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Saturday, September 23, 2006
Freedom in Nevada?
23 Sep 2006 08:10 pm
In some parts of America, freedom isn't being restricted. It stands a chance of flourishing. More on the Nevada Marijuana Regulation Initiative here. I love the fact that opponents of regulating the legal use of marijuana say they are defending Nevada's "respectability." Er: check the barn door, guys.
Another Southerner Against Torture
23 Sep 2006 07:48 pm
Military honor still counts for something in the South.
The Apocalypse in Iraq
23 Sep 2006 06:23 pm
I mean literally. Juan Cole notes that Moqtadr al-Sadr is aligning himself with Ahmadinejad on the imminent return of the Twlefth Imam, a Shiite sign of the Apoclaypse. Money quote:
Al-Zaman reports that the young nationalist Shiite cleric maintained that the US Department of Defense has compiled an enormous file on the hidden Twelfth Imam, that is virtually complete save that it lacks his photograph.
[For Shiite Muslims, the Twelfth Imam or Imam Mahdi is a little like Jesus Christ for evangelical Christians. Shiites believe that the Imam was translated by God into a supernatural realm, from which he secretly rules the world and from which he will one day return to restore the world to justice.]
Al-Sadr said during his Friday prayer sermon in Kufa that "The United States has been preparing for ten years a rapid reaction force against the awaited Imam Mahdi and the US provoked the Gulf War so as to fill the region with military outposts for this purpose."
The good news is: al-Sadr urged non-violent resistance to the U.S. Heh.
(Photo: Ali Jarekji/Reuters.)
Democrats and the War
23 Sep 2006 03:48 pm
Will they never learn?
October Surprise?
23 Sep 2006 03:23 pm
First we read this:
According to two conservative websites, White House political strategist Karl Rove has been promising GOP insiders that there will be an "October surprise" before the midterm elections.
"In the past week, Karl Rove has been promising Republican insiders an 'October surprise' to help win the November congressional elections," reports Ronald Kessler for Newsmax.
The we hear this:
The daily newspaper for the Lorraine region in eastern France printed what it described as a confidential document from the French foreign intelligence service DGSE citing an uncorroborated report from Saudi secret services that the leader of the al-Qaida terror network had died.
The contents of the document, dated Sept. 21, or Thursday, were not confirmed by French or other intelligence sources. However, the DGSE transmitted the note to President Jacques Chirac and other officials, the newspaper said.
Hmmmm. Of course, we know how bin Laden really died.
(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)
Naughty Gutfeld
23 Sep 2006 03:07 pm
Check out the bottom of this post, and check the ad directly below. So far, he's gotten away with it. I think I may have just blown his cover.
Stop The Torture Bill
23 Sep 2006 03:01 pm
"I don't know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know," - Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Two days after the Senate compromise, it appears pretty clear that few know exactly what it prohibits, allows or changes. Some of this is inevitable. It's a very complicated legal balancing act. But some of it is deliberate: obfuscation as a way to give the executive complete lee-way. Under these circumstances, it seems clear to me that, barring absolute clarity from both sides, this bill should be shelved till the next session. No bill this complex and this unclear and this important should be rushed into law.
I might add that this position, regardless of your take on the underlying issue of torture, is the politically conservative one. The quintessential conservative virtues are not moral certainty and instant legislation but prudence and deliberation, not faith but doubt, not a rush-to-legislate but careful checks and balances. Yes, I know we're told national security is at stake. We always are. But national integrity is also at stake. And that is not something you cram down the Senate's throat in 24-hour sessions, when no one is quite sure what is being made into law. This should be the Democrats' position. It should be the Republicans' position. Why do I fear it won't be?
The Right's Thought Police
23 Sep 2006 02:44 pm
I've posted about how the American Prospect effectively froze out Brendan Nyhan for posting criticism of the left; but, of course, this kind of policing goes on on both sides. Money quote:
I have to mention that a conservative publishing house which had previously been very enthusiastic about my book "Media Whores" and signed me to a book contract did a 180 and paid me to go away when they learned that I was targeting Bill "Al Qaida has marked me for death!" O'Reilly, Michelle "Fiver" Malkin and a few others in addition to the various left-wing figures on the whores list.
Depressing.
The View From Your Window
23 Sep 2006 12:30 pm
Dallas, Texas, 4.15 pm.
Quote for the Day
23 Sep 2006 11:51 am
It's from Robert Bolt's "A Man For All Seasons." Replace "the Devil" with "al Qaeda," and consider the arguments this administration has made:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
YouTube of the Day
23 Sep 2006 10:23 am
Tom Cruise - in a Bollywood movie. Here's the trailer:
Friday, September 22, 2006
Matt, Trey, Jake
22 Sep 2006 11:00 pm
Heads up: ABC News' Nightline does South Park tonight.
