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 An Apology
- The Advocate, (July 5, 2005)


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 An American Creed
- NPR, (July 4, 2005)


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 Despite The Flaws
- The Stranger, (July 2, 2005)

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Sunday, July 17, 2005
 
"I'VE ALREADY SAID TOO MUCH": Those words could come back to haunt Karl Rove. According to Matt Cooper, they were the last words Karl Rove said to him in their telephone call over the Wilson affair. Rove also told Cooper that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the "Agency on WMD." That might not be illegal, but it does seem to me to be consistent with an attempt to smear Wilson, using his wife, while skriting the fact of her CIA cover. Classic Rove sleaze. The somewhat aggressive Grand Jury also seems to consist of many African-American women - not exactly Rove's base. Time also reports that
White House political advisor Karl Rove told the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame spy case that he heard about Valerie Plame’s identity from a reporter—or perhaps from someone else in the administration who said he got it from a reporter—Rove just couldn’t be certain or remember which one, a source who has been briefed on his account tells TIME.
So it could have been from the administration or the CIA. The bottle keeps spinning. When it stops, who'll be the guilty one? And guilty of what? It's not even clear any more what possible crime Fitzgerald is investigating.

- 12:08:00 PM
 
NOT THE FIRST MARTYR: Steve McWilliams (see below) isn't the only person with a serious illness who has died in part because of the government's ban on medical marijuana. Here's another case, bizarrely of another McWilliams. (Ryan Sager writes about the first McWilliams here.)

- 11:46:00 AM
 
THREE NEW POSTS: I've linked to these pieces before, but here they are on the site: on staying alive with HIV (to the chagrin of some in the AIDS establishment); life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and why, however chastened, I'm still in favor of the Bush-Blair Iraq war.

IRSHAD PROFILED: The "lipstick lesbian" challenging the mullahs.

- 11:25:00 AM

Saturday, July 16, 2005
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY: An emailer defends the Jesuits:
"As I recollect (from reading John O'Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits, a book well worth reading), the Jesuit ban on Jews was because to begin with, unlike other religious orders (and, indeed, all Christian society) they did not ban conversos, and therefore included a rather high percentage of them in the first generation or two of the Jesuits' existence. (Note, for example, St. Teresa of Avila, in the loosely-Jesuit-affiliated Carmelite order, herself of converso descent.) The ban was in some ways forced on them: their rival orders (Dominicans, etc.) were making hay about "the Jesuits are all a bunch of Jews," so the Jesuits conformed with the rest of Christian society. It's also specifically in line with the Spanish limpieza de sangre laws, barring conversos from a variety of occupations--with which the Church in general at first fought and then generally compromised. Of course, by the time the compromises were done, and the Jesuits had forbidden conversos from the order, a rather large number of conversos and part-conversos in the middle and upper classes had forged sufficient genealogies to get into any order they wanted. The limpieza de sangre laws were in some ways more a tool in intra-Castilian factional fights--your great-grandmother was a Jew, so you can't get this lucrative job, Don Miguel--than an expression of simple bigotry. But the point being that to identify the Jesuits as particularly guilty of anti-Semitism avant la lettre is 1) counterfactual; and 2) buying into the old tropes of anti-Catholicism, where it's always the Jesuits, the Jesuits, the Jesuits who are evil, evil, evil. At the time they're disliked from being too philosemitic; now they're accused of the reverse."
I don't think any reader of this blog would remember me having anything but respect for the Jesuits. In this country, they are becoming the underground resistance that will keep the decent church alive while Benedict spreads his brittle reactionaryism. My point is simply that the Church hierarchy has acquiesced in and found theological justifications for the stigmatization of minorities in the past - and their chief objects of loathing were Jews. Like gays, Jews' very existence seemed to violate the abstract notions of natural law that the Church had constructed to qualify the message of universal love in the Gospels. The Church hierarchy is human. It has perpetrated bigotry against the marginalized in the past. It is doing so again today. Merely the objects of dehumanization have changed. And one day, it will be as ashamed of its treatment of gays as it now officially is of its persecution of the Jewish people. It just may take a couple of millennia for the point to be conceded.

- 8:41:00 PM
 
MORE ON McWILLIAMS: The obit. The first medical marijuana martyr?

- 8:22:00 PM
 
IS THE PURGE IMMINENT? The usually reliable Catholic Reporter's John Allen reports that a long-awaited (and long-feared) document is now in Pope Benedict's hands. The document would put the Vatican's full authority behind banning all gay men from seminaries and the priesthood, regardless of their commitment to celibacy or faithfulness to Church teachings. Their very existence as involuntary homosexuals would make them ineligible for the priesthood. Money quote:
[T]he document will reject a solution that some seminaries, religious communities and bishops have tended to adopt in recent years - that it doesn't matter if a candidate is gay, as long as he's capable of remaining celibate. "I suspect some people, in good will, have gravitated to this idea," one bishop said. "But that's not what the church is saying, and this document will make that clear." To date, there's been no indication of what the pope intends to do.
Just ponder what this might mean. The Church concedes that gay people are involuntarily gay; the Church asks them to commit to a life without sex or physical or emotional intimacy; if they are priests, the conundrum is resolved anyway: celibacy is mandatory for gays and straights alike, and, so the very distinction becomes moot.

