Paranoia pandemic Conservative media baselessly blame swine flu outbreak on immigrants

Paranoia pandemic Conservative media baselessly blame swine flu outbreak on immigrants
Conservative media personalities have baselessly blamed Mexican immigrants for spreading swine flu across the border, despite the fact that several reports have indicated that U.S. swine flu patients had recently traveled to Mexico.

In Attempt To Placate The Right Wing, Collins and Specter Endorsed Pandemic Flu Funding Cut

In Attempt To Placate The Right Wing, Collins and Specter Endorsed Pandemic Flu Funding Cut
On February 5, Karl Rove took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to argue against President Obama's Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act because, in his view, the spending was not targeted to create or preserve jobs. In particular, Rove complained about the fact that the bill included "$900 million for pandemic flu preparations." He contended that such spending was unnecessary because the health care sector "added jobs last year."

Rep. David Obey (D-WI) included the pandemic preparation funding in the package because he believed "that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse." But Rove was not concerned with the actual substance of the funding.

Rather, as Paul Krugman explained at the time, in attempting to oppose and discredit the economic recovery package, conservatives in the media and Republicans in congress aligned themselves around a strategy that amounted to "snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny." Unfortunately, this "snickering" at funding priorities had very real impacts.

Indeed, like Rove, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was apparently unwilling to be seen as endorsing such "funny" sounding priorities as flu "preparedness" in an economic recovery package. Perhaps in an attempt to prove her fiscal conservative bona fides, Collins repeatedly insisted that Obey's pandemic preparedness funding did not belong in the bill:

COLLINS: There's funding to help improve our preparedness for a pandemic flu. There is funding to help improve cyber security. What does that have to do with an economic stimulus package? [CNN, 1/31/09]

COLLINS: I think everybody in the room is concerned about a pandemic flu. But does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill? No. We should not. [MSNBC, 2/5/09]

After the funding was stripped, another moderate Republican attempting to appear tough on "unnecessary" spending in the recovery package, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), endorsed Collins' crusade against the pandemic preparedness funding on Fox News:

MS. KELLY: Okay. $780 million for pandemic flu preparedness, in or out?

SEN. SPECTER: Out. Very important projects, I took the lead along with Tom Harkin on some massive funding for pandemic flu, but it belongs in our regular appropriations bill.

Now, in light of the current outbreak of swine flu, their attempts to placate the conservative wing of their party by standing up against extremely important funding priorities looks extremely shortsighted. Ironically, those ultra conservatives in office who led the fight against the stimulus, like Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), are seeking government assistance in addressing the swine flu outbreak.

Obama's Real 100 Days Versus The Right's Mythical Version

Obama's Real 100 Days Versus The Right's Mythical Version
Summary: As media figures prepare to recognize President Obama's 100th day in office, Media Matters has reviewed coverage since the inauguration and identified numerous myths and falsehoods about the administration and its policies.

As media figures prepare to recognize President Obama's 100th day in office, and presumably assess the administration's performance thus far, Media Matters for America has reviewed coverage since the inauguration and identified numerous myths and falsehoods about the administration and its policies.

MYTH: Obama has weakened our standing abroad

During and following Obama's trip to Europe for the G-20 summit and to Trinidad and Tobago for the Summit of the Americas, conservative media figures frequently mischaracterized Obama's actions and comments to claim they were signs of weakness, continuing the media trend of portraying Democrats as weak on matters of national security and foreign policy:

* During his trip to Europe, Obama at one point stated: "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." Numerous conservative media figures quickly latched on to these comments, claiming they represented an example of Obama, in Fox News host Sean Hannity's words, "blam[ing] America first" and omitting the next two sentences of Obama's speech, in which he said: "But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what's bad."
---------------------
As Obama proposed a Department of Defense budget for fiscal year 2010 and announced plans to close the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, media figures have put forth falsehoods and other misinformation as purported evidence that Obama's policies would endanger the United States:

* Media figures have advanced the falsehood that Obama's budget reduces overall defense spending. But as CNN.com noted on April 6, "The proposed overall fiscal year 2010 Defense Department budget is almost $534 billion, or nearly $664 billion when including the costs of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The current Pentagon budget totals slightly over $513 billion, or almost $655 billion including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts."

* Further, media outlets have uncritically reported claims that targeted spending reductions within the proposed defense budget, including plans to end funding for the F-22 program and to restructure the Army's Future Combat Systems program, would make America less safe. But during an April 6 press briefing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that "it was not a close call" to end funding for F-22s once four more jets are constructed and further stated that "the military advice that I got was that there is no military requirement for numbers of F-22s beyond the 187" the military will have once those four additional jets are completed. Moreover, in an April 7 conference call posted by Wired magazine's Danger Room blog, Gates stated that the design of Future Combat Systems vehicles had "not really adequately integrated the lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq" and specifically referenced "the vulnerability of [FCS vehicles'] lighter armor to EFPs [explosively formed penetrators] and IEDs [improvised explosive devices]."

**more at link

Media is still covering for Bush and Conservatives

In the aftermath of the release of Bush Department of Justice memos authorizing the CIA to use enhanced interrogation techniques with detainees, conservatives are comparing possible prosecutions of Bush administration officials with, in the words of radio host Mark Steyn, "the sort of thing that happens in banana republics."

Examples include:

* On the April 21 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, radio host Bill Cunningham said of possible prosecutions of Bush administration officials, "Well, we shouldn't criminalize legal advice," later adding, "It makes us look ... like a banana republic, where each succeeding administration looks backwards."

* On the April 21 edition of Fox News' Hannity, Fox News contributor Karl Rove stated: "[W]hat the Obama administration has done in the last several days is very dangerous. What they've essentially said is, if we have policy disagreements with our predecessors, what we're going to do is we're going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses, and what we're gonna do is prosecute systematically the previous administration or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration based on policy differences." Moments later, Rove added, "Now, that might be fine in some little Latin American country that's run by, you know, the latest junta -- it may be the way that they do things in Chicago -- but that's not the way we do things here in America."

