Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote a baffling column today (1/24/12) praising part of Newt Gingrich's political persona--not the bad stuff, but man "of big ideas," as he put it (italics his). Cohen gives one example:

Out of nowhere, he has exhumed Saul Alinsky, whose fame is limited to university sociology departments, and yet whose name is so perfectly evocative of old-style radicalism, vaguely European in sound, that it fits Gingrich’s recent formulation, "people who don’t like the classical America." Who dat, Newt?

The reference, although a tad obscure, is nevertheless intriguing. It shows that Gingrich is familiar with the late father of community organizing who died in 1972, and who by occupation and residence (Chicago) is suggestive of Barack Obama. Alinsky was no communist but he was a radical, and to have his name mentioned by a presidential candidate is just plain thrilling--also chilling. This is the bright and the dark side of Gingrich. He knows his stuff and often can't stop from showing off.

Out of nowhere? Using Alinsky to bash Obama has been a staple of right-wing media for at least the past four years. Alinsky was regularly included in Glenn Beck's shrill conspiracy theories. Linking Obama to Alinsky doesn't prove Gingrich knows his stuff--it means he listens to a bit of radio, or perhaps watched some Fox News Channel over the past several years.

Doubly unhelpful to Cohen's argument is the presence of this Post news article today:

If it's a Republican debate night, it's time for a Saul Alinsky reference.

Alinsky, as anyone who has paid close attention to community organizing, Fox News or presidential politics in the past four years knows, is a liberal hero and conservative villain, best remembered for his theory of empowering the disenfranchised.

I guess Richard Cohen hasn't been paying attention to politics.

But still, why does Cohen go so far to praise someone whose views he largely finds repellent? Because he hopes Gingrich will move Obama to the right:

He's an unscrupulous man, a one-car demolition derby, but if he goads Obama to unaccustomed bravery and other Democrats to rethink outdated liberal dogma (affirmative action, etc.), then he will have done his nation a great service.

In theory, presidential campaigns are a valuable opportunity for journalists to evaluate candidates' positions on important issues so citizens can make an informed choice. Actual media coverage is different, of course. And it's striking how some media voices diminish the importance of what the candidates are saying, treating it as meaningless theater that need not bear any relation to what they really think.

It's remarkably cynical--and arguably dangerous as well. But that seems to be the approach when it comes to Republican candidate Mitt Romney. As Jim Naureckas already pointed out, there's a tendency in the corporate media to argue that Romney's flipflops are a strength, not a liability.

In the meantime, one should apparently be comforted by the fact that, soon enough, the "real" Romney will prevail. Here's Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (1/10/12):

Conservatives fear Romney is not telling the truth about his ideological conviction. Others, such as myself, are counting on it. We will forgive him these trespasses since to want to eliminate much of the Cabinet, reject all science regarding climate change, white-out the Federal Reserve or the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, round up all undocumented immigrants, mindlessly turn education over to local authorities, end the government's role in just about everything, and prohibit abortion, contraception and the errant midday sexual thought (pretty much the entire conservative platform right there) would severely hurt the American economy, not to mention ruining any chance of fun.

And Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times ("Waiting for Mitt the Moderate," 1/5/12):

If we do see, as I expect we will, a reversion in the direction of the Massachusetts Romney, that's a flip we should celebrate. Until the Republican primaries sucked him into its vortex, he was a pragmatist and policy wonk rather similar to Bill Clinton and President Obama but more conservative. (Clinton described Romney to me as having done "a very good job" in Massachusetts.) Romney was much closer to George H.W. Bush than to George W. Bush....

So, in the coming months, the most interesting political battle may be between Romney and Romney. Now, do we really want a chameleon as a nominee for president? That’s a legitimate question. But I'd much rather have a cynical chameleon than a far-right ideologue who doesn't require contortions to appeal to Republican primary voters, who says things that Republican candidates have all been saying and, God forbid, actually means it.

These are remarkable endorsements of a fraudulent and insincere brand of politics.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/11), tipped off by at least one of his Post colleagues, decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza to see the festival of anti-Semitism firsthand. Lo and behold, he found none:

Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry--not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to google the phrase "Zionists control Wall St."  Google "nut case" instead.