THE TURN TOWARD BIGOTRY: But now the policy could become something much, much different: even if gay priests live up to all their responsibilities, even if they embrace celibacy wholly, even if they faithfully serve the Church, they would still be deemed beneath being priests, serving God, or entering seminaries. Why? Because, in pope Benedict's own words, they are "objectively disordered," indelibly morally sick in some undefined way, and so unfit, regardless of their actions, to serve God or His people. It is no longer a matter of what they do or not do that qualifies or disqualifies them for the priesthood; it is who they are. Not since the Jesuits' ban on ethnic Jews, regardless of their conversion or Christian faith, has the Church entertained such pure discrimination. The insult to gay Catholics is, of course, immeasurable. It is also an outrageous attack on the good, great and holy work so many gay men and lesbians have performed in the Church from its very beginnings. Father Mychal Judge, for example, the fire-fighters' priest who died in the ruins of the World Trade Center ministering sacraments to fire-men, would retroactively be deemed unfit for the priesthood. So would literally thousands and thousands of gay priests, bishops, cardinals and popes over the centuries. The old doctrine, however cruel and inhumane, at least concentrated on moral acts and made no distinctions between who committed them. It laid out clear rules and insisted that gays and straights abide by them equally. The proposed policy would instead focus on a human being's very core - and exclude him or her as a result. That kind of discrimination is the definition of bigotry. This is the Church? This is God's voice for human dignity and equality in the world? This is an institution that says all are welcome at the Lord's table? I can only hope and pray that pope Benedict doesn't go there. And if he does, I hope that heterosexual Catholics will rise up and defend their gay priests and friends and family members against this unconscionable attack.

(P.S. I am leaving aside, of course, the long history of discrimination and subordination of heterosexual women in the Church. It is equally indefensible, in my view, but the arguments for and against women priests has a different lineage and history that, for now, is best discussed in a different context.)

- 1:17:00 PM
 
THE REAL AMERICAN SOLDIER: Here's the genuine item: tough, relentless but also, ultimately, merciful, and magnanimous.

THE WAR ON POT: Here's a tragic story from the federal government's campaign to prevent people with severe medical conditions from relieving their pain with marijuana. A San Diego man, Steve McWilliams,
who had to cease using medical marijuana after a 2002 arrest, suffered from chronic pain and was likely facing prison time after being charged by federal prosecutors three years ago with possessing 25 marijuana plants. A Supreme Court ruling handed down last month said that federal law prohibiting medicinal use of marijuana trumps California's voter-approved Compassionate Use Act.
Facing time in pain and in prison, McWilliams killed himself. Another victory for the nanny state.

PTOWN MOMENT:





NADAGATE? John Tierney turns in his best column to date:
For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it.
I agree with all that, but especially the first two words. For now. Someone somewhere initiated this Washington series of Chinese whispers. Who? This quote from Bob Novak in Newsday on July 21, 2003, still hangs in the air: "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." Who are "they"?

- 1:17:00 PM

Friday, July 15, 2005
 
HAPPY FIFTH ANNIVERSARY: Five years and counting here at this blog. If you've enjoyed andrewsullivan.com for years and want to support this kind of forum, please consider throwing a donation into the tip-jar.

CHRISTIANISTS VS CATHOLICS? Here's an interesting twist: a pro-life Protestant evangelical adoption group won't consider Catholic parents.

- 7:35:00 PM
 
THINKING OUT LOUD: A left-leaning Englishman in New York is in political and intellectual flux:
So, after 12 months of living in New York is it any surprise that Israel starts to look a little less evil? And that Europe starts to look a little more parochial? That the US starts to look a little more like it is trying to solve some of the world’s problems, and that it is doing so despite the sometimes unfair criticism of its allies? If in England it always looked like the US was the playground bully. Then from the US it looks a lot more like an embattled headteacher in a problem school.
It's a very honest and eloquent posting. Read it.

- 11:59:00 AM
 
DID REPORTERS NAME PLAME? That would certainly be consistent with the Rove-A-Dope strategy. Mickey posits his theories here and Cliff May does here. As I've said, if this backfires on the press because they rushed to judgment, it could turn into another Bush triumph. I don't know yet. But it's a possibility.

- 11:40:00 AM
 
A MUSLIM AGAINST AL QAEDA: In Al Jazeera no less:

Al-Qaida is also a revival of the radical currents that surfaced in Islamic history from time to time only to be defeated by moderate mainstream Islam led by the Ulama (scholars). In particular, they appear to be a continuation of Kharijite thought with its dualistic puritanical conception of the world and the community of Muslims and of Gnostic underground organisations like the Assassins and Qaramita, who sought to disrupt the stability of Muslim societies through acts of terrorism.

Al-Qaida would be best seen as a mixture of these political and ideological strands. Apart from the ideological justifications it takes recourse to, one would, indeed, be hard put to find much that distinguishes it from Latin American anarchist groups. Their acts share the same destructive ferocity, the same absurdity. The difference is that where one finds its ideological legitimacy in Marxism, the other seeks it in the Islamic religion.
(Hat tip: Don Surber.

- 11:20:00 AM
 
GENEVA SUSPENDED: We have new evidence that president Bush's suspension of the ban on torture under the Geneva Conventions and under American law was ordered over the objections of the judge advocate generals (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force and Marines. Money quote:
A law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon working group's 2003 report, prepared under the supervision of general counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority." Haynes -- through Daniel J. Dell'Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the Defense Department -- wrote a memo March 17 that rescinded the working group's report, and Dell'Orto confirmed that withdrawal yesterday at the hearing. According to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post, the general counsel's office determined that the report "does not reflect now-settled executive branch views of the relevant law."
Notice how broad the original exception was. It legalized torture anywhere for any POWs - not just enemy combatants - if the president so ordered. And we now have a precedent that would permit even legitimate U.S. POWs to be tortured in retaliation. We had a president declaring himself above the law, and he got his legal lackey, Alberto Gonzales, to rubber-stamp it. Does any sane person really believe that president Bush's personal suspension of the law against torture had nothing to do with the abuses that followed in every single theater of the war on terror? Or that his decision hasn't put U.S. soldiers now and in the future at greater risk even in conventional combat? Notice also how the military's legal representatives opposed it. The secretary of state opposed it. This was Bush's choice. The line from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the White House is perfectly straight. And people are fixating on Karl Rove?

