In her opening remarks at the Global Counterterrorism Forum, Hillary Clinton had this to say:

Some believe that when it comes to counterterrorism, the end always justifies the means; that torture, abuse, the suspension of civil liberties – no measure is too extreme in the name of keeping our citizens safe. But unfortunately, this view is short-sighted and wrong. When nations violate human rights and undermine the rule of law, even in the pursuit of terrorists, it feeds radicalization, gives propaganda tools to the extremists, and ultimately undermines our efforts. The international community cannot turn our eyes away from the effects of these tactics because they are part of the problem. I know that the United States has not always had a perfect record, and we can and must do a better job of addressing the mistaken belief that these tactics are ever permissible.

The fascinating thing about this quote is how thoroughly oblivious Clinton seems to be regarding the ways in which her own country doesn’t think there’s a problem with means/ends justifications for human rights violations.

She gestures in this direction at the end of the quotation, but she’s quite clearly implying that previous administrations, notably the Bush administration, have had a serious problem on this score.

But not the administration in which she’s Secretary of State? No human rights problems?

HT: Jacob Williamson.

When he passed away five years ago philosophers (Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum and Gianni Vattimo) and newspapers (The Guardian, Tehran Times, and Le Monde) from around the world praised him as one of the most influential thinkers of the second part of the twentieth century.

Although Rorty was a committed academic who taught in a number of distinguished universities and was awarded several institutional prizes, he always remained an independent thinker capable of critiquing not only these establishments but also his own nation when necessary.

The piece from which I’ve quoted doesn’t quite live up to its title — “Five Years Without Rorty” — insofar as it doesn’t really tell us what we’ve missed about Rorty since his death in early June 2007.

In his final years, Rorty wrote quite a bit about the War on Terror and was particularly critical of the way that the Bush administration made use of the September 11 terrorist attacks to keep the U.S. on a permanent war footing.

I have often wondered what Rorty would have said, first, about the election of Barack Obama and, then, how Rorty would have discussed the successes and failures of Obama’s first term. It would also have been fascinating to read Rorty on the Arab Spring, on the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and on the way that human rights have been expanded and contracted at home and abroad.

I know what his philosophical work would have looked like; there wasn’t a great deal of variation regarding his central thesis about the role of philosophy from the late 1980s. But a good dose of Rorty’s liberal pragmatism would have been a nice contribution to our public policy debates over the past half-decade.

We’ve known for quite some time that our justice system is capable of condemning innocent men to death. But some people — like Antonin Scalia, George W. Bush, and Rick Perry — continued to claim the system worked so well that it was always able to save them from execution. With the all of this information about Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham, it’s hard to believe that anyone will continue to make such a claim going forward. Except we know, of course, that they will.

Many years ago now, I bristled at the plot of The Life of David Gale precisely because it implied that, since innocent people really aren’t executed, opponents of the death penalty would need to go so far as to enter into an elaborate conspiracy to make it happen.

That, of course, is demonstrably false:

A Texas judge who reviewed the controversial 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham planned to posthumously exonerate the father who was put to death for killing his three daughters in a house fire.

Scientific experts who debunked the arson evidence used against Willingham at his 1992 trial and a jailhouse witness who recanted his shaky testimony convinced District Court Judge Charlie Baird in 2010 that “Texas wrongfully convicted” him. But Baird’s order clearing Willingham’s name never became official, because a higher court halted the posthumous inquiry while it considered whether the judge had authority to examine the capital case.

[…]

Baird’s intended order never came to light because the court of appeals criticized his handling of the case and prevented him from resuming work on it before he left the bench at the end of 2010 after choosing not to seek re-election. No one asked him for it after the court of appeals blocked him, he said.

Baird, now an attorney in private practice, said he was moved to share the document with HuffPost after reading about Carlos DeLuna, a Texan who a Columbia University team said this week may have been wrongly executed in 1989.

In 2006, Justice Scalia wrote that there hasn’t been “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

When do we suppose Scalia will be prepared to shout his error from the rooftops?

In a piece on Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald made ample use of a new Washington Post/ABC News poll that highlights how progressives are willing to tolerate (or even support) Barack Obama’s policies that they vehemently protested when they were carried out George W. Bush:

[L]ong before Barack Obama achieved any significance on the political scene, I considered blind leader loyalty one of the worst toxins in our political culture: it’s the very antithesis of what a healthy political system requires (and what a healthy mind would produce). One of the reasons I’ve written so much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so remarkable to see these authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in the very same political movement — sophisticated, independent-minded, reality-based progressives — that believes it is above that, and that only primitive conservatives are plagued by such follower-mindlessness.

