2015: The Year In Preview

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Once again, we look into our slightly cracked crystal ball for our annual tradition of fearless predictions for the year to come. Without further ado, we bring you 2015 in preview:

JANUARY: Sony finally allows the wide release of the Seth Rogen/James Franco film “The Interview.” North Korea immediately issues a public statement: “We threatened the U.S. over THIS piece of crap? Man, do we feel stupid. This is more embarrassing than the time we invited Dennis Rodman to dinner because we thought he was LeBron James. Face it, as a government, we’re just not that bright.”

FEBRUARY: Following the lead of the right wing’s insistence on calling torture “enhanced interrogation,” the Mafia announces that it has hired a PR agency to rebrand “armed robbery” as “enhanced wealth acquisition.” Not to be outdone, the National Football League announces that its new behavior policy reframes “domestic abuse” as “enhanced spousal negotiation.”

MARCH: North Korea unleashes its long-dreaded retaliation for the Sony film “The Interview” in the form of a 90-minute feature film called “Obama Is a Big Doo-Doo Head.” At the film’s premiere in Pyongyang, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and Sen. Ted Cruz appear as guests of the North Korean government, but strongly deny serving as technical advisers on the picture.

APRIL: A new hacking scandal erupts when a group calling itself “The Sons of the Big Easy” breaks into CBS’s computer network and releases thousands of embarrassing emails and digital copies of unreleased shows. The group claims that the attack is retribution for Scott Bakula’s awful attempt at a Louisiana accent in “NCIS: New Orleans.”

MAY: Russian President Vladimir Putin announces that he’s formed an “exploratory committee” to consider a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. “Republicans say nice things about me,” Putin says. “Rudy Giuliani is talking about how I ‘make decision and execute quickly,’ and Sarah Palin likes the idea of me ‘wrestling bears.’ They want leadership? Putin give them a bellyful of it.”

JUNE: Republican lawmakers, who hold a majority in the House and Senate, announce a major policy initiative. “We’ve decided to change our practice of not doing anything and blaming it all on President Obama,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tells “Meet the Press.” “After the summer break, we’re going to start doing nothing and blaming it all on Hillary Clinton.”

JULY: Christmas decorations and promotions appear in stores, as Christmas-themed commercials begin running on TV. Everyone complains, but they buy the stuff anyway.

AUGUST: First lady Michelle Obama rolls out a new campaign to promote the eating of junk food. “Candy, sugary sodas, Twinkies three times a day, and lots of Mickey D’s,” the First Lady says. “That’s the secret to a healthy, happy life.” Congressional Republicans and Fox News immediately go on an outraged crusade against the movement, which they call “yet another attempt by the Imperial Obama Presidency to control every aspect of our lives.” Fox begins promoting salads, low-fat foods, and drinking lots of water, while the Republican caucus gives up sugar, white bread and potatoes. Waistlines shrink across the nation, and obesity-related illnesses take a prodigious drop. “I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out,” the first lady says.

SEPTEMBER: Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush formally announces his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination. Bush vows not to back down on his support for immigration reform and the federal Common Core standards, even though those issues are unpopular with conservatives. “I’m willing to lose the primary to win the general,” a defiant Bush says, repeating earlier statement he made to the online magazine Politico.

OCTOBER: The Jeb Bush campaign issues a retraction of his “willing to lose the primary to win the general” promise when someone explains to him how the primary system works.

NOVEMBER: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz attempts to stop President Obama from pardoning the White House turkey by going to the Senate floor for a marathon reading of the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asks the office of senate legal counsel for an opinion on whether the Senate can involuntarily commit one of its own members.

DECEMBER: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat all experience a massive decline in users after Santa announces he’s going to start using social media to help compile the “naughty” and “nice” lists. A young woman identified only as “@SexyAllie 999” explains to The New York Times why she deleted her Snapchat account: “Like, I don’t know if sending some random guy a picture of my, y’know, breasts is, like, something that will get me on, like, the naughty list? But, I mean, I’m not, y’know, taking any chances.”

As we like to say at this season (with a hat tip to poet Ogden Nash): Duck! Here comes another year!

