Atrios may be reading secret e-mails from Fox News containing Protocols of the Elders of Obama that I haven’t seen — oops, I shouldn’t have made a joking reference to that noxious forgery, because by so doing I have played into the hands of anti-Semites — but I haven’t come across any right-wing hits on Obama that feature an American flag burning in the White House fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. ~Gary Kamiya

That’s true.  You’d have to rely on Larry Johnson to come up with something like that.  But the flag in the fireplace isn’t much of an exaggeration at all of various false charges that Obama has no respect for the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance or what-have-you.  The hubbub over Obama’s “endorsement” by Hamas as some kind of “proof” that he was friendly to Hamas or bad for Israel and the basic assumption shared by many Republicans that leaving Iraq is “surrender” to Al Qaeda (or something like that) aren’t exaggerated very much by the picture of Bin Laden.  Considering how much trouble that Hamas “endorsement” caused Obama, I was amazed to see Christopher Beam finish his piece in Slatewith these words:

And, no, Obama’s fist bump was not a secret show of solidarity to Hezbollah. It’s really a secret show of solidarity to Hamas. Just kidding!

Yes, laugh all the way to McCain’s inauguration! 

Of course, it will take some enterprising chain e-mailer about five seconds to remove that last sentence and cite it as more “proof” of Obama’s abiding love of Hamas.  Anyone who has any familiarity with these chain e-mails knows that they are ripping Obama’s own words from The Audacity of Hope out of context to “prove” that he has some higher loyalty to Muslims, and this is being credulously circulated around all the time.  Sometimes critics will include the context and then ignore the significance of what it means when he wrote, “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”  Of course, he was writing here about American citizens who are Muslims, and he is talking about standing with them in the event that there are attempts to curtail their civil liberties.  Would that this supposedly ardent civil libertarian Obama had been voting to support a filibuster of the FISA legislation! 

It amazes me that we have just come out of an era in which roughly half the population was at one time certain that Saddam Hussein not only had operational ties to Al Qaeda (false) but was responsible for 9/11 (some embarrassingly large number of people still believe this), and yet we still get these harangues from Kamiya and The Los Angeles Times about how harmless and unimportant misinformation is.  “People aren’t that stupid!” they declare.  They’re not stupid, but they can be ignorant, and that ignorance can be exploited, just as the Bush administration did in its arguments concerning Iraq.  When national polls are finding that nearly 40% of the public believes Obama went to a religious madrassa (madrassa itself ultimately just means “school”) and about one out of eight people think he is a Muslim, you have to be strangely optimistic that this kind of misinformation won’t spread any more than it already has.        

I intend for this to be my last post commenting on this cover image matter, because one of the most damaging things that the image and controversy about it have done is to distract almost entirely from recent things related to The New Yorker that aren’t phenomenally stupid.  These would be the enormously important reports derived from Jane Mayer’s book on the torture and detention regime and, less importantly, also overshadowed Ryan Lizza’s interesting investigation into Obama’s Chicago political past.  The former is obviously of great importance to debates on national security, treatment of detainees and most of all to understanding what crimes were committed by members of the government.  The other has some notable points, the most important of which was this concluding one:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.

While I have tended to put it more harshly than this, this is what I have been arguing for some time now.  Obama is not interested in challening the status quo in any fundamental ways, and he has no interest in confronting powerful interests and lobbies.  This is why the people who are most critical of him because of his alleged “weakness” on Israel, antiterrorism or national security have been entirely wrong about him, while those who keep hoping that his hawkish gestures are only temporary are being taken for a ride.  The closer he gets to being elected, the more he will accommodate the Bush era status quo in all these areas.  Those who are basically satisfied with the foreign and national security policies of the last eight years can feel very comfortable knowing that they have two candidates who will reliably line up with them on almost everything.

