More serious than an intern and a cigar - The preliminary review of torture

In January of 1994, then-Attorney General Janet Reno named a special counsel to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a failed real estate deal known as “Whitewater.” Nobody knew that decision would lead to investigators questioning Arkansas state troopers about Bill’s extramarital affairs as governor, a right wing-subsidized lawsuit by someone named Paula Jones, and a “pattern of behavior” demonstrated by an affair with a White House intern. It all ended with the impeachment of President Clinton which doomed campaign of VP Al Gore and gave us the unintended consequence that was the George W. Bush administration.

On Monday, current Attorney General Eric Holder announced a “preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations.” He went on to say, “The (Justice) Department regularly uses preliminary reviews to gather information to determine whether there is sufficient predication to warrant a full investigation of a matter.” He added that “neither the opening of a preliminary review nor, if evidence warrants it, the commencement of a full investigation, means that charges will necessarily follow.” The review will be conducted by a career prosecutor named John Durham who will find there is more than enough predication and that the evidence will warrant a full investigation because there no doubt that federal laws were violated. The charges to follow will eventually have George W. Bush in the dock at the International Criminal Court answering for the war crimes committed during his presidency.

When Holder refers to “interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations,” he’s very likely talking about the alleged mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was held at a secret CIA prison for four years after he was picked up in 2002. A report by then-CIA Inspector General John Helgerson in 2004 said that “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane, and undocumented detention and interrogation techniques” had been used on al-Nashiri, who believed he was being held in a country known for torturing prisoners. He had been stripped naked, shackled, and hooded while CIA officers alternately threatened him with a pistol and a power drill. He was told his mother and family would be brought in and raped while he was made to watch. And not only was he waterboarded, but the authorization to use that particular torture technique on him came directly from Vice President Dick Cheney himself.

For his part, John Durham was already investigating the CIA’s destruction of 92 videotapes of interrogations (including al-Nashiri’s), so looking into possible violations of federal law by CIA officers basically gives him the power to investigate the entire agency with the unlimited resources of an independent counsel. Add a mandate to review how the CIA did its interrogation work overseas, and his jurisdiction becomes worldwide. Once his inquiry takes him to Aghanistan, he’ll find the military base where CIA interrogator David Passaro beat an Iraqi detainee named Adbul Wali to death during two days of questioning in June of 2003. Though Passaro was convicted of felony assault with his flashlight, no homicide charges have been filed. Yet.

As John Durham works his way from the interrogators in the field through the station chiefs and back to headquarters in Langley, he’s going to find CIA officers repeatedly questioned these “enhanced techniques” and asked for guidance on what was and wasn’t legal and how far to go. Disturbingly, he’s going to find those interrogators were told time and time again that what they were doing was cleared by the Justice Department and authorized by the President – so they should keep pushing the limit.

It’s important to remember that the decision to torture al-Nashiri’s came directly from the White House, as did the decision to murder Wali – which traveled through the chain of command first. Dick Cheney may be the most powerful VP in American history, but even he can’t change the fact that the Vice President has no Constitutional authority to do anything except break ties in the Senate. The torture and murder of these men (among many others) may have been carried out by the CIA, but the decision to torture and murder them was made by Cheney’s boss. Ultimately, the responsibility for their treatment falls on the President.

Ordering someone to be tortured is a war crime. If someone dies (as Wali did) as a result of that torture, it becomes a war crime punishable by death. At least one CIA officer knew this and wondered if “one day, agency officers will wind up on some ‘wanted list’ to appear before the World Court for war crimes.” Another is quoted as saying, “Ten years from now we’re going to be sorry we’re doing this…(but) it has to be done.” Unfortunately for them, they’re right about one day being held to account for what they’ve done. I hope they find consolation in the fact that George W. Bush, the man who ordered them to break the law, will be right there with them – an unintended, yet inevitable consequence of Eric Holder’s preliminary review.

Prime time gets political - Dancing with Tom the Hammer DeLay

There is a huge difference between a “celebrity” and a “star.” With the exception of the adult movie business, you have to have talent demonstrated through a body of work to be considered a star. But you can be a celebrity for all kinds of stupid reasons – from having over a million followers on Myspace to being pregnant with eight children. In the world of celebrities, some are like Omarosa in that they are notorious and some are like Bernie Madoff in that they’ve been disgraced. When casting a feel-good prime-time reality TV show for a major American broadcast network, you don’t want to go any further than “notorious” for your mandatory villain. It’s too bad Conrad Green, the Executive Producer of “Dancing With the Stars” is British, so he didn’t realize what an incredibly bad idea it was to include former Republican House Speaker Tom DeLay in this season’s cast.

In Green’s defense, ABC doesn’t really rely on stars. Their best shows (“Lost,” “Brothers & Sisters,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “Desperate Housewives”) all feature good ensemble casts. Their only show that features the star’s name in the title (ala “Roseanne”) is “According to Jim” which, ironically enough, is the least recognizable of his two names and isn’t the one for which he’s best known.