Before you send your note of thanks to Cohen, wait until he gets to his real point:

This right-wing attempt to discredit both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party's hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible. It's made possible, however, because no one this side of the Moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it marches off to some location to highlight what we all know--that Wall Street guys are rich--and their slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.

Cohen goes on to call Occupy Wall Street "a destination for the aimless...a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." It is also

a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans...an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including--by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation--the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

For good measure, Cohen makes the argument that the right-wing smears of OWS are derived from the left:

The imputation of anti-Semitism, however, adds gravitas to this lighthearted event. The smear is in deadly earnest, a reminder that the devious tactics of the Old Left have been adopted by the New Right. (No accident, maybe, that the practitioners are the descendants of lefties.)

Well, he was on the right track with that first paragraph.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/5/11) takes the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to say that he's sorry:

I went home on September 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war--against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term.

Wait--we all did what now?

Someone who was really sorry for stoking war fever would be honest enough to point out that not everyone was on board. And of course Richard Cohen knows this--he was writing columns attacking those who weren't "going along with it." As he wrote about Dennis Kucinich, "How did this fool get on Meet the Press?"

There are plenty of thoughtful pieces--Drew Westen's in the New York Times over the weekend being the most recent one--that try to figure out what's going on with Barack Obama.

Then there's Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (8/9/11), who begins by retelling a story about FDR:

In her autobiography, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalled telling President Franklin D. Roosevelt about her visits to the camps of migrant workers. She was especially poignant about the children and their lack of Christmas toys when the president tried to stop her. "Don't tell me any more, Helen," FDR told the woman who is probably best known for losing a dirty Senate race to Richard Nixon. She was stunned. Roosevelt was crying.

Cohen asks: "Can anyone imagine Barack Obama doing anything similar?"  I haven't a clue, but Cohen does--he's seen the evidence:

The answer--at least my answer--is no. And this is quite amazing when you think about it. FDR was a Hudson River squire--down to his cigarette holder and cape. Nonetheless, he could connect to the less fortunate. Obama, in contrast, was raised in the great American muddle, not rich and not poor. Yet when the stock market fell more than 500 points last week and the image that night was of the president whooping it up at his birthday party, the juxtaposition--just bad timing, of course--seemed appropriate. He does not seem to care.

FDR cried when he heard the stories of children living in poverty. Obama didn't even cry when the Dow lost 500 points. What an uncaring monster.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote a rather apoplectic column about presidential candidate Michele Bachmann this week, lamenting the fact that other GOP candidates aren't calling her out for being completely ill-prepared for the job:

Bachmann does not deserve to be in the presidential race. Legislatively, she has done little, she knows next to nothing and what she thinks she knows is wrong.

He also called her "an ignoramus" and "a bigot when it comes to gays."

Straight news coverage obviously isn't going to put things like that. But what's remarkable is how reporters seem to give Bachmann credit for being sort of, kind of, well-informed--at least relative to another political figure.

Here's Time magazine's recent take:

It is easy to dismiss Bachmann as a shorter Sarah Palin with a Minnesota accent. But there are important differences. Whereas Palin can stumble over simple questions, Bachmann is far surer on her feet. When Fox News host Chris Wallace recently recounted some of Bachmann's most outrageous statements and asked point-blank whether she is a "flake," the congresswoman didn't blink and delivered a firm recitation of her credentials. During a 2010 interview on MSNBC's Hardball, Bachmann stuck so resolutely to her talking points that the exasperated host, Chris Matthews, asked whether she was "hypnotized." She smiled and repeated them again.

"They'll throw nothing but heat at her, and she stays in the batter's box and doesn't flinch," marvels an adviser to a rival Republican candidate. Her fans say that's because Bachmann, who has two law degrees, offers more substance than Palin and can speak intelligently--and without Palin's mangled syntax--about policy issues. "She's smart. She's well informed," says Ralph Reed. It's true that Bachmann has a scant House record and a penchant for factual misstatements, including her bizarre claim that NATO air strikes killed up to 30,000 Libyans. But few other politicians so effectively combine policy, ideology--and pure star power.

Talk about exasperating.