Question Time

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Today’s column is a grab bag of questions which, for some strange reason, I can never seem to get a straight answer to:

If you think President Obama’s “weakness” in Syria is what led to Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea, what do you think we should have done in Syria? Should we have bombed them for using chemical weapons even after they agreed to give up their chemical weapons stockpiles and production facilities? If so, do you also think police officers should be ordered to shoot criminals who’ve thrown down their weapons?

Do you think America should have intervened or should now intervene militarily in Syria? If so, which side should we come in on, the side backed by Hezbollah, or the one fighting alongside al-Qaida?

If you think our current response to the Russian annexation of Crimea is too weak, do you favor military intervention? If so, please locate Ukraine on a map and tell us where American troops should be based for such an intervention and where they’d be supplied from.

If you blame President Obama’s “weakness” for the Russian annexation of Crimea, do you also blame President George W. Bush for the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia? If not, why not?

If you think Obamacare needs to be repealed, are you also willing to repeal the popular parts of it, like the part protecting people with pre-existing conditions and the part allowing parents to insure their children to age 26? If not, how do you propose to keep the insurance system alive if everyone isn’t required to pay into it?

What do you propose to do with the millions of people already insured through the exchanges when the mandate goes away and insurance companies can go back to charging people exorbitant amounts or denying them insurance altogether if they have pre-existing conditions?

If you were one of the people who insisted in 2012 that the polls putting President Obama ahead of Mitt Romney were “skewed” and that Romney was going to win in a landslide, please tell us why we should believe you when you claim that the Obama administration is “cooking the books” on Affordable Care Act enrollment and that Obamacare is doomed to fail?

If you believe that a single-payer, taxpayer supported, medical insurance plan is “socialism” and that it will destroy America, do you plan to refuse a Medicare card when you become eligible or turn yours in if you have one now? If not, why not? If your reason is “I already paid into this,” isn’t that just an acknowledgement that it’s a taxpayer-funded system?

If you claim Obamacare is a “socialist takeover” of the American health care system, please explain how the terms “socialism” and “takeover” apply to a system of privately owned insurers paying privately employed doctors with support from privately paid premiums.

If you don’t think “enhanced interrogation” techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, being locked in small boxes and subjected to extended “stress positions” are not torture and therefore not legally actionable, would you say the same if those techniques were used by terrorist groups against American citizens?

Would you consider being strapped to a board, having a cloth put over your face, then having water poured on the cloth until you had the sensation of drowning to be torture if you had to undergo that yourself? If waterboarding isn’t torture, do we need to apologize and pay reparations to the families of the Japanese officers we prosecuted for war crimes for using similar techniques?

If you’re upset about government gathering of private data, were you as upset about it when the government’s ability to do so was greatly expanded by the Patriot Act? If not, why not? Do you support rolling back the Patriot Act? Do you think we should re-examine the principles set out in Smith vs. Maryland, the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that getting “metadata” about American citizens’ phone calls (i.e., information about who called who when and for how long) was not a “search,” since that information was not “private” at all? If not, why not, if you claim to be angry about government spying on us?

Normally, when I pose these sorts of questions to my fellow Americans, I get attempts to change the subject or angry denunciations of President Obama and/or “libs,” “leftists,” “statists” or “Obama-bots,” none of which have any connection to the question asked.

Can you do any better?

(Author's note: if you follow the link to the paper's website and check out the comments, you'll see that the answer to that last question is "no").

"Lawyering Up" Doesn't Always Mean Clamming Up

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When I heard about the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, I immediately thought two things.

The first was, "Thank God everyone's all right." (Except, it seems for the hapless Abdulmutallab, whose attempt to set off a liquid explosive in his underwear succeeded only in causing severe burns to his intimate areas. I confess I'm a bad person, because I laughed hard.)

The second thought I had was, "Hey, what's that giant whirring sound?"

That sound was, it turns out, the Right Wing Spin Machine firing up, ready to politicize this near-tragedy for all it was worth. President Obama, it seems, had done nothing right. He had stayed on his Christmas vacation in (gasp!) Hawaii rather than go on TV immediately, pat us on the head and "reassure" us that we were safe from Scary Dark-Skinned People with bombs in their underwear.

His Justice Department had chosen to indict Abdulmutallab and prosecute him in the civilian justice system rather than send him to Gitmo and put him in front of a Super Secret Military Tribunal. My God, Pat Buchanan sputtered on the Sunday after the attempt, he hasn't even been tortured yet!