The Torture Proposal
22 Sep 2006 08:02 pm
Orwell would have understood David Addington, the brilliant legal thug behind Cheney's and Bush's authorization of torture for the past five years. That's why you have to read the torture bill very closely to see what it does and does not do. The good news seems to me that the Congress has not redefined the Geneva Convention formally. That would have been a catastrophe; and it has been avoided. The consequences for the moral high ground in this long war, the effect it would have on the entire structure of Geneva, the barbarism it would have helped unleash in the coming years, the threat it would have posed to U.S. soldiers in or out of uniform - this has not yet come to pass, however strongly the president wanted it. The evidentiary rules are also better than what Bush wanted, though removing all judicial oversight and any individual's ability to cite Geneva in the courts is a major blow to civilized warfare - and to individual liberty in America.
But - and this is a big but - Marty Lederman's concern about the language in the bill about "cruel" treatment is deeply worrying. Here's Marty's point:
More important is the bill's definition of "serious physical pain or suffering." One would think that, on any reasonable understanding of ordinary language, the "alternative" CIA techniques do, indeed, result in serious physical suffering, at the very least. Indeed, such serious suffering - and the prospect of ending such suffering by telling one's interrogators what they wish to hear - is the whole point of using such techniques in the first place. But remarkably - and not accidently - the bill's definition would not cover all such actual "serious physical suffering."
The definition would require, for one thing, a "bodily injury" - something that would not necessarily result from use of the CIA techniques - even though one can of course be subject to great physical suffering without any "physical injury."
What's worse, such physical injury would also have to "involve" at least one of the following:
(1) a substantial risk of death;
(2) extreme physical pain;
(3) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature, not to include cuts, abrasions, or bruises; or
(4) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty.
As you can see, this definition simply does not cover many categories of actual serious physical suffering, including, naturally, the physical suffering that ordinarily results from the CIA techniques that have been reported.
The result, unfortunately, is a very constrained conception of what constitutes "cruel treatment" - a much narrower conception than a fair or reasonable interpretation of Geneva Article 3(1)(a) would provide.
And therefore the bill would appear to exclude from the definition of "cruel treatment" many cases of actual cruel treatment prohibited by Common Article 3. And when that occurs, it is likely the Executive will construe the statute -- and Common Article 3, as well -- to permit some forms of cruel treatment that Geneva in fact proscribes, i.e., the "alternative" CIA techniques. Indeed, it's happened already: The ink was hardly dry on the draft when numerous Administration spokespersons were gleefully informing the press that the bill is a green light to the CIA to reinstitute the "alternative" techniques that Hamdan had effectively interdicted. Byron York has gone so far as to relate that "both sides appear to believe that the agreement permits the CIA to continue to use sleep deprivation, cold rooms, and other such techniques," even though such techniques do, in fact, constitue a breach of our Geneva obligations.
So we "formally" leave Geneva alone, but grant the executive branch complete discretion in determining what "cruel" means; and the language of the bill certainly can be construed to allow waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and long-time standing. It even allows for a person to be beaten, cut, or near-drowned.
It's important to note that McCain does not believe that this is the case. He believes that the definition of "cruel" here would bar such "alternative methods". But we know from bitter experience that in any ambiguity, this administration has opted for the more draconian interpretation. So therefore all of these techniques, described in detail in Solzheniytsen's "Gulag Archipelago," potentially remain available to this president under this proposal. Barring further clarifications confirming McCain's belief that this bill bars these "alternative methods", I see no legal barrier in this bill to Bush's continuing to authorize them in the future. Worse, the proposal will have declared these practices not to be "cruel". Worse still, its Orwellian abuse of language contains echoes of totalitarian discourse.
The Struggle Continues
22 Sep 2006 08:01 pm
The major step forward in this bill, however, seems to me to be the idea that the president specify in the Federal Register the torture methods he has actually approved. What I don't understand - and what even now good lawyers tell me they don't understand - is why these techniques aren't already published before the bill is passed; or whether they will be published ahead of a torture session or after it; or whether the president can simply withhold this information as he sees fit. Some lawyers say that the president will not be required to issue such regulations and facts; merely permitted to do so. If that's true, it's meaningless. My fear is that this is a ruse; my hope is that it is a window for transparency. It is critical that the president tell the American people and the world what techniques he is using and what standards are being applied in the name of the United States. Sources tell me that there is a gentleman's agreement that waterboarding is now off the table, that sleep deprivation will be restricted to 48 hours (as opposed to 48 days in one case), and that other barbaric practices like hypothermia will cease.
The trouble is: Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Addington are not gentlemen. If we have learned anything these past few years, it is that they are not to be trusted on the torture question, that they have lied repeatedly and knowingly and insistently, that their use of the English language is designed to obfuscate and obscure the reality they are advancing, and the constitutional freedoms they are bent on dismantling. In so far as this bill grants this president discretion in enforcing Geneva, it means that the standards of Geneva will not apply under this president - although they might under a more civilized and competent one.
