Darkness Visible

No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.

The Dark Side and the Dark Knight


The Battle for a Country's Soul by Jane Mayer

Alan Brinkley's review of Mayer's The Dark Side.

At the urging of Cheney - or his surrogate Addington - President Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions and, without publicly stating it, suspended habeas corpus for terror suspects, thus removing two important impediments to torture. Others worked to undermine the 1984 international Convention Against Torture, which, under American leadership, had provided the first explicit definition of what torture was.

Obama better win in November. The unsung heroes:

Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration - conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies. Waxman summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers and Defense Department officials (including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force), all of whom supported the restoration of Geneva Convention protections. Waxman was quickly hauled up before Addington and told that his efforts constituted "an abomination." All of these lawyers, and others, soon left the government after being deceived, bullied, thwarted and marginalized by the Cheney loyalists.

Via Crooks and Liars, conservative pundit Glenn Beck says Bush is Batman:

"This seems to be a movie that extols some of the conservative viewpoints that we are dealing with terrorists, that you can trust people to make the right decision, that sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do, and you have to cross lines that you don’t want to cross, if you’re going to save - if you’re going to save your city, in this case it’s Gotham.

"But Batman goes into another country and with a C130, snatches a guy out, then throws him back here into Gotham. So there’s rendition! At one point, the Morgan Freeman character says to Batman, ‘Wait a minute, hang on... you’re eavesdropping on everyone in Gotham?’ And Batman says, ‘Yes, to stop this terrorist.’ Morgan Freeman says, ‘I can’t be a part of it.’ And yet Morgan Freeman does become a part of it, and they find the Joker. One of the ways they find the Joker is through eavesdropping. I mean the parallels here of what’s going on is to me stunning."

It's a movie, which I enjoyed by the way. Batman wants to retire for various reasons and feels he can because of Harvey Dent. In the real world, he could because there'd be a FBI after the Joker and in the real world Batman's eavesdropping and torture of Eric Robert's mob boss (by dropping him off a building balconey) are illegal. So Bush is doing illegal stuff? Extraordinary rendition is not when you snatch someone and bring them to the US to stand trial. It's when terrorist suspect are handed off to intellegence services of countries like Syria, Egypt, and Jordan where they are tortured.

These conservatives are trying to defend torture on principle. It's the Vic Mackey theory of justice or the ideas embodied by Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men. Damon Root discusses another salient example at Hit and Run:

There's a lot worth thinking about in Justice Antonin Scalia's harsh Boumediene v. Bush dissent, but one passage jumped out right away. After noting that the Bush administration used the naval base at Guantanamo Bay precisely because it believed that enemy combatants would not enjoy habeas corpus and other constitutional rights while being held there, Justice Scalia suggests the following: "Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention." Here's the kicker: "Those facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves."

Given that "allies" such as Egypt and Syria regularly torture their prisoners, I'd certainly agree that things "might well have been worse" elsewhere. But isn't Justice Scalia contradicting President Bush, who famously declared that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." And maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Scalia's words sure sound like an implied threat. You liberals think Guantanamo is bad? Next time you won't even know where the prisoners are held.

Glenn Beck and Scalia are like the police officer the Joker baited in jail. They are like Harvey Dent when - driven mad by fear of losing the one he loves - he's threatening Joker's tied-up flunky with death, until Batman talks him out of it. To paraphrase the Joker, all some conservatives need to become fascist is a little push. These scenes argue against seeing The Dark Knight as propaganda. Plus why would they have a cameo with Patrick Leahy if Glenn Beck was right?

(spoiler) Also, the film has a nice climatic scene of solidarity, when each boatload of passengers refuses to kill the other boatload of strangers in order to save themselves. The mad Joker believes they will succumb to fear, whereas Batman believes they won't.