Brainiac - The Boston Globe

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September 7, 2007

The terror lawyers

"The Terror Presidency," a new book by Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and head man at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 to June 2004, is getting a lot of attention, thanks to some special-access deals W.W. Norton cut with the New York Times magazine and Slate.

Slate dramatically labels excerpts of the book "Inside the Bush Power Grab," but Goldsmith explicitly states that his tale should not be framed as one of power-mad Bushies vs. brave lawyers who take a stand on the Constitution. True, Goldsmith clashed with White House lawyer (specifically, Cheney lawyer) David Addington whenever Goldsmith suggested, for example, that working with Congress on such things as detainee policy was the pragmatic thing to do.

Addington thought that that meant Goldsmith was in favor of "giving away" Presidential power. Goldsmith, however, countered that the then-Republican-controlled Congress would largely give Bush what he wanted anyway. So the disputes were largely about means, not ends. A strong defender of Presidential prerogatives, an opponent of the creeping influence of international law on American jurisprudence, Goldsmith absolutely doesn't want to be lionized by liberals. But that's sort of happening now.

To me, the most interesting part of the book comes when Goldsmith finally says what he thinks about the infamous "torture memos" written in 2002 and 2003 by the then-OLC-lawyer John Yoo, who ironically helped get Goldsmith his prestigious job. Retracting OLC opinions is almost never done, Goldsmith writes, and yet he knew, almost from the moment he arrived, that Yoo's torture documents were so bad that there was no alternative to pulling them.

As has been widely reported, Yoo defined torture so narrowly that many practices commonsensically considered torture would have been permitted under U.S. laws banning it. For instance, Yoo plucked a definition of "severe pain" -- a distinguishing characteristic of torture, under U.S. law -- from a manifestly irrelevant statute having to do with medical benefits. To be torture, Yoo concluded, an act had to cause the sort of pain associated with "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." These word games "didn't seem even in the ballpark," Goldsmith writes.

Moreover, Yoo concluded that the President could ignore anti-torture laws at will, if he deemed torture necessary to protect the nation. In failing to mention precedents suggesting that Congress might have some voice in the matter, Goldsmith writes, Yoo's memos displayed "an unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis."

Goldsmith finally asks: "How could [Yoo's] opinions reflect such bad judgment, be so poorly reasoned, and have such a terrible tone? And why would OLC write an opinion that was so unnecessary and overbroad?" Goldsmith's own answer is anticlimactic, after that damning peroration: Terror threats were pouring into the White House in 2002 and 2003. It's understandable, he says, that even brilliant, honest public servants would suffer lapses in judgment.

Yoo, for his part, has said he stands by the memos and that Goldsmith caved to political pressure from liberals. So he, anyway, doesn't agree with Goldsmith's generous verdict of temporary insanity.

One wonders whether Jay Bybee does. The OLC chief who signed off on one of Yoo's memos is now a federal-appeals court judge on the Ninth Circuit. He has lifetime tenure.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 02:01 PM

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Brainiac's bedside table

"Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work And What They Mean" (Da Capo), by Douglas Wolk, is -- I hate to admit it -- a fine book. (Like everyone else who's spent decades been encouraging Americans to take the medium of comics seriously, I perversely dislike it when Americans actually do so. Last month, I cringed when the New York Times instructed readers (reg. req.) to honor the legacy of superhero artist Jack Kirby. But I have to get over it.) Wolk does a terrific job of distinguishing between "art comics" and what are sometimes called mainstream comics, while insisting that readers should not divide themselves into hostile factions. He deftly argues that there are good things about "bad" comics, and bad things about "good" comics. And then he illustrates his points with close analyses (many of which he originally published in The Boston Phoenix, not to mention The Believer, Salon, and The Village Voice) of works by artsy and mainstream masters of the medium like David B., Alison Bechdel, Chester Brown, Charles Burns, Steve Ditko, Will Eisner, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, James Kochalka, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. If you've been feeling behind the curve on the whole graphic novel phenomenon, Wolk's book provides a turbo-thrust.

Speaking of comics, Fantagraphics has issued the latest volume in their beautiful "Complete Peanuts" series. It spans the years 1965 and '66, during which time Snoopy first takes on the Red Baron, and Peppermint Parry rocks Charlie Brown's world. I scanned the panels above only because they confused me when I was a kid. ("Sydney or the Bush is an Australian phrase urging that total success or failure be staked on one risky action. In this case, Charlie Brown beating up a bully who teased his sister.) Get rid of those cheapo, incomplete paperback "Peanuts" collections from the '60s and '70s -- the ones whose spines are cracked -- and pick up this collection. You won't regret it.

Also from Fantagraphics: "Devilish Greetings," a collection of vintage postcards featuring images of the devil. Designer and cultural archaeologist Monte Beauchamp has been showing off these flea market finds for years in the pages of BLAB!, the graphics-illustration-comics annual he founded and edits. Now they're collected in one devilishly enjoyable book.

And now for something completely different. "Prehistoric Digital Poetry" (Alabama), by New Jersey Institute of Technology's C.T. Funkhouser, is an "analytic history" of digital poetry -- which is to say, computer-assisted poetry composition. An offshoot of "constraint-based writing" (think of Georges Perec's 1969 Oulipo novel "La Disparition," which doesn't include the letter "e," or Michel Thaler's 2004 novel "Le Train de Nulle Part," written without verbs), digital poetry takes advantage of the programmable nature of the computer to create poems. Why "prehistoric"? Because computers were being used to program poems as early as 1959, according to Funkhouser... and Oulipo wasn't founded till 1960. This is an exhaustive study. Hats off to the author.

Until yesterday, I'd say the best fictional treatment of the mythical Amazons I've ever read -- besides the first few issues of "Wonder Woman" -- was Heinrich von Kleist's "Penthesilea," a tragic drama in which Amazons interrupt the Greek siege of Troy and nearly capture Achilles. But now, I've got a new favorite: "Les Guérillères," an experimentalist 1969 novel by the French author Monique Wittig, newly translated by David Le Vay and published on these shores by the University of Illinois Press. The titular guérillères are a tribe of contemporary warrior women who seek to subvert and destroy patriarchy using whatever means necessary, from japery to linguistics to bullets. They form a temporary autonomous zone and, in this violently humorous passage, defend it:

Mary McCarthy called the book "a delectable epic of sex warfare," but it's not a particularly racy novel. It's utopian, incantatory, visionary. Good stuff!

Another fascinating new example of 1960s-era French utopianism: "Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970" (MIT), by U. Arizona art historian Larry Busbea. During the period in question, French and non-French architects and artists alike were intensely engaged in the quest for an ideal city of the future. A city whose inhabitants' material needs would be met by automation and technology, a city whose buildings and streets would be works of art, a city that might actually float in the air. C'est magnifique!

Coming in October: "Dear Future Me" (F&W), edited by Matt Sly and Jay Patrikios. Sly and Patrikios are the founders of FutureMe.org, a website that permits you to send an email to yourself, to be delivered at whatever point in the future that you choose. I think this is a great idea, so I blurbed this book (shortly before the Globe instructed its freelance writers that we shouldn't blurb). Here's what I wrote:

The book looks very attractive, indeed, but the silver metallic cover doesn't reproduce well on Amazon. So I've posted a photograph, above.

The terror lawyers

Brainiac's bedside table

Wrinkly Reagan

On the Road (again)

Brainiac's favorite blogs

Lit-Crit Conflict Diagram

Taking Things Seriously -- the party