In the course of the conversation, it became clear that Perot thought Obama was a Muslim. When I informed him that Obama was actually a Christian, Perot was relieved. He didn’t hate Obama; he just had an instinct to believe whatever he happened to see online over what he read in reputable newspapers. ~Jonathan Alter

All of this might also have something to do with the small problem that Perot has the reputation of being not quite right in the head, but that’s not entirely fair.  One must also ask what sources these people are using.  It isn’t as if “online” sources are uniformly awash in nonsense and gossip.  There are certain kinds of online media and certain sites that excel in misinformation, but there are just as many that don’t.  However, if a reasonably well-informed, albeit eccentric, billionaire can buy into such idiocy, there’s no telling who might be susceptible to it among all those voters who still have no idea what either candidate believes at this late stage in the election.  The notion that only die-hard rejectionists would entertain bizarre ideas about Obama gets things backwards in a lot of cases–some people become die-hard rejectionists because they come to believe bizarre things about him.  If many general election voters have only just started paying attention or won’t pay attention until the autumn, it doesn’t help when you have an image circulating since mid-July depicting the most terrible distortions about a candidate.  The Wright controversy exploded the way it did because there was a visual record, and people could watch Wright say what he said, which obviously gave the controversy more staying power and made Wright’s remarks more memorable than they might have otherwise been had they just been published in a transcript. 

It’s not surprising to see someone at the official Obama NewsletterNewsweek taking the view that I and many others have taken that the image is very damaging, but Alter is right to emphasise the power of images to override whatever arguments are set up against them.  Visual associations are powerful and readily remembered.  Propagandists and campaign communications directors (more or less the same thing in different guises) know this, which is why they spend so much time concerning themselves with presentation, atmospherics, backdrops and the like.  To take a less extreme example, the principal reason why McCain’s “green background” speech was regarded as a failure was its visual effect, and for the most part no one remembers what he said–only that he said it against a hideous green background and looked absurd.  Virtually everyone knows that how candidates appear at presidential debates have an influence on how they are perceived by their audience, and can even affect how the viewers decide whether one candidate or another prevailed.  People will remember this image long after many of them have forgotten the purpose of the artist in making it.       

Update: One of the responses I keep seeing is something like what the L.A. Times wrote in its editorial:

Obama’s campaign is deeply worried about the legions of morons who they apparently believe make up the heart of this great nation.

There is an idea that people who think the image will do real damage to Obama politically must be assuming that there are “legions of morons” or that there are some people too “unsophisticated” to grasp the obvious satire.  Here’s the problem: satire relies on an audience possessing sufficient knowledge to understand the references well enough to recognise that they are being used ironically.  It isn’t really a question of sophistication or lack thereof, and it isn’t even a question of intelligence.  What matters is how much voters already know about Obama and his wife.  To think everyone will “get” the joke as a joke, you have to assume that everyone has been following the election campaign as obsessively as political junkies and professional bloggers.  Of course, there has been a string of columns and articles discussing how relatively unknown Obama still is to much of the country, and yet to hear the defenses of the cover image you’d think that everyone has followed all the twists and turns of the campaign from Springfield till now. 

In fact, this is the high-information argument that takes for granted that everyone in the country already knows the maximal amount about every phony Obama controversy and also knows enough about Obama himself to know that the controversies are phony.  “Oh, yes, the burning flag in the image is rather like the one William Ayers once stepped on in protest of the government!  And we all know who William Ayers is, don’t we?  Very clever!”  This assumption is absolutely wrong, as any focus group with undecided and “swing” voters could tell you.  Given the characteristics of many undecided voters, you could not have come up with an image that was more likely to provoke undecided voters in all the wrong ways if the goal was to deprive the false charges of their power and influence in the election.     