The ability to recite talking points instead of answering questions can be called a lot of things-- being "sure on your feet" isn't one of them.

Bachmann has a "penchant for factual misstatements"--one example is given, sandwiched between tributes to her intelligence. Compare that to this assessment from early this year, courtesy of a PolitiFact editor:

"We have checked her 13 times, and [found] seven of her claims to be false and six have been found to be ridiculously false," PolitiFact editor Bill Adair told Minnesota Public Radio.

He added that no other politician had been factchecked as often as Bachmann without saying something that was found to be true.

"I don't know anyone else that we have checked more than a couple times that has never earned anything above a false," Adair said. "She is unusual in that regard that she has never gotten a rating higher than false."

That's pretty astounding--and doesn't really come through in the coverage of her campaign.

On top of all of this, of course, is the notion--rampant in the coverage of her campaign--that Bachmann should be compared to Sarah Palin. There's something strange--and deeply sexist--about this. But without a doubt, being compared to the most famously inarticulate national political figure of our era does a tremendous favor to Bachmann.

Richard Cohen is wondering when other Republican presidential candidate will criticize her record; the same question should be asked of the press corps.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes (6/7/11):

I once worked for an editor who banned the word "oxymoron." I don’t know why. It's a good word, meaning a contradiction in terms. The dictionary offers some examples: "wise fool" and "legal murder." I would like to cite another: Barack Obama. He sends contradictory messages.

That sounds reasonable enough--what are some good examples? Cohen writes:

The fact remains, no matter what Obama says--and almost no matter what he does--the business community deeply feels that he is unsympathetic to them and their goals. They say all they want to do is make an (honest) buck, but to do that they need consistency, predictability and--it would be nice--a pat on the back.

Whatever you think of that, it's not really an oxymoron. It's an example of a class of people who have apparently arrived at a conclusion about Obama that doesn't seem to be rooted in reality. Not even Cohen finds their case persuasive:

My reading of it is not much different than Obama's, but then I am not a businessman, do not eat in their clubs or fly charter. I do know that many of them feel that Obama is at root a hostile liberal, a former community organizer (this is often cited as if the word "community" was synonymous with communist) who would tinker with God's most perfect economic system by giving the government an inordinate role. You will look in vain for anything Obama has said to substantiate this view.

Again, interesting observation--but not at all an oxymoron.

Cohen sees the same thing with Israel policy:

Here again Obama's oxymoronic quality is on display. As with the business community, Obama's assurances to the pro-Israel community mean little. His precise words are discounted. As with the business community, rumor or anecdote trumps pronouncements or actions--something Obama once said, a pro-Palestinian friend he once had. Something like that. The whisper has more volume than the speech itself. It is an odd state of affairs.

Again, hard to see how this would qualify as an oxymoron.

Maybe Richard Cohen's old editor banned him from using that word because he didn't seem to know what it means.

The big Israel-Palestine news of the week is Richard Goldstone's op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday (4/3/11). The short version you pick up from the media is that Goldstone has "retracted" his UN-sponsored report on war crimes during Israel's Operation Cast Lead war in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.

The "retraction" language is fairly common--as in the  New York Times headline (4/4/11), "Israel Grapples With Retraction on UN Report."

But is there any real retraction?

Goldstone, a retired South African judge, chaired a four-person fact-finding commission investigating crimes committed by both sides. As he explains in his Post column, the Israelis refused to cooperate, which obviously affected the report's findings:

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion.

Goldstone writes that he now believes that "civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."  He sides with a follow-up report from the UN, which credits Israel for launching some investigations of their Gaza war--though he added:

I share the concerns reflected in the McGowan Davis report that few of Israel's inquiries have been concluded and believe that the proceedings should have been held in a public forum. Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn't negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.

At CounterPunch, Jonathan Cook notes (4/5/11):

Israel would certainly like observers to interpret Goldstone's latest comments as an exoneration. In reality, however, he offered far less consolation to Israel than its supporters claim.

The report's original accusation that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes still stands, as does criticism of Israel's use of unconventional weapons such as white phosphorus, the destruction of property on a massive scale and the taking of civilians as human shields.

