Goldsmith left the government and joined Harvard at a time when two generally separate streams of events were occurring and, because of Goldsmith, were joined together to some extent at the Harvard Law School. One stream was that, even though the mainstream media’s performance from 9/11 onward has generally been incompetent and dangerous to the nation, in 2004 a few reporters had discovered and were writing about horrible government misconduct including torture and renditions. From these reporters, and from cases filed by the ACLU, it became known that Americans were beating prisoners, sometimes unto death, were forcing them to kneel or squat for hours (these are “stress positions”), were administering and threatening electric shocks to the testicles, were threatening detainees with death and the murder of their families, were hanging them by their arms, were forcing them to lie on blistering hot surfaces, were keeping them naked in frigid cells, were denying them needed medical treatment, were threatening them with vicious dogs, were kidnapping people off the street in Europe and sending them to countries like Syria or Egypt to be tortured by authorities there, were operating secret prisons for interrogation and torture in places like Afghanistan, Thailand and eastern Europe, and were engaging in waterboarding, an ultimate torture used by the French in Algeria, the Argentines, and the Uruguayans. (A Uruguayan interrogator had said of waterboarding that ‘“there is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe.’”)
As all this became known, it also became clear -- from common sense, from the writing of a (now famous) CIA guy named Michael Scheuer, and from logical deductions -- that George Bush and others were blatantly lying when they denied that America was torturing people, and that the orders to commit torture came from the very top -- from Bush and Cheney -- notwithstanding denials. As well, though the media flatly refused to write about it, the torture ordered by the highest -- and culpable -- levels of our government constituted grave war crimes under international law, were felonious violations of two domestic statutes, and could be punished by up to life imprisonment and even by execution of the immediate perpetrators. As I say, the media flatly refused to write about that.
The second stream of events, one infinitely less in the news, was that the whistle was being blown on two famous professors at the Harvard Law School. They had committed plagiarism in books they had written and, worse yet, probably did not even know they had plagiarized. For as discovered by deduction, even though they claimed full, sole credit for writing the books, in fact parts of their books had been written not by them, but by students. The professors themselves, guilty as they were of falsely claiming credit for work done by students, may not even have known that the students had plagiarized. The professors were criticized on this blogsite for their misconduct, and both of them failed to make statements which, if true, would have shown they were not guilty of the charged misconduct. Obviously, they couldn’t make such statements truthfully.
The two professors were protected by Larry Summers and by the Dean of the Law School (a former Clinton administration minion), who made fancy Washington-type statements designed no doubt to cause people to think something significant was being done about the horrendous violations of basic rules of academic honesty, when in fact nothing at all was being done or, at most, a mere slap on the wrist was being administered.
It also became known at about the same time that, when Goldsmith was being considered for the Harvard Law faculty earlier in 2004, certain professors -- liberal ones mainly specializing in international law, I gather -- had raised questions about his role, if any, in abetting the torture that had been coming to light, including his role, as head of OLC, in writing a memo (dated march 19, 2003) that had authorized the government to transfer prisoners out of Iraq for questioning -- in practical reality, to transfer them for torturing by interrogators located outside Iraq. These prisoners, the revelations in the news media made clear, had been among the now famous “ghost detainees” who had been hidden from the Red Cross, and it was reported that Goldsmith’s transfer memo had been relied on to transfer them from Iraq to wherever they were being tortured. Goldsmith mainly refused to talk about any of this -- until he wanted publicity for his book he adopted the same stonewalling attitude as his accused Harvard colleagues had adopted with regard to having students write parts (or in one case conceivably even all) of their books.
Harvard law faculty members said the Dean had reported that Goldsmith had said he did not draft the separate, August 1, 2002 OLC memo authorizing torture by the CIA and had not worked on a similar or nearly identical memo (of March 2003) drafted partly for and made a part of a DOD memo on torture. (They had been done by Yoo before Goldsmith joined OLC.) Also the Boston Globe quoted Goldsmith as saying in an interview that he had not worked on the torture memo for the CIA because he was not in government yet when it was written (which was true) and had not worked on the DOD memo when he was at DOD. (I later was told by the redoubtable Scott Horton that he (and apparently others too) had interviewed a person who had noted Goldsmith’s presence at a meeting of the small working group that produced the DOD memo.)