I should add that it is essential to the integrity of language and law that the word torture not be defined out of existence. Waterboarding, hypothermia, long-time-standing, and various forms of stress positions are torture, have always been torture and always will be torture. What we must do is what Orwell demanded: speak plain English before it evaporates from our discourse, refuse to acquiesce to the corruption of language and decency. In that respect, the press must continue to ask both McCain and all administration representatives whether passing this bill means that waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, long-time-standing or stress positions are now illegal and unavailable to the CIA. They must not be allowed to get away with the answer that they will not mention specific techniques. The specifics are everything. And we must not be snowed by abuse of English into saying something is true when it isn't. Until they are completely forthcoming on these critical details, this bill should not be passed. Moreover, something this complex and this grave should not be rushed into law with round-the-clock haste. We need this to be debated and deliberated slowly. Which means leaving it to the next session of Congress.
The Torture "Compromise"
22 Sep 2006 07:24 pm
Who can speak more persuasively than Vladimir Bukovsky? Money quote:
I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.
This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.
Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources.
When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.
So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.
It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans. And not just endorsing it, but brandishing the use of it as a tool to gain re-election and maintain power. If there is a conservative soul, and I believe there is, the current "conservative" leadership is bent on destroying it. And the resistance must not waver. I'll post my take on the torture compromise bill shortly.
The Deal
22 Sep 2006 04:11 pm
Forget the spin. Read the primary source. Here it is. My thoughts soon.
Quote for the Day
22 Sep 2006 04:06 pm
"The man ... I wouldn't call him nuts. He's not crazy. He's crazy like a fox," - Maurice R. Greenberg, who spills the beans on the discussion with Ahmadinejad at the Council on Foreign relations. Money quote:
He has been quoted many times, including last evening, that the Holocaust needs to be explored as to whether or not it really occurred. And he says, "Well you know, every time somebody tries to do that, they get imprisoned." Well, the reason some have been imprisoned is because it's against the law in some places to deny that the Holocaust occurred.
Of course it occurred. And when he said that, I responded: "Listen, I went through Dachau during the war. To suggest it didn't occur is simply a lie." So he turned around and asked me how old I was, to determine if I was old enough to have been there. And then he changed the subject.
Begin and Torture
22 Sep 2006 03:49 pm
A reader writes:
Begin has a nasty image problem outside of Israel. But it should be noted that his torture policy was noteworthy. As soon as he assumed office, after the general elections of 1977, he summoned the head of the GSS (AKA Shin Beth), and told him simply, "you must stop using all methods of torture. This is an order". The director protested: "Not even a slap to the face?"; "Not even that," replied Begin.
It should be noted that when he did so, the country was under a deadly wave of terror attacks. Not yet suicide attacks, but deadly nevertheless. And he stuck by his order.
When you have actually confronted what torture is, like McCain and Begin, you know how cancerous it is to a free society. The sign of a strong conservative is his disavowal of torture. The sign of a weak one is his embrace of it.
Apologies
22 Sep 2006 03:23 pm
I haven't posted on the torture bill yet because of its complexity, language and political implications, and because this matter is easily the most important moral decision made yet in the war on terror by the Congress, and I want to make sure I understand it entirely and have thought it through. Blogging can be instant and maybe should be instant. But I'm trying to read the actual text rather than the spin. I've learned these past few years that Cheney's legal aide, David Addington, is absolutely ruthless in making sure that the United States continues to have the capacity to torture prisoners. I've also learned that if you do not read every comma, adjective and sub-clause, you may get taken to the cleaners by this guy. I've taken my time honestly to avoid getting trapped in the spin zone, and to listen and read carefully what both sides have said. Bear with me.
The Carnage
22 Sep 2006 12:45 pm
The near-anarchy in Iraq intensifies. 7,000 sectarian murders in the last two months, according to the U.N.
Menachem Begin on Torture
22 Sep 2006 12:44 pm
You might be surprised.
Excitable Moi
22 Sep 2006 11:54 am
A reader writes:
I find myself troubled by your recent posting. Specifically, the line, "We have a dictator on the brink of nukes." By all indications, the Iranian regime is at the very least, 6-7 years away from a working nuclear weapon. Most estimates give it a decade, as in around the year 2016. Some predict more time. I have seen no credible reports that they are remotely close to a nuclear weapon. Have you?
Also, Ahmadinejad is not a dictator. He cannot make decisions without the specific approval of Supreme Leader Khamenei. A small point, but still.
I understand the difficulty in projecting domestic politics in a country as hostile as Iran. However, we know that Ahmadinejad is facing a dearth of support in his country over his economic failures, when he was elected largely on an economic populist platform. Seeing how the key issue driving his popularity appears to be his belligerence and feistiness towards the USA, instead of adapting a hard-line stance and feeding into his popularity, it puzzles me why we don't treat him like the pretend fraud he is.
Considering that Iran will likely have its nukes by 2016, and Ahmadinejad is up for re-election in 2009, the smart move appears to be to apply sanctions and just wait him out. By that time, we will have a new administration who is able to competently deal with the issue, and Ahmadinejad will likely be tossed out by his own people.
In any case, they are not on the "brink" of nukes. This hysteria does nothing to help the situation. Personally, I don't think any of this matters. Bush and company appear determined to deal with Iran and they will do so, over the rest of our complaints.
There are reasons to hope for the best, yes. And reasons to fear the worst as well.