In a new effort to “help” Obama yet again, the cartoonist for the Seattle P-I has done this mock-up of a cover for the McCains.  As everyone can see, a rather crucial difference between what the cartoonist did here and what the New Yorker cover did is that the things being used to mock McCain (rather than refute charges against him) have some significant basis in truth:

The two images aren’t really comparable, but they’re being treated here as if they are, which is actually to reduce the New Yorker image to its most plain, “literal” meaning as an exaggeration of real traits.  The first is a roundabout satire of false charges being made against the two figures, and the second is simply a caricature exaggerating certain truths about McCain (e.g., his age, support for the security state, his enthusiasm for killing Iranians, his wife’s former drug problem).  If you wanted to make an argument that the New Yorker image reflects some exaggerated form of “dangerous” truth about the Obamas, you would put it side by side with this McCain caricature as this presumably pro-Obama cartoonist has done.  Nice work.  Those of us who don’t support Obama should just get out of the way of his fans and let them drag him down.   

Second Update: The LAT editorial has another claim:

It may be that there are some spectacularly literal-minded Americans who will see the New Yorker’s over-the-top portrayal of Obama as a confirmation of their worst fears. But then, they weren’t going to vote for him anyway.

Of course, there’s no way for them to know that.  They assume that there are no potential Obama voters who could be swayed by misinformation and provocative images to vote for someone else, which is to project their own stereotype of the kinds of people who are likely to vote for Obama in the general election (i.e., people just like them).

Almost everyone except for the people who work at The New Yorker seems to have grasped that, whether intended as satire or not, the effect of the cover image is disastrous for the Obama campaign.  The timing might have been worse, but not by much, since Obama is getting ready to go on his trip out of the country.  The image is the most complete expression of the inexplicable desire of Obama supporters to “help” the candidate by portraying him in what are actually the most unflattering and politically damaging ways possible while simultaneously believing that they are pre-emptively defending and praising the things they are describing.  This cover image is slightly different, in that it is trying to undermine the worst attacks by revealing them to be nonsensical caricatures, but nonetheless the artist seems incapable of imagining that there are many voters, particularly those who don’t know that much about Obama, who will see this image flashed on their television screens or attached to chain e-mails and think, “I knew there was something about that Obama I didn’t like, and now I see what it is!”  No doubt many Obama supporters thinks this gives a lot of voters too little credit, but they have been giving them too much for a long time.  Besides, this isn’t just a question of voter savviness–the power of suggestion can be great, and in a tightly contested race, in which the challenger has not yet won the confidence of a majority of voters, any lingering doubts that prevent people from supporting the challenger could be decisive.  The less informed undecided voters are, the more susceptible they will be to such an image, which will plant seeds of doubt where there might have been none before. 

In an era of instant, mass communication, the image will be, indeed already has been, circulated widely and will gradually lose whatever “ironic” edge it once had.  That the image derived from a New Yorker cover and was intended for an audience of high-information, predominantly left-leaning voters who already support Obama will be irrelevant or will add to the “credibility” of what the image conveys. Then the word will go forth in forwarded emails everywhere: “Even The New Yorker thinks Obama is a secret Muslim, etc…”      

The artist, Barry Blitt, takes for granted that the portrayal of the Obamas he is ridiculing is self-evidently absurd, which is the essential failure of imagination that accompanies every one of these episodes of some starry-eyed friend of Obama “helping” the candidate.  While casually mentioning how many foreign relatives he has, his purported greater understanding of the Islamic world and how very excited many Arabs are that he may be elected, the “helpers” seem to be unable to imagine how these same claims–to say nothing of the more bizarre fantasies built on top of them–would inspire dislike and hostility in many voting constituencies.  They seem to conclude that because they find such a reaction to be wrong and misguided that it will not be significant, which makes no sense.  They also seem to have made the strange judgement that just because a candidate is being attacked in wildly contradictory and irrational ways that the attacks can easily be offset by showing how irrational and contradictory they are, which misses the point that they are irrational.