* On the April 22 broadcast of his radio show, Sean Hannity stated of Republican responses to the potential prosecutions, "[A]ll I hear is a bunch of mealy-mouthed complaining about how this prosecution threat is unprecedented and we don't need to investigate past administrations like they do in, you know, these Third World, you know, dictatorships, which by the way, is a great point."

In the wake of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) report on detainee abuse, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is calling for the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DoD), to lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution.

“Long before Justice Department lawyers were tasked to justify torture, US psychologists were busy actually perpetrating it,” said Steven Reisner, PhD, Advisor on Psychological Ethics at PHR. “These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law, they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics.”

The SASC report is the latest and most comprehensive account of the Bush Administration’s regime of torture and the central role health professionals played. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), Chair of SASC, is calling for the Department of Justice to review the report and pursue any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, a move that PHR supports.

“The Senate Armed Services Committee confirms what we have long known—health professionals were the agents that spread the virus of torture,” said Nathaniel Raymond, Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture which brings together thousands of health professionals who oppose torture in all circumstances. “Now is the time for those who violated our laws and our values to be held to account.”

PHR is renewing its call to Congress and the White House to immediately create a non-partisan commission to investigate the Bush Administration’s use of torture, with a specific focus on the role that psychologists and medical professionals played in its design, justification, supervision, and use.

“A non-partisan commission is required if the American people are to know the truth about our nation’s descent into torture,” said John Bradshaw, JD, PHR’s Washington Director. “Congress must move quickly and show the world that we are serious about restoring our reputation as a nation that defends human rights and the rule of law.”

PHR urges human rights supporters to sign its online petition calling for the establishment of a commission to investigate US torture and hold health professionals accountable.

Since 2005, PHR has documented the systematic use of psychological and physical torture by US personnel against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase, and elsewhere in its groundbreaking reports, Break Them Down, Leave No Marks, and Broken Laws, Broken Lives. The Senate report confirms the use of abusive and illegal interrogation techniques documented in these PHR reports. These techniques include:

* beating
* sexual and cultural humiliation
* forced nakedness
* exposure to extreme temperatures
* exploitation of phobias
* sleep deprivation
* sensory deprivation and sensory overload
* prolonged isolation
* threats of imminent harm

Physicians for Human Rights has repeatedly called for an end to the use of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) interrogation tactics by US personnel, an end to the use of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and called for a non-partisan commission to investigate the US government’s use of torture. Additionally, PHR has worked to mobilize the health professional community, particularly the professional associations, to adopt strong ethical prohibitions against direct participation in interrogations.

[Editors, please note: PHR has four leading experts on torture—physicians and psychologists who have investigated torture by US forces, studied the physical and psychological consequences, and advocated to hold health professionals accountable.

Torture works sometimes but it's always wrong

Torture works sometimes -- but it's always wrong
So the easy argument against torture, that it is ineffective, is wrong. Torture can work. Nor can one simply dismiss the philosophical "ticking bomb" debate. Even ethicists bitterly opposed to torture acknowledge that if that hypothetical situation -- endlessly depicted in Fox's TV show "24" -- actually existed, there would be a compelling moral and philosophical argument for torture in that instance.

But in the real world, the "ticking bomb" situation never arises. It is never the case that we know we can automatically avert mass slaughter by torturing someone. Reality is not that neat. Guilt and knowledge are not established in advance. Those whom we torture may or may not be planning nefarious deeds. As the British political scientist Henry Shue pointed out in his classic 1978 essay "Torture," "Notice how unlike the circumstances of an actual choice about torture the philosopher's example is. The proposed victim of our torture is not someone we suspect of planting the device: he is the perpetrator. He is not some pitiful psychotic making one last play for attention: He did plant the device. The wiring is not backwards, the mechanism is not jammed: the device will destroy the city if not deactivated." Shue concludes that "The distance between the situations which must be concocted in order to have a plausible case of morally permissible torture and the situations which actually occur is, if anything, further reason why the existing prohibitions against torture should remain and should be strengthened by making torture an international crime."

As Shue suggests, the "ticking bomb" situation should be left in the classroom, for ethicists and philosophers to ponder. It has nothing to do with the real world. And those who invoke it are leading society down a fatal slippery slope, which ends with the wholesale justification of torture. Their arguments, which appeal to and are based in fear and anger, not considered analysis, would return us to the Middle Ages.

In a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, Hayden and former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey asserted that Abu Zubaydah was "coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM [9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad] and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-up plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S." According to the Washington Post, Hayden and Mukasey's account is false: Zubaydah gave most of his useful information before being waterboarded, and the CIA was unable to provide any examples of specific leads acquired by the use of torture.
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The Urban Myth - KLM, Torture and The Library Tower Plot

The Library Tower? Is that the best that Bush's torture apologists can do?

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen’s claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen’s argument) is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush’s counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and “at that point, the other members of the cell” (later arrested) “believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward” [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, “In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast.” These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s characterization of it as a “disrupted plot” was “ludicrous”—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t captured until March 2003.

10 Environmental Disasters to Remember on Earth Day

10 Environmental Disasters to Remember on Earth Day
Ten tragic lessons in our nation's environmental history that should never be forgotten. And one climate destabilization tragedy in the making that needs our urgent help.

1. Extinction: Three Species Per Hour

According to a United Nations report released in 2007, our planet is at risk of losing three species per hour. Ahmed Djoghlaf, the head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, declared: "We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct."

For John J. Audubon, the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, the great American wild pigeon, would have ranked high: "The multitudes of Wild Pigeons in our woods are astonishing," Audubon wrote. "Indeed, after having viewed them so often, and under so many circumstances, I even now feel inclined to pause, and assure myself that what I am going to relate is fact. Yet I have seen it all, and that too in the company of persons who, like myself, were struck with amazement." A victim of hunting and industrial abuses, the last Passenger Pigeon died in an Ohio zoo in 1914.