The View From Your Window
22 Sep 2006 11:41 am
Saline, Michigan, 6 pm.
The Deal
22 Sep 2006 10:44 am
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness...
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer...
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient," - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
I intend to study very closely the language of the Senate deal on "alternative interrogation techniques" before commenting further.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
No Air-Kissing
21 Sep 2006 08:59 pm
I think American Airlines just lost a lot of potential customers.
Harris on Benedict
21 Sep 2006 08:21 pm
Sam Harris, fearless as ever, hammers the Pope for having ... religious faith. One core element of Benedict's address was that science cannot account for science itself, that there is something called the whole in which scientific and empirical discourse have an essential place - but not the only, or prime, one:
Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought — to philosophy and theology ...
Harris has no real answer to this (scientism has its limits), concedes that questions of epistemology can indeed make one sweat, but then dismisses Benedict's point by arguing that he said nothing "interesting or controversial" about this issue. So, in one essay, Harris both condemns Benedict for being controversial in inflaming Muslims and then condemns him for not being controversial enough. I can understand Harris' argument, respect his intellect, and admire his last book. But asking the Pope to be an atheist is not exactly illuminating. And between the pope's call for reason-in-faith and the Islamist insistence on revolutionary violence, I don't think it's the "silly old priest" who bears the greater moral burden in these perilous times.
Quote for the Day
21 Sep 2006 07:41 pm
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Respect for bodily integrity
2297 Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong. Terrorism threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately is gravely against justice and charity. Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law. 91
2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.
Notice that terrorism and torture are treated in the same context and abhorred for similar reasons. You cannot morally fight one with the other - without losing the very moral law you are trying to protect.
A Torture Deal?
21 Sep 2006 07:34 pm
Here's the AP wire-story.
Left Behind
21 Sep 2006 06:17 pm
Here's Ahmadinejad's peroration at the U.N.:
"I emphatically declare that today’s world, more than ever before, longs for just and righteous people with love for all humanity; and above all longs for the perfect righteous human being and the real savior who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood on the planet.
O, Almighty God, all men and women are your creatures and you have ordained their guidance and salvation. Bestow upon humanity that thirsts for justice, the perfect human being promised to all by you, and make us among his followers and among those who strive for his return and his cause."
Read it again. Ahmadinejad is calling upon God to bring about the coming of the Twelfth Imam ("the perfect human being promised to all by you"), who heralds the Apocalypse. He is also saying that he will "strive for his return." It is the most terrifying statement any president of any nation has made to the U.N. We have a dictator on the brink of nukes, striving to accelerate the Apocalypse. Think of the Iranian regime as a nation-as-suicide-bomber. And anything serious we can do to prevent it may only make matters worse. No wonder Ahmadinejad smiles. Paradise beckons.
YouTube of the Day
21 Sep 2006 06:00 pm
So we finally get to see the "researcher" behind much of the debunked "science" that the religious right uses against gays. The Daily Show's Jason Jones interviews Paul Cameron - and puts his theories to the test.
Gonzales' Trouser Malfunctions
21 Sep 2006 05:23 pm
A reader reminds me that Alberto Gonzales has a strong record of fibbing when it comes to questions of detention and torture:
On November 30, 2001, in an OpEd in the NYT, Gonzales defended the President's November 13, 2001 order, reassuring the American people that it "preserves judicial review in civilian courts." In fact, the order does exactly the opposite, stating that individuals subject to the order "shall not be privileged to seek any remedy or maintain any proceedings, directly or indirectly, or to have any such remedy or proceeding sought on [their] behalf in (i) any court of the United States, or any State thereof, (ii) any court of any foreign nation, or (iii) any international tribunal."
On June 22 2004, in a press conference held the day the White House released the President's Feb 7 "determination" on the Geneva Conventions, Gonzales stated:
"Now, interrogation and detention policies in Iraq were issued by General Sanchez in the field. They do not involve input from Washington and are not related to legal opinions I have discussed concerning the war against al Qaeda."
In fact, General Sanchez himself said that he relied on these legal opinions and that he received input from Washington.
In the same press conference, Gonzales also stated:
"The President's [February 7] determination [regarding the Geneva Conventions] is not controversial within the Executive Branch."
In fact, as is now the public record, Gonzales himself was witness to a massive controversy within the Executive Branch.
He needs a fire extinguisher in his back pocket at all times. But he does what he's told. And that's why he's attorney-general.
The Pro-Torture Chorus
21 Sep 2006 04:57 pm
Marty Lederman notes that many of us have long asked those who support the administration's detention policies to come out and say clearly that they favor torture. I guess it's a lesson in being careful what you ask for.
The View From Your Window
21 Sep 2006 04:31 pm
Seattle, Washington, 1.30 pm.
Gonzales' Flaming Trousers
21 Sep 2006 03:12 pm
It's not easy dissembling as smoothly as the attorney general. But he outdid himself on Tuesday, when asked about the U.S.'s seizure of an innocent man at JFK airport, and deportation of him to Syria, where he was brutally tortured - sorry, subjected to "coercive interrogation techniques" with a metal cable. No one disputes the facts of this story, but Gonzales said Tuesday:
Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria. I'm not aware that he was tortured.
