[…] General [Anthony] Taguba wrote the preface to Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact, a report issued in June by Physicians for Human Rights on the lingering effects on detainees of what was done to them, based on medical examinations of some of them. General Taguba said that "the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture." He added:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

To date the "enablers of torture," as Major [David J. R.] Frakt called them, are doing fine. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and David Addington remain in office. Jay Bybee, who issued the legal opinion that said the president had unlimited power to order the use of torture, was nominated and confirmed as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before his torture role became known. John Yoo is in his professorship at the Berkeley law school; the dean, Christopher Edley, said in April that tenure protected him there and that his clients — President Bush et al. — were "the deciders." Yoo is also regarded by television programs and by the opinion pages of newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, as a legitimate voice on issues of presidential power, and he appears frequently.

Yoo and Addington appeared in June before a House Judiciary subcommittee; they ducked questions about their responsibility. When Addington was asked whether it would be legal to torture a detainee's child, he replied: "I'm not here to render legal advice to your committee." William Haynes, the former Defense Department general counsel, appeared before a Senate committee and repeatedly said, in answer to questions, that he could not remember. A Washington Post column on his testimony was headlined "Abu Ghraib? Doesn't Ring a Bell."

Torture by officials is prohibited by US criminal law as well as by the international Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. According to the new book by Jane Mayer, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a report last year that interrogation methods used by the CIA on a high-level prisoner "categorically" constituted torture. Her book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, says the ICRC report was sent to the CIA, the detaining authority, which "shared it with the President and the Secretary of State." Mayer writes that the report "warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the US government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."

[…]

Somehow this country has to reassert its historic repugnance at the use of torture. And that may not be easy. A recent poll showed that Americans' support for the torture of alleged terrorists has risen from 36 percent of those asked in 2006 to 44 percent this year. We were shocked by the Abu Ghraib photographs. Since then a good many of us have become desensitized to the use of torture.President Bush and his top officials have evidently succeeded in persuading many with their contention that "enhanced interrogation techniques," as they call torture, produce valuable information. The evidence asserted for this contention is weak; Senator Jay Rockefeller, drawing on his experience as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said:

I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an immi nent terrorist attack. And I have heard nothing that makes me think the information obtained from these techniques could not have been obtained through traditional interrogation methods used by military and law enforcement interrogators.

But in any event the cost of the policy to America's reputation — and its national security — has been enormous. It has aroused much of the Muslim world to hatred of the United States. And it has sapped the belief of many Americans in the righteousness of their country.

In the end the cure, if there is to be one, will have to come from leaders who reassert the primary place of law in the American character: from a president who does not seek unrestrained power, from an attorney general and other officials who respect the law. It is not too late to return to a government of laws, not men.

Licensed to Vote

[…] In a 6–3 decision in April written by John Paul Stevens, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court upheld a 2005 Indiana law requiring voters in that state to produce a government document with a photograph at the polls. In practical terms, this meant a passport or a driver's license. Since less than a third of adults have a passport, the Indiana case focused largely on how many adults lack a license to drive. During oral arguments, several justices pressed the plaintiff's lawyer for an answer. For reasons I cannot fathom, he kept using the number 43,000, for a state whose voting-age population is 4.6 million. In fact, the Federal Highway Administration, in an easily obtained report, says that 673,926 adult residents of Indiana have no license, which works out to a not trivial 14.7 percent of the state's potential electorate. Had that percentage been stressed, we can conjecture that Justices Stevens and Anthony Kennedy might have shifted their position.

Requiring a driver's license to vote has a disparate racial impact, a finding that once commanded judicial notice. To apply for the state ID card that Indiana offers as an alternative, moreover, nondrivers must travel to a motor vehicles office, which for many would be a lengthy trip. While licenses do not record race, Justice David Souter cited relevant studies of the race of license-holders in his dissent, which was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In one survey, made by the Department of Justice in 1994, black residents of Louisiana were found to be four to five times more likely not to have the official photograph needed for an identifying document. (Not to mention access to a car; recall how many couldn't leave as Katrina approached.) A Wisconsin survey published in 2005 was more precise. No fewer than 53 percent of black adults in Milwaukee County were not licensed to drive, compared with 15 percent of white adults in the remainder of the state. According to its author, similar disparities will be found across the nation.

The Indiana decision will not only make it harder to add new people to the rolls; many who had previously voted without photo identification are now required to produce an official photograph. If Marion County (Indianapolis) has the same proportion of unlicensed voters as Milwaukee County, I count it as having more than 44,000 black residents who will be needing transport to motor bureaus to ensure that each item in their nondriver ID application has been properly filled in. Extended nationwide, this means that a lot of on-the-ground assistance is going to be needed.

Purging the Rolls

In 2002, Congress passed the amiably titled Help America Vote Act, presumably to thwart the recurrence of butterfly ballots and dimpled chads. To ensure that voters won't face problems at their polling place, each state is required to maintain an electronic "statewide voter registration list," to be linked to every precinct. States were also mandated to keep their lists current, eliminating the people who die or move away. One method is to mail letters to everyone on the rolls and expunge the names on those letters returned because the addressee could not be found. But black families tend to move more, especially in cities, and few think to notify election officials. When Ohio purged 35,427 returned names in 2004, a review found that the addresses were in "mostly urban and minority areas." Here too, getting back on the rolls can be like mending a mistaken credit rating.

Florida doesn't depend on mailings. Rather, it uses computers to match registrants' names against their Social Security numbers, which are then sent to Washington (actually Baltimore) to see if they match. Whoever devised this system should have known that the Social Security Administration is unable to match submitted names with numbers in 28 percent of the cases sent to it: for example, because they are maiden names of women who married or changed them back after a divorce. Not to mention keyboard operators getting a single digit wrong. Florida also uses the help-the-voter act to check felony records, since convicted criminals there can't vote. Oddly, it only requires that 80 percent of the letters in your name match with the name of someone with such a record. So if there's a murderous John Peterson, the software disenfranchises everyone named John Peters. In view of the racial rates for incarceration, black voters are more apt to have names closely resembling those with felony histories.

Florida's system for purging the voting lists was approved by a 2–1 ruling in federal circuit court this spring, Flor-ida State Conference of the NAACP v. Browning . The dissenting judge, Rosemary Barkett, a Clinton appointee, was the only one to spell out the disparate racial impact. She noted that while black voters made up 13 percent of the scanned pool, they comprised 26 percent of those who were purged; while whites were 66 percent of the pool, they were only 17 percent of the rejected group. Again, if you have plenty of time, you can claim that the computer was mistaken and try to find documents that show you exist and were never a felon.

[…]

Since 1968, the Democratic Party has not been able to muster a majority of white Americans. Al Gore fell twelve percentage points behind among white voters in 2000, and John Kerry had a seventeen-point gap four years later. It all started with Richard Nixon's strategy, which was initially aimed at the South. With the opening of electoral rolls to blacks, the then-dominant Democrats were becoming a biracial party, which disconcerted many whites. So Nixon invited them to join the Republicans, assuring them that they would not press to integrate their party. The formula continued to work when it moved north with the emergence of Reagan Democrats. By the 2000 GOP convention, there were only eighty-five black faces among the 2,022 Republican delegates. Some unknown proportion of white voters doesn't want to support a party to which black Americans are drawn — "any more," as Darryl Pinckney has noted, "than they would go on living on a street that got too integrated."