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For it to be in fail, Bernanke would have had to have done something horrifyingly embarrassing, like accidentally light himself on fire while trying to answer the question.

I don't think mere pandering and spin quite qualifies it for lies. We usually reserve lies for blatant falsehoods (Palin was against the bridge to nowhere, CO2 is harmless because it's natural, John Yoo stood up for human rights, etc.).

I don't know that Bernanke was all that mad about this, but I find it plausible that he came to the conclusion that it was necessary, and even plausible that this is contrary to his ideological leanings.

I'm glad that he admitted that it's our responsibility to take care of the poor. Let's take a look at what the effect of people coming together in a social contract to take care of them was:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/07/poverty-will-always-be-with-us-until-we-do-something-about-it.php

(quoted for the graph, though Yglesias is responding to another ideological yarn-spinner in Friedman's vein)

Curious how when the welfare state got put in place, the poverty rate went down...until we had a President who believed, as Friedman did, that it's better to let poverty be. That way the rich have their liberty from incentives to make the poor productive, and the poor had the liberty to be kept by them as wage slaves or just die and reduce the "surplus" population.

In fact, you can see that the very year in which Friedman is giving this speech, 1978, poverty had literally been halved in the wake of the Great Society, only to rise again when his kind of thinking came back into vogue thanks to Reagan's apocryphal Welfare Queens.

Personally, I love the way he waves away government's responsibility to the poor by comparing it to the building's responsibility. I suppose government has no responsibility to repay its debts (as buildings do not), to respect the boundaries of property (as buildings do not), or the responsibility to only shoot when absolutely necessary (as buildings do not).

Turns out, government has no need to be responsible at all. I would guess this guy also taught John Yoo in law school.

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>> ^mkknyr:
who were they clapping for?


Torture.

The amount of spin in 2:53 of video is astounding.

"Hurting America First" - Didn't it hurt America to start using torture in the first place? One of the key states to fight against the policies of Nazi Germany, the Stasi, the KGB and Khmer Rouge. One of the main founders and signatories of the Geneva convention?

"Showing military men and women in bad light" - Torture policy was top down not bottom up, we are to hold those who put these policies forward not those made to carry them out as orders. John Yoo, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney. It was not a few bad apples.

"Voyeurism" - Was it voyeurism to cite 9/11 in almost every campaign speech during the elections? Was it voyeurism to acknowledge the victims of the holocaust? More diversionary spin. Such steps would assure these events will never occur again. One must see the mistakes of before to learn from them lest we repeat this again.

"Acts that have ended" - The acts were supposed to have ended with the Abu Ghraib scandal, but they didn't. It was a policy that was implemented and carried out before and after the scandal broke and would have kept going had the information not been leaked out.

"Hurting our National defense/Reason for suicide bombers" - The reasons for suicide bombing and attacks on America are plentiful for those who choose to do so. The way the statement is framed doesn't acknowledge that actually carrying out torture has been a great boon to creating more terrorists, or that its continual oppression and denial only furthers the case that America has a hypocritical stance. "It's bad when others do it, but its okay for us to do it."

"Replayed in the Arab world" - This is a lie. I live in the Arab world, we have enough of our own issues, the accusations of torture coming out were not surprising as the Arabs already know that Americans do not really care about the plight of the Arab people given the long history of political meddling in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Iran.

"Hurt the military" - Again an example of attacking the grunts instead of attacking those who created and put this forward these policies.

"Reveal intelligence gather techniques" - There has not been a single document published by the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the US military nor any other intelligence gathering component of the US government that has showed unequivocally that torture had prevented attacks and or has made America safer in anyway. What it has do is cost America the moral standing, the support of the international world and created strained relations across the world providing fuel for terrorist organizations to attack the US more then ever.

^ >> ^volumptuous:
It was called the "Torture Memo" authored by John Yoo.
Basically, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rummy and the rest of the gang literally signed off on allowing torture, and stating that the 4th amendment doesn't apply for them.


I understand that part, but that isn't what this guy is talking about. He wasn't describing interrogations (which is what the memo was aimed at), he was talking about the general treatment of detainees.

I doubt the medic was ordered to punch any detainee that refused to eat... he was probably just pissed off and figured he wouldn't get in trouble.

I hate that torture was prescribed as an interrogation technique and I wouldn't disagree with an investigation into the policies that the administration put into place, but I also can't blame Bush for every individual decision that each soldier there made.

>> ^Psychologic:
If the Bush administration is to be condemned for anything then it should be direct policy decisions, not the actions of individual soldiers. If they ordered torture then that is perhaps something to pursue in court.
However, if the soldiers down there were being abusive on their own (ie- not because of orders) then they should be the ones facing responsibility for it (and perhaps there direct supervisors). It's difficult to tell who was allowing what without being directly involved in the situation.



