The OPR report: required reading?
It’s easy for me to tell you (echoing Sullivan) to read this blog post by James Fallows. It’s more difficult for me to commit to what he advises. After months of delay, the Office of Professional Responsibility report on the ethical conduct of Bush Administration lawyers has been released (Peggy Steinfels posted about it and the accompanying report from David Margolis over the weekend). And it’s available online: you can download the pdf here. Will you read it? Fallows says you should.
If you want to argue that “whatever” happened in the “war on terror” was necessary because of the magnitude and novelty of the threat, then you had better be willing to face what the “whatever” entailed. Which is what this report brings out. And if you believe — as I do, and have argued through the years — that what happened included excessive, abusive, lawless, immoral, and self-defeating acts done wrongly in the name of American “security,” then this is a basic text as well.
And when you’re done, you can download Margolis’s 69-page memo and read that too.
Some argue that the Internet has made it easier for people to be uninformed, or selectively informed — you can choose, if you wish, to hear only that which validates the opinions you already hold. True enough. But the Internet also makes it easier to do the background work — to circumvent filters and get information straight from the source — if you want to. It has made it possible to find out whether the sources you rely on are actually reliable. But, of course, you have to put in the effort, and the time.
On the issue of torture and the law, defenders of the Bush Administration’s policies have been saying demonstrably untrue things on television and in print for years (as I noted here last year). They keep doing it because their interlocutors — not just Raymond Arroyo, but most cable-news hosts and many opinion-page editors — either don’t know or don’t care that their arguments have already been shown to be false. Dick Cheney has fought to prevent documents like this OPR report from being released. (And not only Cheney; according to that Jane Mayer New Yorker article I recommended earlier this month, Rahm Emmanuel has been pressuring Eric Holder not to rock the boat.) But even when the truth comes out, it makes not difference unless people actually hear it. That’s why Fallows is recommending that his readers take the time to read this report. And I think he’s right. We know by now that we can’t depend on the Sunday-morning talk-show circuit to take care of it on our behalf.
There are a lot of things I’d rather do than read this report, of course, but I’ll do it anyway. A Lenten penance, perhaps. Will you? Or, is there a source you trust to do the heavy lifting and tell you what’s in it? I know Sullivan is orchestrating a group-read and report on his blog. I will again recommend Scott Horton’s “No Comment” blog for informed commentary. Where else should we look?
… Rahm Emmanuel has been pressuring Eric Holder not to rock the boat.)
Ms. O’Reilly:
Correction: Barack Obama has been pressuring Eric Holder. Of course, that has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the people you urge us to read, but don’t you dare give Obama a pass on all this, Emmanuel reports directly to Obama; this is Obama’s pressure.
It is fascinating and dismaying to me that of all the grave issues facing us, the most important to you and yours is the ongoing effort to imprison those who were trying to defend us, and to run interference, no doubt with the best of intententions, for murderous terrorists and their lackeys and running dogs. Shame, SHAME on you. You have earned my everlasting distrust.
Actually, Bob, connecting the dots between Obama and Emmanuel, and between Obama and Holder, is a major theme of that Jane Meyer piece I keep recommending. You could try reading that, or any of the other sources I’ve pointed to; they’d certainly put your mind at ease on the question of whether I’ve been giving Obama “a pass.”
Is this the same James Fallows who predicted 30 years ago that the economic juggernaut of Japan was going to conquer the world? Don’t you have to be right at least once about something important before anyone should take what you say seriously?
Don’t you have to be right at least once about something important before anyone should take what you say seriously? I always try to apply that rule of thumb around here, Mark.
I wonder why there is no mention of abortion being an act of torture?
Also relevant is former AG Mukasey and Deputy AG Filip’s letter to to OPR from January 09.
http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2010/02/20/description011909.mukaseyfiliplettertoopr.pdf
Some sources that may be helpful:
Choire Sicha at the Awl has some thoughts, and some links. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick is dismayed — a thing of terrible beauty; please read it — and David Luban says, “David Margolis Is Wrong.” Marcy Wheeler has been working her way through the report since Friday. And Glenn Greenwald is knocking down the attempts to play this as a vindication of Yoo et al. — but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
I guess there’s not much interest in joining my OPR report Lenten book club. But if you do try to tackle it, one of Sullivan’s readers has offered a reading guide.
Point of information: I am reading the report–and it is Lenten reading in its obscurity. But can any one clarify: Drafts 1 and 2 were ready by January 2009 when the Bush Administration was still in office, what are we reading now? A version of these? A new report?
Margaret–
The drafts were circulated to the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ for comment, as well as to several of the individuals mentioned in the drafts–e.g., Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury. Some of the individuals chose to provide responses to the drsfts, some did not. Yoo, for example, provided a response in May of 2009. (See bottom of page 9 and top of page 10 of the linked report.) It’s unclear from my reading so far how much, if anything, of the content of the drafts is reflected in the final version of the report.
In reading the report, I am reminded of the scene in Brazil, where Archibald “Harry” Tuttle disappears in a blizzard of paper.
We may need a scriptural exegete to get us through.
Nancy:
You said,
I wonder why there is no mention of abortion being an act of torture?
Abortion is even worse than torture. I know I’m going to get killed for saying this, but I’m leaning toward this:
Every abortion is a blood sacrifice to Satan.
Having said that, I realize that many young girls, having absorbed one or more of the feminist philosophical statements about abortion don’t understand exactly what they are doing. But there are others who do; and the worst are the “Catholic” apologists for abortion.
You have a lot of courage, Ms. Danielson, for advancing your views here. God bless you, and you go girl!
Abortion is even worse than torture.
Bob,
This might carry some weight if it came from someone who actually opposed torture.
To claim abortion is torture puts one in the same intellectual camp as those who claim waterboarding is not torture: Words have no meaning other than the ones they are assigned to support the argument of the moment.
Unfortunately, I suspect the pro-torture wing of the “pro-life” movement is not it’s smallest faction. The smallest would probably be those who support the “seamless garment” theory — if they are actually allowed in the “pro-life” movement at all.
For better or for worse, abortion is not the subject of the OPR report or any other documents related to it. It’s not the topic here either.
I am reading through and commenting on the report over at the Innocent Smith Journal:
http://innocentsmithjournal.wordpress.com/
Further thoughts from a couple of the folks ar ‘Balkinization”
David Luban’s Slate article:
http://www.slate.com/id/2245531/pagenum/all/#p2
As I read it, Luban says that Margolis, the DoJ attorney, engaged in ‘tortured’ legal reasoning to avoid endorsing the OPR recommendations that Yoo and Bybee be referred to state certifications boards for breaches of professional conduct.
Jack Balkin (http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/02/yoo-bybee-and-hall-of-mirrors-of-legal.html)
Money quote:
The moral of the story is not that legal argument is hopeless. It is rather that you should be careful that you do not demand the wrong things of it. Law works best when it relies on plausibility and reasonableness; when it requires certainty it often badly misfires, because lawyers are trained to upset certainty where ever they find it. That is what they do for a living. If Yoo and Bybee are guilty of something it is not they made objectively bad legal arguments. It is that they were toadies to power and facilitated torture. Professional responsibility rules are not well designed to deal with this kind of evil.