Poking holes in the Brookings Institution's "preening conceit"--"they bequeath their website with an '.edu' suffix... They are 'scholars.' Just ask them and they'll tell you"--Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/26/09, ad-viewing required) quotes one blogger fundamentally debunking Brookings mainstay William Glaberson's May 22 New York Times contention that, as U.S. president, Barack Obama "has sworn an oath to protect the country": "Barack Obama did not swear an oath to 'protect the country.' He swore an oath to protect the principles upon which the country was founded and the document in which those principles are enshrined."

Looking more broadly at "Beltway world," in which "the Brookings Institution is a 'liberal' think tank," Greenwald explains that

when it comes to foreign policy and civil liberties, these are three of its most consequential contributions over the last several years: (1) the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, in the form of Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon (working in tandem, as usual, with the ultra-neoconservative American Enterprise Institute); (2) unquestioning devotion to Israel's right-wing policies, in the form of major funder Haim Saban ("I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.... On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk"); and (3) indefinite, preventive detention with no charges or trial in the form of Benjamin Wittes (with his close associate, Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith), who also serves at the right-wing Hoover Institution and writes for the Weekly Standard. Only in Washington would such a group be deemed anything other than extremist.

In fact, U.S. journalists see the Brookings Institute as so far from the "extreme" that they have made it the No. 1 most-cited think every single year since FAIR started tracking such things in 1995. See our annual Think Tank Spectrum report by longtime contributor Michael Dolny.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/19/09, ad-viewing required) "gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism":

Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country's institutions--particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media--acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it. And they still do.

Nothing has produced as much media praise for Obama as his embrace of what [the New Republic's Jack] Goldsmith calls the "essential elements" of "the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy." That's because--contrary to the ceremonial displays of regret and denouncements of Bush--the dominant media view is this: the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism was right; those policies are "centrist"; Obama is acting commendably by embracing them; most of the country wants those policies; and only the far left opposes the Bush/Cheney approach.

Anyone who doubts that should consider this most extraordinary paragraph from Associated Press' Liz Sidoti:

Increasingly, President Barack Obama and Democrats who run Congress are being pulled between the competing interests of party liberals and the rest of the country on Bush-era wartime matters of torture, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Beyond quoting Sidoti having "described Obama's embrace of Bush's policies as 'governing from the center,'" Greenwald goes on to note that "her AP colleague Tom Raum said virtually the same thing today":

Internationally, Obama reversed course and is seeking to block the court-ordered release of detainee-abuse photos, revived military trials for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and is markedly increasing the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan....

Still, even though Obama may be irritating liberal purists on both national security and domestic policy, he has no real choice but to move toward the middle.

Greenwald quips that "apparently, Bush/Cheney terrorism policies are Centrist. Who knew?"

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site's lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was "Tortured in a Chinese Prison." Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer's ordeal--"kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door...handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air"--to be "a major editorial breach" for the paper that so agilely dances around the T-word when reporting on U.S. actions:

So that's torture now?... Using the editorial standards of America's journalistic institutions--as explained recently by the NYT public editor--shouldn't this be called "torture" rather than torture--or "harsh tactics some critics decry as torture"? Why are the much less brutal methods used by the Chinese on Fischer called torture by the NYT, whereas much harsher methods used by Americans do not merit that term? Here we find what is clearly the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: Everything is different, and better, when we do it. In fact, it is that exact mentality that was and continues to be the primary justification for our torture regime and so much else that we do.

Along those same lines, I learned from reading the New York Times this week (via the New Yorker's Amy Davidson) that Iraq is suffering a very serious problem. Tragically, that country is struggling with what the Times calls a "culture of impunity." What this means is that politically connected Iraqis who clearly broke the law are nonetheless not being prosecuted because of their political influence!

Luckily for us, such a scenario could never play out under the press' watchful eye (let alone with its outright endorsement) here in the U.S. where "everything is different, and better."

In his latest Salon blog entry (5/1/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald displays his find of "a perfect illustration of how severely our political spectrum has shifted in the last two decades and how depraved and extremist our political and media classes have become"--one quote of the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer rebutting those who "believe you never torture. Ever":

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. . . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. . . .

as compared to the text from Article II/IV of the "Convention Against Torture, signed and championed" by none other than Ronald Reagan:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . .  Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law.

That Ronald Reagan's ideas "are ones that are now--in the view of our dominant media narrative--the hallmarks of The Hard Left" is clearly demonstrated by the fact that

Reagan's explicit view that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" permits signatory nations (such as Spain) to prosecute torturers from other countries (such as the U.S.) is now considered so fringe that it's almost impossible to find someone in mainstream American debates willing to advocate it.

Writing at Salon (4/23/09, ad-viewing required) of how the "sheer criminality" of George W. Bush-era torture, "really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates," Glenn Greenwald is thoroughly unsurprised by their behavior as "media stars are forced to address it":

Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses--things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions and accountability when they abuse their power.

To Greenwald,

This remains the single most notable and revealing fact of American political life: that (with some very important exceptions) those most devoted to maintaining and advocating government secrecy is our journalist class, of all people. It would be as if the leading proponents of cigarette smoking were physicians, or those most vocally touting the virtues of illiteracy were school teachers. Nothing proves the true function of these media stars as government spokespeople more than their eagerness to shield government actions from examination and demand that government criminality not be punished.

Listen to the current edition of the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09).

Blogging from his regular Salon perch (4/20/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald notes that the public wants to investigate U.S. torture (that's what the polls tell us), but:

These facts about public opinion are virtually always excluded from establishment media discussions, and those who advocate investigations and prosecutions--the view held by large percentages, if not majorities, of Americans--are virtually never heard from. That's because the belief that elites should be exempted from all consequences when they break the law is as close to a trans-partisan religious tenet of Beltway culture as it gets.

Consider yesterday's Meet the Press panel discussion of this issue involving David Gregory and five exceedingly typical Beltway insiders--the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein, Fortune's Nina Easton, Time's Rick Stengel, former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former "moderate" Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. That's three ostensibly non-partisan journalists, a right-wing fanatic, and a New Republic/DLC Democrat from Tennessee whose career was built on proving how much he embraces GOP policies--that's called "diversity of views" in Establishment Media World.

Writing that, "exactly as one would expect, they were all in full and complete agreement that there must be no investigations or prosecutions," Greenwald heard "not a syllable uttered that political officials should be treated the same as ordinary Americans when they got caught breaking the law"--not that this should surprise anyone much: "As always, only the suffocatingly narrow Beltway consensus is heard in our political debates, even when huge percentages of Americans reject it." Listen to the recent FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Mark Danner on Torture" (4/10/09)