SPEAKING OF WHICH: Here's an important quote from George Orwell, writing in the middle of the Second World War, on October 12, 1942. He was responding to a very similar argument to that proferred by today's American right that the depravity of our enemies exempts us from our historic decency toward prisoners, that their barbarism makes maintaining Geneva standards "quaint." Here's Orwell's reflection:
"May I be allowed to offer on or two reflections on the British Governments' decision to retaliate against German prisoners, which seems so far to have aroused extraudinarily little protest?

By chaining up German prisoners in response to similar action by the Germans, we descend, at any rate in the eyes of the ordinary observer, to the level of our enemies. It is unquestionable when one thinks of the history of the past ten years that there is a deep moral difference between democracy and Fascism, but if we go on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth we simply cause that difference to be forgotten. Moreover, in the matter of ruthlessness we are unlikely to compete successfully with our enemies. As the Italian radio has just proclaimed, the Fascist principle is two eyes for an eye and a whole set of teeth for one tooth. At some point or another public opinion in England will flinch from the implications of this statement, and it is not very difficult to foresee what will happen.

As a result of our action the Germans will chain up more British prisoners, we shall have to follow suit by chaining up more Axis prisoners, and so it will continue till logically all the prisoners on either side will be in chains. In practice, of course, we shall become disgusted with the process first, and we shall announce that the chaining up will now cease, leaving, almost certainly, more British than Axis prisoners in fetters. We shall have thus acted both barbarously and weakly, damaging our own good name without succeeding in terrorising the enemy.

It seems to me that the civilised answer to the German action would be something like this: "You proclaim that you are putting thousands of British prisoners in chains because some half-dozen Germans or thereabouts were temporarily tied up during the Dieppe raid. This is disgusting hypocrisy, in the first place because of your own record during the past ten years, in the second place because troops who have taken prisoners have got to secure them somehow until they can get them to a place of safety, and to tie men's hands in such circumstances is totally different from chaining up a helpless prisoner who is already in an internment camp. At this moment, we cannot stop you maltreating our prisoners, though we shall probably remember it at the peace settlement, but don't fear that we shall retaliate in kind. You are Nazis, we are civilised men. This latest act of yours simply demonstrates the difference."

At this moment this may not seem a very satisfying reply, but I suggest that to anyone who looks back in three months' time, it will seem better than what we are doing at present and it is the duty of those who can keep their heads to protest before the inherently silly process of retaliation against the helpless is carried any further."
Notice also that the practice Orwell was abhorring was merely the chaining of prisoners of war. Just the shackling! And his enemies were genocidal maniacs. Can you imagine what he would think of suspending legal bans on torture? Or forcing detainees into near-suffocation through drowning? If we kept our heads against the Nazis, why can we not remain sane and moral against today's fascists?

- 10:30:00 AM
 
THE "GRIEVANCE" OF BRITAIN'S MUSLIMS: David Goodhart, in the Guardian, sees no there there. Money quote:
Under Labour the first Muslims were elected to the House of Commons and appointed to the Lords. Muslim organisations lobbied for and won state funds for Muslim schools, a question in the census on religious faith, and criminalisation of religious hate crimes. The huge rise in public spending and focus on improving delivery in the poorest areas will have particularly benefited Muslims alongside other disadvantaged groups. And since 9/11 the government has sought out bright young Muslims for senior civil-service jobs and introduced innovations such as the hajj information unit for those making the pilgrimage to Mecca.
None of this shifts the Muslim community leadership's constant victimization-line, an argument that certainly doesn't help defuse the kind of deranged anger behind the London massacre. (Mad props: Clive Davis.)

EMAIL OF THE DAY: "I have been in Sana'a, Yemen working on an English language magazine and I felt the need to tell you that the climate here is angry. I read your blog daily and have the highest esteem for your intellectual pursuits. But, you've got it wrong about the "war is good because it stops the breeding of terrorists" thing. It's only making it worse - much, much worse. The U.S. is seen in a terrifically unenthusiastic light and all the war in Iraq seems to be doing is creating a culture of furious, uneducated 13 year olds who have to prove their manhood. The U.S. was something made up to them before this war. It was a far off place of blonde girls in bikinis and dudes who blow-dry their hair five times a day. Now, it's real and it's cramping their style. All the work our soft power did to create positive relations in the Arab world is becoming moot. Democracy is something a nation has to want, something a nation has to want so much they will shed blood for it. And the Arab world wants democracy as much as they want a hole in the head. They don't get it, they don't care to get it and it seems to be making life particularly shitty for their Iraqi brothers. I don't care what Bush or Wolfowitz or any of that crew have to say, people are not going to embrace this imposed "freedom." I am here, you aren't." And those millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote last January? They wanted democracy like they wanted a hole in the head? It sure didn't look like that from here - or among any of the direct witnesses at the time.

- 9:58:00 AM
 
RUSHING TO ROVE JUDGMENT: I can well understand the urge of some to find one of the most powerful and ruthless men in Washington to be a liar or a criminal. But I have to say there's no incontrovertible evidence yet of either, although his lawyer seems to have tied himself up in knots. We seem to know, thanks to Newsweek and now the NYT, that Rove confirmed to both Matt Cooper and Bob Novak that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. We do not know that Rove disclosed her name precisely, or knew that she was under-cover. We are also told so far that the calls were initiated by the reporters, not the other way round. The Cooper call seems unremarkable to me. As Mike McCurry points out in HuffPuffnStuff:
Rove was making a late week heads up call to the White House news magazine reporter and, believe me, that is not the time or place to dish major strategy. A two-minute call such as the one now reported is basically to get the signals straight -- green, yellow, red. Rove seems to have been telling Cooper that the yellowcake story was a flashing yellow and he needed to be cautious.
McCurry is no GOP spinner. The interesting question is how Rove knew of Plame's identity and role. Confirming something raised by reporters or warning a reporter off a hot story is not the same thing as criminal disclosure of an undercover identity. Rove may have known he was flirting with danger - hence the "double super secret" background. But we have no smoking gun yet; and someone else may be the real guilty party. It is a longstanding practice of this administration to deflect the press away from a real scandal by allowing them to get their panties in a twist over a minor one. It would be prudent for journalists and Democrats to hold their fire and wait until we have solid facts about an affair that remains cloudy before rushing to premature judgment.