But the thing that apparently put the worst twist in the wingnuts' knickers was that Abdulmutallab was - I can hardly bear to even say it - read his Miranda rights upon his capture!

If you've watched any television cop shows in the last 40 years, you know the Miranda warning by heart: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, etc. It's called the Miranda warning after the name of the case, Miranda vs. Arizona, which established the principle that a defendant had to be informed of these rights before being interrogated by the police.

Despite the outcry at the time (and ever since), it wasn't all that new or radical a principle: Both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the FBI's procedures required that a suspect be informed of his right to remain silent and of his right to counsel. But, as everyone knows, the FBI and the military were, then as now, well-known hotbeds of liberalism.

Now, it might seem strange that all this fuss was being made over the Undiebomber being charged in civilian court, while the same people never complained when the so-called "Shoe Bomber," Richard Reid, got the same treatment. Reid committed almost exactly the same acts during the Bush administration, and Dubbya didn't interrupt his vacation or make a statement about the attempt for six days.

The reaction from the Right? (Cue sound of crickets chirping.)

Both Republican Sen. Kit Bond and wingnut emeritus Newt Gingrich have struggled and failed in public to make some distinction, with Gingrich finally falling back on a time-honored tactic: making stuff up. Reid got the benefits of civilian law and the Undiebomber shouldn't, Gingrich said, because Reid's an American citizen. (Not true. Reid is actually British.)

But, the objection goes, if you let a suspect lawyer up, he'll clam up. You won't get any good intelligence from him! More Scary Dark-Skinned People might be coming to kill us! Aaaaaaaah!

Real life and real lawyering, however, are a good bit different from an episode of "Law & Order." The last instructions a terrorist gets from his commanders may be "resist until death," but any halfway decent lawyer, given a client like the Undiebomber who was caught in the act, is not, I guarantee you, giving that advice.

He's very likely telling his client, "Look here, Slim, your chances of walking out of here whistling are exactly zero. Maybe you need to start trying to save as much of your own behind as you can, with the only thing you've got that they want: names, places and methods."

And, it appears, that's exactly what's happening with Abdulmutallab. There've been some fits and starts; he was originally quite forthcoming with the intel, then did clam up for a while. But after his family was allowed to see him, Abdulmutallab has reportedly been "cooperating on a daily basis" and providing "actionable intelligence that could help prevent terror attempts on U.S. soil."

OK, so it's not as much fun for wingnuts as torturing him might be. But it's undoubtedly working better. And we don't have to abandon real American principles like the Rule of Law to do it.

Torture Works...Well, Maybe Not So Much

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Unless you're a real hard-core news geek, the name John Kiriakou probably doesn't ring any bells with you.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency's "intelligence analysis and operational directorates," is not, to put it mildly, one of the better-known figures in the whole debate over national security and the fight against terrorists. But I'm willing to bet you've heard about a statement he's made, because it's one of those statements that's been woven indelibly into the wingnut tapestry of talking points on the subject of torture.

Back in December 2007, Kiriakou (hereinafter referred to as "Mr. K") gave an interview to ABC's Brian Ross (one of the Right's most reliable water-carriers in the so-called "liberal media").

In that interview, Mr. K asserted that Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaeda commander, had cracked under a single short session of the torture technique known as "waterboarding." Further, said Mr. K., "From that day on, he answered every question. The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

That statement was all that the torture fans of Wingnut Nation like Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan needed to hear. Torture works, Limbaugh crowed while reporting on the ABC interview. "Thirty to 35 seconds, and he was done."

Except, as it turns out, Mr. K. didn't really know what he said he knew. In his recent memoir, "The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror," Mr. K admits that he wasn't there when the interrogation took place. "Instead," he said, "I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

And, he goes on to say, the information he got may have been part of a disinformation campaign within the CIA itself: "In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own."

Further, Mr. K. reiterated an assertion that had come out since his interview: Zubaydah wasn't just waterboarded once; he was tortured 83 times in one month - "raising questions," Mr. K admits, "about how much useful information he actually supplied."

So to sum up, the guy who told everyone that torture works, and that torturing a top al-Qaeda commander saved lives, now says, "Well, maybe not so much." But, as we've seen over and over, once a talking point gets woven into that tapestry, it's almost impossible to pull it out.

