with aides who show him polls about unenthusiastic Republicans and even delegates. Tax cuts, campaign finance reform, and ANWR. And finally, the blink decision maker with faith in his gut — the born risk taker who blinked T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code when his North Vietnamese captors paraded him before the cameras — reached once again for the sheaf of memos and backgrounders in the folder marked “Palin.”

He reflected on the strong impression she had already made on him, the courage and resilience she had demonstrated in her public and family lives.

And he said to himself, “If this works, she’ll be great. And if it doesn’t, maybe…well, maybe it serves them right.”

Presidents' droit du seigneur

Richard Nixon was famous for collecting "historic firsts." His friendly rival Ronald Reagan has beat him to the last one. While Yorba Linda continues to wallow in Watergate, the Reagan library, 20 years after it opened in Simi Valley, California, has finally uncovered the scandal that buffeted Reagan's presidency in 1986-87:

Before the [about-to-be-unveiled] renovation, the Reagan library made scant mention of the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret U.S. sale of arms to Iran despite an embargo. The sales were an attempt to induce Iranian-backed guerrillas in Lebanon to free American hostages, but some of the proceeds went to fund anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

The new library devotes a section to Iran-Contra, including a recording of Reagan's 1987 speech in which he admits responsibility for the affair.

The long-awaited gust of fresh air in Simi Valley is in the way of all things presidential librarian. Because their millions give them leverage over the National Archives, ex-presidents' friends and families get to see hagiographic museums when libraries first open. It's one price federal archivists pays to get state-of-the-art storage facilities which enable them to preserve White House records for scholars and researchers.

The museums usually last 5-10 years before being renovated or replaced, when objectivity begins to intrude. With the federal Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit evidently still tied up by the Watergate-era Nixon friends who now control his foundation, have the Reaganites outdone the Nixonites in historical transparency?

No and yes. When we opened the Nixon library in 1990, it was an exception to the rule for at least two reasons. The first is that it was privately rather than publicly run. The second is that it had a substantial exhibit on Watergate, the ugliest episode in Richard Nixon's career. That set it apart from the public Johnson and Reagan libraries, whose first-generation museums neglected Vietnam and Iran-contra.

In Yorba Linda, we knew we'd be pilloried for overlooking Watergate. Our solution was a large, polemical exhibit which attracted considerable criticism from reporters and historians over the years, though none managed to find an error. (Trying to do so, historian David Greenberg committed a couple of his own.) In 2006, in my 17th year as Nixon library director and in the midst of our second attempt to turn it over to the taxpayers, NARA's presidential libraries chief, Sharon Fawcett, and I agreed that the new federal director, distinguished Cold War historian Tim Naftali, was the best person to plan and install the second-generation Watergate exhibit.

But while a pro-Nixon Watergate exhibit was one thing, the no-holds-barred rendition Naftali envisioned (based on extensive interviews with Nixon men such as Dwight Chapin, shown here) was quite another. The public learned last August of Nixon operatives' attempts to derail the new exhibit. One can also imagine secret maneuvers. Were other presidential foundations perhaps given the impression that Naftali and Fawcett were trying to take away presidents' traditional droit du seigneur when it comes to their precious reputations? Just think of a Nixon hand clutching a glass of chardonnay and whispering in the ear of someone from the George W. Bush foundation, "If they get their way on Watergate, you'll have to open your museum with a torture exhibit."

But that was never the point. At 21 years old, the Nixon library has reached the age of historical maturity. Besides, no matter how defensive some of his men may be about their own reputations when it comes to the full range of Watergate-related activities, the reputation of the Nixonite who actually thought of going to China can withstand telling the full story. And now Ronald Reagan has beat him to it.

If They Were Doing It To-- Oh, Never Mind

The savage torture and murder of women in backward cultural settings around the world (and not just Islamic ones) is reported to be on the rise.