The New York Times takes it from there:
The attorney general's comments caused puzzlement because they followed front-page news articles of the findings of the Canadian commission. It reported that based on inaccurate information from Canada about Mr. Arar's supposed terrorist ties, American officials ordered him taken to Syria, an action documented in public records.
On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Gonzales had intended to make only a narrow point: that deportations are now handled by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice.
Ohhh. I see. So it all depends on what the meaning of the word "we" is. Like the president's oft-stated position: "We do not torture."
Bush, Dems, Polls
21 Sep 2006 01:53 pm
A helpful primer on where we are.
The Formidable Ahmadinejad
21 Sep 2006 01:47 pm
Watching the CNN interview with Mahmoud Ahamedinejad and reading about his meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations reinforces my sense of foreboding about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There's no point in denying that his trip to the U.S. has been a big media and p.r. coup for him. And there is a chilling slickness to him that is as disturbing as it is obviously formidable. The way he deflected questions always back toward the U.S., the way he skilfully used every awkward moment to pivot to the themes his domestic and international audience want to hear, the very image of the informal, mild-mannered, quiet-spoken, constantly smiling serenity: all these represent a very, very capable politician. There is a complete self-assurance to him that suggests he can neither be trusted as a diplomatic partner nor under-estimated as a global foe.
The serenity may also come from his own fundamentalist psyche. There's a reason fundamentalism is popular. Unlike other forms of faith, it relieves the believer of almost all responsibility for any of his doubts, it surrenders everything in a person's psyche to God's will, it appeases all anxiety and reassures away every question. And so, in many cases, it can be a source of great goodness, unleashing compassion and service and amazing resilience. Look at how fundamentalism created, say, the Salvation Army. But in others, it can become the constant absolution and rationalization of almost any action. It can justify torture. It can legitimize all sorts of ugly means because the motive is deemed pure. In a religion like Islam, where reason has been eclipsed for a very long time, the absence of oxygen for the doubt that makes faith both real and reasonable is acute. The combination of that psyche with naked political cunning is one of the most dangerous combinations there is. We are looking at a man who absolutely believes he is right; and that he has a large majority of the cards. Alas, thanks to this administration, he has many more cards now than he did when he took office.
(Photo: Georges Gobet/Getty.)
Christians For Torture
21 Sep 2006 12:50 pm
The Traditional Values Coalition, led by the Reverend Louis P. Sheldon backs torturing military detainees. They might want to get the date of the Geneva Convention right. We have a new bumper sticker, don't we: WWJT? Who Would Jesus Torture? Oh, wait ...
Then There Were Five
21 Sep 2006 11:48 am
The fifth former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has publicly come out in opposition to the president's bill to amend the Geneva Convention to allow torture. But Dick Cheney knows better, doesn't he?
Don't Mess With ...
21 Sep 2006 10:54 am
A reader writes:
"All these years later, the end-result is a Texan president who hasn't seen a civil liberty..."
If your use of the word Texan here is relevant in this context then it must be perjorative. I enjoy your column but can't help but be offended by your occasional generalizations when it comes to my state.
Please realize that all Texans do not hate civil liberties and some are even willing to fight to make sure that Texans and non-Texans alike may enjoy them. Just ask Mr. John Lawrence.
Furthermore, remember that New Haven-born Dubya was raised by a Connecticut family that spent summers vacationing in Maine. He was "educated" at the Phillips Academy (Andover, MA), followed by Yale University (New Haven, CT), followed by Harvard (Cambridge, MA). The man may have lived in Midland but the mold of the man is pure New England. Do not be fooled like the rest by the boots, bird hunts, Crawford ranch, and embellished southern accent. That's all about the politics. If you want to know about Texas and Texans then spend some time learning a bit about Ann Richards. Andrew, she was a Texan.
Confronting Islam
21 Sep 2006 08:35 am
The pope was right to do so, even though he could have been more politic and accurate. In that vein, good for the former Archbishop of Canterbury:
Lord Carey said that Muslims must address "with great urgency" their religion's association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the "clash of civilisations" endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.
"We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times," he said. "There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths."
Arguing that [Sam] Huntington's thesis has some 'validity', Lord Carey quoted him as saying: "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power." Lord Carey went on to argue that a "deep-seated Westophobia" has developed in recent years in the Muslim world.
Ressentiment under Allah: a toxic brew indeed.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The Left's Thought Police
20 Sep 2006 10:40 pm
A reader writes:
First off, good on Nyhan for sticking to his guns. Second, I recommend that Sam Rosenfeld take a good, long look in the mirror. His acquiescence to the true believers besieging his e-mail server is more odious than those true believers themselves, and they're stinkier than a horde of Visigoths. Nyhan sums it up perfectly:
...while TAP can choose to (almost) exclusively criticize conservatives, isn't open and honest debate a value that liberals prize? Is it appropriate to largely ignore one side while jumping on virtually any misstatement from the other?