- 9:32:00 AM

Thursday, July 14, 2005
 
GREAT NEWS: Our main hope against the Islamo-fascists is that their evil will alienate the people on whose behalf they claim to speak. That may no longer be merely a hope. There's also growing support for democracy. That's why, for all the legitimate criticisms, I still favor the Iraq war and the attempt to replace a brutal dictatorship with a democratic space in the Muslim world. And that's also why I'm still prepared to praise and support Bush and Blair for pioneering the policy.

THE MORAL CURVE: A sobering point from a reader:
"At the beginning of WWII, Roosevelt and Churchill were outraged and disgusted at the way the Nazis bombed civilian populations. Bomber Command made a few attempts at low-level daytime raids but the cost in men and planes was horrific, and so they too soon switched to "area bombing," at night and from high altitude. By 1943 we were launching "Operation Gomorrah" which killed perhaps 50,000 in Hamburg, almost entirely civilians. Nearly 100,000 would die similarly in Tokyo, and then of course there were Fat Man and Little Boy, which were in a practical sense "terror" weapons designed to frighten the Japanese out of fighting to the bitter end.
The use of these weapons did not turn us into the Soviet Union which would in coming years use tanks to crush democratic revolutions, or for that matter the Russia which in the last decade used a WWI-style artillery barrage to suppress the Chechens in Grozny. Indeed, our bombs are now the most discriminating in the world. There is no morality or ethics within the casing of an artillery shell, but only within the hand that directs its course."
I hope I have not given the impression that I do not understand the predicament the administration is in. I just find their secret drift toward the endorsement of torture-in-all-but-name to be worrying, unnecessary, immoral and counter-productive. We need new laws that clearly delineate clear guidelines for humane, effective interrogation of terror suspects. The Congress needs to step in. Soon.

THE 'DETERRENCE' OF TORTURE: Another emailer makes a pertinent point:
Is your correspondent suggesting that "aggressive interrogation techniques" deter terrorism? Has he missed reports of the dramatic increase in the number of incidents of terrorism since Abu Ghraib went public? Or, does he believe that the insurgents in Iraq, the suicide bombers in Great Britain and the regrouping Taliban in Afghanistan are all so ignorant or so disconnected from the world that they have no idea how we have behaved, in Guantanamo, in Iraq and elsewhere? Does any criminal ever think he's going to be caught? Do suicide bombers consider deterrence when strapping on explosives? Hey, if I were a suicide bomber, I might just think that the only thing better than dying for my beliefs would be getting caught and interrogated by the US government. Unpleasant, sure - but damned fine publicity for the cause!
I'm not sure these fanatics are deterrable in any sense. But I do know that evidence of detainee abuse has severely undermined support for the war among our allies, and undoubtedly alienates the middle ground of Muslim opinion where we need support.

- 6:14:00 PM
 
OTHER EMAILS: I guess I prompted some emails from those who disagree with the Bush policy on abusive and degrading treatment of detainees. Here's an email that takes a different view:
Sorry to hear that emails are running in favor of torture. Count me on the opposing side. I am in favor of the war in Iraq. I can reluctantly concede the necessity to risk our young people’s lives in our defense. But I cannot think that it is right for us to ask that they sacrifice their souls. Forget about what the torture does to the detainees. I cannot accept what it does to us. These incidents will be the things that haunt these soldiers forever.
And another pertinent question:
Would even one person who currently defends such treatment continue defending it, if it were being inflicted on Americans?
Since, according to the Schmidt report, the incidents and techniques cited are now part of the field manual and cover even Geneva-protected POWs, then this becomes not an academic question. But my question is a more simple one: if you were shocked by the images from Abu Ghraib, why are you not shocked by the evidence from Gitmo? In some ways, Gitmo is worse - because the policies charted by the Bush administration which migrated to Abu Graib were developed and practised by professionals under the strictest supervision. They do not even have the excuse of being un-trained, overwhelmed and in a war-zone. Meantime, it's worth asking Don Rumsfeld directly at his next press conference: could he elucidate the practice or "pouring water" over an inmate's head "regularly"? What was it designed to do? How is it different from the "water-boarding" practised by the French in Algeria? Does he believe, as the Schmidt report asserts, that it is "humane" treatment? Is it now legal for U.S. interrogators to do such a thing? The report is somewhat vague. Rumsfeld should clarify.

