Good God Dammit

MSNBC's headline right now is "Terrorist Torture Deal". They don't know how right they are. This is a deal to decide when to torture and how to torture, and it gives the President of the United States the sole authority to determine what is and is not torture.

[I]t only takes 30 seconds or so to see that the Senators have capitualted entirely, that the U.S. will hereafter violate the Geneva Conventions by engaging in Cold Cell, Long Time Standing, etc., and that there will be very little pretense about it. In addition to the elimination of habeas rights in section 6, the bill would delegate to the President the authority to interpret "the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions" "for the United States," except that the bill itself would define certain "grave breaches" of Common Article 3 to be war crimes.

So as long as the torture doesn't go on for too long, it's legal. And actually, we'll never end up knowing what's done anyway, as long as detainees have no way to challenge violations in a court of law, eliminating habeas corpus rights. Digby has been absolutely right on this from the beginning, and he continues here:

So the good news is that these fine Republicans were all able to sit in Dick Cheney's Senate office and hash out what "amount of time that a detainee's suffering must last before the treatment amounts to a war crime" in the last three days. We can sleep better tonight knowing that they decided that the suffering must do "serious and non-transitory mental harm, which need not be prolonged." Excellent. And now we know that "cruel or inhuman treatment" that would constitute a crime under the War Crimes Act is comprised of "techniques resulting in 'serious' physical or mental pain, rather than 'severe.'" That's just the kind of "clarity" they've been looking for. On with the interrogations.

Oh and they will leave it up to the president to decide if standing shackled naked in a cold room with ice water splashed randomly on you for 72 hours is torture. Or if being forced to walk around on a leash like a dog or have fake menstrual blood smeared all over your face is degrading. (I wonder what he'll say?)

The best part is that they might let the prisoners see classified evidence used against them that's been redacted or summarized, nobody who was tortured will be able to sue the government or hold anyone in it legally liable and there's a nice fat habeas corpus loophole so these embarrassingly innocent people down in Gitmo will stay under wraps.

It's tough and smart for St John and the Republicans, for sure. For reasonable people, not so much. This is a terrible bill and I don't think the Democrats will get any benefit from backing it.

Democrats got flat-out rolled. The Republicans both get to look like the tough SOBs doing what it takes to stop terrorists, AND the sensible types who defend American principles. In fact this bill does neither. Sensible people get this, but the Democrats are so piss-pants afraid of being called soft on terror (which they will be called anyway) that they decided to crawl into a hole and hide on this significant attack on American values and the Constitution. Part of the problem is that the media decided only to report on the pie fight, and consider a deal between Republicans and other Republicans as a "bipartisan compromise". But clearly, in public statements, Democrats were loath to insert themselves into the debate. They're gutless cowards, and they still don't seem to understand that their ACTIONS are far more important than their words. Hiding out during this national security debate reinforces the frame that they're not tough on national security.

Between this AWOL move on national security and Arianna Huffington's discovery that the national leaders plan to run on THE ECONOMY (!)

This is a crying shame. The 2006 election — and with it control of the House and the power to investigate the Bush administration’s abundant outrages — is there for the taking… if only Democrats would put down the economy crack pipe and put their energy into hammering Bush and the GOP for their many tragic foreign policy and national security failures, which have combined to make America far less safe.

The only thing Democrats have going for them right now is that the candidates out in the country are much more attuned to reality than those in DC. As Kos says:

I'll be shocked if we wake up on election day controlling either chamber of Congress. If we do, it'll be because enough candidates decide to give those DC consultants and staffers the middle finger and run the race they know they need to run to win.

The Fighting Dems coalition should right now, today, put out a clear statement against torture, against George Bush deciding what is and isn't torture, and against this heinous bill. They should have a unified message that every candidate could rattle off in a 30-second soundbite. They need to run their own campaign and literally tell the DCCC to get the hell out of the way. The Dems in DC right now don't know how to play the game of politics. They don't know how to win, they just know how to be afraid of losing. I will support the candidates that understand this.

UPDATE: Charlie Pierce has more and he's unsparing (and right):

You worthless passel of cowards. They're laughing at you. You know that, right?

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage. They're laughing at him, too [...]

And the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives -- "Aggressive interrogation techniques" -- the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

This was as tactically idiotic as it was morally blind. On the subject of what kind of a nation we are, and to what extent we will live up to the best of our ideals, the Democratic Party was as mute and neutral as a stone. Human rights no longer have a viable political constituency in the United States of America. Be enough of a coward, though, and cable news will fit you for a toga.