The XX Factor: What women really think.

Her Story, My Memory: Another 9/11 Loss

A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:

Alissa Torres lived down the block from me on 9/11. We were working on being acquaintances. We were meant to turn into friends. Her husband worked in the wrong tall building; he died, mine didn't. There might be budding friendships that could survive that—but ours wasn't one of them ... (Read more in Double X.)

Yes, we tortured. Who is responsible?

But having my current government release the evidence is a strange kind of relief, sunlight coming out of the clouds. A few weeks ago, I attended a panel on the the executive response to 9/11. Ann Compton, the only reporter on Air Force One on 9/11 (after My Pet Goat), moderated Andrew Card, Michael Chertoff, Douglas Feith, Tim Flanigan, and Ari Fleischer—all of whom had been intimately involved in the response to the bombings. (John Yoo was in the audience.) Let me say that it was agony remembering 9/11, feeling again that scorched and distraught feeling we all had from being attacked. I was awestruck as they told what 9/11 had felt like from the inside—believing that there were more planes in the air, ready to hit, and not knowing what to do to prevent more attacks. They told unanimously about being given a single policy directive: This must never happen again. Stop another attack at any cost. There was no countervailing interest.

But that scorched feeling inside me quickly worsened into feeling almost too sick to listen, knowing how that prime directive had forced my country far off course, away from morality. We were a small audience of journalists selected for our interest in constitutional law, and so we were soon drilling them about the constitutionality of their responses. How could the administration have authorized and implemented torture, indefinite detention, the suspension of habeas corpus, the destruction not just of the Taliban but of Afghanistan itself (that last a paraphrase of an Afghani journalist's question)?

My question: How they could have been so certain that anyone they picked up on the battlefield had to be guilty? Why should citizens be expected to believe that our government was omniscient, knowing in advance who should never see daylight again? Chertoff answered that on a battlefield, they would have been permitted to kill anyone there; where should the line be drawn between what was permitted in battle and what was permitted to people picked up in battle? Then Flanigan looked directly into my eyes and said, essentially: We were the lawyers. We did what we were asked to do. If you want to hold someone responsible, look to the policymakers.

That disavowal took my breath away. (As did the moment Feith looked straight into the eyes of the Afghani journalist and said: Our goal was to prevent an another attack on the U.S. We were successful. In other words, your country = not my problem.) Afterward, law professor Sherilynn Ifill, who was sitting next to me, said: If I were to convene a truth commission, Flanigan is the first one I'd call. He's ready to name names.

Outgoing Cheney Cheer

When I was a child, I was a huge fan of a series of books that featured small, soft, furry white creatures known as Moomins. Of course, not everything in Moominvalley was as nice as the Moomins. There was another character who came along every once in a while, the Groke. Wherever she went, she left behind a trail of frozen ground that killed all living things. Dick Cheney has always remind me of the Groke.

In a new interview with Politico, Cheney pronounces the United States should expect a catastrophic nuclear or biological terrorist attack in the near future—and the Obama administration increases the likelihood it will happen. Cheney's penchant for practices like water-boarding, he claims, kept more 9/11-style attacks at bay during the Bush administration.

[Cheney] asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans—and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team—understand ...

He expressed confidence that files will someday be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted—over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism—were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks. ...

“If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth—then we would have been attacked again," he said.

Do the Wright Thing: Don't We All Have Friends Who Are Nut Jobs?

Barack Obama, of course, has had a far more substantial relationship with his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in turn is sweet on Louis Farrakhan. And as everyone with cable now knows, Wright has given a bunch of fiery sermons in which he blasted America's foreign policy and racism, and said Hillary Clinton has never been called the n-word. (Only, except for the part about the "chickens coming home to roost'' on 9/11, isn't much of what he was railing about sad but true? Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro suggests that Obama is an affirmative-action slacker with skills inferior to those of the average white guy, her candidate responds with a tepid tut-tut, and there's somebody out there who thinks racism is not still a problem?)

But spend two minutes listening to Obama, and you know he is no more in the same zip code with Wright on the anti-American or us-vs.-them stuff than Clinton is anti-Semitic or McCain is anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim. The real question about Obama in all of this is why, knowing that this guy Wright was a big political liability, he didn't quit that church years ago. But isn't the only possible answer that he didn't do that because he still has other-than-political motivations in his life, ties to a community that mean more to him than they maybe even ought to, and stubborn gratitude to the man who, as he put it, brought him to Jesus and to the "Gospel on which I base my life''?

Kind of puts to rest those rumors about him being a secret Muslim, doesn't it?

What's the Deal With Paul Krugman?

Wouldn't you love to know the back story on Paul Krugman's column today? Because without knowing that his real beef is that his wife can't stop singing "Yes, we can," or maybe that his idiot nephew won't shut up about how all the cool people are on the O Train, it's all very mysterious: What is he referring to when he says "most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody''? That Obama's supporters are not chill like Hillary Clinton's?

That is a fresh take, definitely, but where did he get the impression that "many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of 'Clinton rules'—the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.'' Then he draws a straight line from there to ... Whitewater? Suggesting what? That if not Obama then those who mindlessly follow him approved of the vast right-wing thing? I'd hate to put this non-sequitur on a par with Krugman's buddy Bush mentioning 9/11 in the same breath with Saddam—but we're all in some danger, aren't we, of mirroring what we loathe?

His least original point, about how "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,'' is one I hear all the time from Hillary supporters who claim it is a sign of immaturity to support Obama and that to believe there is any other way of doing business is really to believe in a fairy tale. But thinking that any one group or campaign or party has cornered the market on "most of the venom'' is what seems like kid stuff to me.

We Need To Talk

Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.

And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)

It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.

We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.