Just returned from celebrating with T's family the great American holiday of worshiping conspicuous consumption. Many wonderful presents all around, it was a lot of fun.
I will be leaving for a two-week trip to Israel in three days. I expect there will be much to photograph and write about there.

In the meantime, my good friend S.M. and his colleagues at the Gadfly blog have two excellent posts from the last few days.
First an analysis of Mark Bowden's column "In Defense of Waterboarding," in which Bowden argues that while torture should still be illegal, the torture of Abu Zubaydah should warrant neither prosecution nor condemnation. From Gadfly:

The reason the legal regime cannot be seen as permitting torture because first, it would be dishonorable to a polity that does not wish to see itself as backward and illiberal, and second, because while individual cases of torture may be justified because of their positive consequences, permitting it as the rule would increase the incentive to torture in the future.
What Bowden wants to do is separate our notions of justice from the legal regime. The trouble, it seems to me, is that such a division presumes two distinct spheres of action where events in one do not impinge upon the other. Yet, if the law goes soft on these investigators this time, doesn’t that propel the legal regime, at the margins, towards the unacceptable end of legalized torture? Which is to say: if enough incidents of the same kind occur and are extrapolated to infinity, ethical norms will shift in favor of permitting torture in the long-term. If the law is not a reflection of popular norms, then it is subtly acting upon them.

The trickle-down effect of extra-legal war powers is a particularly troubling aspect of the Bush administration. The word got out that torture was legalized for the worst Al Qaida terrorists, and American GI's in Iraq were soon unleashing dogs at naked Iraqi civilians. "Enhanced interrogation" became the norm at Guantanamo Bay. The only reason the CIA needed all its "black site" prisons around the world was to interrogate prisoners without U.S. law getting in the way. Abu Ghraib was the most notorious case that we know about, only because the participants were stupid enough to take pictures. But let's not be so naive to think every other U.S. military prison in the world follows the Geneva Conventions. Those quaint treaties, in effect, were declared null and void - even if the government's official position remains otherwise - and the legal sanction to torture spread like a virus through the system. Similarly, habeas corpus was denied to the worst terrorist suspects, and you get a female Icelandic tourist at JFK airport detained, shackled and denied access to a lawyer because she overstayed her visa twelve years ago.

How long will it be before torture becomes common practice in police stations? Before common criminals are denied access to legal counsel on a regular basis? The law still forbids all this, of course, but the de facto highest power in the land - by virtue of no coequal power seriously challenging its assertion of such status - has made it clear, with a wink and a nod between every line of doublespeak, that the law is a trifle nuisance in the face of Security.

Authorizing the torture of mass murderers to prevent terrorist attacks is the beginning of a very slippery slope, with criteria for certain knowledge of the future and measurement of worse evils that are impossible to define or justify in 99.9% of cases. If a case is to be made that there should be special exceptions in the law to the worst terrorists with knowledge that will certainly prevent imminent mass destruction, then it must be air-tight: only those cases matching very stringent criteria of imminent threat, and sanctioned by the President, a special court, and a special committee of Congress should be authorized; to be carried out only by a very select group of interrogators; with a full accounting of the valid information gained from said torture, and with records recorded for public release in the future.

Those acting without explicit authorization - at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else, through all levels of the chain of command - should definitely be prosecuted. The cultural trickle-down effect has no legal standing. But once a legal authorization is issued - ideally never, possibly in limited cases, and in the past with Al Qaida detainees - those acting on the authorization should not be prosecuted. To punish the torturers of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, when the President and senior members of Congress approved their actions, would have a chilling effect on intelligence and even military operations by the constant threat that actions deemed legal today will be retroactively banned tomorrow.

Finally, the next President needs to make it very clear that the United States of America made a mistake. It was wrong to sanction torture and wrong to circumvent legal processes. The next President needs to take responsibility on behalf of the nation for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extraordinary renditions and the creeping tyranny that has seeped into our culture, and then begin the process of healing and reversing that fall. An absolute ban on future torture would be a good place to start.