Within a few days after the failed bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by a poorly trained teenager who botched the job, Buchanan went on CNN to demand that Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab be tortured.

"We need to deny him his pain medication," Buchanan insisted, his voice rising hysterically until I began to wonder if soon only dogs would be able to hear him. "We need to subject him to harsh interrogation!"

Even the information that Mutallab was -apparently fully cooperating with the investigation didn't assuage Buchanan's lust to see him tortured, because, he asserted, we've "proved" that torture works.

Except we haven't. But the American Right seems determined to follow the words of St. Ronald Reagan, who famously said, "Facts are stupid things." They're aided in carrying out that belief by the so-called "liberal" media. ABC, for example, after heavily promoting Mr. K's interview back in 2007, has now conveniently buried his recantation deep in the back pages of its Web site.

The Right loves torture. They love it so much that, as Buchanan's rant shows, they want to torture people who are already talking. They don't really care if it works or not, because it's really not about gathering information. It's about taking out their rage and fear on someone, preferably someone who looks different from them. And they'll seize on any so-called justification for that, whether that justification turns out to be true or not.

So please, don't confuse them with the facts. And don't expect the "liberal" media to set the record straight when those "facts" turn out not to be facts at all.

The O RLY? Factor

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The kids on the Internet have a saying, or as it's known, a "meme." Whenever an Internet discussion gives rise to a claim that's patently absurd, someone is likely to respond with "O RLY?"
Pronounced "Oh, really?" it's a response that indicates anything from mild skepticism to outright scorn. For some reason, it's often paired with a goofy picture of a quizzical looking owl.
Well, you know me, always hip to what's happenin' now with the youths on the webs, there. So, without further ado, we bring you a column we call The O RLY? Factor:
First, there's hysteric-in-chief Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who got his knickers in a bunch when the failed Christmas Day attack on an American airliner was described as an "attempt." Hoekstra took to his Twitter account to try and raise the fear level: "It was a terrorist attack!" he tweeted. "Just not as successful as they (AQ) planned."
O RLY? Well, perhaps Rep. Hoekstra was so eager to politicize the incident that he didn't exactly think through the implications of what he was saying. See, it's a wingnut article of faith that "Thanks to George W. Bush, America wasn't attacked after 9/11."
If, however, you've changed the rules so that even an attempt counts as an attack, then that talking point goes right out the window, because there was a nearly identical failed attack by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. And therefore, all of Bush's waterboarding, wiretapping, renditions and "black sites" didn't keep us that safe after all, now did they?
Unless, of course, you attempt to rewrite history even further, like former White House mouthpiece Dana Perino, who asserted on TV, apparently with a straight face, that "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
O RLY? I seem to remember that Dubbya was inaugurated in January 2001 and that the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred in September of that year. Now, I'm no fancy political consultant like Ms. Perino, but I do have a nifty little device called a "calendar" that tells me that Sept. 11, 2001, was during President Bush's term.
Ms. Perino went on to insist that the terrible massacre at Fort Hood must be described as a terrorist attack. "We owe it to the American people to call it what it is," Perino said.
O RLY? Because so far, no one has developed any evidence that I know of that Nidal Malik Hasan was anything but a lone Muslim nutball who thought he was killing in the name of Allah.
But if we're going to call attacks by lone Muslim nutballs "terrorist attacks," then, as we've mentioned before in this column, you have to include DC sniper John Allan Muhammad, who was, according to his partner, Lee Boyd Malvo, engaged in "jihad."
You have to include Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, who drove his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to, in his words, "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world" and follow in the steps of his hero, 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta. And so, we're back to attacks on our country during Bush's term.
The star of today's O RLY? Factor, however, is former Vice President Dick "Shooter" Cheney, who's broken with years of tradition and decorum to try and undermine the president. (I remember when this was called "treason," but that's a rant for another day.) President Obama, Cheney sneered, "pretends we're not at war" with terrorists.
O RLY? This might come as a surprise to Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, or his deputy Khwaz Ali Mehsud, or to the top Al Quaeda official in Somalia, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. It might come as a surprise to Al Quaeda trainers Mufti Noor Wali and Abdullah Hamas al Filistini, not to mention senior Al Quaeda commander Zuhaib al Zahibi.
It might come as a surprise to them, that is, if they weren't all dead, just a few of the many terrorists killed by American forces in the past year.
It would definitely come as a surprise to those same forces who are still being deployed in the fight against Al Qaeda and their sponsors in the Taliban. Guess Shooter forgot about them.
This has been the O RLY? Factor. We report, you deride.
And just remember: The wingnuts only think they can get away with these outrageous lies because they think you're too stupid to know the difference.
RLY.