Cook adds that some observers see this as a mostly misdirected debate over intentionality--whether Israeli forces meant to kill civilians, or merely disregarded the fact that their actions would kill civilians. As Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch put it at the Guardian (4/5/11):

Goldstone has not retreated from the report's allegation that Israel engaged in large-scale attacks in violation of the laws of war. These attacks included Israel's indiscriminate use of heavy artillery and white phosphorus in densely populated areas, and its massive and deliberate destruction of civilian buildings and infrastructure without a lawful military reason. This misconduct was so widespread and systematic that it clearly reflected Israeli policy.

Roth also tweeted some criticism of the New York Times' coverage:

NYTimes wrong on Goldstone oped. He said intentional killing wasn't policy. No retraction on indiscriminate warfare.

And:

NYT wrong again. Goldstone says Israel didn't intend to kill but its policy was still crime of indiscriminate warfare

So what has happened then? Goldstone--who has been under tremendous pressure to distance himself from the report that bears his name--now says that there may have been cases where the Israeli military was not behaving with intent to kill civilians. Left unchallenged is the fact that many civilians were actually killed in attacks where little was done to prevent such killing.

But those details may not matter, if Richard Cohen's column in the Washington Post today (4/5/11) is any indication. Cohen writes that it was "shocking" that "Israel was accused of deliberately targeting civilians during its brutal 2008-09 war with Hamas." But now comes vindication:

Goldstone has retracted his findings. He no longer believes that Israel intentionally targeted civilians during the Gaza war (although he still believes Hamas did) and says that any deaths were inadvertent--the usual fog of war, the usual panicked decision.

The report focused on Israeli actions that were "either reckless, disproportionate or deliberate." There is nothing to suggest that most of the report's findings are in serious dispute. But to Cohen, it's now all "the usual fog of war." Cohen also claims:

As Goldstone acknowledges, Israel has looked into every charge of war crimes--incident by incident. Some soldiers have indeed been punished because some awful things happened.

It is not clear where Goldstone says or implies this in his brief op-ed. As Roth and other writers have pointed out, the Israeli investigations have yielded few indictments.

Cohen closes by writing:

Those who gleefully embraced the Goldstone report have to ask themselves why. They may hate the answer.

One might assume that he's suggesting anti-Semitism on the part of Goldstone's "gleeful" champions. Ironically in a piece admonishing those who rush to judgment, Cohen recalls that

a West Bank settler family of five was recently murdered in their home by what are universally thought to be Palestinians. This, too, has put Israel on edge.

As I noted before, there is plenty of speculation that a Palestinian committed those murders--but no evidence to date to that effect. Apparently speculation is enough for Richard Cohen. He should ask himself why. He may hate the answer.

Richard Cohen recently (FAIR Blog, 2/15/11) took to the Washington Post to argue that Teach for America is wonderful because.... Well, it just is. He predicted that the "best teacher in America" is likely to be drawn from the ranks of the program, which draws recent graduates from elite universities into the teaching profession. His only evidence of the greatness of this scheme was that the program is very competitive.

On Sunday, George Will joined Cohen in praising Teach for America--more evidence, if any was needed, that TFA enjoys a great ride in the corporate media. In Will's column, was "Teach for America: Letting the Cream Rise," he explains:

Until recently--until, among other things, TFA--it seemed that we simply did not know how to teach children handicapped by poverty and its accompaniments--family disintegration and destructive community cultures. Now we know exactly what to do.

Will says TFA is "a template for transformation." And the cream is, obviously, rising:

TFA has become a flourishing reproach to departments and schools of education. It pours talent into the educational system--80 percent of its teachers are in traditional public schools--talent that flows around the barriers of the credentialing process. Hence TFA works against the homogenization that discourages innovation and prevents the cream from rising.

As Bob Somerby noted at the Daily Howler, Will offers no evidence to back up his argument. And even Teach for America doesn't make such claims; Somerby points out that the TFA website offers this lukewarm assessment:

TEACH FOR AMERICA: Research over time has conclusively shown that Teach For America corps members' impact on their students' achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers.

So this program takes the best and brightest, the talented cream, and turns them into...average new teachers?