P.S.  This entire episode reminds me of the art school subplot in Ghost World with The New Yorker in the role of the art teacher promoting an art project that “ironically” uses blatant racial stereotypes.  Had the editors at the magazine been more attentive Steve Buscemi fans, they would have seen the problem with using the image.

Update: Sullivan says that “the notion that most Americans are incapable of seeing that [it is satire] strikes me as excessively paranoid and a little condescending,” but it is not so much a question of capability as it is one of willingness.  Some people will see it as a confirmation of what they already believe or suspect, others will “get” it but still find it outrageous, and still others may understand that the intent was satire but will still come away with the impression that there could be some element of truth to the stereotyping.  The fairly small number who just laugh at it and think that it skewers smear artists will not begin to offset the number of people who will either take offense or take the image all together too seriously.

As I started reading Ryan Lizza’s interesting, long article on the rise of Obama, who should I come across on the first page but Alderman Toni Preckwinckle?  That makes sense, since she was one of Obama’s earliest supporters and an important patron in city politics, but the name rang a bell for a different reason.  Her name had come up earlier in that Globe story about failed private development of public housing in Obama’s state senate district:

After Rezko’s assistance in Obama’s home purchase became a campaign issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration of Rezmar’s buildings never came to his attention. He said he would have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known.

Other local politicians say they knew of the problems.

“I started getting complaints from police officers about particular properties that turned out to be Rezko properties,” said Toni Preckwinkle, a Chicago alderman.

She had previously received campaign contributions from Rezmar and said she had regarded the company as a model, one of the city’s best affordable housing developers.

But in the early 2000s, she called Rezko to ask for an explanation for the declining conditions. He told her Rezmar was “getting out of the business,” she said – walking away from its responsibility for managing the developments.

“I didn’t see him nor have anything to do with him after that,” she said.

While she wouldn’t talk to the Globe about Obama and Rezko specifically, the article used Preckwinckle’s break with Rezko to imply that Obama’s claim of ignorance about the deterioration of Rezmar buildings was questionable, which made his continued association with Rezko prior to the latter’s indictment seem even worse than it already did. 

Now Lizza uses her as a representative of disenchanted Obama supporters, and in his article she does have some things to say about Obama and Rezko:

Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama’s and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: “Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles.” As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle’s current view of her onetime protégé. “I don’t think you should forget who your friends are,” she said.

The general impression one gets from the two old Obama supporters quoted in the beginning of the article is that Obama has a bad habit of relying on constituents to propel him upwards and then ignoring them (or at the very least making them feel as if they have been ignored, which is usually just as bad for the pol).  This is true of many politicians, but it isn’t necessarily true of all of them, and it certainly isn’t a very attractive feature. 

Update: Regarding Obama’s much-celebrated 2002 antiwar speech, Lizza quotes the woman who organised the rally to make the obvious point:

The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, “He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!”

Second Update: Whatever else people take away from the article, it seems to me that its merits and revelations are going to be completely overshadowed by controversy over the cover of the issue in which it appears:

On the Roger Cohen scale of counterproductive, tone-deaf pro-Obama gestures, this is a 12.

You might guess that an op-ed that refers to “raving grease-monkey CPAs” is not persuasive, and you’d be right.  Yglesias marvels at the uselessness of the Post op-ed pages that DeBord’s piece exemplifies, though he should remember that this is an outfit run by Fred Hiatt, and reaction to the idiotic lament for the Hummer has been appropriately severe and caustic.  As an icon of the fantasy of “endless abundance,” the Hummer fulfills far more than the fantasies of insecure men–it perpetuates the myth that technology and progress will triumph over all things, there are no limits, resources are practically infinite, and a standard of living that has now become prohibitively expensive is within the reach of all.  In other words, it is an invitation to insanity. 

Worst of all, DeBord slipped up and acknowledged just how absurd the entire Hummer phenomenon he is praising really is:

If this all sounds like caricature, that’s because it is.