Self-criticism and honest inquiry are hallmarks of the liberal mindset. Bloggers like Atrios apply filters to their facts and judge dissent and criticism as the height of disloyalty, a crime punishable by ridicule and financial ruin. Schopenhauer's point about taking care not to become the beast you fight is eerily apt. In their fanatical drive for unity and victory, they risk becoming what they hate.
Eric Hoffer once wrote, "The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than a deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without." This could not be more true of anyone, Right or Left - we all have the propensity. Once we stop accepting criticism as an opportunity to reflect and evaluate, we become less. The only way we can avoid doubt within and retain our humanity and honesty is to weather the slings and arrows that come our way, using reason as our shield. Going on the offensive, by calling someone 'wanker of the day' for example, isn't the act of someone confident in their opinions. It’s the act of a coward afraid of his own shadow of doubt.
Heads Up
20 Sep 2006 08:55 pm
I'll be on Anderson Cooper's CNN show tonight, after his exclusive interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
YouTube Removed
20 Sep 2006 08:31 pm
That 30-second clip from "The 4400" depicting "waterboarding" has been removed from YouTube. Not sure why. Probably because it's a clip from a TV show and the network decided it wasn't "fair use." Sorry. Hiding the truth about what the government is doing is integral to this administration's successful use of illegal torture. If anyone finds any other video dramatizations of the Bush-authorized techniques - "cold cells" and "waterboarding" particularly - please email them. As we saw at Abu Ghraib, hideous violence can be made to sound inane through euphemism. Photos bring the truth home. That's why the images are kept from you. And in a free society, the media exists to propagate them. And, before Malkinians blog-swarm me, I have also shown and linked to the evil of Islamist violence and torture as well.
The Roller-Coaster
20 Sep 2006 08:18 pm
First, it seemed the House Judiciary Committee voted down the Bush torture bill. Now I hear that Jim Sensenbrenner cracked the whip and eked out a tiny majority. Here's Reuters:
In an abrupt reversal, a U.S. House of Representatives committee narrowly voted on Wednesday to endorse President George W. Bush's plan for tough interrogations and trials of foreign terrorism suspects after Republicans rounded up enough members.
About an hour earlier, the House Judiciary Committee rejected Bush's plan, with three Republicans joining committee Democrats. Embarrassed Republicans then summoned absent members, called for another vote, and approved it 20-19.
It's called winning ugly. This internecine struggle cannot be quite what Rove had in mind. Stay tuned.
The View From Your Window
20 Sep 2006 07:27 pm
South Pole Station, sunrise. Yes, I have a reader on the South Pole. The "day" there lasts a very long time this time of year.
Pulped Non-Fiction
20 Sep 2006 07:22 pm
As I write, the entire print-run of my forthcoming book, The Conservative Soul, is being pulped or trashed. A horrible printing error spliced half of the fifth chapter into the middle of the sixth, rendering the entire second half of the book incomprehensible. Many of the books were ok, but so many - thousands of them - weren't that we had no option but to start over, or risk the integrity of the text. All copies that were shipped are being recalled from booksellers. This is every writer's nightmare - especially as I discovered the error myself while re-reading the book late one night last week and couldn't believe my eyes. But it has a relatively happy ending. With the speed of today's print technology, the publishing date has been moved back only a week - to October 10. The review galleys were fine, mercifully. If you pre-ordered by Amazon, fear not. Nothing has shipped yet and the entire batch will be replaced. But if you got an advance, published, finished book, you'll soon be getting a replacement and an apology. My apologies on behalf of my publisher and printer. But we caught it in time; and the final product will have the pages in the right order.
A Southern Paper Against Torture
20 Sep 2006 06:23 pm
The Atlanta Journal Constitution opposes the president's policy.
Goldwater, Benedict, Conscience
20 Sep 2006 06:12 pm
A reader writes:
In my childhood memory, the first two politicians I ever recognized were Nixon and Goldwater, and Nixon spooked me enough that I was one of only two in our 35-student first grade class who chose McGovern in our election day show-of-hands straw poll of 1972 - and I always thought that the girl who also raised her hand only did so because she liked me. I remember feeling as though Goldwater looked like the strictest principal I could envision, and now I come to find that he had the strictest principles one might envision.
I find it enlightening that your use of the idea of "conscience" in speaking of the senator dovetailed so closely with my reading of Christopher Hitchens' illuminating language in his Ratzinger article that "the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintains a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith." I feel as though a great deal of what ails this administration is that our leader, who undoubtedly considers himself a vessel of Christ on Earth, maintains that same, steady attack. And though we might like to find in our current political landscape a Goldwater-styled defender of principles, even McCain has caved to the broader faith-based puppeteers whose grip on our democracy MUST be loosened if we are to advance our shared Constitutional freedoms.
It is surprising to me that I never before joined the two words individual/conscience in my assessment of my own, non-faith/religion-based beliefs. I hold no book to be the word of God, and I presume no church to be the church of God, but I presume every individual to have developed an individual conscience that defines them more truly than any book that they might carry, or any religion that they may promote. Hypocrisy is the truest barometer of an eroded conscience, and our world strains against the raging current of it that washes over all of the earth's shores.