Harvard’s Dean was quoted in the Boston Globe as saying of Goldsmith’s appointment to the faculty that “’I’m as proud of this appointment as I could be,’” since Goldsmith is “‘an absolutely superb teacher and scholar’”, and ‘“puts issues on the table that everyone focuses on and debates.’” The Dean said he is ‘“a very agenda-setting scholar, and that’s exactly the kind of exciting scholars that we want to have here.’”
The Dean’s claims sounded much like the whitewashing she gave the two culprits whose books were at least partly authored by students. Because the same kind of whitewashing seemed involved, this blog considered the possibility that perhaps Goldsmith had had something to do with torture by writing a memo authorizing transfers of prisoners out of Iraq when perhaps he had to know that the transfers were for purposes of torture. Because relatively little concrete information was then available, especially compared to what is now known three years later, deductions from the few known facts were required. The deductions made it look like Goldsmith was almost certainly guilty -- made it look as if to not know that prisoners were being transferred for torture, Goldsmith would have had to be living under a rock during his time at DOD and must have completely failed to read pertinent OLC torture memos both while he was Haynes’ assistant and after he became head of OLC. None of this seemed plausible and now, thanks to Goldsmith’s own book, we know he read and was horrified by torture memos after he was put in charge of OLC and long before he wrote the transfer memo. (As said in the title to this posting, he is convicted out of his own mouth. It is no longer totally a matter of the (sometimes not self evidently obvious) deductions that were all that was available then.)
It is fair to say, however, that from the time in 2004 and early 2005 when all the stories were broken in the media and discussed on this blog, until the impending publication of Goldsmith’s book in September 2007 and the New York Times article of October 4, 2007, all of these matters discussed in the media and the blog in 2004-2005 were Krugmanned. (Krugmanned is a verb which future editions of dictionaries should define as follows: Krugmanned. A verb meaning to reveal or to disclose the truth but to then be completely or largely ignored by the media. Thought to be named after Paul Krugman, a Princeton economist and New York Times columnist circa late 20th and early 21st centuries, and especially but not exclusively applied when the disclosure of truth could be thought to be on the liberal side of politics, or contrary to conventional wisdom, or contrary to what people, especially conservatives, wish to hear. An example of being Krugmanned is the media’s failure to inform of or take account of the fact, known since about 1990, that the Soviet commander in Cuba possessed, and had received authority to fire, nuclear missiles if America invaded Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. This information has been ignored or suppressed -- has been Krugmanned -- lest it be used to oppose conservatives’ desire that America take military actions all over the world. Synonyms for Krugmanned: To be ignored; to have fallen into intellectual desuetude. Antonym: Greenspanned, meaning to receive extensive long lasting, bootlicking praise and admiration from the media for purportedly portentous pronouncements that are empty of meaning or are wrong.)
All of the pertinent matters having been Krugmanned for nearly three years -- the matter of the two other Harvard professors is still Krugmanned, though anyone interested in either the torture or the bookwriting matters can read about them at pp. 65-140 of (an inexpensively priced) book available from Amazon that is entitled Blogs From The Liberal Standpoint: 2004-2005 -- Goldsmith helped bring a major part of it back to life, not only with his book, but with interviews he gave to plug the book. One interview, actually “a series of conversations,” was for a four full page story in the Sunday Magazine section of the Times on September 9, 2007. Was it merely a coincidence -- why does one doubt this? -- that the interviewer was Jeffrey Rosen, who says, “I have known Goldsmith since we were at law school together. In addition to being intellectually curious and having good judgment, he always struck me as a pragmatic rather than an ideological conservative.” (Rosen, p. 42.) Not much chance there of an unfavorable article, is there? I also happened to hear Goldsmith interviewed about his book for an hour on Tom Ashbrook’s On Point on NPR, where one of the other guests, who was to comment on the book, was Benjamin Wittes. Ashbrook told the audience that Wittes had written on the book for a magazine. But he did not tell them that, in the Acknowledgements section of the book, Goldsmith said, “The two people who helped me most in writing the book were Ben Wittes and Andrew Woods. Ben is not a lawyer but he has a great legal mind and is a great writer. He helped me work out the narrative arc of the book and gave me many very good suggestions.” (TP, p. 218.) Not much chance there either of anything less than favorable comments on the book, is there? One wonders: Did Goldsmith not tell Ashbrook of Wittes’ role? Did Ashbrook or his people not read the book with sufficient thoroughness? I know from listening to Ashbrook, on subjects about which I know something, that he and his staff do miss crucial points.