Since “DWTS” has featured mostly actors and athletes, I could understand the tongue-in-cheek use of the word “stars” in the show’s title. If you go back far enough in a professional athlete’s life, you’ll find he or she was the star of some team at some point and the actors have usually starred in at least one production. Some of the wildcards have been understandable (Steve Wozniak is definitely a star in the geek world and newly-single Kim Kardashian is technically a porn star) but the only other Washington-based contestant on the show (Tucker Carlson) was also a swing-and-a-miss in casting.

I understand the logic behind the decision to cast a semi-political figure like Carlson or a former elected official like DeLay. All of a sudden, “DWTS” is being talked about on cable news shows, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will do bits about it, and we’ll probably hear about it in a few late-night talk show monologues. And it would all be very funny and we could all feel good having a laugh together – if we were talking about Conrad Green’s “dream booking,” Bill Clinton, or his second choice, Dan Quayle.

But we’re not. We’re talking about a man who is scheduled to go on trial for felony money laundering in connection with re-election campaigns for Republicans in Texas, the result of which allowed him to illegally redraw districts in the middle of a census cycle to disenfranchise black voters. We’re talking about a man who has taken bundles and bundles of cash from convicted felon, Jack Abramoff, and even flew on the disgraced former lobbyist’s jet to the Super Bowl and on a golf junket to St. Andrews in Scotland. At Abramoff’s request, DeLay also blocked legislation to end sweatshop conditions in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands and called the business-first, anti-union climate on those islands “a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island.”

It came as no surprise to me that DeLay was available, excited, and “said yes in about ten minutes,” according to Green. I was, however, surprised to learn the search process stopped when DeLay was booked, and even more surprised when I found out what the producers were looking for. Green said part of the criteria was that the political figure they cast not currently be in office, that it be someone that everybody knows, and he wanted someone without partisan ties.

“We don’t want to get into that morass,” he said. He got the first part right (though he should be worried about the whole impending-trial-for-felony-money-laundering thing), but he doesn’t seem to understand that the reason everybody knows Tom DeLay is because of his partisan ties. Part of the reason he got his nickname, The Hammer, is because he considered every Democrat in the House of Representatives to be a nail.

But this move will probably work, some cable news viewers will watch the season premiere, and nobody will even remember this ever happened once Tommy does the “perp walk” dance right off the stage and into prison. That doesn’t mean it was right to validate this man in this way – even if he’s humiliated in the process.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to tell Conrad Green how to do his job. After all, what would I, a man raised in and on American popular culture, be able to tell an Englishman who produced “Big Brother UK” about what appeals to American audiences? But If I was, I’d tell him that his dream booking isn’t Bill Clinton, it’s Sarah Palin – she’s athletic, she’ll look great in costume, she’s got plenty of free time, millions of people will tune in to watch her, and she’s just crazy enough to say yes.

Remebering Eunice - The most influential Kennedy

Growing up in Boston, you basically learn about Joe and Rose Kennedy and their nine children in school. Anyone from Massachusetts will tell you that public service is the Kennedy family business – and we all know about the sons who gave their lives to and for their country. Not as well known is the contribution of the middle sister and mother of our own Councilman Bobby Shriver, the recently departed Eunice Kennedy Shriver, whose worked touched millions of people around the world.

Hers is an amazing story. At a time when a woman’s place was in the home, Eunice refused to have an identity imposed on her. After graduating from Stanford in 1943, she took a job in the State Department’s Special War Problems Division before moving over to the Justice Department to head a special project on juvenile delinquency. In 1950, she went to West Virginia to be a social worker in a women’s prison, then moved to Chicago where she worked with the Juvenile Court. With all of her wealth and privilege, she could have lived a life of unconcerned luxury, but she chose to help female felons and at-risk youth instead.

She campaigned for her brother John when he ran for President in 1960 and by 1962, she was running the Kennedy family foundation. That’s when she made the world-changing decision to write a letter to the Saturday Evening Post (the 1960’s version of USA Today) revealing the fact that her sister, Rosemary, was developmentally disabled. She also helped establish a network of research facilities at universities across the country, encouraged her brother to found the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development – and she pushed her brother, Ted, to write the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Through the force of her own will, she compelled the country to have a conversation about developmental disability and brought millions of Americans out of the shadows at the same time, all out of love for his sister. “I had enormous affection for Rosie," she said. "If I [had] never met Rosemary, never known anything about handicapped children, how would I have ever found out? Because nobody accepted them anyplace."

Her work didn’t stop when she got home, either. When a desperate mom called because no camp would take her developmentally disabled daughter, Eunice’s response was, “You don't have to talk about it anymore. You come here a month from today. I'll start my own camp. No charge.” And in the summer of 1962, she created Camp Shriver at the family estate in Maryland. Today, no parent anywhere in America has to wonder where their developmentally challenged kid can go to spend their summer just being a kid because thanks to “Aunt Eunice,” there are Camp Shrivers everywhere.