2. Everything in Its Path: Mountaintop Removal

Imagine a quarter-mile strip of land stretching from Washington, DC until San Francisco: An estimated 800-1000 square miles of mountains and valleys have been eliminated from the American landscape since the launch of mountaintop removal strip mining operations in central Appalachia in 1970. Using explosives and heavy machinery, over 500 mountains in the oldest and one of the most diverse ranges on earth, have been clear cut, blown to bits and then toppled into valleys and streams with their waste since President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, which shamefully recognized mountaintop removal as an approved mining technique.

Mountaintop removal has not only destroyed the natural heritage; it has ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process.

It continues today as one of the most egregious human rights and environmental violations in the nation.

more at link...

Brit Hume ignored evidence that torture by U.S. is "recruiting tool" for terrorists

Brit Hume ignored evidence that torture by U.S. is "recruiting tool" for terrorists
Brit Hume falsely suggested there is no evidence that the United States' use of torture has served as a "recruiting tool" for terrorist groups. In fact, military and FBI interrogators have stated that terrorists have employed the United States' use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques as a recruiting device.

During the April 19 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume falsely suggested there is no evidence that the United States' use of torture has served as a "recruiting tool" for terrorist groups. Responding to the suggestion from NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson that terrorist groups will no longer be able to point to U.S. interrogation techniques to boost recruitment, Hume stated: "Oh, as a recruiting tool? Where's the evidence of that?" In fact, military and FBI interrogators have stated that terrorists have employed the United States' use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques as a recruiting device. For instance, using the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, an Air Force senior interrogator who was in Iraq in 2006 wrote: "I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Alexander further wrote in his November 30, 2008, Washington Post op-ed that "[i]t's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse."

Paranoid Right-Wingers See Obama's Volunteer Service Project as Sinister Plot

Paranoid Right-Wingers See Obama's Volunteer Service Project as Sinister Plot
The far right has seen the fresh face of fascism, and it looks like the civic-minded legislative love child of Sens. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

Most Americans applauded last month when the Senate voted across party lines to expand national-service opportunities. How could you not? The Serve America Act, which passed easily 78-20, invests $5 billion in volunteer corps focused on education, clean energy, health care and veteran issues. In a symbolic but meaningful gesture, the bill also designates Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, thus expanding a post-9/11 concept of patriotism previously limited to dying in Iraq and shopping at JC Penny.

The Service Act will help millions of people learn to read, go to college, stay warm and connect with their fellow citizens. Upon passage, it was immediately hailed by 9/11 survivor organizations, literacy advocates, veterans groups and the AARP.

But not everyone feels warm and fuzzy about the bill whose House version was dubbed the GIVE Act. Among readers of WorldNetDaily and other sites that bridge mainstream conservatism and the lunatic fringe, the biggest question was whether President Barack Obama had shape-shifted from Stalin into Hitler, or had morphed into some grotesque dictatorial hybrid unique to history.

Whatever the genus of the beast, it was agreed in these corners that the Service Act heralded the end of the Republic, the end of Liberty, and the end of Boy Scouts helping little old ladies across the street.

The far right had actually been rehearsing for this moment since July. It was then that Obama told a rally in Colorado Springs, Colo., that he intended to create a volunteer "civilian national security force as powerful, as strong and as well-funded" as the military. For months, rhetoric on the far right concerning Obama's service agenda has ranged from mildly panicked to paranoid delusional.

The patriots at Resistnet.com warn that brown shirts lurked under every red windbreaker worn by AmeriCorps volunteers, whose ranks the Service Act will swell by 175,000. Judi McLoud of Newsmax speaks of "forced labor" and evokes the sign that greeted arrivals at Auschwitz.

Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin agree that the bill is proof we are becoming "slaves" to the federal government. In this the duo echo the Citizen's dubbing of the Service Act as the "National Enslavement Bill." The same Citizen editorial estimates that the Service Act's goal of seven million volunteers roughly equates to the number of East Germans who collaborated with the Stasi.

Not wanting to regurgitate Third Reich and USSR analogies, popular conservative blogger C.J. Graham has taken the globo-government tack and connected the legislation to the United Nations' volunteer development program, and asks, "Will American kids trade baseball caps for mandatory white helmets?"

Michelle Bachmann arrived a little late to the competition, but surprised judges when she executed a flawless triple-backflip allusion to Communist Vietnam, telling a Minnesota radio station last week that the Act would establish "re-education camps for young people" in which they would "get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

It should surprise no one that the right's convulsive fits have been based on misreadings and distortions of the actual bill. While it's true the AmeriCorps Web site has an unfortunate red, black and white color scheme reminiscent of the Nazi flag, the Service Act's fascist overtones stop there.

Most right-wing bleating focuses on early drafts of the House version, H.R. 1388, which included a section instructing Congress to investigate the feasibility of a mandatory national-service requirement. But the clause died in the Senate. The final bill sent to the president merely expands existing programs (some of which were founded under Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush), such as AmeriCorps, SeniorCorps and Learn and Serve America. The Act also increases funding for service-earned college scholarships and programs for youth with disabilities and foster children.

The closest thing in the bill to the fascist dystopia of conservative nightmares is a clause in Section 120 that sets as a condition for some programs the integration of "service learning" into the curricula of secondary schools receiving Service Act funds. This "mandatory service learning" clause is what Bachmann has in mind when she warns of leftist "re-education camps."

And what, exactly, will America's future volunteers be learning in these "camps" before doing the devil's work of retrofitting energy-inefficient homes, providing emotional support to homeless veterans and tutoring poor children in math and English?

According to the bill, educational programs funded under the bill will be designed to: "promote a better understanding of (A) the principles of the Constitution, the heroes of American history (including military heroes), and the meaning of the oath of allegiance; (B) how the nation's government functions; (C) the importance of service in the nation's character."