If Mr. Bush has himself long ago reached self-caricaturing status, epitomised by his reported remarks at the G-8 summit, DeBord reminds us that there is still a constituency for ridiculous bluster and defining American identity according to how much we can consume and destroy.

The thing that prompted Rod to write about Africa yesterday was the Security Council vote that rejected the proposed sanctions against Zimbabwe, which the reporters for the Times declared rather hyperbolically to be “an historic defeat for the West.”  Of course, it’s true that Russia and China have essentially taken Zimbabwe’s side in their resistance to any international attempt to regulate the internal affairs of Zimbabwe, which they understand quite well could be applied to them or their satellites in the future, but the points that their ambassadors made are worth considering.  The Russian ambassador said:

This draft is nothing but the council’s attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of a member state.

Of course, that is exactly true.  Indeed, that’s the whole point of the exercise.  The Chinese ambassador added, “Internationally, to use or threaten to use sanctions lightly is not conducive to solving a problem.”  This is often also true.  Suppose for a moment that the arms embargo and travel ban had been enacted, and the financial assets of the ruling clique frozen in various banks around the world.  Does anyone seriously think that this would mean that the ZANU-PF goons and the military would not be able to acquire arms illicitly?  Of course not.  It probably would make it much more likely that the opponents of Mugabe would be unable to arm themselves for self-defense.  The travel ban and asset freeze would be more burdensome, but would the latter not encourage the kleptocrats to steal whatever they have not already stolen inside Zimbabwe?  Has anyone thought for a moment how such an action would worsen conditions, as hard as that may be to imagine, rather than impose pressure on Mugabe?     

Furthermore, the Security Council does not properly have the authority to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe for its government’s misrule and brutality.  This is not the purpose of the United Nations Security Council.  Under the U.N. Charter, the Security Council can impose sanctions, blockades and even authorise military action to restore “international peace and security,” according to the provisions of Chapter VII, but one of the key provisions of the Charter that no one in the West seems to care for very much (and which non-revisionist powers such as Russia and China end up defending out of self-interest) is the statement in Article 2:

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter…

Those who want the Security Council to act against Zimbabwe’s government want it to do something that it does not actually have the authority to do under the U.N.’s own fundamental law.  The powers it possesses to pursue collective security very plainly concern international disputes that threaten the peace.  The disaster in Zimbabwe does not fall under this jurisdiction. 

Update: It’s also worth noting that there are many significant sanctions already imposed on Zimbabwe by the U.S., EU and the Commonwealth, and these have had no effect in changing the behaviour of Mugabe’s regime.

I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need. ~John McCain

Well, there’s never been any danger of McCain becoming a great communicator.  Also, it’s not a good sign that he had to be reminded that he reads his own daughter’s blog.

Via Rod, I came across this rather extraordinary article by one Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent, in which he proclaimed Africa worthless:

They are now — one way or another — virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Far be it from me to tell anyone to be more optimistic, but if this statement is true of some parts of Africa (and I think you can fairly say that it is) it is manifestly untrue or at least grossly exaggerated concerning other parts.  There is also a matter of when we are talking about: fifteen years ago, you would have listed Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast as success stories of post-colonial independence, and at that time they were doing reasonably well, but today you would list them as tragic cases of disaster to varying degrees.  My inclinations towards pessimism should make me conclude that this shows that even the seemingly successful states in Africa are going to collapse into chaos and disorder eventually, but I’m not sure that this shows that at all.  I think those two cases in particular do show that the politicisation of ethnicity through elements of mass democracy and the division of a country along ethnic lines tend towards the creation of ruinous, exploitative and oppressive policies that destroy previously flourishing states.  The case of Zimbabwe does point to the inherent difficulties in transitioning from an old, entrenched anti-colonialist political class to a new political leadership, but it does not necessarily mean that Zimbabwe will be doomed to this cycle forever.     