Imago Dei And Torture

In an "epistle," the cover story in the new "Atlantic," Andrew Sullivan, who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, calls on President Bush to be accountable for torture in the same way Reagan accepted responsibility for the Iran-contra affair and Lincoln for the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. In doing so, he appeals to his and Bush's shared Christian faith:

[T]orture has no defense whatsoever in Christian morality. There are no circumstances in which it can be justified, let alone integrated as a formal program within a democratic government. The Catholic catechism states, “Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions… is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.” Dignity is the critical word there. Even evil men are human and redeemable. Our faith demands that, even in legitimate punishment or interrogation, the dignity of prisoners must be respected. Our faith teaches that each of us—even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—is made in the image of God. To violate that imago Dei by stripping and freezing him, by slamming him against a wall, or strapping him to a board to nearly drown him again and again and again, to bombard him with noise and light until he loses his mind, to reduce a human being to a mental and spiritual shell—nothing can justify this for a Christian. Nothing. To wield that power is to wield evil. And such evil is almost always committed by those who believe they are pursuing good.

Who Really Speaks For Mary Jo?

I guess it's always a matter of whose ends and whose means. The Justice Department prepares to investigate CIA agents who may have stepped over the line to protect their country. Andrew Sullivan bristles when a columnist ponders whether it was appropriate to torture the Sept. 11 mastermind to see if he knew of more plots. Meanwhile two writers openly speculate about whether the death by slow suffocation of Mary Jo Kopechne was worth the subsequent blossoming of Sen. Kennedy's legislative career. First, Melissa Lafsky wrote:

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

Only to be seconded by one of our country's most respected novelists and critics, Joyce Carol Oates:

[I]f one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

As a Christian, I get that redemption can come from tragedy. Kennedy himself seems to have looked at it in that light. Oates's larger point is also about redemption. But this utilitarian-sounding weighing of the large good vs. the one instance of bad -- especially when imputed to the young woman herself -- is beyond the pale in that it would seem to invite the opportunistic to make the case for the purportedly small evil in advance.

Torturing Grandma

Torture in America, less than a century ago: The brutal treatment of women protesting peacefully for the vote in front of Woodrow Wilson's White House, culminating in an almost unbelievable "night of terror" in November 1917. Hunger striker Alice Paul was tortured for weeks. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know about this before. Read about it here and here.

Leon Vs. Eric

No-Drama Obama couldn't quiet an operatic Cabinet clash over torture prosecutions.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=425774&f=21
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The Inconvenience Of "Rough Men"

Pat Buchanan makes the case against torture prosecutions of CIA personnel:

"Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

George Orwell's truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the "rough men" who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres....

[Obama] and Holder may not like what was done...but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.

Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?

"Pro-Torture" Christians

Andrew Sullivan, an eloquent conservative voice against torture, rouses himself from his "summer bloggatical" to respond to yesterday's developments. In his post, he reiterates Matthew Yglesias's generalization about bloodthirsty evangelical Christians. I assume they have evidence to back their statements up. Sullivan's comparison of the attitudes of evangelicals and Iranian Muslims would take an exceptionally specific poll question, asked of both Americans and Iranians:

[M]uch of the American people, especially evangelical Christians, expect less in terms of human rights from their own government than Iranians do of theirs'. In fact, American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims.

This Beating's For You!

Here's some progress to report in the annals of justice and gender equity. While Malaysian authorities plan to give a brutal, primitive beating to a woman in the name of the state and Islamic law because she drank beer, for "compassionate reasons" they have decided to delay the torture until Ramadan is over. What a great bunch of guys, huh?

No Fun With Dick And Nancy

Andrew Sullivan called for the prosecution of former Vice President Cheney because, he says, Cheney broke the laws against torture. Sullivan now says that if congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, knew about the alleged felonies but did nothing, they too should be held accountable. But he hasn't yet written that Pelosi should be indicted and prosecuted as an accessory to a felony.

I'm not accusing Sullivan of hypocrisy, because I don't think he has partisan motives for dogging the Bush administration so relentlessly over torture. But eventually he'll have to confront the preposterousness of prosecuting government officials. We now know that in the wake of Sept. 11, all three branches of government, including leaders from both parties, acted as though the U.S. was facing an existential threat. We're talking not about a lawless administration but a government-wide state of mind, reflecting the mentality and wishes of voters, in the face of a danger that felt and appeared virtually unprecedented in our national experience.

