Businessy risk

Via.

Look out, it's America's worst law professor!

DECEMBER 10, 2014 11:00 AM

Ignoring Risks to National Security 
The Feinstein report reflects the Democratic party’s contempt for U.S. intelligence agencies. 

By John Yoo

Happened to catch this minutes after seeing Valerie Plame getting interviewed on MSNBC—remember her, the Cheney administration (Karl Rove in particular) got pissed off with her husband for casting doubt on its account of Iraq's imaginary uranium shopping and decided to punish him by revealing her identity as a CIA operative running a clandestine network in Iran, thereby destroying her career and incidentally wrecking for years the US ability to collect intelligence from inside Iran, a country said to be kind of important.

So that accusation of "contempt for US intelligence agencies" in the deck copy (and what's with that lower-cased "party"?) sounds a little unearned. One side thinks the agency needs (a lot of) reform and the other thinks you can throw very substantial bits of it in the trash to carry out a minor political vendetta. I'll leave you to decide which qualifies as "contempt".

But what interests me is the notion of "risk" running through this piece, sometimes very oddly indeed:

We cannot blame CIA agents who will doubt the empty promises of support from politicians the next time that they are asked to risk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to keep our nation safe. 

The passage of the Declaration of Independence referred to is not about a risk but a pledge: the Founders pledged their lives and fortunes and sacred honor, that is dedicated them to the cause. This dedication could entail losing their lives or spending their fortunes, but those 18th-century gentlemen would certainly never have accepted a risk to their honor—they wouldn't have risked their fortunes, in the sense of gambling with them, either, and risked their lives only as they felt their honor compelled them to. Honor being the most important of the three.

Yoo is just drooling in this sentence, of course; I'm pretty sure CIA agents don't risk their fortunes by going to work, or if they do it's not in their contract (do they all really have fortunes?). But they do put their honor at risk if they do dishonorable things; if they torture helpless prisoners (that has nothing to do with whether they're evil or not; if you have the power to hold them naked and freezing in the dark for days and weeks at a time and give them a hummus enema, they're helpless), or if they tell lies to their employers, who are us. That's contemptible behavior, and it dishonors them, and their country, and I would prefer politicians not to support them in it, thanks.

And they do it in our name, on the theory that it's keeping us from risk:

In the wake of the [9/11] attacks, the White House and congressional leaders unanimously demanded that the CIA adopt tough, aggressive measures to prevent any future attacks. The CIA did not go rogue. At politicians’ urging, it developed new tactics to fight a new kind of enemy.

As demanded by

the very same politicians who urged the CIA to go on offense. In May 2002, Feinstein herself declared, “I have no question in my mind that had it not been for 9-11 — and I’d do anything if it hadn’t happened — that it would have been business as usual.” She made clear her understanding that the CIA would take unprecedented steps. “It took that attack, I think, to kind of shiver our timbers enough to let us know that the threat is profound, that we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.

Not exactly. Yoo is too shitty a scholar to check out where this quote (which has been cycling around the rightwing noise machine for a few days) comes from, but the source was an opinion piece by Todd Purdum, and the kinds of extreme non-business-as-usual self-protective action he thought she had in mind were somewhat different:

Most experts agree that the fight must range from new efforts at sharing intelligence and tracking bank accounts abroad, to cracking down on loopholes in student visas and border controls. Some of that is underway, but much remains to be done.

No chaining people to the wall or cramming them in boxes there, and no waterboarding. It's only old Feinstein so maybe I shouldn't care, but making her into a 2002 torture advocate is Breitbartery, decontextualizing bullshit.

Of course as we now know, the CIA at that point had been planning their black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques for months already, since November 21, per today's piece by Matt Apuzzo and James Risen, long before they had any prisoners to try them out on; John Rizzo, former general counsel to the agency, is lying pretty baldly when he says they thought about it only after they found themselves stuck with Abu Zubaydah in March 2002:

“If Abu Zubaydah had been on a military base somewhere under the D.O.D. umbrella, maybe we wouldn’t have even thought about these techniques. I don’t know.”

He knows very well. But Feinstein certainly didn't have a clue, in May, that anything of the sort was under discussion.

There are a lot more lies and distortions in Yoo's piece, I believe, but any competent Googler should be able to sort them out. I'm here at the moment to talk less about his dishonesty than the lack of a sense of honor that he unwittingly expresses.

It was George Washington's sense of sacred honor that led him to forbid his troops to abuse prisoners in such strong terms:

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775 (via antiwar)

There's a kind of conservative-tradition rhetorical stance of suggesting that there are only two kinds of people with honor: the heroes—soldiers, cops, firefighters, etc.—who professionally risk their lives (and are therefore entitled to a "thank you for your service"), and the entrepreneurs who supposedly risk their fortunes (and are therefore entitled to preferential tax treatment, bailouts, and so forth), while the rest of us have essentially no honor at all, too poor to venture our money and too wussy to venture our bodies, who must therefore be protected against all risks by any means necessary (or certain types of risk, since there are many risks they don't think we need to be protected against at all, such as being shot by white people, or catching hepatitis, or getting our pensions cut without warning).

I don't think that's the way George Washington thought; I think he believed that everybody has a stake, and should welcome a share of the risk, in freedom. I do have a sense of honor for what it's worth, and I'll bet you do too. I don't want to be protected by base and infamous means. I'd really rather die (easy to say, given that it's a vanishingly tiny chance, much smaller than Cheney's 1%). As an American, I feel very specifically dishonored by this story.

Update: Scott Lemieux disposes of Yoo's worthless legal argument.