Astore, who is a retired Lt. Colonel in the USAF,  taught at the Air Force Academy and served as Dean of Students/Provost at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC).  He suggests that torture and abuse were not undertaken by the Bush/Cheney administration for pure Machiavellian,  ends-justify-the means reasons.  He argues instead that the U.S. did not have the personnel to elicit information in a humane (or legal) manner.  Aside from the fact that it takes months to properly train interrogators , we did not have translators who were proficient in the languages needed for these wars, i.e., Arabic, Pashto, or Dari.

 "Because we lacked the language and cultural skills to play good cop, we played bad cop as a short cut", says the author. 

 And he asks: "Is torture the last refuge of the impatient and the incompetent?  If so, how do we instill patience and competence?"

 I don't think impatience  and incompetency are the only reasons people  turn to torture, but they were present in the  Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration and probably contributed in their decisions, including the decision to invade Iraq and subsequently to torture.   Field agents can be steeped in culture and language so that they become competent in certain fields, and perhaps with enough training an impatient person can learn to be patient.  In other words, we can train, or instill if you prefer,  "good cops".  

 The real onus lies with the leaders, though, and they are what they are.  Their characters are formed and they are the ones who do the instilling once they are in power.  Impatience and incompetence in the leaders inevitably leads to the same in corporate body.  Although it is possible to "grow in office", there are times when a solid bedrock of character is required and nothing else will do.  The decisions about  whether  to wage war or not and  to abide by the law or not and to treat fellow humans humanely or not  are not things you grow into  nor can they be instilled in a person already in power.  These decisions are part of the foundation and if the foundation is crumbling,  the corporate body collapses with it.

So - my answer to Astore's first question is a qualified yes and for the second, a yes and no, depending. I invite you to put in your 2 cents.  Do you think it was incompetence and impatiences that led them to torture?

 1.  "I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." *

 Or this?

 2. "Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."*

 Hint:  The speakers were not Dennis Kucinich and Michael Moore.

 You may be surprised to hear that the first quote came from Thomas Jefferson and the second from Abraham Lincoln.  The dangers corporations presented to our freedom and democracy were recognized long ago, but instead of crushing the aristocracy of corporations in its birth, we gave birth to the corporate person.  Perhaps, as thepeoplechoose said in his blog, corporations are not citizens, but they are persons under the law and enjoy the protections of the 14th amendment just as people do.

 We have been fretting recently about the corporate influence in the healthcare reform debate.  But hold on to you hats. According to Richard L. Hasen, things are about to get  a whole lot worse. In an article in Slate, Hasen says that the Supreme Court is about to open the spigot on corporate campaign fundraising.  SCOTUS delayed a ruling on the Hillary Movie suit until September, and it is widely** thought that the usual suspects will rule in favor the plaintiffs and against campaign finance reform that curtails corporate funding.  

  I'm not a lawyer, but personhood is the only excuse I can think of that justifies corporations tampering with elections and legislation.  Every election cycle I get boiling mad about this, and then let it go once votes are counted.  If those five justices come down on the corporate side this boiler may explode.  To save myself, I've been exploring with google and  I found an interesting , but puzzling site: Reclaim Democracy.org

 We believe that corporations are not persons and possess only the privileges we willfully grant them. Granting corporations the status of legal "persons" effectively rewrites the Constitution to serve corporate interests as though they were human interests. Ultimately, the doctrine of granting constitutional rights to corporations gives a thing illegitimate privilege and power that undermines our freedom and authority as citizens. While corporations are setting the agenda on issues in our Congress and courts, We the People are not; for we can never speak as loudly with our own voices as corporations can with the unlimited amplification of money.