A truth commission to understand what happened and why in order to guide future Presidents, yes. Locking up a former VP and the woman who is second in line to the Presidency, no.

The Whats Vs. The Whys Of Torture

Andrew Sullivan skewers former Bush adviser Karl Rove for saying that the Bush administration didn't authorize torture even though he's said that John McCain was tortured in North Vietnam because he was left in a stress position, one of the techniques the Bush administration authorized. Under political and media pressure, the Bush administration itself banned the most controversial technique, waterboarding, which hadn't actually been used since 2003. But as for whether it amounted to torture, the word game that Rove and others are playing is unseemly and dangerous.

While its agents didn't maim and kill its prisoners, the CIA used extreme discomfort and pain to punish people or extract information. Perhaps Rove and other Bush advocates should call it "mild torture," "not the worst kind of torture you can imagine," or "not anything like what our enemies would do and have done to our guys if they got the chance." But they should stop acting as though it wasn't torture at all.

The first reason is that insisting otherwise is an Orwellian misuse of language. Besides that, after all these months the American people have every reason to believe that the fundamental issue in the torture debate is the definition of the word. If President Bush and his advocates are seen as losing the semantic argument, they risk losing the moral one as well. Better to cede the definition and invite the more important and far more complicated debate over how much latitude we are willing to give the government in times of apparent existential challenge. Bush and his advocates will stand taller in that conversation, and rightly so. One risks looking evasive and self-serving by arguing that torture isn't torture. If instead you say, "I might have gone too far to protect the people of the United States, and I have to say that I'd probably do it again," you don't look perfect, but you also don't look small.

Did Bush really go too far? He may have. Did he do so with the best intentions as well as with the knowledge of Democrats and Republicans in Congress? He did. Do future administrations have something to learn from this experience? Undoubtedly. Should the former President and his advisers be prosecuted? Only if we want to weaken the Presidency. Only if we're more interested in political retribution and advantage than in really understanding and learning from what went right and wrong.

Pelosi Knew

It's official: The Speaker of the House was briefed in 2002 on what President Obama calls torture.

Paula Jones Vs. Osama's Jones

The wheel of retributive political justice goes 'round: Jonathan Chait says Republicans are hypocrites for opposing torture indictments for members of the Bush administration after having impeached President Clinton for perjury. The rule of law applies equally to everyone, he argues.

The varying motives for the alleged crimes notwithstanding (protecting the United States vs. not getting in trouble with the First Lady), Chait overlooks an important event when he says:

This argument [that Bush's decisions on torture should be understood in the light of post-Sept. 11 anxiety] would carry more weight if Republicans had changed their thinking on torture and could be expected to follow the law the next time they won the presidency. Alas, they show little sign of intellectual progress.

As a matter of fact, the Bush administration's thinking changed enough that it decided to stop waterboarding in 2005. So if Chait is really saying that torture would have been understandable immediately after Sept. 11 if ultimately the U.S. learned that it probably shouldn't engage in such practices -- well, it did learn, because it stopped, and under Republicans. The pro-torture arguments Chait describes as being intellectually stunted are part of a political rather than a policy debate, since they're being made by those who are engaging in mortal combat over whether Bush officials should be prosecuted. No matter if their thinking has evolved or not, saying, "Now that you think about it, we really are war criminals" is probably not the best defensive move.

If the actions of the next administration, Republican or Democrat, are Chait's real concern, then an intensive blue ribbon investigation (but not leading to prosecutions) is the best way to go.

Relying On Politics, Not Word Games

In his column today, Charles Krauthammer doesn't try to make the case that waterboarding isn't torture. Instead, he rests his argument on two political realities. The first is that if the Bush administration overstepped its bounds, it was in order to protect the people of the United States. The second is that Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats knew what the administration was doing and didn't object.

A third reality -- rarely noted by his critics -- is that President Bush stopped the waterboarding in 2005 in response to media revelations and political pressure.

For the sake of the public's right to know and guidance for future Presidents, I say yes to full disclosure of what techniques were used, on whom, by whom, and to what effect, but only if it wouldn't endanger national security. To prosecutions of elected or appointed officials, attorneys, judges, or interrogators because of waterboarding and other extreme techniques, no.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry