links for 2009-04-24

Congressional Republicans, led by House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), came out swinging against President Barack Obama's apparent new-found willingness to entertain the possibility of prosecuting former Bush Administration officials for decisions made regarding enhanced interrogations. Hoekstra (R-MI), penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal declaring that if Democrats wanted to conduct an investigation, Republicans would make sure Congressional Democrats were the subjects of the probe right along with the Bush Administration.

California became the first state in the nation Thursday to mandate carbon-based reductions in transportation fuels in an attempt to cut the state's overall greenhouse gas emissions.

The California Air Resources Board approved a phased-in reduction starting in 2011, with a goal of shrinking carbon impacts 10 percent by 2020. Fuel producers could comply in different ways, such as providing a cleaner fuel portfolio, blending low-carbon ethanol with gasoline or purchasing credits from other clean-energy producers.

California's low-carbon fuel standard could lead to a national measure under President Barack Obama, as well as shape how the transportation sector evolves. But businesses and oil industry critics warned that the air board was moving too quickly and that its action would lead to higher costs for consumers in a recessionary economy.

Economic development officials in Hardin are looking at the soon-to-close detention facility in Guantanamo Bay as a possible fix for the jail sitting empty in Hardin.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order Jan. 22 to close the Guantanamo detention facilities in Cuba where hundreds of enemy combatants have been held since 2002. The closure is to occur in a year, during which time remaining detainees must be returned to their home countries or detained elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a 460-bed detention facility sits empty in Hardin. Built by Two Rivers Authority, the city's economic development arm, the facility was meant to bring economic development to Hardin by creating more than 100 high-paying jobs.

While leaders continue to look for contracts to open the jail, which was completed in 2007, people in Hardin have approached Two Rivers executive director Greg Smith saying they have the answer: Get the contract to hold those prisoners from Guantanamo.

First let's all acknowledge that even the "evil" Bush administration's notion of "torture" is a far cry from what most of us think when we hear that word. There are no beheadings — like terrorists did to Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl — no shooting people in kneecaps, and no cutting off fingers one-by-one by with rusty garden shears.

What we're really talking about here is waterboarding and, whether you are morally in favor of it or not, it's far from clear whether that technique qualifies under the law as "torture."

And that's the whole problem: What exactly is "torture"?

Several of the foreign leaders who heard the president's apology come from nations that have a documented history of employing the following "enhanced interrogation methods" : electrocution, starvation, dismemberment, genital mutilation, disembowelment, eye-gouging, and beheading. The NKVD, for one example, employed some of these methods not for purposes of interrogation, but for the sake of inflicting pain and destroying the humanity of the victim — thereby crushing the spirit of anyone allied with the victim.

In fact, some of these foreign leaders hail from countries where these "enhanced interrogation methods" aren't mere history, but current practice.

There has been a lot of debate on the potential prosecution of Bush Administration officials who offered legal opinions supporting waterboarding — with some even calling for investigations of high-ranking officials like Dick Cheney. However, one thing that hasn't been given the attention it deserves is the precedent it would set if we were to criminalize national security decisions. Hence, I've finally decided to test out the time machine I've been building in my basement – and you would be surprised what sort of things grew out of the current debacle.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned Israel's right-wing government on Thursday that it risked losing Arab support for fighting any threats from Iran if it shuns Palestinian peace talks.

Signaling U.S. impatience with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reticence over peace talks, Clinton said Arab nations had made clear to her that Israel must be committed to the Palestinian peace process if it wants help countering Iran.

The Treasury Department is preparing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing for Chrysler that could come as soon as next week, people with direct knowledge of the action said Thursday.
The Treasury has an agreement in principle with the United Automobile Workers union, whose members’ pensions and retiree health care benefits would be protected as a condition of the bankruptcy filing, said these people, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Porter Goss, former CIA Director and past chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, blasted the Obama administration for releasing Justice Department memos on harsh interrogation techniques. “For the first time in my experience we’ve crossed the red line of properly protecting our national security in order to gain partisan political advantage,” Goss said in an interview.