America's quick recovery from its torture program suggests it wasn't a torture program in the first place

America's quick recovery from its torture program suggests it wasn't a torture program in the first place
Having all-but granted immunity to those who actually carried out the torture because they believed they were merely following legal advice, and with the widespread understanding among experts that it's nearly impossible to criminally prosecute lawyers who were merely offering legal advice, the Catch-22 of nonaccountability is almost complete.

But is President Obama right that America has survived its injuries, having had a while to sleep it off? Can we simply put behind us the obscene picture of violence and cruelty painted by the new OLC memos and the 43-page report by the International Committee of the Red Cross publicized last month by Mark Danner? Was the decision to brutalize our prisoners some form of temporary insanity that is, as Obama's Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair put it yesterday, justifiable if looked at within the "context of these past events" and the "horror of 9/11"? Are we OK about government lawyers and medical personnel and the highest-level government officials collaborating to legalize and implement water-boarding next time the "context" and the "horrors" lead us to lose our collective minds?

What we have learned from the new memos and the ICRC report dwarfs the hoodings and humiliations that took place at Abu Ghraib. Yet when we learned of the prisoner abuse there in 2004, it wasn't just vengeful, lefty, America-hating crackpots who were horrified. We all were. What happened in the intervening five years to make feeling sick to your stomach a partisan issue?

President Obama makes forgiving and forgetting sound awfully appealing. The country is in deep economic trouble. The days and weeks after 9/11 were really, really scary. We need our intelligence officials to be able to keep us safe without having to look over their shoulders. Good people shouldn't be punished for the bad legal advice they received. Bygones. But is the short-term comfort of saying we're over it worth the long-term cost of having become torturers and then cavalierly gotten over it? Because the real risk of getting over it is the possibility that it happens all over again.

Obama Hints At Torture Investigation

Obama Hints At Torture Investigation
Earlier this month, a Spanish court said it would consider opening a criminal case against six Bush administration officials “over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo.” The Spanish attorney general said today that he would not recommend a case, but Judge Baltazar Garzon “will decide whether to press ahead with a criminal investigation.”

Thus far, Obama administration officials have tried to skirt questions on the matter. On Tuesday, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded, “We may have some reaction based on what ultimately happens.” Today, CNN’s Juan Carlos Lopez asked Obama about the investigation ahead of his trip to Mexico. Obama repeated his desire to look forward:

OBAMA: I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there. So I have not had direct conversations with the Spanish government about these issues. My team has been in communications with them.

Obama did, however, say he was aware of a “process” moving forward in the U.S. to “understand” what happened under Bush. Notably, he did not endorse or rule out an investigation or commission:

I think that we are moving a process forward here in the United States to understand what happened, but also to focus on how we make sure that the manner in which we operate currently is consistent with our values and our traditions.

Obama concluded: “And so my sense is, is that this will be worked out over time.”

Michelle Malkin and Newt Gingrich Take Report on Rightwing Violence To Heart

Michelle Malkin and Newt Gingrich Take Report on Rightwing Violence To Heart
Michelle Malkin is completely bent out of shape over the release of a Department of Homeland Security report analyzing the risk of violence in the coming years from radical right wing extremist groups. One of the reports rather obvious conclusions is that the combination of the current economic climate (record unemployment) and the current political climate (Democrats in control the government, black man with Muslim-sounding name as President) is a recipe for increased violence among fringe right wing groups.

Malkin seems to think this report represents some sort of plot by leftists in the Obama administration to target people like herself and her merry band of teabaggers. Implicit in her rant is the notion that there couldn't possibly be any legitimate concerns underlying this report. The reality, though, is that this report was almost surely written by a career analyst at DHS, not a partisan operative, and its conclusions are as obvious as they are non-controversial.

I wonder if Malkin happens to remember what the single deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil was prior to 9/11. That's right, it was the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people (many of them children) and wounded over 800. And it was carried out by right wing extremists. Moreover, in the years directly preceding the bombing, the country had been in recession and the Democrats had taken control of Congress and the White House. Indeed, the entire Clinton presidency was marked by increasing radicalism among fringe right wingers that eventually led to the creation of armed militia groups all over the country.
.....the rest at the link

More here, The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition
Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing "right-wing extremist activity." The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration" and "groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they're on the train to FEMA camps. The Right's leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: "Here we go Again," protesting that "this seems so nakedly ideological." Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it's "Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!" Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS -- as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) -- now considers the Constitution to be a "subversive manifesto." Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin's Hot Air stomps its feet about all "the smears listed in the new DHS warning about 'right-wing extremism.'"

The Corporate Lobbyists Behind the Tea Parties by Jane Hamsher

The Corporate Lobbyists Behind the Tea Parties by Jane Hamsher
Anyone who has watched Fox News of late has seen them talking about the April 15 "tea party" demonstrations, which they take pains to characterize as a spontaneous grassroots uprising against government spending that they are simply "covering."

Neil Cavuto said:

We are are going to be in the middle of these protests because at Fox, we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March, even though, as I pointed out, it turned out to be well shy of a million men.

The Million Man March happened in 1995. Fox News didn't go on the air until 1996.

Why all the effort to distance themselves from the teabaggers? It's obvious they are integrally involved -- Fox has given them millions in free publicity, despite the fact that there's no evidence of "ratings gold" here. Four of their biggest stars will be appearing at the rallies, Fox Nation will be hosting a "virtual tea party," Glenn Beck is holding a $500 a plate fundraiser for them and Fox has been officially promoting the entire affair as the FNC Tax Day Tea Parties:

cavuto-20090409-beck.jpg

Maybe they're afraid that if people knew that those behind the demonstrations were the very same lobbyists and influence peddlers the teabaggers claim to decry, the whole thing would be revealed to be what it is -- a hollow excercise in extremist right-wing hypocrisy.