- 5:25:00 PM
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY: Emails are running overwhelmingly in favor of the "abusive and degrading" treatment of detainees, as cited in the Schmidt report. And they are in favor of narrowing the definition of torture to the extremes that the Bush administration has done. Here's a typical email:
"McCain is right -- it's our reputation that matters here.
And, if you're fighting fanatical terrorists, it's good to have a reputation for aggressive interrogation techniques. As long as it's within the law, JUST DO IT. That's what the Administration has done, and more power to them. Degrading treatment and aggressive interrogation techniques designed to open hearts and minds are all admissible under the law, as long as it's not torture, and that's as it should be.
Welcome to America, Andrew. I think you'll find that a vast majority of the American people want our lawyers to tell us the limits of the law. Americans don't want the French or the Swedes or the Germans to define the limits for our interrogation techniques during GWOT. Nor do they want those limits to be defined by the liberal salons in NYC and San Francisco, or their silly liberal op-ed writers. And torture has a legal definition which should not be allowed to be dumbed down by the sensitivities of talking heads, bloggers, literati, and glitterati. That's American, and it's good.
Short of torture, I'm glad that they're doing what they can and should to break these awful men. That's a good reputation to have in the Arab world -- screw the cultural sensitivities of the European softies. They're not with us in this war, so bother them all.
Soon, I think the Paki-bashers in merry old England will blow up a mosque or two. And they will do that because they don't have any faith in their authorities taking a hard line on English terrorists. I don't think that will happen in America, but it may if we get attacked too.
I fear this is the popular view. America is not the America it once was. But a couple of points: much of this is against the law, unless you believe that the president can change the law as he sees fit in wartime. Most do. As another emailer put it, "The Bush Administration will not be harmed by these reports of torture. The country has spoken and it does not mind. The pictures and actions are very American."

- 4:29:00 PM
 
A TWO FRONT WAR? Can we manage it, asks Andy Borowitz?

- 4:18:00 PM
 
CIVIL LIBERTIES AND GILBERT AND SULLIVAN: A fabulous flash protest against the Blair government's plans to provide every Briton with an identity card. Very British.

- 4:16:00 PM
 
LUSKIN AGONISTES: TNR's Ryan Lizza follows the recent contortions of Karl Rove's lawyer.

- 4:11:00 PM
 
THE GUARDIAN'S OWN ISLAMO-FASCIST: The Guardian, in the wake of mass murder, publishes this piece defending Islamo-fascism from one of its own "trainee journalists" who also advocates a world-dominant Islamist state, calls for a war to extinguish the Jewish state, and openly boasts that his loyalty is not to any nation-state.

- 12:34:00 PM
 
LEDERMAN ON SCHMIDT: More invaluable analysis of the Schmidt report on Gitmo by Marty Lederman can be read here. He calls the post "Defining Humane Down." The Schmidt report calls the treatment of detainees "abusive and degrading" but also "humane." That's the Orwellian world George W. Bush has introduced us to. What we clearly need is a legislative overhaul of interrogation, clearly defining what is and is not authorized, in the clear light of day. What we have developed under this administration is something quite radical. Money quote:
More disturbing still is the Report's repeated assertions that the techniques in question ... are not only "humane," but also are authorized by Army Field Manual 34-52. Field Manual 34-52 has, since the 1960's, defined the interrogation techniques that are acceptable within the military even for POWs who are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
Until now, the debate over the Bush Administration's interrogation policies has been about whether and why it was permissible for the Administration to go far beyond Manual 34-52 in its coercive treatment of detainees. But if, as the Schmidt Report concludes, the techniques used at GTMO are authorized by the Army Field Manual itself, it then follows that the military may use those techniques on any detainees, including POWs, anywhere in the world, in any conflict. Accordingly, by virtue of the Schmidt Report itself, this is not simply about al-Qahtani and other high-level detainees, nor about what is permissible at Guantanamo. Rather, it presages a radical transformation of what is deemed acceptable, lawful treatment of U.S. military detainees across the board — an erosion of the Geneva-based standards that have been the basis for the military's training and practices for the last few decades.
The Bush administration is turning the military into something previous generations would not have recognized: licensed to abuse prisoners of war.

- 12:21:00 PM
 
ABU GHRAIB - AUTHORIZED: Maybe you still remember the shock of seeing the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. More gruesome images are on their way, and may well be released within a month. What we saw - the use of barking dogs, people shackled to the floor, sexual abuse, a man dragged around on a leash like a dog, simulation of gay sex, references and threats to relatives - was indeed shocking. But we were emphatically told by the administration that none of this was policy, that all of it was dreamed up by some nutjobs on the night shift who got their ideas from bad television or their own demented psyches. When some of us pointed out that there was clear evidence that some of these techniques were authorized, that, indeed, the commander of Guantanamo Bay, had been sent to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize" it, we were told we were slandering the troops and the administration.

SCHMIDT'S BOTTOM LINE: One great merit of the Schmidt report - which is otherwise riddled with worrying euphemisms, dismissal of troubling facts, exoneration of almost all commanders - is that we now know that almost every one of the Abu Ghraib techniques was practised and innovated at Guantanamo. These were not improvised out of nowhere. They were what the report calls "the creative application of authorized interrogation techniques," and the interrogators "believed they were acting within existing guidance." Here's a list of techniques used at Gitmo. You might find some of them familiar:
* interrogators "brought a military working dog into the interrogation room and directed it to growl, bark and show teeth"
* some prisoners were restrained with "hand restraints connected directly to an eyebolt in the floor"
* one interrogator "tied a leash to hand chains, led [the detainee] around the room through a series of dog tricks."
* a prisoner was pinned down while a female interrogator straddled him
* a prisoner was told he was gay and forced to dance with another male
* one prisoner had his entire head duct-taped because he refused to stop "chanting passages from the Koran;" one had his Koran removed; another had an interrogator squat over his Koran on a table, while interrogating him.
If you recall Abu Ghraib, you will remember how almost every one of these techniques was deployed on the night shift. This is a critical point. The kind of techniques used in Abu Ghraib - sexual humiliation, hooding, use of dogs, tying prisoners up in "stress positions", mandatory nudity, humiliating prisoners for their religious faith, even the famous Lynndie England leash - were all developed at Guantanamo Bay under the strictest of supervision. What we were told were just frat-guy, crazy techniques on the night shift - had been deployed by the best trained, most tightly controlled, most professional interrogation center we have. The Schmidt report argues that, while some of this was out of bounds, it was only because of some extra creativity, not because the techniques themselves were illicit, or unauthorized by Rumsfeld and Bush. Abu Ghraib is and was policy - just policy absorbed by ill-trained, unprofessional hoodlums. But those hoodlums didn't get their ideas from thin air. They got them from the Pentagon and the White House.

