Saturday, May 6, 2006

06 May 2006 10:57 pm

The Bingham Cup

Over the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, over forty rugby teams will converge on Randall's Island in New York City to compete for the Bingham Cup, named after Mark Bingham, one of the heroes of United Flight 93. Bingham's 36th birthday would be this May 23, if religious fanatics had not hijacked his plane and tried, in vain, to turn it into a missile against Washington, D.C. Why not honor his memory by going to the games? Full info is here. A brief history of the tournament can be found here. The website for the host team, Gotham Rugdy Football Club, is here. I suppose one way to commemorate a rugby player is to beat the crap out of each other on a muddy field for an hour and a half. There will be plenty of beer afterwards, as well.

(Photo of Mark, courtesy of San Francisco Fog, SF's rugby team.)

06 May 2006 09:47 pm

Cole's Motives

A reader writes:

I find it difficult to fathom how you could find it difficult to fathom why Cole would be "acting as a witting dissembler about the views of Ahmadinejad." Cole could not possibly be more perfectly representative of the very disease on the left the Euston Manifesto is designed to counteract. He dresses it up in academic language, but strip that away, and time and again you are left with the same tired bromides and the same tired conclusion: everything, everywhere, at all times, is the fault of Bush and co., and the fault of Israel. He is simply incapable of reaching any other conclusion and I defy you or anyone to prove me wrong about that. He is the very antithesis of a true intellectual: he starts from a conclusion (it's Bush & Co./Israel's fault!) and then ties all inconvenient and unignorable facts up into pretzels to make them fit. How is this not an accurate description of exactly what's he's just done in the present case?

06 May 2006 09:42 pm

Cruise Tanks?

M:I 3 appears to be underwhelming the box office. Thanks for all your non-support of the movie. Keep it up. Don't even think about going.

06 May 2006 06:32 pm

Girls, Boys, G-Rated Movies

Talk about stereotype central.

06 May 2006 06:17 pm

Cole, Hitchens, Ahmadinejad

A blogger tidies up the controversy (and could do with an editor). Two basic points. Firstly, nothing Cole said on a private email list has not been written by him in the public domain, so Cole's hyperventilating on this privacy point is a little strained. Secondly, Cole has publicly defined the Iranian phrase "Occupation Regime" to mean Israel proper, not just the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and parts of Jerusalem, as he subsequently tried to spin it. Substantively Hitch wins on all points. And Cole, for reasons I cannot fathom, is acting as a witting dissembler about the views of Ahmadinejad. I think his opposition to the current administration has led him to make excuses for a genocidal religious right fanatic.

06 May 2006 03:59 pm

My Sources Confirmed

[T]he Daily News moves the story forward on the Goss resignation:

"Dusty was a big poker player, and it's my understanding that Porter Goss was also there [at Wilkes' parties] for poker. It's going to be guilt by association."
"It's all about the Duke Cunningham scandal," a senior law enforcement official told the Daily News in reference to Goss' resignation. Duke, a California Republican, was sentenced to more than eight years in prison after pleading guilty in November to taking $2.4 million in homes, yachts and other bribes in exchange for steering government contracts...
"Supposedly the [Cunningham] scandal was the last straw," the source said. "This administration may be on the verge of a major scandal."

 

The stench of corruption is beginning to reach higher and higher.

(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP.)

06 May 2006 03:33 pm

George Allen's Racist Past

It isn't going away.

06 May 2006 03:13 pm

Ramesh Coulter, Ctd.

I've criticized the title of Ramesh Ponnuru's new book, "The Party of Death" as being too overtly partisan, bringing political rhetoric on difficult moral questions down to Coulteresque levels. Ponnuru insists that he is being bipartisan in the book. Here's an extract from an interview on NRO:

Lopez: You make clear in the book that the "party of death" in the title is not the Democratic party. Plenty of Republicans are members. But the Dems have embraced it with open arms, so aren't they kinda sorta the party of death, or its main political manifestation?

Ponnuru: One of the stories the book tells is how abortion transformed the Democratic party from a party primarily concerned about protecting the weak to one that is more avid about defending the alleged rights of the strong. Pro-life Democrats have resisted this transformation, but it is certainly true that the Democratic party has become the party of unrestricted abortion, lethal research on human embryos, and euthanasia. The way I put it is that the party of death has largely taken over the Democratic party and has an outpost in the Republican party too.

Here's what the inside flap of the book says:

Is the Democratic Party the "Party of Death"?

If you look at their agenda they are.