Goss, a former CIA operative, has made few public comments since leaving his post as DCI in September 2006. In December 2007, he told a Washington Post reporter that members of Congress had been fully briefed on the CIA’s special interrogation program. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” Goss told the Post. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

But, since then, even while continuing to update his site constantly, Drudge has almost completely disappeared from public life. As far as I can tell, the Clinton event was his only public appearance of the past few years. In September 2007, he gave up his Sunday evening radio show, which had long been his most visible platform. Some of the politicos he once regularly contacted now say he is in touch less frequently. One source relays that, these days, the only media figures he talks to regularly are a select group that includes Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who has helped run the Drudge Report on a part-time basis. (Also working on the site has been Kevin Lucido, who runs the Vienna, Virginia-based ad firm Intermarkets and sells Drudge's advertising.)

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.

Many intelligence officials, including some opposed to the brutal methods, confirm that the program produced information of great value, including tips on early-stage schemes to attack tall buildings on the West Coast and buildings in New York’s financial district and Washington. Interrogation of one Qaeda operative led to tips on finding others, until the leadership of the organization was decimated. Removing from the scene such dedicated and skilled plotters as Mr. Mohammed, or the Indonesian terrorist known as Hambali, almost certainly prevented future attacks.

But which information came from which methods, and whether the same result might have been achieved without the political, legal and moral cost of the torture controversy, is hotly disputed, even inside the intelligence agency.

Bob Gainey is asking Montreal Canadiens fans to show some respect.

Less than 24 hours after the American national anthem was greeted by boos at the Bell Centre, the Montreal Canadiens general manager/coach is urging the crowd to avoid jeering the Star Spangled Banner prior to Game 4 of the Habs-Boston Bruins first-round series tomorrow night.

It was an embarrassing act, one that has happened far too often in the past during post-season games here in Montreal.

A new Public Policy Polling survey has some interesting findings concerning Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R): While 76% of Republican voters have a favorable opinion of her, 21% say they would rather vote for President Obama if she became the Republican party presidential nominee in 2012.

In a head-to-head match up, Obama would beat Palin, 53% to 41%.

The survey also shows Obama beating Mike Huckabee, 49% to 42%, Newt Gingrich, 52% to 39%, and Mitt Romney, 50% to 39%.

President Barack Obama has finished the second leg of his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of America and his predecessors.

Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America "has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has "a moral responsibility to act" on arms control because only the U.S. had "used a nuclear weapon." In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by "just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy" — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not "pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors" because we "failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas."

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair got it right last week when he noted how easy it is to condemn the enhanced interrogation program "on a bright sunny day in April 2009." Reactions to this former CIA program, which was used against senior al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003, are demonstrating how little President Barack Obama and some Democratic members of Congress understand the dire threats to our nation.

George Tenet, who served as CIA director under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, believes the enhanced interrogations program saved lives. He told CBS's "60 Minutes" in April 2007: "I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."

Releasing the Justice memos opened a door and the contents repulsed many people. But these were not evil men who drafted the memos. These were not evil people who carried out the methods authorized by them. They were our fellow citizens who were trying to protect us from the real evildoers.

The president has got a lot on his plate. If his fellow Democrats in Congress want to try to impeach a federal appeals court judge who oversaw the memos and interrogate or prosecute former Justice Department lawyers, an attorney general or two and maybe a former vice president, then the battle will be drawn in the courtroom and in the political arena.

The losers will be us. All of us.

When MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" debuted during the historic campaign of Barack Obama, the program's ratings soared and made its host a breakout star on cable.

But as the president's administration nears its 100-day milestone, Maddow's show — like most cable programs that traffic in political talk and chatter — has seen its numbers cool. March was the lowest-rated month so far for Maddow with her numbers falling from an average high of 1.9 million viewers to just slightly over 1.1 million.

The road to regain viewers would seem an especially challenging one for Maddow. Politics, not to mention television, thrives on conflict, but how much of that will there be with a left-leaning host in a time of a left-leaning president? Maddow isn't worried.