A report by Lee Fang at Think Progress documents the involvement of corporate lobbyists FreedomWorks in organizing the teabaggers. FreedomWorks is run by ladies' man (and registered lobbyist) Dick Armey, and if they're not "organizing" the Tea parties, it's news to him. From a letter he wrote on March 10:

FreedomWorks has been organizing many of these "tea parties" and we are listing the details on our website IamWithRick.com

If you visit the website, you can rsvp for an event near you, and you can download guidelines to organizing a tea party in your home town if there isn't one being planned already.

On the Freedomworks website, it says: "If you are not able to organize or attend a Taxpayer Tea Party, you can still help the cause by donating or buying a t-shirt.

The "donation" for the Tea Parties page goes to -- you guessed it -- the FreedomWorks Foundation. The "thank you" letter is signed by Matt Kibbe, President & CEO, who cut his teeth working for Lee Atwater. He was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.

FreedomWorks was launched a GOP version of MoveOn. "We believe that hard work beats daddy's money," said Dick Armey at the time. Armey seems to be a bit irony challenged -- Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Krugman notes, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin and other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

This fact that none of this would be possible without the open checkbooks of right wing billionaires and the lobbyists who love them is beyond the grasp of Glenn Reynolds:

These aren't the usual semiprofessional protesters who attend antiwar and pro-union marches. These are people with real jobs; most have never attended a protest march before. They represent a kind of energy that our politics hasn't seen lately, and an influx of new activists.

In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a "single mother" in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

Before any media covering these events accept the idea that this is just a grass roots outpouring of populist sentiment, they ought to take a look behind the curtain -- where Dick Armey is laughing and counting his cash.

© 2009 FireDogLake

Symptoms of the conservative crack-up

Symptoms of the conservative crack-up
President Obama's recent trip to Europe, Turkey and Iraq was a fairly bland freshman outing in foreign affairs, notable for the enormous good will it generated toward the U.S., along with some practical achievements and a few minor errors. It lacked the drama of the untested young Kennedy grappling over Berlin with the wily old Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. On the American Right, however, Obama's trip produced a hysteria not seen since radio listeners mistook Orson Welles's 1938 radio production about an invasion from Mars for the real thing, and crowded the highways, heads wrapped in wet towels, to escape the poisonous miasma of the onrushing aliens. The weeping and trembling of Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol underlined once again that the rightwingers are playground crybabies who kick and scream and faint whenever they do not get their way.

The outrage began when Obama greeted Saudi King Abdullah by leaning into a double-handed handshake. Sean Hannity at Fox Cable News sputtered, "We got this video of Barack Obama bowing to the Saudi King Abdullah. Now look, watch how low he gets. Way below the shoulder." Camille Paglia denounced from her own little papier-mâché Mount Olympus "the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia." The critics missed the point; far from being obsequious, Obama's double-barreled handshake violated the protocol for greeting royals. When singer Kylie Minogue similarly clutched Prince Charles's hand, the London tabloid press noted it as a faux pas that only a celebrity could get away with. But in any case surely George W. Bush's sycophantic cheek-kissing and hand-holding of Abdullah was far more offensive to the political Right? Apparently not. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) called the greeting "shameful." She also darkly warned, "we're still finding out what happened during that G20 summit. I think that there may have been agreements made behind closed doors that we aren't even aware of, that could be ceding American sovereignty."

Most conservatives had little trouble with the part of Obama's address to the Turkish parliament in which he declared that the U.S. is not at war with Islam. Those conservatives only wanted to emphasize that George W. Bush had said the same thing. But there were notable, clownish exceptions.

Radio personality Rush Limbaugh challenged the president, saying that if we are not at war with Islam then the Somali pirates must not be Muslims. Perhaps, the rotund one suggested with his world-famed gift for subtle wit, the Somalis are actually Orthodox Jews. But Obama had explicitly said that the U.S. is at war with some Muslims, to wit, al-Qaida, and had merely exempted the broad religion of Islam as an object of enmity. When the U.S. went to war against the Serbians over Kosovo, it was presumably not involved in a war on Christianity, even though the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox Christians. Moreover, Islamic law forbids piracy, so the Somalis are not acting out of religious motives. The fevered irrationality of such diatribes, on the part of someone recognized as the leading voice of the contemporary Republican Party, points to the party's dire intellectual straits.

Obama's address to the Turkish parliament also managed to enrage Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who blew a chance to prove wrong the adage that he is always wrong about everything. He complained to Brett Baier of Fox News on April 6, "Look . . . We have defended Muslim nations against terrorists. It would have been nice if President Obama could have said a word about the young Americans who went to Afghanistan . . . and . . . Iraq. But could Barack Obama say something that would be mildly unpopular to an audience [to] which he was speaking? No."

Somehow Kristol seems to have missed the part of Obama's speech where he emphasized that Turkey and America were fighting a common enemy, side by side, in Afghanistan. "Finally," said the president, "we share the common goal of denying al-Qaida a safe haven in Pakistan or Afghanistan. . . Turkey has been a true partner. Your troops were among the first in the International Security Assistance Force. You have sacrificed much in this endeavor. Now we must achieve our goals together." In other words, Obama said precisely what Kristol alleged that he did not. Kristol, the mighty Casey of rightwing punditry, struck out yet again, for a lifetime batting average of .000.

That in the same speech Obama praised Turkey's modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and that country's "strong, vibrant, secular democracy," irked unemployed theocrat Karl Rove. Rove complained that Obama had declared that the U.S. is not a Christian nation and had sympathized with Turkey's separation of religion and state. The notorious betrayer of CIA agents opined to Sean Hannity on April 8, "Yes, look, America is a nation built on faith. I mean we can be Christian, we can be Jew, we can be a Mormon, we can be -- you know, any variety of things. . . And to somehow go to Turkey and in order to sort of identify yourself with this Turkish secular movement that began in the early part of the previous century and try and somehow make Turkey and America equivalent is to deny each nation's reality." Like Kristol, Rove apparently didn't bother to read or listen to Obama's remarks in full before criticizing them. In the speech, Obama urged greater acceptance of religion in public life in Turkey and the reopening of the Eastern Orthodox Halki seminary.