Testifying before Congress a few weeks after the book came out, Goldsmith was treated as a hero by foolish (to use the politest possible word) Democrats who think he is on their side because, after three years of silence, he finally exposed misconduct which they have been too weak and inept to learn of or stop, and who seem not to understand that he vigorously, even violently, disagrees with their substantive positions. And as far back as February 6, 2006 Goldsmith was hailed as a hero by Newsweek for leading a revolt which it called nothing less than “a quietly dramatic profile in courage.” Positively Kennedyesque, isn’t it?
So Goldsmith, who says he was “too timid to defend myself” (TP, p. 173) when Harvard colleagues were raising questions in 2004 about his appointment to the faculty -- isn’t that rich? The guy who had just taken on the Cheyney thug David Addington, as well as Bush’s hatchet man, Alberto Gonzales, tells us he was “too timid” to defend himself against some Harvard law professors -- nonetheless succeeded in arranging, or his publisher succeeded in arranging, or together they succeeded in arranging some big time great publicity that most authors would kill for. Imagine -- a four page spread in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by an admiring former fellow student at Yale Law School! Not bad for Mr. Timid.
But is all the adulation deserved, or is at least deserved if one ignores the fact that Goldsmith stood silent for three years while evil occurred? To examine this, let us turn to what is revealed in his book and in the Times article of October 4th and some of its progeny.
* * * * *
Jack Goldsmith appears to have gone through a fairly hellish experience as head of OLC. Working as part of a small group (Addington, Gonzales, Haynes, Tim Flanigan and Goldsmith himself, a group which called itself the War Council and which often bypassed others in government), Goldsmith often, perhaps nearly always, was under constant pressure to produce memoranda saying that what persons in the Administration wanted to do was lawful. (TP, pp. 22, 23, 166-167) That is what John Yoo indispensably had done before him (as part of the War Council (TP, pp. 167-168), to the point where, according to the Times article of October 4th , Ashcroft -- of all people -- began to privately call Yoo “Dr. Yes.” Goldsmith agreed with Bush on a lot of matters and felt the head of OLC should be attuned to the desires of the President. (TP, p. 34.) He wanted to produce memos that enabled officials to walk right up as close as possible to the line of legality and, as one official had put it, to ‘“live on the edge’ where his ‘spikes will have chalk on them.”’ (TP, pp. 78, 167.) Yet when Goldsmith nonetheless found something so legally awful that he felt unable to give legal blessings to what the Administration wanted to do, or, worse yet, when he felt he had to withdraw prior OLC memos as being simply beyond the pale, Goldsmith would catch hell from the vituperative Addington, whose hard-line non accommodation stance always prevailed when the lawyers met to discuss legal policy issues in Gonzales’ office.” (TP, p. 182.) (The prior OLC memos Goldsmith had to withdraw were authored by his friend Yoo; apparently the two no longer speak. (Rosen, p. 43).) Addington would tell Goldsmith that if he does not do as the Administration wishes, the blood of a hundred thousand Americans will be on his hands due to the next attack that could (would?) occur. (TP, p. 71.) Addington even took to carrying around in his pocket a list of opinions that Goldsmith had withdrawn, taunting him about the withdrawals on the list, and asking what other OLC memos, which government officials had relied on, did he intend to withdraw. (TP, p. 161.) If Addington were not so evil, one might almost sympathize with him, since Goldsmith says he withdrew more memos than any head of OLC ever had before, and never before had someone in the same Administration withdrawn an OLC memo written on its behalf. (TP, p. 146.)
In his book, and in his interview with Jeffrey Rosen for the four page spread in the Times’ magazine, Goldsmith will not say what memos he withdrew other than the first of two torture memos of August 1, 2002 relating to CIA actions and the apparently pretty identical first memo, of April 2002, relating to DOD interrogations. Goldsmith says there is much he is not permitted to talk about by the government (TP, p. 182), so much stuff remains secret and we are disabled from knowing much or anything about other possible governmental horror shows. But Goldsmith takes credit for withdrawing unidentified ones about which (because of governmental compulsion?) he keeps us in the dark. (TP, p. 12; Rosen, pp. A22-A23.)
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