THE OTHER T-WORD: Was it torture? Well, in the Clintonism deployed by the Bushies, that all depends on what the meaning of torture is. In some ways, it's a useful thing that this report comes out at a time when the threat of Jihadist mass murderers is still fresh in our minds. The balance between the threat they pose and the methods we use to interrogate them is a precarious and difficult one. And in two cases - of high value detainees - we have a detailed account of what they experienced. This has not been reported in the newspapers, but it is graphic. Make your own mind up about whether this amounts to torture. I'd say that use of aggressive techniques against high-level members of al Qaeda is easily the most defensible use of "coercive interrogation." But hundreds of others - including many innocent prisoners at Abu Ghraib - found themselves dealing with the consequences of allowing this to become policy. All the following facts come from the Schmidt report. They amount to the minimum abuse that might have occurred. Each incident has been corroborated.

THE FIRST DETAINEE: One high-value detainee was subjected to the following:
He was kept awake for 18 - 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 consecutive days, he was forced to wear bras and thongs on his head, he was prevented from praying, he was forced to crawl around on a dog leash to perform dog tricks, he was told his mother and sister were whores, he was subjected to extensive "cavity searches" (after 160 days in solitary confinement) and then "on seventeen ocasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject."
This latter is a very curious statement. Presumably, the interrogators weren't refreshing the detainee. This, I infer, was "water-boarding," a technique finessed by the French in Algeria, where water is poured over a person's face to bring them to the point of drowning, and then released from suffocation at the last minute. Later in the report, we are told that this was done not just seventeen times but "regularly" as a "control measure." All this was "legally permissible under the existing guidance." That guidance was crafted by John Yoo, approved by Alberto Gonzales and signed by the president. Rumsfeld himself personally signed off on this interrogation. If anyone tells you that president Bush had nothing to do with what happened at Abu Ghraib, then hand them a copy of this report. But was it torture? Your call. If it happened to you, what would you call it? The Schmidt report calls it "degrading and abusive treatment."

THE SECOND DETAINEE: But there's another detailed account worth absorbing. It's what happened to another high value detainee. Call him Detainee B. B cracked under interrogation and some of the approved techniques were never used as a result. But when he cooperated, he told one interrogator of what he called previous torture. He said he had been sexually abused: "female interrogators removed their BDU tops and rubbed themselves against the detainee, fondled his genitals, and made lewd sexual comments, noises and gestures." The report concludes that the interrogators "used their status as females" to interrogate, but cannot corrobroate the specific charges. Recall that this kind of sexual stuff - including the smearing of fake menstrual blood on a detainee's face - were specifically developed to offend strict Muslims (and were deployed at abu Ghraib). Detainee B also claimed he'd been beaten up. A physician found "rib contusions," "an edema of the lower lip" and a "small laceration" on his head. Then it gets interesting. During the interrogation process, an interrogator posed as a captain in the Navy and told detainee B that they had captured his mother, and if she and he did not cooperate, she'd be sent to Gitmo as well. Then they sent in a masked interrogator. (The report says that "this was done in case the interrogation team wanted to use that interrogator later in another role.") This masked man then told the detainee a story:
He told [detainee B] that he had a dream about [detainee B] dying. Specifically he told [detainee B] that in the dream he 'saw four detainees that were chained together at the feet. They dug a hole that was six feet long, six-feet deep, and four foot wide. Then he observed the detainees throw a plain, pine casket with the detainee's identification number painted in orange lowered into the ground.' The masked interrogator told the detainee that his dream meant that he was never going to leave Gitmo unless he started to talk, that he would inded die here from old age and be buried on 'Christian ... sovereign American soil.' On 20 Jul 03 the masked interrogator, "Mr. X" told [detainee B] that his family was 'incarcerated.'
The detainee was later told that his family was "in danger." Then they sent in a fake messenger to "deliver a message to him:"
"That message was simple: Interrogator's colleagues are sick of hearing the same lies over and over and are seriously considering washing their hands of him. Once they do so, he will disappear and never be heard from again. Interrogator assured detainee again to use his imagination to think of the worst possible scenario he could end up in. He told detainee that beatings and physical pain are not the worst things in the world. After all, after being beaten for a while, humans tend to disconnect the mind from the body and make it through. However, there are worse things than physical pain. Interrogators assured detainee that, eventually, he will talk, because everyone does. But until then he will very soon disappear down a very dark hole. His very existence will become erased. His electronic files will be deleted from the computer, his paper files will be packed up and filed away, and his existence will be forgotten by all. No one will know what happened to him and, eventually, no one will care."
This threat helps make sense of the fact, as documented in previous government reports, that the Bush administration has designated some detainees in secret detention centers - and at Abu Ghraib - as "ghost detainees," assigned them no numbers, and made them subject to potential "disappearance." The threat, in other words, was a credible one. And it worked. Eventually, detainee B said he was "not willing to continue to protect others to the detriment of himself and his family." Even the Schmidt report concluded that threatening someone's life and the life of his family violates US military law, but is not "torture" as redefined by president Bush.

SOME CAVEATS: Some things to be aware of. This is not an independent report. It recommends mild reprimands at best. All of this occurred because interrogators "believed they were acting within existing guidance." Their failures were just of being over-creative. Some officers lied about these incidents at first: "The JTF-GTMO Commander's testimony that he was unaware of the creative approaches taken in the interrogation is inconsistent with his 21 Jan 03 letter to CDR USSOUTHCOM in which he asserts that the CJTF approved the interrogation plan in place and it was followed 'relentlessly by the command.'" The investigation took place not on the basis of detainee allegations, but because FBI staff objected to what they were witnessing. The real details of the interrogations, by their very nature, were often not subject to corroboration. What happened in those cells will always remain to some extent a mystery. Also: "several past interrogators at GTMO declined to be interviewed." What you call this is semantic and subjective. But we do know one thing. When president George Bush said that the vile practices recorded at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, he was right. They don't. They represent his administration and his policies. Of that there can no longer be any reasonable doubt.