I was asked by Jeff Miller to comment on Greenwald’s piece. Here’s my commentary:

Greenwald is right. It’s plainly hypocritical to denounce something in one’s political opponent and then turn around and embrace it in one’s political ally.

That said, I don’t think it’s surprising and it doesn’t anger me the way that it angers Greenwald. What we see here, not all that surprisingly, is that, like conservatives, these people are political animals. They care a great deal about having their party’s candidate in the White House. So how does this realization make me feel? Mostly, I suppose, it makes me sad. And I suppose that’s because I generally like progressives (or liberals or Democrats or whatever) and want them, as Greenwald does, to be better than this. I identify with them (sometimes), as they tend to support a lot more of the things that I support.

To say a bit more, I think what we might conclude is that a whole lot of people are willing to overlook something terrible about someone provided they can find a bunch of other things that aren’t terrible about him. Obama says (and does) some things that progressives support; he also does some things that progressives hate. So many progressives overlook the things they hate — or, what is really weird and difficult to understand, decide they don’t hate those things quite so much after all — because they generally support what Obama does. The same, for them, simply couldn’t be said for George W. Bush, as progressives didn’t find the trade-off that they find with Obama. There was, for them, nothing in Bush’s agenda that they supported.

Of course, all of this brings up the question that Greenwald and I debated a few weeks ago, namely why more progressives aren’t willing to look past Ron Paul’s racism (amongst a host of other things) in order to embrace his beliefs about civil liberties with which they agree. Doesn’t Paul, Greenwald asks, provide progressives precisely that trade-off, some good for some bad? He does indeed.

But the things that Ron Paul does badly, he does very badly. And these are things that absolutely incense progressives. Conversely, the things that Obama has done well — and for which he’s been hammered by conservatives since he started doing them — have been right in the progressive wheelhouse. And so some progressives likely recognize the trade-off and support Obama despite all of the policies that Greenwald highlights. What’s more, they can’t help but recognize that all of the alternatives to Obama are even worse than he is on these issues (or, in the case of Paul, worse on a host of other issues).

Why not simply criticize these policy choices, though, while still supporting Obama against his GOP rivals? Why minimize or ignore them? Well, some people do. As Greenwald does point out (parenthetically) at one point in his piece, “35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose these Obama policies.” This, it seems to me, would be the best possible position to adopt and, consequently, it’s the position that I’ve tried to adopt. If a better alternative presented, perhaps I’d be quick to jump ship and lend my support … but, to be clear, it would need to be an alternative that vocally supported both the domestic and foreign policy choices that I support.

This is the alternative that progressives thought they were getting when Obama burst onto the scene. And so they have been sorely disappointed, especially with regard to foreign policy and (some) civil liberties. Realistically, though, it’s not at all clear that we’re going to do any better any time soon. Of course, this is no reason not to complain and criticize, and every reason to complain and criticize. Greenwald and I agree that having the conversation about our policy preferences is incredibly important; it’s the only way for change ever to occur, even if it’s glacially slow.

But it’s important to note that some people will make trade-offs and some people will plainly and simply rally behind the leader of their party. I don’t think these people are repulsive, as Greenwald suggests their hypocrisy makes them. I just think they’re ordinary Americans who are faced with unfolding events and who are balancing some things they believe against other things they believe, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully.

I’m often asked — given my frequent posts about the death penalty — why I don’t offer more criticism of President Obama for his position on the issue. It’s true: Obama says that he doesn’t oppose the death penalty, he has failed to step in when he might have done so, and — perhaps more to the point — he has approved the targeted extrajudicial executions of American citizens.

In other words, Obama could be doing a whole lot better.

But it’s also important to note that, when it comes to the death penalty, his administration is actually a whole lot better than others have been … at least when it comes to the federal death penalty. Here’s some information from a story I read back in August:

But not everything related to the federal death penalty is stuck in neutral gear. Last month, after more than two years of study, the Justice Department quietly adjusted the directions it gives federal prosecutors who want to seek the death penalty.

The changes didn’t get much attention, but they represent a turnaround in two main areas, Bruck says.

“This administration is much more willing to listen to what the local prosecutors who actually have to prosecute the cases in court are saying about when the death penalty should be sought,” he says.

