Jesse Ventura was on CNN with Larry King last
night and this exchange occurred, illustrating how simple, clear and
definitively non-partisan is the case for investigations and
prosecutions for those who ordered torture (video below):
VENTURA: I don't watch much TV. This year's reading, I covered Bush's life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects.
And I'm very disturbed about it.
I'm bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we've created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem.
I will criticize President Obama on this level; it's a good thing I'm not president because I
would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would
prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that
ordered it. Because torture is against the law.
KING: You were a Navy SEAL.
VENTURA:
That's right. I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School,
Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to
go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam.
All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us
was waterboarded. It is torture.
KING: What was it like?
VENTURA:
It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are
drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way,
you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him
confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
Let's just repeat that: "I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law." That
is the crux of the case for investigations and prosecutions. That's
it. Can anyone find a "liberal" or ideological argument anywhere in
what Ventura said? It's about as far from a partisan or "leftist" idea
as one can get. Yet our establishment media has succeeded (as Digby recently argued) in
converting this view into a "Hard Left," "liberal" or "partisan"
argument because that's the only prism through which they can
understand anything, and that's their time-honored instrument for
demonizing any idea that threatens their institutional prerogatives and
orthodoxies (only the Hard Left favors this).
Ventura
himself, like the argument he's advocating, is also about as far from
being a "leftist" or partisan as it gets. He was elected Governor of
Minnesota by running as the ultimate non-partisan, as a poorly-funded
independent who defeated both the GOP and Democratic establishment
candidates on a largely libertarian platform and on what he called
"fiscal conservatism," including large tax rebates. Unlike the
establishment-revering, prosecution-opposing pundits who are the true
partisans -- loyal spokespeople who fiercely defend Beltway culture and
legal immunity for political elites above all else -- Ventura is doing
nothing more than expressing definitively independent and
non-ideological political principles, ones that were quite obviously
ingrained in him over the course of decades as an American and a
veteran: torture is wrong in all cases; it is illegal; and those who
do it should therefore be prosecuted.
Former aide to Condoleezza
Rice and former 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow
yesterday became the latest to join Ventura by calling for
investigations into torture, telling Laura Rozen: "When there is this kind of collective failure, we need to learn from what happened." Gen. Barry McCaffrey two weeks ago pointed out that numerous detainees were "murdered" in U.S. custody -- which is unquestionably true -- and called for criminal investigations of the top-level political officials who sanctioned torture. Gen. Antonio Taguba previously stated
that "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current
administration has committed war crimes. The only question that
remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture
will be held to account." Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff,
retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, this month endorsed
both investigations and prosecutions for Bush officials who broke the
law. Bush 41 ambassador Thomas Pickering
and Reagan-appointed FBI Director William Sessions wrote in The Washington Post that an independent investigation was a pre-requisite to moving beyond the torture era. Ronald Reagan vehemently insisted that torture is inexcusable in all cases -- no exceptions -- and that those who do it must be prosecuted.
These
are the people -- Gen. McCaffrey, Gen. Taguba, Col. Wilkerson, Philip
Zelikow, Jesse Ventura, Ambassador Pickering, Director Sessions -- that
our little David Ignatiuses deceitfully dismiss as "liberal score-settlers" and that our David Broders and Jon Barrys
accuse of lying by masking their Hard Left thirst for partisan
vengeance with false pretenses about a belief in the rule of law and
contrived disgust at torture. Our media stars have a script from
which they mindlessly read -- anyone who believes that political
leaders should be held accountable for serious crimes must be a member
of the "Hard Left" when the lawbreaking political leaders in question
are Republicans -- and they recite it over and over no much how evidence piles up in front of their noses proving how untrue it is.
Our
media stars accuse everyone with any actual beliefs -- and especially
any beliefs that deviate from Beltway establishment orthodoxy -- of
being motivated by ugly "partisan" impulses because that's the only way
they are capable of seeing the world. It's the
ultimate act of projection. That's how the most non-ideological and
non-partisan principles (e.g.: government leaders who commit
serious crimes should be held accountable; torture is wrong; Presidents
shouldn't eavesdrop on Americans without warrants where the law makes
doing so a felony) are transformed into partisan, "ideological" views
of the Hard Left, even when they are plainly nothing of the sort. As
commenter DCLaw1 wrote
in explaining the media's sudden obsession this week with whether Nancy
Pelosi was briefed on the CIA's interrogation program even though that
issue has been known for years:
I
want to point out that the main reason, if not the only reason, for
this overwhelming media view is because the only lens through which
they can see this issue - like every issue - is the Republican/Democrat
or conservative/liberal lens. When one's entire point of
reference for even issues of egregious lawbreaking goes no further than
fixating obsessively over the identity of the people and parties to the
"controversy" and the issue's putative effect on partisan politics,
whether a leader of one party was informed of the crimes of the other
takes on a meaning perversely greater than the evil of the underlying
conduct itself.
Our establishment media simply
cannot get beyond this stultifyingly narrow framework. It is
pathological. Additionally, this staunch avoidance of anything
approaching a substantive assessment of the actual illegal conduct, in
favor of a petty fixation on the partisan "helps or harms" game, helps
only the "side" that has committed the crimes and wrongdoing. No wonder
our discourse is so unbelievably misshapen.
Few
things better illustrate how warped our political discourse is than the
media's claim that advocating investigations and prosecutions for
political lawbreakers who commit serious crimes, who torture, who
illegally spy on Americans with no warrants, is the province of
partisans on the "Hard Left," even when people who are as far away from
that as possible prominently advocate exactly that.
* * * * *
Beltway
mavens are eager to declare that the torture controversy is ending, but
these crimes are far too significant to sweep under the rug, no matter
how unified the political and media establishments are in that effort.
In addition to the Ventura interview and the Zelikow call for
investigations yesterday, here are some headlines just from the last 24 hours:
Interrogation Probe Should Include Congressional Leaders, Hoyer Says
US lawmakers to hear from Bush 'torture' dissenter
Top US Democrat under fire over 'torture' briefings
US lawmaker: Public needs all facts on alleged torture
Ire Over a Columnist, an Author of Torture Memos
Speaker Under Fire on Torture ("With a series of torture investigations already in the works . . . the issue simply isn't going away").
It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the President's apparent contemplation of reversing himself
on whether to release 60 new photographs showing brutal American abuse
of detainees (outside of Abu Ghraib) is part of an effort to tamp down
what is still, quite obviously, the growing political pressure not to
simply "move beyond" the serious crimes that were committed.
* * * * *
The call for prosecutions from the newest member of America's rapidly growing Hard Left: