There’s word today from numerous sources that Colin Powell will go on Meet the Press this Sunday and endorse Barack Obama. The Obama campaign certainly isn’t doing anything to discourage the speculation:

Today Obama spokesperson Linda Douglas said she has no news on the Powell front, but the campaign would obviously love an endorsement.  ”We would welcome the support of somebody with such a distinguished and honorable career as General Powell,” she told me this morning, as Obama’s plane flew to Virginia for a rally.  Obama has previously cited Powell as a potential member of his administration, and the two have been in touch before. “I know they talk from time to time about foreign policy matters,” Douglas said, though she did not know the last time they spoke.  Powell is widely viewed as a thoughtful public servant who carries credibility (and experience) in both parties.

Quite a few folks in the progosphere think Powell endorsing Obama would be a great thing.  I’m not so sure.

Like many others, I had a great deal of respect for Powell before he joined the Bush Administration.  His story was a compelling one and his service was largely distinguished.  In 1996, Powell chose, for a variety of reasons, not to run for President.  Had he done so, he very well might have defeated Clinton.  Instead, he remained on the sidelines until Dubya asked him to serve as Secretary of State.

These days, Powell is often viewed as a tragic figure, largely because of his 2003 presentation at the UN Security Council during the Administration’s push for war with Iraq.  According to Powell, he was duped by the CIA, who convinced Powell that the intelligence behind his presentation was unimpeachable.  Powell then went out and made the case for war.

Thirty months later, Powell told Tim Russert that the CIA had misled him, using intelligence based on discredited sources.   Since then, conventional wisdom has given Powell the benefit of the doubt.  Many commentators regard his statement that he had been misled as the same thing as an apology:

Private warnings cannot cancel out Powell’s hawkish presentation to the U.N., but unlike so many war cheerleaders in politics and the media, he owned up to his mistakes. On national television, Powell called the U.N. address a “blot” on his record.

Fair enough — everyone makes mistakes, and to his credit, Powell has acknowledged (or at least gave the appearance of acknowledging) that he was wrong.  Second chances are the American way, and certainly a Powell endorsement of Obama would represent an open repudiation not only of his friend John McCain, but also of the Administration for whom he worked.

There’s just one small problem.  Powell’s testimony before the UNSC was only the second biggest “blot” on his record.

The biggest was, and is, his tacit support for torture.  If, as the Nuremberg tribunals established, knowledge is complicity, then Colin Powell is guilty of war crimes.  And unlike Iraq, he’s never apologized for his role in helping to shred the Constitution, ignore the Convention against Torture, and trash the Geneva Conventions.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Here’s what Jane Mayer has to say in The Dark Side:

Bush also knew about, and approved of, White House meetings in which his top cabinet members were briefed by the CIA on its plan to use specific “enhanced” interrogation techniques on various high-value detainees.  The meetings were chaired by Rice. . . . The participants were members of the Principals Committee, the five Bush cabinet members  who handled national security matters:  Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, CIA Director Tenet, and Attorney General Ashcroft.

Knowing how the Agency had been blamed for ostensible “rogue” actions in the past, Tenet was eager to spread the political risk of undertaking “enhanced interrogations.” However, some members of the group became irritated with Tenet’s insistence upon airing the grim details.  “The CIA already had legal clearance to do these things,” a knowledgable source said, “and so it was pointless for them to keep sharing the details.  No one was going to question their decisions. . . . It’s not as if any of the principals were debating the policy — that was already set.  They wanted to go to the limit that the law required. . . .”

There is no indication. . .that any Bush cabinet members objected to the policy. [emphasis added]

As Mayer acknowledges, Powell did object quite strongly to Bush’s decision to suspend the Geneva Conventions.  But he did not make those concerns public or threaten to resign.  He merely accepted the outcome and soldiered on.  It is only at the time of Abu Ghraib (and the first media reports of John Yoo’s infamous August 2002 “torture memo”), Mayer notes that Powell (along with Rice) began to express qualms:

After reading the torture memo  itself for the first time in the newspapers, Rice and Powell confronted Gonzales together and furiously insisted that there be “no more secret opinions on international and national security law.”  Their righteous anger seemed somewhat undercut by reports that Tenet had provided graphic details of specific coercive interrogations during the Principals Committee meetings while both were present.  And while they directed their frustration at Gonzales, neither had the temerity to confront Cheney, who clearly was the true source of these policies. [emphasis added]

Colin Powell passively assented to torture.  Although he occasionally raised concerns, there is no evidence that he threatened to resign — as Ashcroft and others did over the issue of domestic wiretapping.  He sat in meetings and listened as George Tenet offered graphic descriptions of torture committed by U.S. government officials — and never once objected, other than to complain that Tenet’s statements were unnecessary, given the fact that the President already had authorized torture.