Hysteria

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Watch Pat Buchanan in this bit, and I think you'll understand, if you didn't already, how insane the wingnuts really are. Watch as Buchanan, supposedly some kind of right wing elder statesman, gets more and more hysterical, his voice climbing almost into a range only dogs can hear, as he demands that the Undiebomber be tortured, even though the reports are that he's already cooperating. Then he demands that we kill his entire family.

Then contrast that with the commentary from Washington Independent reporter Spencer Ackerman, who sounds like an adult. I particularly like the bit about "Muslim supermen with Muslim heat vision". A tip of the hat to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's rapidly becoming one of my favorite bloggers, for cluing me in on this one.

I certainly hope the adults win this conversation. I wish, however, that more Democrats would grow a spine and push back against this hysteria and fearmongering, not to mention calling these assholes out for politicizing this failed attack to raise funds and get votes.

When America Tortures, the Terrorists Win

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It looks like Dick "Shooter" Cheney has hit the talk show ­circuit, defending his administration's use of torture -- oh, sorry, "enhanced interrogation." This, after steadfastly denying that the Bushistas used ­torture and insisting that any attempt to obtain documentation about it would imperil national security.
Now he wants CIA memos released -- because, he says, they show that torture works (an assertion which Sen. Russ Feingold, who has seen the memos, disputes). But it's not really torture. And we didn't really do it. Sorry, it's hard to keep all these different stories straight.
But you know, I remember reading once about a country where enemy bombs were exploding all night, every night, all over the country, for weeks. The country's very existence was threatened.
In that country, there was a prison that held dedicated and fanatical enemy operatives. The worst of the worst. People who had information that could help save lives and even save the country.
They did not, however, use torture to get that information. In fact, an interrogator who did nothing worse than get frustrated and smack a prisoner on the back of the head was immediately sacked.
And they got good intelligence. On at least one occasion, they even managed to "turn" an enemy operative and use him to send false information to the enemy.
There was another country whose enemy threatened them with nuclear weapons and repeatedly promised to wipe their way of life from the face of the earth. That country didn't torture people, either. In fact, one of that country's best-loved leaders pushed for and signed a treaty forbidding torture.
I'm sure you've figured out who those countries were. The first was Great Britain during the Blitz. As described in a recent column by Christopher Hitchens, a prison known as Latchmere House just outside of London held what would now be called "high-value targets."
The commander of that prison was no touchy-feely liberal; he was a feared martinet known behind his back as "old Tin-Eye." But he firmly believed (as did Prime Minister Winston Churchill) that "Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information." His methods were based on gaining prisoners' trust. They worked. And Britain survived and prevailed.
The second country, of course, was the United States during the Cold War. Even under the grave threat of nuclear annihilation, a succession of American presidents refused to make torture official policy, even for people caught spying for Russia. And we won the Cold War. Because we didn't lose sight of who we were: We were the good guys.
One way you could tell the good guys from the bad is that the good guys didn't torture people and didn't use weasel words to make torture sound like something else. In fact, conservative icon Ronald Reagan signed an international treaty against torture "and other inhumane practices" which he called "abhorrent."
So were Churchill and Reagan wimps? Did they want to "offer the enemy understanding and therapy?"
No. They were leaders who realized that the contest they were in, like the one we're in now, was for civilization itself. And they chose not to fight barbarism by becoming barbaric.
As I've said before, the central front in the War on Terror is not Iraq or Afghanistan. The central front in the War on Terror in the American mind. The goal of the terrorists is to scare us into forgetting who we are. They want to make us act in a way that will allow them to say to the world, "Look! We were right! America is brutal and barbaric!" And the eight years of Bush/Cheney were one long retreat in that war.
Torture is a squalid and cowardly act ordered by people who have let fear master them. When anyone says "we have to torture because the ­terrorists do," they're surrendering to the terrorists. And yes, that includes any Democrats who signed off on it.
Because torture is wrong. It is un-American. It is not who we are.
Bonus: from the Pilot's letters column today: an answer for those who say "what we did isn't torture": Really, [defining torture is] the easy part. If we would prosecute anyone who did it to our sons or daughters for war crimes, then it's torture.