One of the perennial justifications offered for intervention in various African countries is the assumption, often unstated, that Africa as a whole is a hopeless disaster that will collapse in on itself if no one else does anything.  We, and by “we” I mean mainly Westerners, do not take this view of any other part of the world, except perhaps when it comes to Arab states (more on that in a moment), and this is very curious.  Crucial to developmentalist ideology is the idea that Africa is thrashing about impotently and needs still more aid, when surely the thing that Myers’ article tells us is that it has been the habit of development “aid” and the desire to “do something” to save immiserated Africans that have compounded the problems many African nation-states face.  One essential thing that I think should be taken from Myers’ article is the recognition that it would help African states to provide them with fewer crutches of aid and loans and integrate them more fully into the world’s economy.  If, as James has wisely observed, growing corruption worldwide is the great story of the decade and one of the great threats to political life in many “developing” countries, the role of development aid in fostering corruption cannot be ignored. 

As William Easterly has said in one of his many salvoes against the destructive ideology of developmentalism:

But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help.

As Prof. Easterly laid out last year, fatalities caused by war account for an extremely small percentage of deaths in Africa, and economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa has been considerable:

But this doesn’t quite square with the sub-Saharan Africa that in 2006 registered its third straight year of good GDP growth — about 6%, well above historic averages for either today’s rich countries or all developing countries. Growth of living standards in the last five years is the highest in Africa’s history.

The real Africa also has seen cellphone and Internet use double every year for the last seven years. Foreign private capital inflows into Africa hit $38 billion in 2006 — more than foreign aid. Africans are saving a higher percentage of their incomes than Americans are (so much for the “poverty trap” of being “too poor to save” endlessly repeated in aid reports). I agree that it’s too soon to conclude that Africa is on a stable growth track, but why not celebrate what Africans have already achieved?
 

Easterly makes the vital point that the standards by which African progress is often being measured demand incredible improvements in very short spans of time, and so naturally African states keep falling short despite making reasonably good progress.  Easterly quoted an Ugandan journalist who asked the obvious question: “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?”  This is the basic conservative understanding that dependence created by aid can be positively harmful.  Whatever their intentions, humanitarians and developmentalists are working to distort and stunt the development of African nations.

Myers’ attitude towards Africa is no doubt influenced by experiences in some of the worse, more conflict-ridden states (or, in Somalia’s case, pseudo-states) and his appropriate horror at the irresponsible attitudes of many southern African governments, not merely that of Mbeki, about the region’s public health crises.  Myers makes many legitimate points, and I’m sure the sweeping generalisations he ends up making are the product of frustration with the stigma against saying such things publicly.  Still, it occurs to me that this overly broad view of Africa is very much like the American view of “the Middle East,” which people in this country will commonly refer to as exceedingly violent or unstable, when it has been–outside of a very narrow strip of the Levant–relatively quiet, peaceful and stable until recent years.  Americans believe this because they are frequently shown only those parts of the region that make international news, and those tend to be the parts where there are intractable conflicts, and they are now often told that America’s role in the region is to provide stability in a region that supposedly would otherwise lack it.  That almost exactly the opposite might be true is not really considered a serious view.  The idea that Africans can make their own way in the world without ongoing assistance and support also seems to be quite unusual and controversial.  Developmentalists and interventionists have many incentives to propagate the idea that outside aid and meddling are essential for the well-being of the regions in question, but this not credible.  The most important thing to take away from Myers’ complaint is that these are the people who have exacerbated many of the problems that they then use to justify continued interference.