Rove also forgot to coordinate with neoconservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who told Baier on the 6th, "I think he did all right in his speech to the parliament in Turkey. I thought there was an overemphasis in the second half on how it's a Muslim nation. But in the first half . . he stressed the fact that it's a secular democracy. And I thought that was a good approach." This clash of interpretation showed up the fissures in what is left of conservatism, between the proponents of Christian Reconstructionism (religious rule) and the generally secular neoconservatives. What it does not do is damage Barack Obama, who obviously managed to navigate the minefields of secularism versus religion, both in the Turkish and the American context.

Aside from complaining that their pleas for Christian state-making have been ignored by the president, conservatives were reduced to alleging that Obama was just doing and saying all the same things as W. had, but was getting more credit for it. Some even seemed to hope for redemption through apocalypse, since they kept coming up empty in their histrionics. Bill O'Reilly said on April 6, "there's no question . . . that the Islamic world likes Barack Obama better than President Bush. Okay, fine. . . But before it's all over, they may hate Barack Obama . . . We get hit again, Barack Obama's going to have to wipe out a few countries. Okay?" Of course, it is not actually true that replying to a strike by a small asymmetrical terrorist organization would require wiping out whole countries, nor even that it would require enmity between the U.S. and the broad Muslim world. And if the possibility of such an attack is all Republicans have left to cling to, it is a sad state of affairs.

More hot air was vented on the Right in making elementary errors of logic, and more verbiage spent condemning the bow to King Abdullah, than in discussing any of the meatier issues broached during Obama's trip abroad. The ever greater concentration on minutiae, and the investment of more and more passion in matters of no moment, signals the bankruptcy of conservative philosophy. Its proponents have stared transfixed as the ruthless implementation of their most cherished principles produced a series of economic, social and foreign policy calamities from which it may take decades to recover. The spectacle of their spokesmen misunderstanding English, hyperventilating over dark suspicions of surrender of sovereignty or reeducation camps, condemning a Muslim country like Turkey for setting a bad example by being insufficiently theocratic, and engaging in mock auto-da-fes to illustrate their inner rage, raises the question of whether the Republican Party is having a collective nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, Obama and the rest of the country have begun seeing "glimmers of hope."

-- By Juan Cole

Reprinted for educational purposes.

Fox News Sponsors and Promotes Crude Populist Tea Craziness, Then Denies it

Fox News Sponsors and Promotes Crude Populist Tea Craziness, Then Denies it
To quote Gregg Levine, "What Part of “FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES” Don’t You Understand?" But I guess we're going to have to dive once more in to the obvious.

Glenn Beck:

I'm going to also -- and we'll announce this later today -- I'm going to do a fundraiser for them. I'm going to try to squeeze in a speech for lunch. So you can come and you can have lunch with me. And I think -- I don't know any of the details, but I've heard it's like $500 a plate or something like that.

Reynolds says "if heavily-promoted coverage is the same as 'financing' then the MSM 'financed' Obama’s campaign." Did I miss those $500 a plate fundraisers that Keith Olbermann and Brian Williams were throwing for Obama and promoting on air? Somebody shoot me a link.

Media Matters:

TaxDayTeaParty.com lists Fox News contributors Michelle Malkin and Tammy Bruce as "Tea Party Sponsors." The sponsors section also lists American Solutions for Winning the Future, whose general chairman is Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich. Gingrich filmed a video "invitation" to attend the April 15 protests.

And of course there's Hannity:

Hannity has frequently promoted the April 15 protests by providing on-air information about the protests and encouraging viewers to "join us." Hannity has also encouraged viewers to "send us your 'Tax Day Tea Party' videos," which he said may be posted online or on-air.

Republican Tax Plan is Regressive

Rep. Paul Ryan: GOP Tax Plan Is ‘Progressive’
If by “progressive,” Ryan means “overwhelmingly favoring the rich while hurting the middle class,” then yes, the GOP plan is indeed “progressive.” As the Citizens for Tax Justice found, the GOP plan would slash taxes for the richest Americans while poorer families would have to pay more:

–Over a third of taxpayers, mostly low- and middle-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the House Democratic plan in 2010.

– The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $75,000 less, on average, in income taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the Democratic plan in 2010.

– The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan…would cost over $225 billion more than the Democratic plan’s income tax policies in 2010 alone.

Indeed, the GOP’s “progressive” plan would give the average CEO a $1.5 million tax break. What’s more, the poorest Americans would be forced to pay more taxes under the GOP plan.

Republicans in Desperation Over Obama Releasing More Bush Torture Memos

Republicans in Desperation Over Obama Releasing More Bush Torture Memos
By Scott Horton, The Daily Beast
Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

Barack Obama entered Washington with a promise of transparency. One of his first acts was a presidential directive requiring that the Freedom of Information Act, a near dead letter during the Bush years, was to be enforced according to its terms. He specifically criticized the Bush administration’s practice of preparing secret memos that determined legal policy and promised to review and publish them after taking office.

But in the past week, questions about Obama’s commitment to transparency have mounted. On April 2, the Justice Department was expected to make public a set of four memoranda prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, long sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations in a pending FOIA litigation. The memos, authored by then-administration officials and now University of California law professor John Yoo, federal appellate judge Jay Bybee and former Justice Department lawyer Stephen Bradbury, apparently grant authority for the brutal treatment of prisoners, including waterboarding, isolated confinement in coffin-like containers, and “head smacking.” The stakes over release of the papers are increasingly high. Yoo and Bybee are both targets of a criminal investigation in a Spanish court probing the torture of five Spanish citizens formerly held in Guantánamo; also named in the Spanish case are former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and three other Bush lawyers. Legal observers in Spain consider the Bush administration lawyers at serious risk of indictment, and the memos, once released, could be entered as evidence in connection with their prosecution. Unlike the torture memos that are already public, these memos directly approve specific torture techniques and therefore present a far graver problem for their authors.