IT’S NOT JUST abortion-on-demand. It's euthanasia, embryo destruction, even infanticide—and a potentially deadly concern with "the quality of life" of disabled people. If you think these issues don’t concern you — guess again. The Party of Death could be roaring into the White House, as National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru shows, in the person of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In The Party of Death, Ponnuru details how left-wing radicals, using abortion as their lever, took over the Democratic Party — and how they have used their power to corrupt our law and politics, abolish our fundamental right to life, and push the envelope in ever more dangerous directions. In The Party of Death, Ponnuru reveals:

* How Hillary Clinton could use the abortion issue (but not in the way you think) to become president * Why the conventional wisdom about Roe v.Wade is a lie * How the party of death — a coalition of special interests ranging from Planned Parenthood to Hollywood — came to own the Democratic Party * How the mainstream media promotes the party of death * Why Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, and other leading liberals gave up being pro-life * How liberals use animal rights to displace human rights * The Democratic presidential candidate who said that infanticide is a mother's "choice" * How doctors—and other health care professionals—are being coerced, by law, into violating their consciences * The ultrasound revolution: why there's hope to stop the party of death.

Hmmm. No mention of the Republican party at all. Complete identification of the "party of death" with one party. Ponnuru gets a veto on the dust-jacket. His attempt to have it both ways is, at the very least, disingenuous.

06 May 2006 02:50 pm

Britain Follows Canada?

This email strikes me as on the money:

I've taken to listening to BBC radio 4 podcasts. What is interesting is the comparison between England and Canada. Canada had a fiscally-responsible centrist party running the show for a decade or more under Cretien. They starting getting lazy and corrupt. Cretien stayed on power two years too long and his finance-minister successor was heading a party that "needed to lose". The Conservatives managed to rebrand themselves as a center-right rather than right party and now Stephen Harper is Canada's Conservative PM.
Blair and his party have gotten lazy (no corruption like the Liberal corruption in Canada) and Blair is staying too long. The Chancellor who will succeed him is losing his time to undo the laziness in the party. By the time he gets power Labour will "need to lose". Cameron is rebranding the Tories as a center-right party.
Prediction based on Canada: Brown's Labour will form an unstable minority government after the next election and will then lose after a year or so when Cameron will win a small majority/large minority.

06 May 2006 02:37 pm

Crazed Lefty vs Rumsfeld

Many of you have pointed out that Ray McGovern, the man who challenged Rumsfeld in public, holds some wacko views, and has made some arguably anti-Semitic statements. It seems my description of him as not being a "crazed lefty" was wrong on at least one count. But then this administration has turned many previously sane, moderate people into those who want to scream at the dishonesty and incompetence of their own government. What interests me is that no one has denied that McGovern was indeed the man who used to brief the president's own father on intelligence, and that, in the exchange in question, it is now clear that he was right and Rumsfeld wrong. Here is a transcript of the exchange between Rumsfeld and McGovern. The precise point at issue is whether Rumsfeld had categorically stated that there were WMDs in Iraq. Money quote:

RUMSFELD: [I]t appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

McGovern: You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and we were ... just ... (crosstalk)

McGovern: You said you knew where they were Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

RUMSFELD: My words ... my words were that ... no, no, no wait a minute, wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second.

Here's the transcript to which McGovern was referring:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

That's pretty categorical to me. Let's say it was an honest mistake. Has Rumsfeld ever apologized for unwittingly misleading the American public in the beginning of a war? He subsequently cites one facility in the Kurdish area where he suspects WMDs might already have been looted by Jihadists or Saddamites. Why? Because we never sent enough troops to secure the WMDs the war was supposed to take out. In fact, for months, many key weapons sites were left to be looted by the insurgents we are now fighting. This is one mystery I've never been able to understand. We were told the war was to prevent WMDs from getting into the hands of terrorists; and yet the war-plan, with its extremely light force-structure, was designed almost to ensure that such WMDs could be easily given to terrorists by a regime that no longer had anything to lose. Can anyone explain that? Was Rumsfeld so wedded to his ideology that he stuck to it even when it violated the entire point of the war? With Rumsfeld, it would not surprise me. Then there's this revealing exchange from the same show:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think we'll still be fighting in Iraq six months from now?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, goodness, you know, I've never -- we've never had a timetable. We've always said it could be days, weeks, or months and we don't know.

No time-table; no plan; no contingencies. Yet we risked everything. Fire Rumsfeld Now.

06 May 2006 02:07 pm

Again

The New Republic on Darfur.

06 May 2006 01:42 pm

The U.N., the U.S., and Torture

It's painful to read the following:

The torture convention outlaws all forms of torture and inhumane treatment whatever the circumstances, forbids sending people to countries where they risk torture, and requires prosecution and punishment of all those responsible for torture up the chain of command.
In a report to the committee this week, UK-based Amnesty International said there was evidence of 'widespread torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees'.
It accused Washington of creating a climate in which torture and ill-treatment could flourish, by trying to narrow the definition of torture and failing to hold senior officials responsible.
Jennifer Daskal, US advocacy director of Human Rights Watch in New York, said yesterday that senior US officials were still refusing to classify 'water-boarding' – a near-drowning technique used in the Spanish Inquisition – as torture.

Can some journalist with some balls simply ask Rumsfeld or Rice or Cheney or Bush up-front whether they believe "waterboparding" amounts to "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees? We deserve an answer.

06 May 2006 01:18 pm

Goss Goes

The WSJ has the money quote:

Neither Mr. Goss, 67 years old, nor President Bush, who accepted the resignation during a brief White House announcement Friday, gave any reason for the surprise exit. (Read the full text of their statements.) But it comes after the once highflying agency has been eclipsed in the post-9/11 shake-up of the intelligence community and the creation of a White House-based National Intelligence directorate under John Negroponte that had sapped power from the Central Intelligence Agency chief. More recently, the agency has been rocked by a controversy over intelligence leaks.

The agency also has been drawn into a federal investigation of bribery that has sent former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham to prison. Just this past week, the CIA confirmed that its third-ranking official, a hand-picked appointee of Mr. Goss, had attended poker games at a hospitality suite set up by a defense contractor implicated in the bribing of former Rep. Cunningham. Friday, people with knowledge of the continuing Cunningham inquiry said the CIA official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, is under federal criminal investigation in connection with awarding agency contracts.

Dusty Foggo. Tom Wolfe, are you now scripting reality?

Friday, May 5, 2006

05 May 2006 08:44 pm

The Man Who Heckled Rummy

Not some crazed lefty. The man who demanded that Rumsfeld answer the questions we all want to have answered turns out to be the man who gave former president George H. W. Bush his daily intelligence briefing. And he was right in the exchange; and Rummy was factually wrong. Yep: Rumsfeld lied. Quelle surprise.

05 May 2006 08:04 pm

Bush Age: the Meltdown

The data are really quite remarkable. Here are two graphs, cited by Mark Blumenthal and created by Charles Franklin here and here.

Then there's this downhill slalom:

Franklin comments:

I was frankly shocked at the above results. Other presidents have suffered low approval ratings, and President Bush still stands above the lows of four of the ten other post-war presidents. But I had not appreciated how much the current approval is below other mid-term approval ratings, even without extrapolating current trends. We have simply never seen a president this unpopular going into a midterm election.
I will be surprised if the current rate of decline continues. But I will also be surprised by a sustained upturn at the rate of November-January. Either would be an extreme outcome. But approval between the upper 20s and lower 30s seems entirely plausible. There is no precedent for a midterm with approval at those levels.

I'm predicting that the Democrats will win back both Houses this fall. Of course, no one should under-estimate the idiocy and incompetence of the Democratic party. But they have stiff competition on both those fronts these days.

05 May 2006 07:49 pm

Goss's Statement

It tells you not much. The full background on Hookergate, in which Goss, or his staffers, may be embroiled, is here. Republican spin can be found here. I find it underwhelming. The suddenness of this departure, its Friday afternoon timing, and the absence of any obvious cause suggests there is more to emerge. My sources tell me: much more.

05 May 2006 07:25 pm

Good for Patrick

Yes, it's bad if U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy got preferential treatment by the cops after a driving accident caused by substance abuse of some kind. There seem to be inconsistencies to his story. But he has acknowledged his addiction problem; he is going into rehab; and Kennedys have human rights too. They're human beings as well as celebrities and politicians. I guess I'm biased because I'm old friends with some members of the family. But I have deeply admired how some Kennedys have sustained sobriety. It's not easy for addicts. And as a society, we should do more to support sobriety and less to demonize and criminalize addicts. Patrick deserves no legal special treatment; he shouldn't be let off the hook if he did something wrong. But he also needs help. I hope he gets it.

(Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP.)

05 May 2006 07:06 pm

Now They Get It

From the latest AP-Ipsos poll:

Forty-five percent of self-described conservatives now disapprove of the president ... A whopping 65 percent of conservatives disapprove of Congress ... Even 31 percent of conservatives want Republicans out of power.

What took them so long?

05 May 2006 06:51 pm

Why did Goss Go?

The rumors are swirling. The CIA is in open revolt, and that might have something to do with it. But the hottest rumors have to do with the Duke Cunningham scandal. Josh has more. There's some important background reporting on the struggle between Goss and Negroponte here. Stay tuned ...

05 May 2006 06:35 pm

The South vs the West

The real Republican split on immigration is a geographical one, Ryan Sager argues. Money quote:

Back in December of 2005, Survey USA tracked views on immigration in all 50 states. In West Virginia, 60 percent of respondents agreed that "immigrants take jobs away from Americans." The picture was the same throughout most of the South: In Alabama, 56 percent agreed, Arkansas 53 percent, Mississippi 53 percent, South Carolina 53 percent.

Meanwhile, only 33 percent in New Mexico agreed that immigrants take away American jobs. In Arizona it was 42 percent, Colorado 44 percent, Nevada 44 percent and California 30 percent.

The South is a very difficult base to manage. Like a cuckoo, it tends to kick other allies out of the nest, be it a Democratic nest in the past or the Republican nest now.

05 May 2006 02:48 pm

Sistani's Pogrom

The religious head of Iraq's Shiite population, Ayatollah Sistani, recently issued an edict calling for the brutal murder of all gay people in Iraq. "The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing," this spiritual leader declared. Shiite militias are apparently making good on the fatwa. According to the Independent in London:

A number of public homophobic murders by the Badr militia have terrified Iraq's gay community. Last September, Hayder Faiek, a transsexual, was burnt to death by Badr militias in the main street of Baghdad's al-Karada district. In January, suspected militants shot another gay man in the back of the head.

The most recent is the point-blank shooting of a 14 year-old boy for having gay sex:

Ahmed Khalil was shot at point-blank range after being accosted by men in police uniforms, according to his neighbours in the al-Dura area of Baghdad... Ali Hili, the co-ordinator of a group of exiled Iraqi gay men who monitor homophobic attacks inside Iraq, said the fatwa had instigated a "witch-hunt of lesbian and gay Iraqis, including violent beatings, kidnappings and assassinations". "Young Ahmed was a victim of poverty," he said. "He was summarily executed, apparently by fundamentalist elements in the Iraqi police."

I have yet to hear anything from the major national gay groups. Surprise! Alas, I don't expect the Bush administration to protest this - because they need Sistani so badly. But they should.

05 May 2006 02:29 pm

Hillary = Hezbollah?

Hannity goes there.

05 May 2006 02:25 pm

The Dysfunctional DHS

Rebuffing free surveillance technology? Jon Rauch has uncovered an almost unbelievable story of government inertia and incompetence.

05 May 2006 02:11 pm

The Arrest of an Intellectual

Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo was an expert in Isaiah Berlin and Mohandas Gandhi. No wonder Ahamedinejad has accused him of espionage.

05 May 2006 02:08 pm

Father Mychal, Mystery and Easter

It's still the Easter season. Catholics have fifty days to ponder the great mystery at the heart of our faith - ten more than the more famous forty days of Lent. And the core of that mystery is how such great life can come out of such terrible death. This mystery is, indeed, as Jesuit priest Christopher Devron explains here, inexhaustible. And the life and work of Mychal Judge, brought before us primarily because of the sacrifice of his death, is a new chapter in the Easter miracle. The new documentary, "Saint of 9/11", is a revelation primarily because it fills in the rest of Judge's astonishing life of service: to the poor and homeless, the victims of terrorism and of AIDS, the warring Irish and the courageous fire-fighters of New York City. His death, in retrospect, was the culmination of a life of sacrifice for others; of humility and abounding generosity. Jesus walked among us. And until he endured the final sacrifice, most of us didn't even know.

05 May 2006 12:46 pm

Contraception or Abortion?

That's the effective choice for the theocons. The latest data on unintended pregnancies and abortions are not so great. Money quote:

Among sexually active women who were not trying to get pregnant, the percentage of those not using contraception increased to 11 percent from 7 percent from 1994 to 2001, the latest data available, according to numbers Guttmacher analyzed from the National Survey of Family Growth, a federal study.
The rise was more striking among women living below the poverty line: 14 percent were not using contraception in 2001, up from 8 percent in 1994. Better-off women — those who earned more than twice the poverty rate — were also less likely to use contraception: 10 percent did not use any in 2001, up from 7 percent in 1994... The rate of unintended pregnancies, which had declined 18 percent from the early 1980's to the mid-1990's, has leveled off since about 1994. That reflects a diverging trend: among poor women, the rate rose 29 percent, but among better-off women, it declined 20 percent.

So the Catholic church's ban on all contraception (even if it would prevent AIDS) and the now-fashionable emphasis on abstinence in sex education may have contributed to more abortions in this country than would otherwise be the case. Once again, as in their opposition to an HPV vaccine, the pro-life movement turns out to risk being pro-death in practice. A comprehensive strategy to reduce abortions would not be obsessively focused on criminalizing it altogether, as the theocons want. It would center on a massive effort to get contraception out to sexually active women, especially the poor and black who may not be able to force their sexual partners to use condoms. It would provide Plan B over the counter, no questions asked. Then you need a much more ambitious adoption program, that includes all potential adopters, i.e. gay and lesbian parents as well. Many on the religious right would rather see abortion rates rise or stay stable than concede on these issues. Which reveals what really motivates them: a hostility to sexual freedom as much as a desire to protect life.

05 May 2006 12:35 pm

Tory London

David Cameron's new, more urban-friendly conservatism had its best showing last night in London. Elsewhere, fine but not spectacular. But the London vote matters. The Tories cannot regain national power or a majority without winning over the middle class professionals, especially in urban areas, who have supported them in the past. They're beginning to do that. What they need now is a broad philosophical definition, gathered, in my view, around the theme of expanding individual freedom, to cement their gains. As for Blair, he saw his party reduced to third place, at 26 percent, far behind the Tories on 40 percent. These are local elections and may well not represent a solid national pattern for the next election. But if the anti-Tory parties split as evenly in the future as they did last night, then the uphill battle for Number 10 may be less onerous for Cameron than might be expected. Blair has just fired a bunch of cabinet members and reshuffled his team. Think of thm as deck-chairs. It would be better for him and his party if he didn't drag his own scheduled resignation out for much longer.

(Photo of David Cameron by Andrew Parsons/AFP/Getty).

05 May 2006 12:20 pm

Manners, Jonah

I'm not going to get into the spat between Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Greenwald, but I will say that it's poor etiquette and unhelpful to readers to criticize an online piece or blog-post without linking to it. Probably just an oversight. Greenwald responds again here.

05 May 2006 02:40 am

Tory! Tory! Tory!

A great result in Britain for the newly rebranded Conservative party. As of this writing, they won 39 percent of the vote in the local elections to Labour's and the Liberal Democrats' 27 percent a piece. Good for Cameron, the new leader. All he needs now are some ... policies. For Blair: a rubbishing, as the Brits might say. I give him twelve months at most.

05 May 2006 02:30 am

Colbert Nation?

A reader writes:

I think that members of the press, such as Cohen, have completely missed the point with respect to the Colbert performance. Among my friends and family, I am known as the one who follows current events and politics. Although I try to get them involved, I would describe most people I know as apolitical. They catch the really big stories and might have what I would consider to be fairly incoherent opinions, but for the most part if an issue doesn’t directly affect them, then they won’t know anything about it. Sadly, I think in this regard they are fairly typical Americans. But here is the thing: everyone I know has been talking about this Colbert performance. My parents; my in-laws; my disaffected and apolitical friends; my colleagues; simply everyone I know. And while I would describe many of these folks as committed liberals and Democrats, they certainly aren't all like that. And I don't even need to bring Colbert up; these generally apolitical people are spontaneously asking me for my take on it. The buzz on his speech is tremendous. I can't remember anything quite like it.

I think Colbert really touched a nerve. I suppose it is no surprise that many people are excited about what Colbert did. After all, we know from polls that most Americans no longer trust or approve of Bush. But I think this whole episode illustrates just how dissatisfied people are with both the President and the press. I think people are tired of his talking points and bullshit non-answers and are delighted that someone had the courage to call him on it to his face. For Cohen and others to dismiss the event in the way that they have ('he wasn’t funny!')… well – based on the reaction that I’ve seen from virtually everyone I know, who are by-and-large ordinary, middle-class Americans – I think they just don't get it, still.

Thursday, May 4, 2006

04 May 2006 09:20 pm

Cohen's Yglesias Award

A reader objects:

Richard Cohen deserves no Yglesias award. Richard Cohen is upset because Stephen Colbert violated the only commandment that both the Washington Post and Fox News currently obey (for different reasons, mind you): thou shalt always be sycophantic before the Executive Branch of the United States. If you think Richard Cohen was offending his base, you misunderstand his base - it is not those who oppose George Bush unreflexively, it is his editor at the Post, the rest of the MSM, and his other political cronies and sources that serve to buttress the career of (in my opinion) such a tawdry writer and thinker.

Update: another reader is kinder:

I disagree with your reader about Cohen being "tawdry". He is, in fact, one of my favorites. But your reader was correct in this important respect: Cohen was, this time, a mile wide of the mark.

04 May 2006 09:14 pm

Wahhabism's Funniest Home Videos

Zarqawi can't get his gun to work right. Heh.

Update: a reader comments:

Yes, it's quite funny that Zarqawi can't fire that weapon properly, but what's not so funny is the fact that if this is the caliber (pardon the pun) of the enemy we're fighting, what does it say about our ability to catch the guy? Do you think the Pentagon's spinmeisters thought about that before releasing the video? As you've said before, Fire Rumsfeld Now.

04 May 2006 07:36 pm

Quote for the Day

"I don't think there's anything wrong with singing it in Spanish. The point is it's the United States' national anthem. And what people want is it to be sung in a way that respects the United States and our culture. At the same time, we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of many, many languages," - Laura Bush on Larry King. She also said she thought the national anthem should be sung in English.

04 May 2006 07:29 pm

They Knew

Remember when Rumsfeld and Bush professed shock, shock at the abuses at Abu Ghraib, when they were revealed? Among the latest cache of released government docs, we discover the following:

The ACLU also released an Information Paper entitled 'Allegations of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan' dated April 2, 2004, two weeks before the world saw the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The paper outlined the status of 62 investigations of detainee abuse and detainee deaths. Cases include assaults, punching, kicking and beatings, mock executions, sexual assault of a female detainee, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to 'send a message to other Iraqis,' stripping detainees, beating them and shocking them with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves and interrogations at gunpoint.
The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of 'a few bad apples,' the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

In one document, Sanchez is said to have given orders to take prisoners to "the outer limits" in interrogation. One investigation, to pick one out of dozens underway before Abu Ghraib was exposed, involved the following:

[A] doctor cleared a detainee for further interrogations, despite claims he had been beaten and shocked with a taser. The medic confirmed that the detainee's injuries were consistent with his allegations, stating, "Everything he described he had on his body." Yet, the medic cleared him for further interrogation, giving him Tylenol for the pain. There is no indication that the medic reported this abuse.