It was called the "Torture Memo" authored by John Yoo.

Basically, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rummy and the rest of the gang literally signed off on allowing torture, and stating that the 4th amendment doesn't apply for them.

http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/yoo_army_torture_memo.pdf


It's right there. It wasn't just individual soldiers. It was a policy that came from the top down. During Nuremberg, the Int'l courts decided that prosecuting every single German soldier who went against international conventions on treating detainess would just be ludicrous. That's why they only went after commanders.

Non-uniformed forces fall under Geneva Conventions common article 3, so the Geneva conventions apply to terrorist forces.
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=3661&from_page=./index.cfm

The Bush administration has agreed to apply the Geneva Conventions to all terrorism suspects in U.S. custody, bowing to the Supreme Court's recent rejection of policies that have imprisoned hundreds for years without trials.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/11/AR2006071100094.html

The interrogation and torture inflicted on these combatants using your definition that was co-authored by John Yoo and David Addington have only brought international infamy for the US and further threatened US national security.

This not to be taken as defense for those who choose to commit acts of terror but rather to uphold a better standard in the Western World.

When fighting monsters its important not to become monsters ourselves.

imstellar28,

It's not big government that results in subversive use of power, its the politicians who possess that power and what stance they take, it's the people who claim that for America to be free it needs to spy on it's citizens, that it can rewrite laws and impose torture.

Its not a symptom of big government, its a symptom of misguided and failed leadership. The day America imposed torture, spying and elimination of heabus corpus was when the president was a fiscal social conservative who ran on a platform of reducing government, yet over the next several years created new agencies, increased military and defense spending, and subcontracted government agencies to private firms (Blackwater and AEGIS), and increased the national debt.

Did his policies fulfill the single objective he put forward? The elimination of terrorism? Or even the capture of Osama Bin Laden.

I understand Bush came into a difficult times and situations, but your claim that his actions were because of big government is a misreading of history, it gives no voice to the actions of Dick Cheney and David Addington (John Yoo) who together had the view that the actions of the President are infalliable and should not be criticized, that documents regarding policy are secret, that all communications should be monitored, that torture is okay and the other 750 signing statements articulated by them that bypass the democratic process of the US.

Watch Addington claim that the Vice president's office is not part of the executive branch.



David Addington on torture:



There is thousands of hours of testimony, documentary, news and papers and articles that outline the failure of leadership and subversion of America's legal stance by a small cadre of hawks in the Bush Administration.

It was not simply because it was BIG government. It was a implementation of a policy views held by those in power.


PS: Al qaeda may watch CSPAN.



===============

Your basic criticism is that a socialist state equals a imperialistic state based on government expansion over the last 70 years of American history.

Some socialistic states (to various degrees) in the world currently include: Japan, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany and many others.

They are not imperialistic and have high social and economic indicators. Japan happens to be one of the largest self contained economies in the world. All the countries possess a system of subsidized health care provided by the state.

Are they invading nations? Taking out the rights of their citizens? Are they failures socially and economically because they have socialistic principles like universal healthcare? Welfare?

Interesting. Sounds a little bit like John Yoo.

"The President can say fuck you to whoever he wants, and there ain't shit you can do about it."

At least, if you've cowed congress into a rubber-stamp assembly.

The usage of torture is a strategic failure in the process of information gathering from the enemy.

First of all it assumes that the terrorist organization is a top down informational entity with operational strategy going down to all it's entities. Thus if we capture one combatant in Iraq, we might derive actionable intelligence. That is of course wrong, terrorist organizations operate in cell structures, one cell does not know the existence of a sister cell, this is the viewpoint of the intelligence community post 9/11. This is problematic because it allows the enemy to remain always at large in the political process in Washington, that is why the enemy definition keeps changing, its Osama first, then insurgent forces, then the very broad term of 'Islamic extremism'.

The cell structure thus allows for unrelated parties to assume the guise of representing a greater whole, separate actors can suddenly be part of a larger nebulous whole even though in reality they are not related. This is how Bush in his simplistic assessment of the threats can say there is terrorism from Morocco to Indonesia. In Iraq the US labeled Zarqwi as being an operative member of al-Qaeda, this is beneficial for both sides Osama can claim larger operation status while the US can state that its fighting al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. However Zarqwi for example did not possess intelligence on operations in Afghanistan, they were not related, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Funny how Osama Bin Laden was called the mastermind of 9/11, in mere hours after the event, what happened to such intelligence gathering clairvoyance?

