Author: Jonathan Schwarz

This is from Scott Horton’s new article in Harper’s on creating some kind of accountability for the torture conducted by the Bush administration (subscription required):

[I]n a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that the use of waterboarding to obtain intelligence was a “no-brainer.”

Cheney at the time declined to refer to this practice as torture, preferring instead to describe it as “robust interrogation,” and that reluctance has been echoed in the press. I myself was twice warned by PBS producers, in advance of appearances on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, that I could use the word “torture” in the abstract but that I was to refrain from applying it to the administration’s policies. And after an interview with CNN in which I spoke of the administration’s torture policy, I was told by the producer, “That’s okay for CNN International, but we can’t use it on the domestic feed.”

As always, the question remains: why is the major US media so incredibly left-wing?

Has anyone been discussing starting to put donations for Obama’s 2012 run in escrow, to be released upon the accomplishment of certain goals—eg, on Iraq, health care, energy, etc.?

It would take a ton of effort and wrangling to set up. And I haven’t thought it through at all, particularly the various legalities involved. Just off the top of my head, I think you’d have to set up a vote on whether he’d succeeded and the money could be released. I’d also guess you’d might have to require each person to specify a second choice organization for the money to go if Obama fails, so they wouldn’t just get it back and be able send it to the campaign anyway.

(See also this post by Micah Sifry about what’s going to happen to MyBarackObama and its tools.)

OpenLeft has set up a petition to John Podesta and Michael Strautmanis of the Obama transition team calling on Obama not to appoint Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary. As they describe, there are many reasons Summers would be an horrendous (although funny!) choice.

MORE: Don’t miss this chummy note from Summers to Ken Lay when Summers became Treasury Secretary. Note the handwritten PS: “I’ll keep my eye on power deregulation and energy market infrastructure issues.”

This is from a recent profile of Seymour Hersh:

[H]e is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. ‘You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president’s inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:] “You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.”