The release of the memos that the Senate Republicans want to suppress was cleared by Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Greg Craig, and then was stopped when “all hell broke loose” inside the Obama administration, according to an article by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff. Newsweek attributes internal opposition to disclosure of the Bush-era torture memos to White House counterterrorism adviser and former CIA official John O. Brennan, who has raised arguments that exposure of the memoranda would run afoul of policies protecting the secrecy of agency techniques and has also argued that the memos would embarrass nations like Morocco, Jordan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Egypt, which have cooperated closely with the CIA in its extraordinary renditions program. Few informed independent observers, however, find much to credit in the Brennan objections because the techniques are now well-known, as is the role of the cooperating foreign intelligence services—any references to which would in any event likely be redacted before the memoranda are released. Moreover, the argument that the confidence of those engaged in torture—serious criminal conduct under international and domestic law—should be kept because they would be “embarrassed” if it were to come out borders on comic.

The Justice Department source confirms to me that Brennan has consistently opposed making public the torture memos—and any other details about the operations of the extraordinary renditions program—but this source suggests that concern about the G.O.P.’s roadblock in the confirmation process is the principle reason that the memos were not released. Republican senators have expressed strong reservations about their promised exposure, expressing alarm that a critique of the memos by Justice’s ethics office (Office of Professional Responsibility) will also be released. “There was no ‘direct’ threat,” said the source, “but the message was communicated clearly—if the OLC and OPR memoranda are released to the public, there will be war.” This is understood as a threat to filibuster the nominations of Johnsen and Koh. Not only are they among the most prominent academic critics of the torture memoranda, but are also viewed as the strongest advocates for release of the torture memos on Obama’s legal policy team.

A Republican Senate staffer further has confirmed to me that the Johnsen nomination was discussed at the last G.O.P. caucus meeting. Not a single Republican indicated an intention to vote for Dawn Johnsen, while Senator John Cornyn of Texas was described as “gunning for her,” specifically noting publication of the torture memos.

No decision was taken at that Republican caucus meeting whether to filibuster or not, though Cornyn was generally believed to support filibustering Johnsen and potentially other nominees. Johnsen has met recently with moderate Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both of whom are being lobbied heavily by colleagues and religious right groups to oppose her nomination.

Both Koh and Johnsen are targets of sustained attacks coming from right-wing lobbying groups. The Daily Beast previously reviewed the attacks on Johnsen, while Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has catalogued the recent attacks on Koh. Former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson recently endorsed the Koh nomination, calling the Yale dean “a man of great integrity.” But connecting the Obama nominations to the Bush torture memos escalates the conflict toward a thermonuclear level.

Glenn Beck and the rise of Fox News' militia media

Glenn Beck and the rise of Fox News' militia media
After a night of drinking, followed by an early-morning argument with his mother, with whom he shared a Pittsburgh apartment, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski put on a bulletproof vest, grabbed his guns, including an AK-47 rifle, and waited for the police to respond to the domestic disturbance call his mother had placed. When two officers arrived at the front door, Poplawski shot them both in the head, and then killed another officer who tried to rescue his colleagues.

In the wake of the bloodbath, we learned that Poplawski was something of a conspiracy nut who embraced dark, radical rhetoric about America. He was convinced the government wanted to take away his guns, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Specifically, Poplawski, as one friend described it, feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon." (FYI, there is no Obama gun ban in the works.) The same friend said the shooter feared America was "going to see the end of our times."

We learned that Poplawski hosted his own (failed) Internet radio show and that he visited the website of 9-11 conspiracy backer Alex Jones, who has been hyping the threat of a totalitarian world government for years. More recently, Jones has been warning listeners like Poplawski about The Obama Deception (that's the name of Jones' new documentary DVD) and how President Obama is bound to destroy America.

Who's Alex Jones? Even according to some conservative bloggers, the anti-government, anti-Obama talker is a "freak" who's popular with "the tin foil hat crowd." Like with Poplawski, apparently.

Jones might be a "freak," but he has recently been embraced -- and mainstreamed -- by Fox News, as part of the news channel's unprecedented drive to push radical propaganda warning of America's democratic demise under the new president.

During a March 18 webcast of FoxNews.com's proudly paranoid "Freedom Watch," Andrew Napolitano introduced a segment about "what the government has done to take your liberty and your property away." And with that, he welcomed onto the show "the one, the only, the great Alex Jones," who began ranting about "exposing" the New World Order and the threat posed by an emerging "global government."

"I appreciate what you're exposing," Napolitano assured his guest.

Waving around a copy of his Obama Deception, Jones warned Fox News webcast viewers about Obama's "agenda" for "gun confiscation" and the new president's plan to "bring in total police-state control" to America.

Jones also noted with excitement that Fox News' Glenn Beck had recently begun warning about the looming New World Order on his show, just like Jones had for years. "It is great!" cheered the conspiracist. (Like Jones, Beck recently warned viewers that "the Second Amendment is under fire.") Concluding the interview, Fox News' Napolitano announced "it's absolutely been a pleasure" listening to Jones' insights.

We don't know if Poplawski tuned in to watch Jones' star turn for Fox News last month. But is there any doubt that Fox News is playing an increasingly erratic and dangerous game by embracing the type of paranoid insurrection rhetoric that people like Poplawski are now acting on? By stoking dark fears about the ominous ruins that await an Obama America, by ratcheting up irresponsible back-to-the-wall scenarios, Fox News has waded into a territory that no other news organization has ever dared to exploit.

Will Geithner Fire Corporate America

Will Geithner Fire Corporate America
Tim Geithner said on Sunday's Face the Nation that the Treasury might fire the heads of big banks that depend on financing from the federal government, just as it summarily deposed Rick Wagoner, the former CEO of General Motors -- and before Wagoner, the heads of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. "Where that requires a change in management and the board, then we will do that," said Geithner.