I broadly agree. I would also note an important detail in the pope's address. He puts the word "conscience" in quote-marks:
The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. [My italics.]
This is no typo. Ratzinger has long disowned the notion of an individual conscience as we have long understood it in the West, as I explain at greater length in my forthcoming book. His view is that if your conscience goes against anything that the Pope says at any time, then it isn't really your conscience. It's a false conscience in a mirror of the Communist idea of "false consciousness". Your real conscience, Benedict insists, is always in agreement with the Pope. It's just that you are too befuddled by sin to recognize it. This Pope speaks eloquently of using reason in faith. And yet, no post-war Pope has waged a more ferocious war on the use of reason in the Catholic church than Ratzinger/Benedict. Maybe he should take the mote out of his own eye before he excoriates the beam in others'.
(Photo: Maurizio Brambatti/AP.)
Anti-Christianismism
20 Sep 2006 05:34 pm
A reader writes:
One of the standard passages in the "Prayers of the People" in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer asks for God's blessings and guidance for "the President of the United States, the Governor of this State, and all others in positions of authority." I see no particular difference between this and the sign in your illustration. But this perfectly unobjectionable prayer, which used to be included in our ritual every Sunday without regard to who held any of the offices referred to, is no longer being used at my Episcopal church. Maybe this apparent selectivity in deciding which President is deserving of God's guidance and blessing is another species of "Christianism"?
Agreed. The overt partisan politicization of faith is obnoxious whatever side it's coming from, left or right. It's one thing to bring moral witness to the public square, rooted in faith. It's another thing to align - or detach - God with one party or one candidate.
[Update: several readers email to say that their churches and synagogues routinely offer prayers for those in power, whatever their party. That's certainly my experience. I would also think that this president especially needs our prayers. These are terribly trying times; and given his very limited abilities, he needs all the prayers we can send his way.]
The Left's Thought Police
20 Sep 2006 05:30 pm
The American Prospect hired Brendan Nyhan to blog for them. Good idea. Brendan has a sterling record as a non-partisan blogger who calls things as he sees them. So he criticized some left-wing blogs for hyperbole. This is what then happened:
Last Wednesday, controversy broke out when I slammed two liberal blogs for using an airline employee's suicide after 9/11 to take a cheap shot at President Bush. My post, which initially contained a minor factual error, prompted one of the bloggers, Atrios (aka Duncan Black), to label me the "wanker of the day" and to call on TAP editors to "rethink things a bit." Hundreds of Atrios readers filled the Prospect's comment boards with vitriol. In an email Friday morning, Sam Rosenfeld, the magazine's online editor, asked that I focus my blogging on conservative targets. He specifically objected to two posts criticizing liberals (here and here) that I wrote after the Atrios controversy. I refused and terminated the relationship.
Why was I asked to slant my work to the liberal party line? In an email statement, TAP editor Michael Tomasky said that "[t]he Prospect is hardly averse to criticizing liberal verities" and that the magazine had no problem with my initial posts criticizing liberals, but "there were a few posts in succession that struck us as either inaccurate or an effort to draw equivalencies where none existed. The Prospect has always opposed a 'pox on both houses' posture, and that's what we came to believe you were doing."
Sorry, Michael, but that's pathetic. The blog partisanship on the right is often depressing - and boy would I have been fired long ago if I had ever been blogging on a "conservative" site. But the politburo on the left is no better. And to think we once believed the blogosphere could liberate independent thought. Yeah, right. You can now read Brendan, freed from the liberal thought police, at his own blog. Support free thought. They won't.
Beyond Satire II
20 Sep 2006 04:51 pm
"In fact, there has been plenty of politics, and not all that much religion, out of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party over the past six years. There are theocrats and theocrat-wannabes out there, but they're really not much in evidence in the Bush Administration's policies," - Glenn Reynolds, yesterday.
"Sides are being chosen, and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will ... It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ," Tom DeLay, legislative architect of Republican policies for much of the last decade, in March of this year.
Beyond Satire I
20 Sep 2006 03:32 pm
Michelle Malkin has come out in favor of fair trials for convicted terrorists, argues for their right to see evidence used against them at trial, and hopes the International Criminal Court hears their case. Of course, these standards do not apply to the United States government, in which case she supports indefinite detention of a journalist without charges, and accuses him of being a terrorist on the word of the military. This really is the new moral standard for conservatives: the whole world must abide by the principles of Anglo-Saxon justice, except the United States. No other country may torture, but we can. It is, as Glenn Greenwald explains, "beyond satire."
Romney on Torture
20 Sep 2006 03:20 pm
The theocons' favorite nominee is firmly in favor of torturing terror suspects in interrogation - and has clearly positioned himself as McCain's opponent on the issue. I presume he thinks it will win him votes among Christian, Republican base voters.