Thank you, Kevin Smith of Aberdeen NC for that.

Yoo: For Bush, Crushing Children's Testicles Is A-OK

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, asserting that the President can, under the right circumstances, order his people to crush children's testicles in front of the children's parents.



These are the monsters you elected, Bush voters. We tried to warn you...

And don't you DARE come around here blathering about Scary Brown People Who Want to Kill Us unless you are willing to say, in your post, these words, verbatim: "I am willing to crush children's testicles in front of the children's parents".

Oh, and I am going to find a copy of the Presidential Oath and stick it right up the nose of the next person who starts yammering to me about "the President's duty to protect America." The President takes and oath to "preserve protect, and defend THE CONSTITUTION of the United States of America. " And so far, he hasn't done much of a job of that.

We're Still the Good Guys, Right?

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The Washington Post recently did a story alleging that the CIA was running secret prisons for “high value” Al-Qaeda detainees in Eastern Europe. The prisons, known as “black sites,” raised concerns that alleged terrorist subjects might be subjected to torture at the hands of the United States or agents working on their behalf.

I can’t imagine why. I mean, how can someone assume that a prisoner being taken to a place described as a “black site” isn’t going to be treated anything but humanely?

The revelation came at a particularly inopportune time, all things considered. Republican Sen. John McCain, who knows a little bit about torture, had vowed to enact a congressional ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners. Incredibly, the Bush administration, led by Darth Cheney, opposed any such language. Cheney appeared before a group of Republican senators and insisted on an exemption from the torture ban for the CIA.

So, even while insisting that “the United States does not torture,” according to George Dubbya Bush, the administration is still, shall we say, keeping its options open when it comes to subjecting suspects to “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment. After all, you never know when you might want to have the CIA wire someone’s tender parts to a car battery because we think they might have something to do with terrorism.

Refresh my memory. When did we give up any aspiration to being the Good Guys? Wasn’t “Saddam tortures people” one of the multiple and ever-changing rationales for Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure?

Anyway, the revelation that we might be reviving the old-style Soviet chambers of horror incited a furor. The Republican leadership, specifically Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist, demanded an immediate investigation.

Not into the prisons themselves, mind you. They wanted to know who spilled the beans.

In a letter sent to the heads of the House and Senate intelligence committees, Frist and Hastert demanded to know: “Who leaked this information and under what authority? And what is the actual and potential damage done to the national security of the United States and our partners in the global war on terror? We will consider other changes to this mandate based on your recommendations. Any information that you obtain on this matter that may implicate possible violations of law should be referred to the Department of Justice for appropriate action.”

Yeah, fellows, why don’t you do that? Especially since, according to former Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott, the leakers were probably Republicans.

CNN’s Ed Henry reported on Tuesday that Lott “stunned reporters” by declaring that this subject was actually discussed at a ‘Republican senators only’ luncheon on the day before the Washington Post story ran. Vice President Cheney, according to Lott, was also in the room for that discussion. Lott said ruefully that senators “can’t keep our mouths shut,” and that “every word that was said in the meeting room went right to the newspaper.”

(One truly interesting thing about this is the question of why Lott would drop this dime on his own people. One theory I’ve read is that Lott is getting some payback on Frist because Lott blames Frist for his ouster as majority leader. Frankly, I’m torn between the impulse to weep for my country and the impulse to make popcorn, sit down and watch the fighting as the Republicans implode. I’m not proud of it, but I have to say that the prospect of watching this gang turn on one another promises more fun than an entire season of “The Sopranos.” But I digress.)

So. Back to torture. If there’s one encouraging thing here, it’s that there are some decent Americans left who’ll blow the whistle.

There are professionals in the CIA who don’t want to see that organization turned into the American Gestapo. There are people like McCain in the Senate, who still have a vision of the United States of America as the guys in the white hats. There are still people who are willing to blow the whistle when they see that vision tarnished by the prospect that we may turn into the very thing we hate, all in the name of — well, I don’t know.

Once we abandon our ideal of ourselves as an example for how a free country needs to behave, what exactly are we fighting for? When the issue is not “how could we be torturing people?” but instead, “how did you find out about it?”… are we still America?