 Sounds like a proper liberal site, right?  They are working for constitutional change on the personhood question.  But check out the people behind it:

 Our Executive Directors are:

* Steve Spanier, Irvine, CA, and
* Jean-Pierre Swennen, Laguna Niguel, CAOur Board Members are:
* Jean Gore, Boulder, CO -- Past president of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
* Jeff Milchen, Bozeman, MT -- Founder
* Tim Nickles, Jackson, WY -- Independent business owner and activist
* Steve Spanier, Irvine, CA -- National Executive Director and President of our Orange County, CA Chapter
* Jean-Pierre Swennen, Laguna Niguel, CA -- National Executive Director and Director of our Orange County, CA Chapter

Much of our work is done by volunteers dispersed around the country. All chapter organizers are volunteers.

Bozeman MT?  Irvine, CA?  Orange County, CA? Jackson, WY?  Could these hotbeds of far right political activism really be promoting something as sensible as corporate personhood reform?  If so, I'd say we liberals are behind the times.  The more likely explanation is that  a few liberals have survived in these outposts.  I am encouraged in any case.    I say DOWN WITH CORPORATE PERSONHOOD!   

 *See  How Corporations Became Persons published in 2003 by the Unitarian Universalist Association in UUWorld.

 **Court raises stakes in anti-Hillary movie

 Who should be featured in an article about Accountability Reporting and Digging Deep? None other than Leonard Downie, Jr,  Executive Editor of the wapo until September 2008, and Bob Woodward. The irony hit me like a blast of hot desert air and almost took my breath away, or possibly just made me snort.  Here sat these two do-nothings on an Accountability  Reporting discussion panel while the best Accountability journalist at the wapo had just been fired.

Woodward is still riding on his Watergate laurels of course and says his "aggressiveness" failed him on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, but neither of these men knows exactly why they didn't dig deeper.  (A little fuzzy logic and a few memos from the bushies is my guess.) 

 Woodward said, "Obviously, when you're going to war you want the evidence to be hard." Had Post reporters gotten together with Downie "to figure out what questions aren't answered," though, the editor "would have said, 'Get on that; let's mobilize.' We failed to mobilize on that."

And what did Downie have to say about it? "Downie responded by citing the complexity of the story judgments that were required to weed out all the inaccurate reports emerging in the days following the terrorist attacks."   TRANSLATION:  If we want to keep those WH memos coming, we'll  have to take the neocons' word for it.

 The Post didn't mobilized on the invasion issue, the torture issue, the warrantless spying issue, or the habeas corpus issue or...hmmm.  Anyone remember what issue they did mobilize on?  Ah, they broke the Walter Reed story, I believe.  But too many of the horrors of the last eight years were, apparently, too *complicated* for the paper to tackle. 

 Downie and Woodward and their fellow journalists are the grassroots of the MSM, they claim. The pillars of the press.  The defenders of freedom. But there seems to be trouble brewing in rootsville.  Downie says "We're not talking about the survival of newspapers; we're talking about the survival of news."   

 Downie, who appears to be a drama queen in addition to defender,  is hardly in a position to help the American press save itself since he and his former colleagues  at the wapo and elsewhere are part of the problem.  Frankly, I would call it roots rot.  They're looking everywhere in their root cellar for a cure when it can only be found by dragging their own actions out into the sunlight for some serious scrutiny.  Firing one of their critics is just digging a deeper hole for themselves, not "digging deep"  for the news.

Wordnet's definition of treason:
-a crime that undermines the offender's government
-disloyalty by virtue of subversive behavior
-treachery: an act of deliberate betrayal

Cheney undermines the president with his calls to Israel; kirk undermines the economic well-being of the entire country by talking out of school to China; and limbaugh advocates failure of the president and preaches boycott of GM products. Don't these behaviors easily conform to items one and two and combined become item three, treachery?  Who can tell me when dirty politics ends and treason begins? Is there anyone here who believes the republicans have not crossed that line?

The introduction explains that there are on-going investigations in the DoJ on various aspects of the torture issue and there are likely to be full investigations in the future. They discuss impeachment, actions that might be taken by the DC Bar Association, as well as criminal prosecutions. The video lasts over an hour and covers the entire discussion, including questions.

The moderator begins the discussion with the question Why now?  We've known about these issues for years.  Why are we just now talking about doing something?