- 11:43:00 AM
 
THEIR BEST SHOT: My emailer of a few days ago asked a question:
People need to stop hiding behind Clintonian semantics here and understand that even if no actual technical violation of the law is found in the Rove/Plame case it will still be true, based on what we know now from the Time emails, that White House actions compromised a CIA asset during a time of war. What would Hannity, Limbaugh, Scarborough and all the cable loudmouths be saying if it had been Sidney Blumenthal?
Here's David Frum's response:
As a matter of fact, a Clinton aide - not a top aide, but a political appointee - did release personal information about one of Clinton's accusers, highly embarrassing information at that: I am referring of course to former Assistant Secretary of Defense Kenneth Bacon's decision to release Linda Tripp's 3-decade old arrest record to New Yorker writer Jane Mayer.
Er, that's it. I'm not defending the attempted smear on Linda Tripp. But a decades-old arrest record is not nearly the same thing as outing a current CIA operative's cover. At least, not to anyone who cares about national security. I thought Frum did. He will, of course, if the culprit turns out to be a Democrat or liberal.

- 10:09:00 AM

Wednesday, July 13, 2005
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY II: "I hold no brief for the prisoners. I do hold a brief for the reputation of the United States of America as to adhering to certain standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they might be." - Senator John McCain, on the Schmidt report, which found cruel and abusive treatment, but not "torture" of detainees at Gitmo. I've just read the entire report and I'll post the critical details tomorrow. And yes, the details are critical. And so very, very reminiscent of Abu Ghraib. Funny, isn't it, how the authorized techniques at Gitmo were subsequently described as unauthorized high jinks in the night shift in Abu Ghraib. But there's a direct link - much more direct than I'd anticipated. More in the morning.

- 10:58:00 PM
 
THIS IS A RELIGIOUS WAR: "I think we all know that security measures alone are not going to deal with this. This is not an isolated criminal act we are dealing with - it is an extreme and evil ideology whose roots lie in a perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of the religion of Islam." - Tony Blair, in the House of Commons today. This story about the young cricketer who became an Islamist murderer is, in its calm Englishness, one of the most terrifying things I have yet read. These kids were programmed zealots - "cleanskins" who could not be traced through the criminal justice system - and who only need the right mosque and al Qaeda contact to become mass murderers. I don't think the full implications have even begun to sink in. If we think this couldn't happen in the U.S. or indeed anywhere in the free West, we are sadly mistaken.

- 9:27:00 PM
 
THE BBC AND THE T-WORD: Here's the spin today:
Then there has been a controversy about our use of language - particularly the question of whether the BBC banned the word "terrorist". There is no ban. It's true the word is contentious in some contexts on our international services, hence the recommendation that it be employed with care. But we have used and will continue to use the words terror, terrorism and terrorist - as we did in all our flagship bulletins from Thursday.
Here's the reality:
We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly. Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgements. The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.
I think the real policy is: terrorism when it kills Londoners; some other euphemism when anyone else - i.e. Iraqis and, especially, Jews - are murdered.

- 5:30:00 PM
 
COPING WITH SUICIDE BOMBERS: Bruce Hoffman surveys the Israeli experience and asks what they can tell us about how to cope.

- 3:18:00 PM
 
REHNQUIST HOSPITALIZED: With a fever.

- 3:11:00 PM
 
AL JAZEERA AND THE NYT: A reader emails to show a contrast between al Jazeera's coverage of the latest atrocity committed by the insurgents in Iraq, and the New York Times'. Al Jazeera's is tougher on the terrorists! Start with the photos, here and here. AJ also included this devastating quote:
Hassan Muhammad, whose 13-year-old son Alaa also died, said: "Why do they attack our children? They just destroyed one US Humvee, but they killed dozens of our children. What sort of a resistance is this? It's a crime."
I'm not criticizing the NYT's coverage as such. It was fine, if not as graphic as al-Jazeera. But I'm encouraged that al Jazeera is reporting on the popular backlash to terror. Isn't that a good sign?

- 2:55:00 PM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY: "Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors." - president George H.W. Bush, April 26, 1999.

- 2:41:00 PM
 
SODOMY WATCH: An obviously non-procreative couple gets married in Britain. Worse: "Simon is gifted with the organ." I anticipate condemnation from Maggie Gallagher, Stanley Kurtz, and Pope Benedict XVI.

- 2:35:00 PM
 
FALWELL AND BUSH: Whenever I point out the excrescences of Jerry Falwell on the far right, I am routinely told that he is no longer a member of the religious right in good standing, that he is now a fringe character, that he has no real ties to the Bush administration, that his comments blaming 9/11 on gays and women in America made him persona non grata, and on and on. So why did the White House call Falwell for input on a judicial nominee for the Supreme Court? Just asking.

- 12:34:00 PM
 
B16 VERSUS HARRY POTTER: More nuttiness from the new Vatican.

- 11:56:00 AM
 
IVINS RETRACTS: I recently pointed out a glaring error in a recent Molly Ivins column. To her credit, she has now corrected herself and apologized:
This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.
Good for her.

- 11:50:00 AM
 
SARKOZY: He could be France's pro-market, pro-U.S. salvation. A new profile is up at Foreign Policy (you have to register but it's free).

- 11:44:00 AM
 
ROVE-A-DOPE: I'd say it would be prudent for all journalists to be very careful in speculating about the Rove-Plame thingy. We don't know enough to know anything for sure. One of the first casualties of the impulse to jump to conclusions is Bob Kuttner. (I can't believe I beat Mickey to this. I guess he's been too busy covering the London massacres.)