As was the case with his presentation at the United Nations, he accepted what he heard and did as he was told.  Only later, after the Yoo memo and the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, did he begin to object — and then only to ask if there were any other memos he should know about.  At no time did he confront Cheney or Bush, threaten to go public, or quit in protest.

Later on, after he was once again a private citizen, Powell did raise concerns about the Administration’s policies, writing in 2006 to John McCain to express his opposition to proposed rules on Military Commissions:

In his letter to McCain, Powell said the effort to “redefine” the article was “inconsistent” with his previous opposition to the use of torture. “The world,” he wrote, “is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.” . . .

Powell declined yesterday to address Bush’s comments. “To say that we want to modify, clarify or redefine Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions], which has not been modified for the 57 years of its history, I think adds to the doubt” about U.S. morality, he said. “Plus I believe that the legitimate concerns that the administration has can be dealt with in other ways.”

The problem, of course, is that there is no public record during Powell’s tenure as Secretary of State of his “previous opposition to the use of torture.”  In his letter to McCain, Powell makes it clear that his objection is not with the underlying policy, but rather the tactics around the military commission.  That is not exactly taking a stand in the face of evil or speaking truth to power.

Silence in the face of evil is assent.  In the eyes of the law, it’s called conspiracy.   At best, Powell’s  actions — both in regard to Iraq and to torture — show a lack of critical thinking.  At worst, they demonstrate profound moral cowardice.

So pardon me if I’m not thrilled at the notion of Powell endorsing Barack Obama.

Related posts

• Prosecuting Those Responsible for War Crimes
• Ambassador for All War Crimes except Our Own
• What’s Missing at DNC: Torture, Guantanamo. . .and Cheney
• State Department Watch: Fed up with Bush?
• Obama, Messaging, and Dean Wormer

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• Prosecuting Those Responsible for War Crimes
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• What’s Missing at DNC: Torture, Guantanamo. . .and Cheney
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So far we’ve seen dozens of speakers at the Democratic National Convention.  They’ve attacked Bush and McCain.  They’ve touted solutions to energy and climate change.  They’ve talked about Supreme Court justices and choice.  They’ve talked getting out of Iraq, and winning the war against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.  A few have even mentioned, in passing, that the United States needs to rebuild its relationship with allies, once agan leading rather than dictating to the rest of the world.

But there is one set of issues that we haven’t heard about yet — not once in two days of banal blathering.

Call it the destruction of American values.  It includes a number of things.

Like torture.

Guantanamo.

Abu Ghraib.

Indefinite detention of American citizens.

Denial of habeas corpus.

Waterboarding.

Rendition.

Black sites.

It’s as if the books by Jane Meyer, Jack Goldsmith, Philippe Sands, and so many others have gone right down the memory hole.

Where’s the anger at this desecration of everything America supposedly stands for?  Where’s the condemnation of the Bush Administration’s trashing of the Constitution?  Where are the demands that these things stop, and stop immediately?

And where are the attacks on the man who most needs to answer for his role in not just allowing, but promoting these abominations?  Where is the condemnation and vilification of Dick Cheney?

There isn’t a politician more unpopular in America today.  More importantly, there isn’t anyone more responsible for the trashing of America’s reputation in the world.

Yet after two days, we’ve heard nothing about him or his comprehensive attack on human rights and civil liberties.  Nothing about his single-minded shredding of the Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, and Convention against Torture.  Nothing about waterboarding, sleep deprivation, the use of dogs, or forced confinement.  Nothing about the fact that our allies now believe that this Administration has committed war crimes.

We’ve heard plenty about windmills and wages, but nothing about Cheney’s conscious destruction of American values.