Why would he, when abuse was policy? As at Gitmo, the medical professionals were brought into the abuse process, to determine how far prisoners could be tortured without dying. No, this is not Serbia or Saddam's Iraq or Burma. This is the United States.

04 May 2006 06:50 pm

The War and Oil

Many of you disagree with me. Here's one typical but eloquent email:

I don't think that those who say that the war was "about oil," literally think that we decided to invade Iraq in order to secure supplies and lower the price of crude. No one expected that the full invasion of an oil rich country in the heart of the Arab world was going to causes prices to drop, at least not right away. So in this sense, we did not go to war in Iraq in an attempt to get cheap oil right off the bat.
But are you arguing that oil played no part in our decision to go to war? I think most people look at the regime in Iraq and have a hard time distinguishing it from others around the world. Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Syria - all dictatorships, all enemies of the United States, all suspected of WMD's, all with potential connections to Al Qaeda - yet we pick Iraq?
If we went to war to "transform the middle east" then we went to war over oil. The only importance the Middle East ever had, and will ever have, as far as the U.S. is concerned, are its massive oil reserves. You don't hear neocons talking about transforming Africa or intervening militarily to oust dictators in nations with no vital natural resources - but you hear endless talk about transforming the Middle East. We're trying to bring democracy to the region because we believe democracy equals stability, and stability equals cheap and free flowing supplies of oil.

Not so fast. The dreaded neocons supported intervention in Bosnia and Somalia, and I see no oil there. Many neocons support intervening in Darfur. Ditto. Of course, some weight must be given to a region with so much leverage over the essential substance for the world economy. But before 9/11, we have no evidence that Bush was seriously planning on war against Saddam. Al Gore was more vocally anti-Saddam than Bush was, and favored more defense spending. I stick to my point. This was about national security. Oil is a part of that, but it was never the primary mover behind the Iraq war.

04 May 2006 06:30 pm

Yglesias Award Nominee

"On television, Colbert is often funny. But on his own show he appeals to a self-selected audience that reminds him often of his greatness. In Washington he was playing to a different crowd, and he failed dismally in the funny person's most solemn obligation: to use absurdity or contrast or hyperbole to elucidate -- to make people see things a little bit differently. He had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear. But he was, like much of the blogosphere itself, telling like-minded people what they already know and alienating all the others. In this sense, he was a man for our times. He also wasn't funny," - Richard Cohen, alienating many liberal readers, Washington Post today.

04 May 2006 06:11 pm

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

It's alleged that Hitchens has a drinking problem. If so, perhaps you'd be kind enough to pass on specifics regarding his daily intake, so I can emulate. Though I don't always agree with him, I have nothing but admiration for someone who can knock out a weekly Slate column, an erudite review for the Atlantic each month, a longer, bimonthly piece for Vanity Fair and a book a year. I'm a journalist, and I just spent a week laboring over a relatively straightforward 1,200-word essay (on wine, coincidentally.) But I'm obviously not drinking the right stuff.

Me neither. The sheer quantity and amazing quality of Hitch's output puts me to shame. And since I am not a member of the pleasure police, I have no problems with people actually enjoying their lives, rather than merely living them. Others, of course, clearly differ. And they are welcome to their asceticism. Just don't mess with others' recreation.

04 May 2006 06:06 pm

Hillary and Farrakhan

I'm amazed that in an attempt to shore up her liberal credentials, she has decided to go to a Farrakhan rally. Just kidding. But the thought experiment is a useful one. Next week, John McCain visits the Republican version of Louis Farrakhan, i.e. Jerry Falwell. That's not just my analogy. It's McCain's. Money quote from the Arizona senator:

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

So why the media and political acquiescence to McCain's visit. My own resignation comes from the fact that Falwell and the forces of intolerance he represents control the base of the GOP; and McCain simply has no choice but to kowtow to them. But that in itself is surely an indication of how far right the Republican center has now become. Farrakhan is a religious anti-Semite. Falwell is a religious homophobe. Falwell, however, also blamed Americans for 9/11. He did so while the ashes of many such Americans were still in the air in Manhattan. If he isn't beyond the pale, who is? And if he represents the key to being nominated in the GOP, what has happened to conservatism?

04 May 2006 02:37 pm

George Allen and the Confederacy

The Senator's past keeps re-emerging. Ryan Lizza has two new details: 1) Allen had a Confederate flag on his truck at UVA. 2) An Allen campaign ad from 1993 had a Confederate flag in it. In today's GOP, I wonder why anyone is surprised.

04 May 2006 02:34 pm

Hitch and Cole

A reader comments:

I read this first with amusement then with a bit of irritation. Truth is, I like both Hitchens and Cole - they are way up on the list of writers I read compulsively. They both have strong suits - Hitchens is one of the most amazing wordsmiths of his generation, and a man of staggering rhetorical ability to boot. Cole runs a very interesting Middle East press clipping service with commentary (nothing quite like it) and he has an amazing depth of knowledge of Middle Eastern culture, religion and politics. Both Hitchens and Cole have an output which is little short of astonishing. And something which goes with the high volume output - both of them are quite frequently wrong, and are stubborn-headed when their errors are shown.