Somerby adds:

Indeed, in a new C-Span tape (click here), Malcolm Gladwell asks Kopp how well TFA teachers perform. To her credit, Kopp abandons her practice of making anecdotal miracle claims and seems to suggest that TFA teachers aren’t a whole lot better than everyone else. (This happens at 0:51. Rather typically, Gladwell shows no sign of having prepared for his session with Kopp, whom he describes as one of his heroes.) By the 1:05 mark, Kopp is back to making a miracle claim about a beginning teacher in Phoenix. But again: Will doesn’t cite any research about such miracles because it doesn't exist.

Luckily for Will and Cohen, tributes to TFA don't require any evidence. Call it faith-based punditry.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's Teach for America column today (2/15/11) demonstrates a real problem with logic. "Cut Teach for America Funding and We'll Be Closer to Flunking the Future," declares the headline, with Cohen kicking things off this way:

The best teacher in America was in Washington over the weekend. So was the best principal. I cannot name these individuals because they are early in their careers, and the truth of the matter is that I am just playing the odds. They are members of Teach for America, a kind of Peace Corps for the school room--a program so select that most applicants had an easier time being admitted to their college than they did getting into Teach for America. No matter. Its funding is being cut.

Cohen goes on to explain that the program's funding likely won't be cut. But the bigger problem is the assumption that Teach for America teachers are the best--he's just "playing the odds" here, predicting that the best educators of the future will be drawn from the ranks of this "Peace Corps for the school room." His evidence for this could charitably be called "thin." Teach for America, he writes,

is supposed to produce smart students. It also produces incredible statistics. This year it got 48,000 applicants and accepted 5,300 of them. About 18 percent of the Harvard senior class applied; so did 27 percent of Spelman's, a traditionally black women's school.

Note that these statistics don't say anything at all about whether Teach for America actually produces "smart students."  But that's all that Cohen comes up with.

What are the real odds that Teach for America teachers will be the best, or even good? I have no idea. Barbara Miner's profile of Teach for America in the Spring 2010 issue of Rethinking Schools points out that one of the chief criticisms of the program is that many who go through the two-year program don't stick around the classroom. But are they better teachers? One study found "no instance where uncerti­fied Teach for America teachers per­formed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings." Yes, the program attracts a lot of applicants. But it also seems designed to promote career paths outside the classroom:

TFA, meanwhile, actively promotes the value of joining its teaching corps, especially for those thinking of gradu­ate school or immediately transition­ing to a corporate job. Its website boasts of TFA's partnership with over 150 graduate schools offering TFA alumni benefits such as two-year de­ferrals, fellowships, course credits and waived application fees. The most popular schools for TFA alumni are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwest­ern and the University of California-Berkeley--with Harvard the overall top choice. Its employer partners, which ac­tively recruit TFA alumni, are equal­ly prestigious and include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, KPMG, Credit Suisse, McKinsey & Company and Google.

Cohen's column is yet more example of corporate media's fondndess for Teach for America. "If the maniacal budget cutters have their way, the best teacher in America will become another investment banker," he writes.  But Cohen provides no evidence that Teach for America produces such teachers--and apparently doesn't think he needs to.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush's new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10):

As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of Iraq's weapons systems so as to suggest that any other president given the same set of facts would have gone to war. "I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war," he writes. On that score, he is simply not credible.

The accumulating evidence at the time showed that Iraq lacked a nuclear weapons program and did not have biological weapons either. As for its chemical weapons program, while harder to ferret out, it not only no longer existed, but even if it had, it was insufficient reason to go to war. Poison gas has been around since the Second Battle of Ypres. That was 1915. "The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat," Bush writes. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

The late 2010 version of Richard Cohen is certainly up to speed on the pre-war Iraq intelligence. Unfortunately, the 2003 Richard Cohen wasn't, as he most memorably wrote about Colin Powell's UN presentation (2/6/03):

The evidence he presented to the United Nations--some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail--had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman--could conclude otherwise.

In that column, Cohen acknowledged the nuclear evidence was weak, but the chemical/biological weapons case was "so strong--so convincing--it hardly mattered that nukes may be years away, and thank God for that."