In less than a week, Dick Cheney will take the Darth Vader world tour to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.  In his primetime speech, he will call Democrats weak, inept, and unwilling to face down “evil.”

If the Democrats fail to call him out on his own evil this week, he’ll be right.

Are Democrats afraid?  Are they unwilling to confront Bush, Cheney, and McCain on foreign policy?   Are they afraid of John McCain because he keeps reminding people on every possible occasion that he was a POW?

There’s a simple way to handle this.  All the Democrats have to say is that the Bush Administration believes that it doesn’t torture.  Then talk about all the things that they now do that the North Vietnamese did to John McCain.  And then point out that according to George Bush and Dick Cheney, John McCain wasn’t tortured. And then say how dare they implement polices once used against our brave servicemen and women.  And also make sure that people know that John McCain actually sanctions torture, as long as it’s committed by the CIA.

It’s the truth.  It reminds Americans of what we stand for without dragging them through the muck and horror of the past seven years.  It also has the advantage of putting both McCain and the Bushies on the defensive.

We’ve heard that Obama-Biden will be different, that they will no longer concede the high ground on foreign policy issues to the Republicans.  But if they never mention torture, Guantanamo, or any of the other terrors that Cheney, Addington, Yoo and company have inflicted on America and the world, then they are just as fearful and timorous as past candidates.

And next week, the Republicans will have free reign to make them look like apologists and traitors.

And in November, Barack Obama will lose.

Related posts

• Obama, Messaging, and Dean Wormer
• Powell, Obama, and Torture
• Ambassador for All War Crimes except Our Own
• Prosecuting Those Responsible for War Crimes
• Was McCain Tortured? Ask Dick Cheney

Set aside Andrew Sullivan’s obsession with the cross in the dirt story.**  He hits on a much more important point today:

[What the Vietnamese] deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.  Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. . . .McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of “long-time standing” that victims of Bush’s torture regime would have to endure.  These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely “enhanced interrogation.”

. . .[T]he techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the “intelligence” we have procured from “interrogating” terror suspects. Feel safer?

Here’s what Jane Meyer says in The Dark Side about the decision to define torture downward:

Shortly after Zubayda’s capture, John Yoo was summoned to the White House. . . .[Addington, Yoo, and others] tossed around ideas about exactly what sorts of pain could be inflicted on Zubayda.  The CIA had sent a wish list of “stress techniques” it wanted to use. . . .

To blur [the] bright legal line [in the Convention against Torture's definition of torture as "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental"] the White House lawyers turned not to law but to language.  The soft spot in the CAT as they saw it, was the definition of torture. . . .[W]hat if the Bush Administration decribed the psychic stress and physical duress they hoped to exert on captives as something else? . . .The redefinition. . .enabled Cheney to describe waterboarding. . .as “a no-brainer for me,” while at the same time insisting “We don’t torture.”

[snip]

The Bush Administration’s corruption of language had a curiously corrupting impact on the public debate, as well.  It was all but impossible to have a national conversation about torture if top administration officials denied they were engaged in it. . . .

On August 1, 2002, in an infamous memo written largely by Yoo. . .the [Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel] defined the crime of torture [so as] to make it all but impossible to commit.  They argued that torture required the intent to inflict suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodly function, or even death.”  Mental suffering, they wrote, had to “result in significant psychological harm” and “be of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or years.”  This. . .stretched a [U.S.} reservation to the CAT that the Senate added in 1988 at the urging of the first President Bush, requiring mental pain to be "prolonged" to qualify as torture. . . .[I]t was tailor-made to decriminalize waterboarding.

So I think we have the answer to Sullivan’s question.

Wouldn’t it be great, though if a White House correspondent were to ask Dana Perino the question?  Or even better, ask Dubya?

Helen Thomas, white courtesy phone please.

**Sorry, folks, but questioning a story that by its very nature cannot be either verified or disproved — and involves McCain’s time as a POW and his faith –  is a no-win for Obama, his surrogates, or the blogosphere.  If I were McCain, I’d be saying “bring it on.”

Related posts

• What’s Missing at DNC: Torture, Guantanamo. . .and Cheney
• Prosecuting Those Responsible for War Crimes
• Ambassador for All War Crimes except Our Own
• Powell, Obama, and Torture
• Obama, Messaging, and Dean Wormer