Surely Cole is wrong in defending Iran's new nutcase president. On the other hand, Cole's ideas about extending American influence in the region through soft power and education are spot-on and need to be listened to. Hitchens is in overdrive criticizing him. I am prepared to be forgiving to both of them, because they make important contributions to the discussion and are, in the end, educational and entertaining. Moreover, when I see someone with such immense output, I expect mistakes and am prepared to forgive them (though I'd wish for less pig-headedness). This is fundamentally the case for blogging, which I see as in a different category from print and broadcast media. It's a more intimate medium. Somewhere in his notebooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson says that the best thing about friends is that one can afford to be stupid around them. This is very true for list-servs, and also true to some extent for blogging. So while I admire the pugilistic spirit, I say: enough already. Cole and Hitchens are both on my must-read list and no amount of intemperate assault is going to lead me to drop either one.

That's the spirit of true liberalism - and the promise of the blogosphere.

04 May 2006 02:27 pm

The War on Body Hair

Norelco unveils a WMD. I'm for a pre-emptive strike. 

04 May 2006 02:17 pm

The End of Roe?

Public support for one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in recent times is at an all-time low. But views on abortion itself have barely moved in over thirty years, and are roughly where they were in 1973. I think people are beginning to realize that saner abortion laws require legislative, not judicial action. And I say that as someone who opposes all abortion on moral grounds, but would prefer to see it kept legal in the first trimester, for prudential reasons and because of the valid interest of women's freedom over their own bodies. I think legal, but restrictive abortion laws would be the end-result of a post-Roe world across much of America, although some states may have much more liberal laws than others. I support federalism in this as I do in marriage. And if some states were to ban all abortions, along theocon lines, then pro-choice groups should do all they can to expand access to contraception, the Morning After pill, adoption (including gay adoption) and access to out-of-state first trimester abortions if necessary.

04 May 2006 02:00 pm

A War for Oil?

One thing that today's high gas prices strongly suggest is that, whatever else it was, the Iraq war was surely not about oil. If you care about cheap oil above everything else, you'd have found some deal with Saddam, kept the oil fields pumping, and maintained the same realist policy toward Arab and Muslim autocracies we had for decades. Or you could have just seized the Southern oil fields. Instead, we risked losing all of Iraq's oil fields at the beginning of the war, and now face a crippled supply just as India and China are booming and the U.S. is growing fast. (Instability in Iran, Nigeria and Venezuala don't help either.) I have unmixed feelings about this. The high price of gas is the best thing to have happened to the U.S. in a very long time. It alone, given the paralysis of the government, will force a market-driven push into new energy technologies, deter SUVs, and provoke the kind of technological research which will benefit us in the future. A smart overview of the entire situation can be read on this blog. I'm longing for gas at $4 a gallon. Yes, I know it hurts people. But pain is the only medicine for America's oil addiction. And if you have an SUV, decisions have consequences. Live with them.

(Photo: Patrick Andrade/Polaris for Time.)

04 May 2006 01:33 pm

The Incoherence of Tom Hayden

It still amazes me how the far left is still much, much more concerned with bringing George Bush down than in building Iraq up. The contempt some of them once had for the Iraqi people's fate - they were quite happy to see Iraqis consigned for decades to Saddam's tender mercies - is now matched by their zeal to abandon the country to Jihadists and theocratic Shiite thugs. Yes, the Bush administration richly deserves a shellacking for its conduct of the war. But handing al Qaeda a failed state on a plate right now seems to me an odd priority for a group that claims to want something they call "progressive." Tom Hayden echoes the Arianna line today in her celebriblog, and decides to take after George Packer. As you might expect, it's the usual incoherence. Here's one typical passage:

Packer sees the US troops not as occupiers, not the cause of violence, but as "buffers" between violent Iraqis. The same civilizing role was claimed by the British when they sent troops to Northern Ireland in 1969; thirty years later they signed the Good Friday Agreement but still haven't permitted free elections. Baghdad is simply the next Belfast, in this view.

Huh? Does Hayden believe that U.S. troops have caused ethnic division and hatred in Iraq in three short years? Did such divides not exist beforehand? Were they not the critical force behind the construction of Saddam's divide-and-massacre strategy? And of Iraq's very borders? As for Britain's colonial presence in Northern Ireland, it has existed for centuries, and represented one side in the conflict. The current coalition in Iraq have been there for three years, represent no ethnic faction, and are there as a support for an attempted multi-ethnic government. And then there's this bizarre assertion that Britain has not yet allowed free elections in Ulster (with the implication that this has also been the case in Iraq). Huh? Ulster has had several seats in the House of Commons under free elections for decades. London and Dublin have been attempting to broker regional government there for decades. The Irish republic is a booming democracy. Moreover, Iraqis have had more democratic options in the last three years than in the previous several decades. Did Hayden not notice the moving spectacle of a people formerly in bondage finally getting to vote? Or is that something the left has no interest in any more?