As a young girl, Eunice Kennedy loved sports. "I was always trying to find my brothers, not my sisters," she said. "I wanted to play football, and I was very good. I was always the quarterback." It was that appreciation for athletics that led her and her husband to start the Special Olympics. In the summer of 1968, just a few short weeks after her brother, Bobby, had been murdered, she opened the first national games at Soldier Field in Chicago with a thousand competitors from 26 states and Canada. The games now feature more than 3 million athletes in over 150 countries.

What I love about Eunice’s story is that her life’s work grew from the love she felt for his sister – and she never stopped working to improve the lives of developmentally challenged kids and their families. She taught her own children that “everybody’s normal, everybody’s the same” and she set out to pass that belief on to the rest of the world. As she said at the opening of those Chicago games, “the…Special Olympics prove a very fundamental fact. The fact that exceptional children – children with mental retardation – can be exceptional athletes, the fact that through sports they can realize their potential for growth.”

Even with her more famous brothers establishing the Peace Corps, pushing the Civil Rights Act, and fighting to reform our health care system, Eunice’s legacy may outshine them all. Because of her work, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was the only woman to appear on a US coin during her lifetime, and hers was the only portrait ever commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery of someone who was never President or First Lady. She set out to change the world – and she succeeded. As Chicago Mayor Richard Daly said at those games in 1968, “You know, Eunice, the world will never be the same after this.”

Schwarzenegger's losing legacy - How Arnold will be remembered

It was the end of the summer of 2003 and I had just moved to San Francisco from New York. I remember thinking how weird it was to wade through dozens of people collecting signatures on my way into and out of the supermarket every day, but I figured I'd act like a New Yorker and just ignore them. I didn't realize that they were only temporary obstacles outside the Safeway (they would be gone once the question of whether or not to recall Gov. Gray Davis was placed on the ballot) and I would never have imagined the net result of their work would be the disastrous experiment that became the political career of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I can talk about Arnold's time in Sacramento in the past tense because he's officially a lame duck. The list of things he can do before leaving office in 17 months is short and getting shorter because the list of people who will be unwilling to do anything to help him is long and getting longer. His job approval number (28 percent) is so bad that it will take nothing short of a "Kindergarten Cop"-style departure from his comfort zone to save his legacy. If he has even a basic understanding of right and wrong, he should call attention to immorality of taking funding away from services for old people, battered women, and poor children so that the wealthiest Californians can continue not paying their fair share in taxes. And if he has the courage to stand up and be a leader, he can set an example by personally paying his fair share and shaming his friends and associates (some of California's richest and most famous people) into following suit.

As it stands now, Arnold's time in office will be remembered as a throwback Republican administration tucked in between Gray Davis and Gavin Newsom in what will likely be a long succession of Democratic California governors. It will basically be the "Steroid Era" of California politics, brought to us by one super-rich guy in San Diego (Congressman Darrell Issa) who was willing to shell out millions of dollars to take advantage of a ridiculous ballot initiative process that gives voters the power to run the government. For those Californians earning $1 million or more per year, Arnold will have given them almost two full terms of the "no tax" governor they've been wanting. So while the state government (and the rest of us) has been asked to do more with less in this economic crisis, they haven't been asked to do anything. I guess Issa's investment paid off.

What I can't understand is Arnold's political calculation through these budget negotiations that will come to define his career in public life. The fact that he was willing to threaten draconian cuts to get the other side to settle for merely painful cuts means he understands how the process works, but alienating core Democratic constituencies is bad for his political future. Since he can't be president, the highest office he can attain is senator; that means beating either Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein. And he can't do that without the support of the same people whose funds he cut in order to preserve his "no tax" status. Also, there is no future for him as a fundraiser/power broker/kingmaker in the Republican Party because there is no future for the Republican Party. At some point, he's going to have to accept the fact that he's married to a Kennedy and he's going to have to come home to the "D's."

Which brings me back to my point about Arnold's legacy. Right now, he's the man who took food out of the mouths of poor kids, caretakers out of nursing homes, and glasses away from blind people so that California's millionaires and billionaires could hoard their money at tax time. In a year-and-a-half, he'll be a 63-year-old private citizen with a nine-figure fortune, no job, and millions of people to whom he owes an apology. The best way to say he's sorry is to put his money where his line-item veto pen was and use his high profile to call attention to the lack of fundamental fairness in the way income taxes are collected in California.

As the governor charged with balancing the state budget and as a taxpayer who earns tens of millions of dollars per year, he understands the issue of tax evasion better than anyone. He knows that California's tax gap (the difference between what we're owed and what we collect in a given year) is over $8 billion, and he knows the state really could have used that money this year. It's not like anyone named Schwarzenegger is ever going to have to sleep outside or miss a meal. At this point in his life, Arnold can finally afford to pay his taxes. Given the pain he's caused to so many poor and vulnerable people who were counting on him to show leadership as their Governor, it's the least he can do.