Looking back at the myriad of enemy combatants captured so far in both Iraq and Afghanistan - we have yet to see any proof of progress with regards to any actionable intelligence being gathered from those sources, because the actors caught were obliviously small fish.

Second it drives away actual informants who would want to switch sides, by creating the 'US against Them' cornerstone the Bush Administration has actually rallied support for terrorist organizations. Operatives who would gain from switching sides would not want to, knowing that they face torture and long term imprisonment. This is how after all these years of war, and "Mission Accomplished", turning the corner, defeating the terrorists: The Taliban control half of Afghanistan and al-Qaeda is reconstituted its strength in Pakistan and Southern Afghanistan.

Third it assumes from the operative viewpoint that ALL enemy combatants would provide under duress reliable actionable intelligence without actually knowing what that could be i.e. we are torturing to find out something we don't even know might exist, the Rumsfled's known unknowns and unknown unknowns - that is of course a logically fallacy. How can you derive intelligence when you don't know what you are trying to get at? This of course translates into increased torture methods against detainees, eventually breaking them to a point where they will tell you anything to get you to stop. Khalid Sheik Mohammad was tortured to the point that he confessed to a whole swell of terrorist plots and acts, intelligence operatives rolled their eyes because it was simply inconceivable that it could be true as it would mean he was in 5 or 6 places at once, there was no concrete evidence to prove it, he was simply saying things to make them stop.

This is dangerous, as its a self feeding cycle, if you torture enemy combatants without a contextual means to an end you would receive all kinds of rubbish, that feeds into paranoia that it's actually real and you then torture even more. Actionable intelligence has a finite time frame, usually less then 6 months, after which the operative in custody is tapped out, the organization would nullify any plans and change their tactics and plans.

Remember that all the so called reliable actionable intelligence for Iraq possessing and developing WMDs came from a single informant. Look where that lead to.

Fourth it loses the sight of how to attain trust, operatives from past conflicts always state that to derive information you must make the actor rely on you, trust in you and eventually befriend you. Interrogators of Nazi war criminals often state how they derived more information in a simple chess game then through torture methods.

Torture is a annihilation of the human spirit, it drives people insane through sleep deprivation, humiliation and water boarding. It nullifies the human psyche into delirium, psychosis and eventual madness, yet we are led to believe that somehow that would prevent another 9/11.

Finally all warfare is tactics, for all of America's military might they were close to defeat by an insurgence that has lapsed back into guerrilla warfare, the tactics shifted. The application of torture would mean the tactics will shift once more.

The question remains - "Is this strategy benefiting our objectives?"

The US administration would of course say "Yes", why wouldn't they. The appointment of Mukasey as Attorney General for the first time showed how abortions and other issues of the previous Justice Department appointments became insignificant, the question was only "Do you believe water boarding is torture?" - It was asked not because it was important as AG but because there are people in the administration who know they have gone too far and are vehemently trying to cover their asses from prosecution. The scandal of Abu Graibh was called as being "a few bad apples", that is of course not true, operational orders came from the top down. The definition of torture rewritten by John Yoo and David Addington. Torture was stricken through Congress, yet it continues through the special signing letters of the President. The public is basically being lied to.

Now American politicians are too scared to stand against it because they lack a backbone and are more worried they might be wrong, fear penetrates the Democratic party while the Republican party is lost after a presidency of fiscal irresponsibility, looming recession, and the 2 never ending wars.

Its not about constitutional rights for terrorists, its about constitutional rights for US Citizens that is under threat. You could find yourself supporting means to an end that will lead into police state.

In the fall of 2003, Jack L. Goldsmith was widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament. A 40-year-old law professor at the University of Chicago, Goldsmith had established himself, with his friend and fellow law professor John Yoo, as a leading proponent of the view that international standards of human rights should not apply in cases before U.S. courts. In recognition of their prominence, Goldsmith and Yoo had been anointed the “New Sovereigntists” by the journal Foreign Affairs. [ ... ]

Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants. [ ... ]

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions — both drafted by Goldsmith’s friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office — about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations. Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law — although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted,” he told me recently. [ ... ]

After leaving the Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith was uncertain about what, if anything, he should say publicly about his resignation. His silence came to be widely misinterpreted. After leaving the Justice Department, he accepted a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School, where he currently teaches. During his first weeks in Cambridge, in the fall of 2004, some of his colleagues denounced him for what they mistakenly assumed was his role in drafting the torture memos. One colleague, Elizabeth Bartholet, complained to a Boston Globe reporter that the faculty was remiss in not investigating any role Goldsmith might have played in “justifying torture.” “It was a nightmare,” Goldsmith told me. “I didn’t say anything to defend myself, except that I didn’t do the things I was accused of.”

...

Read the full article at NYT Magazine.