Lieberman and the Torture Thing

A couple of weeks ago my family made a modest contribution to Ned Lamont's campaign (which I suppose makes us members of the "the demonizing, hating, virulent, character-assassinating left of the Democratic Party." (Also, I can't be the only one who thinks that quote suffers from its failure to include the phrase "fever swamp" - stop coasting, Lieberman supporters! There are plenty of other words relating to disease and criminality that can be used to describe the Democratic base!)) The donation was the fulfillment of a promise that I made back in 2005, shortly before the final vote to confirm Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. The hearings had made it abundantly clear that a vote for Gonzales was a vote in support of the policies that had led to Abu Ghraib. While Gonzales offered the requisite mealy-mouthed condemnations of "torture" in his testimony before the Senate, he also refused to specify what activities he was actually repudiating (Waterboarding? Naked human pyramids? Beatings that stop short of causing pain equivalent to organ failure?); to take a stand on whether the president may order the torture of prisoners or to clarify his views on the infamous "Bybee memo". Gonzales even declined to comment on whether the activities photographed at Abu Ghraib constituted criminal conduct. In any decent government, this wink-wink nudge-nudge hedging on the subject of torture would be absolutely unacceptable. And for the most part, Senate Democrats managed to stand together to make what should have been the utterly uncontroversial point that torture is very wrong, and that anyone who would facilitate or excuse it has no business serving as the nation's chief law-enforcement officer. Lieberman, however, took a rather different stance:

Again, Justice Gonzales said repeatedly at the hearing that he would not countenance torture, repeated what is the fact that the Administration made very clear, presumably with his Counsel, that the rules of the Geneva Convention applied to the Iraq war because Iraq was a duly formed government, a sovereign state, and a party to the Geneva Convention. And what happened at Abu Ghraib was embarrassing, was hurtful to our cause in the world, and was offensive. It is being dealt with within the military justice system, as we have seen.


Questions are raised about the connection, I suppose, between the Bybee memo, whatever involvement Judge Gonzales had in it, and the events at Abu Ghraib. There is simply no evidence to make a connection certainly between Judge Gonzales and what happened at Abu Ghraib. And any of the independent reviews that have gone on, most particularly Mr. Schlesinger's independent review, said that there was no connection between so-called higher-ups and what happened at Abu Ghraib.


So, in the end, I have to ask myself, because of a memo written by somebody else -- Mr. Bybee at the Office of Legal Counsel -- which has in it material that I find, as I’ve said, profoundly offensive, that judge Gonzales received and did something with, am I prepared to vote to deny him confirmation as Attorney General of the United States? And to me, personally, that would be an unjust result. And that is why I will vote to confirm. I understand the frustration of members of the Judiciary Committee about some of the answers -- many of the answers that Judge Gonzales gave at the hearing. Some of them were evasive, some were legalistic, but that wouldn't be the first time that a witness before a committee had proceeded in that particular way, particularly one who has privileges that he occupies and lives under as Counsel to the President of the United States.

On February 3 of last year (before the above speech was delivered but admittedly, too late to have even the slightest impact), I wrote to Lieberman urging him to reconsider his reported intention to vote for Gonzales. Since I'm not one of his constituents, I used the only point of leverage that an out-of-state Democratic nobody could be expected to have, and said that if Lieberman supported Gonzales then I would support any primary challenge that Lieberman might eventually face. (Unsurprisingly, I never received a response to this email.)

So, while there are plenty of good reasons to oppose Lieberman - his votes for cloture on the bankruptcy bill and on the Alito nomination, his Wall St. Journal editorial equating criticism of the president with treason, his continuing, inured-to-the-evidence support for the Bush administration's policy in Iraq - the most pressing issue for me is Lieberman's willingness to condone torture. Torture is not a complicated moral question about which reasonable people can reach different conclusions, although I've been horrified by the increasingly common tendency to portray it as such. Prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment is one of the basic tenets of American justice, a bright line that is supposed to differentiate the U.S. from nightmare states like Argentina under the Dirty War Junta or Iraq under Saddam Hussein. And without letting any of the architects or executors of the administration's torture policies off the hook (after all, they wouldn't let you off it!), there's something particularly galling when a former Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidate from a solidly blue state acts as if torture is an issue on which triangulation or "deference" to executive overreaching is appropriate. Stances like Lieberman's undermine both the rule of law and the ability of the Democratic Party to present itself as a strong, principled alternative to the Republicans. Claims to the contrary aside, therefore, I don't see our contribution to Lamont as part of an extremist antiwar "jihad" (although I guess I wouldn't, huh?), just a reminder that there's only so much contempt you can display for people's core values before they decide that hey, maybe they aren't that crazy about you either.