The temptation grows

Updated The temptation, that is, to say "tolja so." Yes, yes, okay, I shouldn't be saying it yet, yes, it's too early to make final judgments, but, still!

From Tuesday's Wall Street Journal Online:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say....

Mr. Obama is being advised largely by a group of intelligence professionals, including some who have supported Republicans, and centrist former officials in the Clinton administration. They say he is likely to fill key intelligence posts with pragmatists.

"He's going to take a very centrist approach to these issues," said Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. ...

[Obama] voted for a White House-backed law to expand eavesdropping powers for the National Security Agency. ...

The new president could take a similar approach to revising the rules for CIA interrogations, said one current government official familiar with the transition. Upon review, Mr. Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.

In other words, to 'keep the road open" to use torture, which is precisely what "techniques not approved by the military" means. So the problem wasn't with torture, it turns out, it was just that the White House didn't exercise close enough control over it. It wasn't with the illegal wiretapping, which Obama ultimately approved. It wasn't with the felonies, to which he has given a pass. It wasn't with the claims of extraordinary powers. It wasn't, that is, with the lawlessness, the power grabs, the spying, or the torture. The problem was simply that is wasn't focused enough.

Just last week I said that I suspect that the reason Obama flip-flopped on FISA is that he started contemplating having those powers himself. And this "review" appears to be moving in exactly that direction: It's always easier (and tempting) to embrace power when you are the one wielding it. Although I must admit in fairness the "review" isn't complete and may at the end of the day favor the Constitution, the law, and human decency above cold-blooded, amoral "pragmatism," I very much doubt it. The kind of people he has surrounded himself with give me little cause for optimism: The head of his transition team on intelligence is one John Brennan, who as George Tenet's chief of staff was an advocate of using torture and last spring, already a foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign, openly pushed for telcom immunity, for the government to use commercial databases for data mining, and for "continuity" in both intelligence personnel and intelligence programs - while brushing off a question about privacy and civil liberties by saying they "mean so many different things to different people."

So while I can still hope for the gest, I really do feel like saying "I told you so."

Footnote: One other point to be made here is that it illustrates just how distorted, how corrupt, how morally twisted, our governing ethics have become when the idea of using torture, just with "greater oversight," is regarded as a "centrist," a moderate, a middle-of-the-road, position.

The fact is, some issues do not deserve to be discussed as if they were areas about which reasonable people could disagree. Some things lie outside the boundaries of human decency and need to be condemned as such. Torture, which is both inhumane and ineffective, which destroys the humanity of the torturer even as it destroys the body of the tortured, is one such.

In the first issue of his newspaper The Liberator, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said this in regard to slavery:

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; - but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - AND I WILL BE HEARD.

So should it be with torture.

Updated with the information about John Brennan.