Some quick follow-up (before I head to the airport) on Andrew Sullivan’s malicious and baseless claim that I am a “torturer”:
1. After troubling himself to do some actual research — research that should have preceded his mudslinging — Sullivan retracted his claim that I “appear regularly at the Corner defending torture,” and he also removed from his initial post his contention that I am a “torturer.”
2. Sullivan states that the “factual question of [my] attendance at a meeting on interrogation techniques remains a matter of dispute between [me] and the Senate Committee’s report.” Sullivan’s statement obscures the fact that the report did not name me. In any event, I have been in touch with a committee staffer and expect that the committee will issue an appropriate correction in short order.
3. Scott Horton, relying on the same mistaken passage from the committee report, adds the baseless and libelous allegation that I am “presently melting [my] keyboard with defenses of the torture-enablers at National Review.” It’s unclear what Horton is imagining. As Sullivan’s own retraction backhandedly acknowledges, I have written little or nothing on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies (which I’m guessing is what Horton means by his reference to “torture-enablers”). If I’ve been “melting [my] keyboard” with anything of late, it’s exposing what a threat State Department legal adviser nominee Harold Koh’s radical transnationalist views pose to basic American principles of representative government. None of what I’ve written on Koh has addressed interrogation policies.
Three weeks ago, Horton propagated a bogus claim (still apparently taken as gospel by some on the Left) that Senate Republican opposition to OLC nominee Dawn Johnsen and to Koh was motivated by the desire to “suppress[] critical torture memos from the Bush era.” Horton now apparently regards any criticism of Koh as defense of torture. That’s sure a lot easier than defending Koh and his views on the merits.