Quote for the Day
20 Sep 2006 03:15 pm
"On the one hand, we are faced with a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, nuclear blackmail and terrorist chaos at the heart of the world's Persian Gulf oil supply, and terrorist-planted nuclear weapons in America's cities. On the other hand, we can choose an economically disruptive war with Iran that will alienate us from the world, push us to and beyond our military limits, and that even then may not even succeed. The by now stock phrase, "there are no good options" doesn't quite do justice to the awful choice we face," - Stanley Kurtz, pretty accurately summing up the place we find ourselves in.
YouTube of the Day
20 Sep 2006 02:36 pm
I wondered yesterday if Dean Barnett thought being Jewish was a liability in the South. He replies, rather oddly, here. To continue the debate, the Kazakh celebrity, Borat, performed a social science experiment in a country and western bar in Arizona. It contributes, well, something to the question we were debating, although I confess I'm not sure what.
Goldwater
20 Sep 2006 01:26 pm
If you haven't had a chance to see the HBO documentary on Barry Goldwater by his grand-daughter, you might want to take the time. It didn't have enough politics for this junkie, but it certainly brought to life the spirit of a conservatism now almost entirely eclipsed in the Republican party. Goldwater had no truck for government spending, and raged at the fiscal excesses of his time. By today's Republican standards, the spending he was fulminating against was peanuts. Goldwater was an adamant defender of states' rights, a principle he stuck with even though it meant being smeared as a bigot and a racist. Bush's GOP has no principled interest in federalism, from its education policies to its attacks on states that violate religious doctrines on such issues as marriage, end-of-life matters and even medical marijuana. From the 1970s, Goldwater recognized Falwell and the religious right for what they are: charlatans who have as much concern for traditional conservatism as big government liberals do. What Goldwater would have said about the Schiavo case would not be broadcastable on network television. He also adhered to the old conservative notion of live-and-let-live. He never had a problem with gays, and although he clearly found abortion an awful thing, he wasn't about to remove a female citizen's right in the early stages of pregnancy to control her own body. He was, in other words, a conservative. Or as his great book put it: a conservative with a conscience. And if he was a conservative, then the current Republican party and the current president simply aren't. More and more observers recognize this, especially those who do not have a vested or financial interest in sustaining the charade that this is a conservative administration in any meaningful sense.
The documentary makes much of Goldwater's stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Johnson's astonishingly courageous move to back it. The irony of Goldwater's career is that this decision, made on a principled stance of federalism and limited government, became something else on the ground. It shifted the Republican Party base away from California and the sun-belt into the Deep South. Goldwater was a Western conservative, not a Southern one. And whichever party the South controls will have a hard time reflecting the kind of skeptical, libertarian, tolerant principles Goldwater believed in. So he both created American conservatism and laid the grounds for its eventual implosion. All these years later, the end-result is a Texan president who hasn't seen a civil liberty he wouldn't junk at a second's notice, who bases campaigns on subtle appeals to prejudice and fear of minorities, who has doubled the debt of the next generation, expanded government at a pace not seen since FDR, engaged in two reckless wars without the preparation or manpower to succeed, presided over a government riddled with incompetence and cronyism, and who has nominated candidates to the Supreme Court using their religious faith as a criterion. Whatever else Bush is, he is not merely not Goldwater. He is, in many ways, his nemesis. Which is why conservatism as we have known it has been strangled - by the Republicans. And why the fight to resurrect it must start from almost the same parched earth on which Goldwater confidently took his stand.
Seeing him today, one remembers what courage is. And it's long past time conservatives summoned some up.
Is This Torture?
20 Sep 2006 08:11 am
What follows below is a dramatization of a "waterboarding". It's taken from the USA network award-winning show, "The 4400" on YouTube. Since I have only read descriptions, I cannot verify its accuracy in detail - but it certainly captures the essence of this technique directly authorized by the president, and used by the CIA at the behest of the president and vice-president. The clip lasts around 30 seconds. Most victims apparently do not last that long. If you believe that what you are watching is "severe mental or physical pain or suffering," then it is torture under U.S. law, and the U.N. Treaty. It is undeniably a violation of the Geneva Convention. If it is torture, according to the president himself, then it should stopped. At this moment in history, let us at least look at what is being done by the government; and call it by its proper name.
Christianism Watch
20 Sep 2006 05:21 am
Missoula, Montana, yesterday. If readers driving around find explicitly political and partisan Republican messages on church buildings or signs, please send them in. This one doesn't cross the line. But I wouldn't be shocked to hear they didn't have that sign up under Clinton.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Stephen Glass, Prophet?
19 Sep 2006 11:48 pm
A reader writes:
Andrew, this "Jesus camp" makes me think Stephen Glass was just a little ahead of his time. Remember one of his fake stories was "Peddling Poppy", in which he describes his visit to the "First Church of George Herbert Walker Bush Christ", run by a group of evangelicals who thought "41" was the reincarnation of Jesus.
Ah, yes, Stephen Glass. Ewww. But you need Twain or Mencken to capture today's religious right accurately. And Glass was and is no Mencken.
Capitalism At Work
19 Sep 2006 10:11 pm
They have the Internet on the West Bank and across the Muslim world, don't they? Greg Gutfeld has an effigy store up and running. Bargain prices with a great guarantee: "We ship same day for