I suppose it's comforting to know our government stands ready to fire corporate executives and directors whenever taxpayer money is on the line. But I suspect Geithner's new tough line is mostly designed to reassure a public that's lost all faith in the wisdom of bailing out Wall Street.

For the sake of the argument, assume he's sincere. What criterion will an axe-wielding Geithner be using? If precipitous loss of shareholder value is enough to "require a change in management and the board," presumably every CEO and director of every big bank now being bailed out should be fired, starting with Ken Lewis of Bank of America.

If the criterion is diversion of taxpayer money to uses other than Congress intended when it first authorized the $700 billion bailout, the list of soon-to-be-fired CEOs is a bit shorter but still large. Surely it includes all the bailed-out banks that continue to fly their executives around the world in company jets, award them extraordinary pay packages, and run junkets at fancy resorts. Citigroup's Vikram Pandit (who collected $38.2 million for his taxpayer-subsidized services in 2008) comes immediately to mind.

Why stop there? Perhaps Geithner intends to fire executives and directors of any company that's dependent on taxpayers and is now losing money. Just think of the corporate house-cleaning this will mean. Hundreds of agribusiness executives are now at risk as are scores of military contractors. Hell, the whole pharmaceutical industry depends on taxpayer support (research subsidized by National Institutes of Health, sales subsidized through Medicare and Medicaid), and it's doing badly, so their executives and directors will be gone soon, too.

All told, about one out of every five large American companies depends on government contracts, and a majority of these firms are losing money right now.

Are Republicans Blackmailing Obama

Are Republicans Blackmailing Obama
If the president releases the Bush torture memos, Republicans are promising to “go nuclear” and filibuster his legal appointments. Scott Horton reports on a serious threat to Obama’s transparency.

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

Not a single Republican indicated an intention to vote for Dawn Johnsen, while Senator John Cornyn of Texas was described as “gunning for her,” specifically noting publication of the torture memos.

Barack Obama entered Washington with a promise of transparency. One of his first acts was a presidential directive requiring that the Freedom of Information Act, a near dead letter during the Bush years, was to be enforced according to its terms. He specifically criticized the Bush administration’s practice of preparing secret memos that determined legal policy and promised to review and publish them after taking office.

But in the past week, questions about Obama’s commitment to transparency have mounted. On April 2, the Justice Department was expected to make public a set of four memoranda prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, long sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations in a pending FOIA litigation. The memos, authored by then-administration officials and now University of California law professor John Yoo, federal appellate judge Jay Bybee and former Justice Department lawyer Stephen Bradbury, apparently grant authority for the brutal treatment of prisoners, including waterboarding, isolated confinement in coffin-like containers, and “head smacking.” The stakes over release of the papers are increasingly high. Yoo and Bybee are both targets of a criminal investigation in a Spanish court probing the torture of five Spanish citizens formerly held in Guantánamo; also named in the Spanish case are former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and three other Bush lawyers. Legal observers in Spain consider the Bush administration lawyers at serious risk of indictment, and the memos, once released, could be entered as evidence in connection with their prosecution. Unlike the torture memos that are already public, these memos directly approve specific torture techniques and therefore present a far graver problem for their authors.

The release of the memos that the Senate Republicans want to suppress was cleared by Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Greg Craig, and then was stopped when “all hell broke loose” inside the Obama administration, according to an article by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff. Newsweek attributes internal opposition to disclosure of the Bush-era torture memos to White House counterterrorism adviser and former CIA official John O. Brennan, who has raised arguments that exposure of the memoranda would run afoul of policies protecting the secrecy of agency techniques and has also argued that the memos would embarrass nations like Morocco, Jordan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Egypt, which have cooperated closely with the CIA in its extraordinary renditions program. Few informed independent observers, however, find much to credit in the Brennan objections because the techniques are now well-known, as is the role of the cooperating foreign intelligence services—any references to which would in any event likely be redacted before the memoranda are released. Moreover, the argument that the confidence of those engaged in torture—serious criminal conduct under international and domestic law—should be kept because they would be “embarrassed” if it were to come out borders on comic.

The Justice Department source confirms to me that Brennan has consistently opposed making public the torture memos—and any other details about the operations of the extraordinary renditions program—but this source suggests that concern about the G.O.P.’s roadblock in the confirmation process is the principle reason that the memos were not released. Republican senators have expressed strong reservations about their promised exposure, expressing alarm that a critique of the memos by Justice’s ethics office (Office of Professional Responsibility) will also be released. “There was no ‘direct’ threat,” said the source, “but the message was communicated clearly—if the OLC and OPR memoranda are released to the public, there will be war.” This is understood as a threat to filibuster the nominations of Johnsen and Koh. Not only are they among the most prominent academic critics of the torture memoranda, but are also viewed as the strongest advocates for release of the torture memos on Obama’s legal policy team.

A Republican Senate staffer further has confirmed to me that the Johnsen nomination was discussed at the last G.O.P. caucus meeting. Not a single Republican indicated an intention to vote for Dawn Johnsen, while Senator John Cornyn of Texas was described as “gunning for her,” specifically noting publication of the torture memos.

No decision was taken at that Republican caucus meeting whether to filibuster or not, though Cornyn was generally believed to support filibustering Johnsen and potentially other nominees. Johnsen has met recently with moderate Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both of whom are being lobbied heavily by colleagues and religious right groups to oppose her nomination.

Both Koh and Johnsen are targets of sustained attacks coming from right-wing lobbying groups. The Daily Beast previously reviewed the attacks on Johnsen, while Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has catalogued the recent attacks on Koh. Former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson recently endorsed the Koh nomination, calling the Yale dean “a man of great integrity.” But connecting the Obama nominations to the Bush torture memos escalates the conflict toward a thermonuclear level.

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.