He also wrote that at the UN presentation, "when the by-now hoary charge was made that a link existed between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad, it was Powell who made it--and it hit with force." So a hoary charge sounded convincing coming from Colin Powell. Is the idea that Powell's just a better liar than Bush?

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran's nuclear program:

They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug.

Classy.

The fact that this appears in a column chastising Barack Obama for not being serious enough only makes it worse ("Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States."). But it's worth remembering that Cohen also wrote that "only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman" would have argued with Colin Powell's 2003 UN presentation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses the Frank Ricci Supreme Court case to attack affirmative action:

The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things have changed. For most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant. Everyone knows this. Every poll shows this. Maybe the Supreme Court will recognize this.

First of all, affirmative action was never solely about racism--though the media have long made race their primary consideration in how they talk about the issue.

But to Cohen's actual, umm, "point": Every poll shows that race is irrelevant? Too bad for Cohen that the Washington Post recently asked people about this in a poll (1/13-16/09):

"How big a problem is racism in our society today? Is it a big problem, somewhat of a problem, a small problem or not a problem at all?"

A Big Problem: 26%
Somewhat of a Problem: 48%
A Small Problem: 22%
Not a Problem:  4%

Richard Cohen appears to be in the 4 percent who don't think that racism is at all a problem anymore.  The other 96 percent of us wish him luck in his journey back to the real world.

A couple of recent FAIR Blog posts have dealt with apologists for torture: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who misled ABC News about the effectiveness of waterboarding.  What's striking is how they both offer the same insight into why torture is attractive--it met their post-September 11 psychological needs.

Kiriakou told ABC (12/10/07): "At the time I was so angry and  I wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the United States that I felt it was the only thing we could do."

He sounds a lot like Cohen writing in the Post (4/28/09):

The horror of September 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station--the memorials still fresh--without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day--yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance--and that ember glows within me still. I know that nothing Obama did this month about torture made America safer.

It doesn't sound like it's about making America safer, though, does it?  It sounds like it's about taking care of Richard Cohen's deep psychic wounds.  Does torture work--to make newspaper pundits feel better?  That seems to be the real question on the table.

In his column today, Washington Post's Richard Cohen tells us that he is against torture, which itself is not remarkable.  His real point is this:

Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works--sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works. I refer you to the 1995 interrogation by Philippine authorities of Abdul Hakim Murad, an al-Qaeda terrorist who served up extremely useful information about a plot to blow up airliners when he was told that he was about to be turned over to Israel's Mossad. As George Orwell suggested in 1984, everyone has his own idea of torture.

If the threat of torture works--if it has worked at least once--then it follows that torture itself would work. Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves. This is also the position of Dick Cheney, who can sometimes be both, but in this, at least, he has some support.

If something "sometimes or rarely" works, that's hardly a testament to its effectiveness. As others with more first-hand knowledge of the use of torture than Richard Cohen have argued, torture doesn't produce reliable information.

What Cohen seems to be saying the mere threat of torture cracked this one case. First of all, it would seem that Murad was, in fact, tortured. But whether it was torture or threat of torture was really what "worked" is not really the question; as Washington Post writer Lorraine Adams wrote in a review of an Alan Dershowitz book:

What solved the case, court records show, was that Murad was stupid enough to have started a fire from the explosives, which brought police. In the apartment, they found a computer that detailed the plot, which entailed using liquid explosives to simultaneously destroy 12 commercial planes carrying Americans. Police easily confiscated the explosives in the apartment; the computer supplied names and numbers for the plotters. All were arrested and convicted.

Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture, reached a similar conclusion:

As the Washington Post has reported, Manila police got all their important information from Murad in the first few minutes when they seized his laptop with the entire bomb plot. All the supposed details gained from the 67 days of incessant beatings, spiced by techniques like cigarettes to the genitals, were, as one Filipino officer testified in a New York court, fabrications fed to Murad by Philippine police.

In other words, it would seem that Richard Cohen is using an example of torture not working to argue that torture might, in theory, work.

The more puzzling leap of faith, though, comes when Cohen writes that the "torture works" theory has defenders in high places: "Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves." Well, of course they can. There are "some" scientists who don't believe in climate change. Does the fact that they have that opinion mean that they're right?