There are fish in the water, but when they are not hungry, there is no way to catch them.

Scott Horton has a post on the state of the tor­ture debate at his Harper’s blog. Horton argues that we now have actual evi­dence that the CIA was able to invoke the per­sonal author­ity of George W. Bush to sanc­tion its use of torture:

This week, a CIA agent, John Kiri­akou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an inter­view with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to tor­ture some­one (and it is tor­ture he said, no one involved with these tech­niques would ever think any­thing dif­fer­ent), we have to write it up. The team leader of the tor­ture team pro­poses what tor­ture tech­niques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Oper­a­tions at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hier­ar­chy of the Com­pany. Then the pro­posal is passed to the Jus­tice Depart­ment to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Secu­rity Coun­cil in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose per­sonal author­ity is invoked for each and every instance of tor­ture autho­rized. And, accord­ing to Kiri­akou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find tor­ture was appropriate.

Horton goes on to spec­u­late about how Attor­ney Gen­eral Michael Mukasey fits in to the picture:

As I noted pre­vi­ously, there is a strong basis to fear that Mukasey came up through a litmus test under which he was required to do two things: (1) to give his com­mit­ment to con­tinue to pro­vide cover for the tor­ture system, and (2) to block any effort to have a mean­ing­ful crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion that would dis­close the tor­ture system or any of its details. As things now stand, it looks like Mukasey is deliv­er­ing on these test points.

Here are some excerpts from the tran­script of the Kiri­akou interview:

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In an arti­cle on the dollar’s depre­ci­a­tion in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:

The dollar’s fall has been so dras­tic, it has seeped into the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flash­ing not a stack of Ben­jamins, but a fist­ful of euros.

The impli­ca­tion seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bund­chen] and Jay-Z real­ize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).

Yes, we get it: the point of the anec­dote is to add color (no com­ment) to the story, to break up more mun­dane sen­tences like the one that fol­lows. (”The dollar had been at rel­a­tively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)

But stop for a moment and ask your­self: by what stan­dards does Jay-Z count as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness? Con­sider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:

+ Accord­ing to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 mil­lion in income during 2005

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An ode for Paula Dobri­an­sky, John Baird, and all the other nihilists in Bali who press on toward a “triumph where all things falter.”

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A For­saken Garden
Alger­non Charles Swinburne

In a coign of the cliff between low­land and high­land,
At the sea-down’s edge between wind­ward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brush­wood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blos­som­less bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.