04 May 2006 01:15 pm

Iran and Deterrence

A reader writes:

In your post, "What did Ahmadinejad Mean," to demonstrate his malign and undeterrable nature you quote Rafsanjani saying:

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."

It is worth noting that this is almost exactly the same line that China took during the Cold War: That it did not need to worry about nuclear retaliation because the US and its allies had more concentrated targets, whereas China's vast hinterlands would allow it to resist nuclear attack with manpower left to burn.  "As long as there are green mountains, who needs to worry about firewood?" asked Mao with characteristic directness; "It is the United States that should be afraid of using nuclear bombs against us, because its densely concentrated industries are more vulnerable."  But China in spite of its professed indifference to nuclear retaliation was and remains deterrable.

While you are a great fan of taking murderous dictators at their word, I think that you apply the principle too broadly.  No national leader speaks truthfully when pursuing a strategy of deterrance -- the whole point of a deterrance strategy is to appear more crazy and undeterrable than your rival.  You postulate an odd sort of dictator who is rational enough to tell the truth but too crazy to know how to lie when it manifestly suits his interests.

Any approach to strategy that does not take account of deterrability, and make a serious effort to estimate it, is going to lead to all manner of grandiose invade-the-world schemes. Yet oddly enough one does not see a great deal of such analysis coming from the White House these days, or from its pundit and blog subsidiaries. The phrase "fundamentally unserious," though overused, might well apply here.

The problem with deterrence and Iran's current regime, I think, lies in its fundamentalist religious orientation. When you live in the imminent expectation of a much-wanted Apocalypse, then deterrence may not work against you. We are dealing with a religious movement in which suicide bombing is a virtue. How do we deter suicide bombers? We cannot. How do we know that Iran's leaders do not have the same psychology on a far greater scale? We do not. The Soviets, in comparison, were rational. Religious fanatics, especially those eager for eschatological oblivion, are not. There's the rub.

04 May 2006 01:32 am

Another Online Fight

This time, Weis versus Pollack. Chait keeps score.

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

03 May 2006 08:17 pm

Email of the Day

A reader writes:

I couldn't agree more with Caitlin Flanagan's assessment of the Democratic Party, and even more so with her take on the pundits of the far left (Barbara Ehrenrich drives me 'round the bend). I am firm in my faith and go to church every Sunday with my family (at an Episcopal church where our priest is gay and has a partner.)  My husband works and pays the bills. (Math is not my thing. I mow the lawn and make repairs around the house.) I left a career that I loved to stay at home with our daughter and I've enjoyed every minute of it (even the school volunteering part, a little). I've never voted Republican and probably never will. And sometimes it feels as though neither party claims the likes of us.

03 May 2006 08:15 pm

Moussaoui

A vile human being. I oppose the death penalty, but if I had to make an exception, it would be him. That said, I wasn't on the jury, didn't hear all the evidence, and the system gives them the power to decide such a sentence. The silver lining is that we do not make this monster a martyr. The rule of law was followed; our society allows even this murderous religious fanatic due process. In that sense, Moussaoui got this wrong as he has gotten everything else wrong. He lost. America won. And the fight against him and his allies continues.

03 May 2006 07:52 pm

What Did Ahmadinejad Mean?

Thanks for your emails on the Cole-Hitchens fight. The deeper argument is whether we should take Ahmadinejad's threats in any way seriously. Last month, Ahmadinejad said the following:

"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm." ... He did not say how this would be achieved, but insisted to the audience of at least 900 people: "Believe that Palestine will be freed soon."

We are told that Ahmadinejad has no power. What about the organizer of Iran's latest war-game, Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guards? How about Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the runner-up to Ahmadinejad in the rigged Iranian elections of 2005? He was Iran's president from 1989 - 1997. According to Wiki, he

is currently the Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, that resolves legislative issues between the Parliament and the Council of Guardians and advises the supreme leader on matters of national policy.

In 2001, at the height of his powers, Rafsanjani made the following remarks in a speech to fellow Islamists:

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."

We are told not to take any of this seriously. And the Tehran theocrats may well be bluffing about their current and future capacity. I don't think we should take the bait they are currently offering us, and react excessively to their provocations. I certainly don't favor pre-emptive military action at this point. But that the mullahs would nuke Israel if they could seems to me well within the bounds of possibility. How many genocidal dictators in history do we need to ignore or explain away before we take them at their word?

(Photo: Irna/AFP/Getty Images).

03 May 2006 07:12 pm

Thomas More and Torture

A reader writes:

Your point [about the rule of law] is well taken, and I would imagine a Sir Thomas More of modern sensibilities would likely agree with you. But I am not sure he is the shining example of opposition to torture via abuse of executive authority. I have great respect for the man (and the movie), and have affection for him due in no small part due to his vicious enforcement of law, but certainly there is someone less famous for brutal torture techniques that you could invoke to oppose brutal torture techniques.