There are new reports based on Jane Mayer’s new book The Dark Side detailing a Red Cross investigation that concluded that detainees have been tortured by the CIA and also revealing that the administration ignored warnings that many of those being held at Guantanamo had been detained by mistake.  The authorised use of torture is a disgrace and a blot on the reputation of the government, but it has hardly been a secret.  Indeed, the efforts of members of the administration and its supporters to define away various forms of torture as something other than torture took for granted that the government was using torture on detainees.  The way that most Republican presidential candidates were rushing to out-do one another at one debate in their enthusiasm for brutality towards terror suspects, the dreadful invocations of necessity from Republican bloggers and the ease with which administration supporters began deploying euphemisms to describe torture (e.g., “enhanced interrogation techniques”) all pointed with certainty that the government was using torture and its defenders were either indifferent to this or openly supportive of it.  The progression of apologists for the state is always more or less the same: to suggest that the government is doing something flatly illegal and immoral is disloyal, and then once it has been proved that the government has been doing something flatly illegal and immoral it is only soft-headed idealists who think that such things are unjustifiable.  “We have to be pragmatic!” they tell us.  This is where the logic of wanting to “get things done” takes you.

It is this other information, which is again not entirely surprising, that is more damning in its way, since it reveals the fraud behind the entire defense of detention facilities for “enemy combatants” who were, as Mr. Bush never tired of saying, “picked up off the battlefield.”  According to the new book’s account, this was always as false as it seemed to sound:

After a study involving dozens of detainees, the analyst came up with an answer: A large fraction of them “had no connection with terrorism whatsoever,” Mayer writes, citing officials familiar with the report. Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the U.S. military by bounty hunters [bold mine-DL]. Previous published reports have described the CIA analyst’s visit but have not provided details of its findings.

According to Mayer, the analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error.

As the story relates, the administration refused to review the status of any of the detainees, no doubt concluding that to acknowledge that such a huge percentage of detainees had been arrested in error would be to make sure that the entire para-constitutional system they were trying to create would be fatally undermined.  The premise of the dissenting minority in Boumediene was essentially that if the government has defined someone as an enemy combatant, he should not enjoy any measure of due process and to grant such an “enemy combatant” the ability to contest his detention and the charges against him would be to risk the acquittal and release of terrorists.  Of course, when the government is allowed to define who an “enemy combatant” is, up to and including U.S. citizens such as Padilla, it takes away the possibility of reviewing the very designation that strips the detainee of legal rights, and then without those rights he cannot contest his detention.  Better still from the government’s perspective, because the detainees are charged with terrorism and would not have been uniformed members of any military, they cannot claim the status of prisoners of war and so the government tries to find a way to evade international legal obligations as well.  The argument that these detainees should not have access to the courts relied on the belief that terrorist suspects should not be processed through civilian courts, which presupposed that their status as terrorist suspects had some basis in reality.  The entire system was justified according to the assumption that the government never makes mistakes and always acts in good faith, when we know that the opposite is typically the case.   

This news also reminds us of the secret prison network that the CIA was running in certain European countries, which was revealed back in 2006 to cries that Mary McCarthy was breaking the law and betraying national security.  If there had been half as much outrage about the government’s violations of the law as there was about Ms. McCarthy’s alleged wrongdoing, the entire detention system would have been dismantled years ago.  As I suspectedatthe time, the secret prisons were exactly the kind of black sites that were designed in such a way that they were an invitation to abuses, and that is assuming that they were not specifically intended as places where detainees were to be abused and tortured all along, and this new report of torture by CIA interrogators makes that seem even more likely.

P.S.  Schwenkler hasmore.

Update: Via Steve Clemons, I see that Prof. Andrew Bacevich, a TAC Contributing Editor, has a review of The Dark Side in the Post.  Prof. Bacevich writes:

Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

As the rest of the review makes clear, the same executive usurpation that created the detention system and drove the abuse of detainees is also behind the use of warrantless surveillance, and all of it is premised on the idea that the President and his agents are not under the law. 

Second Update: Glenn Greenwald has more, and makes the point that I have been trying to make in the past:

Things like “torture” and “illegal eavesdropping” can’t be compared as though they’re separate, competing policies. They are rooted in the same framework of lawlessness. The same rationale that justifies one is what justifies the other. Endorsing one is to endorse all of it.