So federal officials in Washington are consulting more with prosecutors across the country. That follows a controversy from the Bush presidency when Attorney General John Ashcroft sometimes overruled the decisions of U.S. attorneys who chose not to seek the death penalty.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, says the change makes sense. “The federal government should be very cautious about you know, intruding on areas that have traditionally been under state control and where it’s the conscience of the community that determines this,” Dieter says.

The Obama Justice Department made another significant change recently, Bruck adds.

“This administration is much less likely to seek the death penalty or to authorize or require a prosecutor to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murders of drug dealers,” he says.

Experts say most juries don’t like to sentence people to death for killing drug dealers. Removing those cases means the Justice Department seeks capital punishment less often.

Let me reiterate: I’d like to see the President do even more. If I had my way, he’d come out and tell the populace that he can’t support the death penalty because it’s racist, arbitrary, unfair, costly, and an abuse of human rights, commute all of the death sentences within his power to commute, and lead his party to push for the end of the death penalty in the state legislatures. But I recognize that’s just not going to happen. Maybe he really does believe in the death penalty. Maybe he just recognizes the political reality he faces. Regardless, it’s noteworthy that his administration is doing better on this issue than previous administrations. Even if a comparison to the Bush administration’s position on the death penalty is a pretty low bar, a comparison to the Clinton administration’s position also shows Obama to be doing a whole lot better on an issue that matters a great deal to me.

Amnesty International has issued a short statement about President Obama’s decision to sign the National Defense Authorization Act:

“Despite expressing serious reservations, the Obama administration has paved the way for legislation that will authorize indefinite detention. The bill places enormous power in the hands of future Presidents, and the only answer the President has is to say “trust me.”

“Once any government has the authority to hold people indefinitely, the risk is that it can be almost impossible to rein such power in. President Obama has failed to take the one action – a veto – that would have blocked the dangerous provisions in the NDAA. In so doing, he has allowed human rights to be further undermined and given Al Qaeda a propaganda victory.”

While I’m not entirely sure that we still need to be referencing Al Qaeda and the whole “If you do X, then the terrorists win” thing at this point, Amnesty’s statement is very much in line with my own thoughts on the subject of the NDAA. At bottom, Amnesty is right about one very important point: The U.S. government, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has weakened the concept of human rights even as both presidents have used the language of human rights to make a case for a variety of policies (some of which have actually respected human rights and some of which have had a deleterious effect).

We’re getting precariously close to the point where the language of human rights loses its meaning entirely.

This interview with Dick Cheney is well worth reading; it’s a great example of the way that one can manipulate others by giving them exactly what they want and what they least expect from you. Cheney knows very well that nothing could be worse for President Obama — when it comes to voters on the Left going into the 2012 election — than the appearance that someone like Cheney approves of his policies. So that’s precisely what Cheney does here, arguing that Obama campaigned as the Anti-Bush but, in practice, has continued all of Bush’s policies.

Here’s the best part:

My concern has been I think the Obama administration has inappropriately characterized what they inherited from us. It would have been nice if they’d said, “Yeah, we benefited from what the prior administration did, by way of interrogation and developing these original leads that ultimately put us on Bin Laden’s trail.” But set that aside, that’s politics. The fact of the matter is I think it’s been policy.

I was very upset when we had talk by the Justice Department about prosecuting the intelligence professionals who’d carried out our policies in the enhanced-interrogation area. They’ve backed off that since. That’s good.

I worry that we do not have now the capacity to interrogate high-value targets. I think that program’s been shut down. If there’s been a replacement put in place, I don’t know what it is.

In short, Cheney’s biggest complaint is that the Obama administration hasn’t been forthcoming enough about how they’ve done exactly what the Bush administration did. He’d like some more credit, especially since he’s being good enough to give Obama his due for so many excellent policy decisions.

That said, for all of his cunning here, Cheney can’t walk away content to make the argument that Obama is simply a weaker version of Bush; he has to return to the argument he never tires of making, namely that “enhanced interrogation techniques” are really terrific. This is one stark difference between the Obama administration and the Bush administration, and Cheney — because of his deep, deep investment in getting Americans to believe that torturing people makes us more secure — can’t let it go, even as he’s attempting to highlight for the Left exactly how another vote for Obama might just as well be a vote for eight more years of George W. Bush.

So, let’s all sit back with Cheney, smile slyly, light up a cigar with a thousand dollar bill, and watch the Left stomp their feet with indignation about the myriad ways in which their messiah of Hope and Change sold them out. Let us chorus of “I’m not voting for anyone in 2012” ring out!