- 11:23:00 AM
 
LETTER FROM AN IRANIAN JAIL: Another reminder of who the enemy is, and how some extraordinary people are prepared to battle imprisonment and torture for the sake of freedom.

- 11:08:00 AM
 
MUSLIM REAX: Memri has the best round-up. Some usual suspects express support for the murderers, but I'm struck by the force of many more condemnations from mullahs and government leaders in the Middle East. Bombing London - a metropolis much loved by many Arabs and Muslims - may have backfired. This was particularly encouraging:
Columnist for the London Arabic daily Al-Hayat Jihad Al-Khazen, who often attacks the American administration and U.S. policy, wrote: 'The Arabs and Muslims, from amongst whom has emerged most of the terrorism since September 11, must head the counter-terrorism efforts. We are responsible for this terrorism before the others, and thus we are responsible for resisting it, and the effort required [on our part] begins by not denying our responsibility for it ... More than once I have written [this], and today too I write that the Arabs and Muslims must help the U.S. and not leave the running of the war on terror to it ... There is no point in accusing the American administration of responsibility for the spread of terror. What is important is that this terrorism exists, and is killing innocents, and everyone must cooperate to defeat it ... The first thing required from the Arab and Islamic countries is to launch a campaign [to increase] awareness amongst the societies that will strip terrorism of its well-known justifications and will emphasize that it constitutes a departure from the religion."
Out of evil, hope.

- 11:05:00 AM
 
A MOTHER ASKS: One Marie Fatayi-Williams, the immigrant Nigerian mother of a London-born son, Anthony, stood in Tavistock Square, near the Islamist massacre in London, and gave the following impromptu speech, holding a picture of her son. The oration speaks for itself. Perhaps in times like these, the rhetoric of ordinary people forced to confront extraordinary evil, is the highest form of rhetoric there is. When it is powered by a mother's love, it reaches new depth and height:
"This is Anthony, Anthony Fatayi -Williams, 26 years old, he's missing and we fear that he was in the bus explosion ... on Thursday. We don't know. We do know from the witnesses that he left the Northern line in Euston. We know he made a call to his office at Amec at 9.41 from the NW1 area to say he could not make [it] by the tube but he would find alternative means to work.

Since then he has not made any contact with any single person. Now New York, now Madrid, now London. There has been widespread slaughter of innocent people. There have been streams of tears, innocent tears. There have been rivers of blood, innocent blood. Death in the morning, people going to find their livelihood, death in the noontime on the highways and streets.

They are not warriors. Which cause has been served? Certainly not the cause of God, not the cause of Allah because God Almighty only gives life and is full of mercy. Anyone who has been misled, or is being misled to believe that by killing innocent people he or she is serving God should think again because it's not true. Terrorism is not the way, terrorism is not the way. It doesn't beget peace. We can't deliver peace by terrorism, never can we deliver peace by killing people. Throughout history, those people who have changed the world have done so without violence, they have [won] people to their cause through peaceful protest. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, their discipline, their self-sacrifice, their conviction made people turn towards them, to follow them. What inspiration can senseless slaughter provide? Death and destruction of young people in their prime as well as old and helpless can never be the foundations for building society.

My son Anthony is my first son, my only son, the head of my family. In African society, we hold on to sons. He has dreams and hopes and I, his mother, must fight to protect them. This is now the fifth day, five days on, and we are waiting to know what happened to him and I, his mother, I need to know what happened to Anthony. His young sisters need to know what happened, his uncles and aunties need to know what happened to Anthony, his father needs to know what happened to Anthony. Millions of my friends back home in Nigeria need to know what happened to Anthony. His friends surrounding me here, who have put this together, need to know what has happened to Anthony. I need to know, I want to protect him. I'm his mother, I will fight till I die to protect him. To protect his values and to protect his memory.

Innocent blood will always cry to God Almighty for reparation. How much blood must be spilled? How many tears shall we cry? How many mothers' hearts must be maimed? My heart is maimed. I pray I will see my son, Anthony. Why? I need to know, Anthony needs to know, Anthony needs to know, so do many others unaccounted for innocent victims, they need to know.

It's time to stop and think. We cannot live in fear because we are surrounded by hatred. Look around us today. Anthony is a Nigerian, born in London, worked in London, he is a world citizen. Here today we have Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, all of us united in love for Anthony. Hatred begets only hatred. It is time to stop this vicious cycle of killing. We must all stand together, for our common humanity. I need to know what happened to my Anthony. He's the love of my life. My first son, my first son, 26. He tells me one day, "Mummy, I don't want to die, I don't want to die. I want to live, I want to take care of you, I will do great things for you, I will look after you, you will see what I will achieve for you. I will make you happy.' And he was making me happy. I am proud of him, I am still very proud of him but I need to know where he is, I need to know what happened to him. I grieve, I am sad, I am distraught, I am destroyed.

He didn't do anything to anybody, he loved everybody so much. If what I hear is true, even when he came out of the underground he was directing people to take buses, to be sure that they were OK. Then he called his office at the same time to tell them he was running late. He was a multi-purpose person, trying to save people, trying to call his office, trying to meet his appointments. What did he then do to deserve this. Where is he, someone tell me, where is he?"
Pray for her, and her only son.

- 10:54:00 AM
 
THEY MURDER CHILDREN, DON'T THEY? I can't get past this story in the New York Times this morning:
Twenty-seven people, many of them children, were killed by a suicide truck bomb today as the children gathered around an Army vehicle where troops were handing out chocolates and other gifts. The blast was so powerful it set a nearby house on fire. The attack, which killed an American soldier and wounded three others, occurred about 10:50 a.m. in east Baghdad, according to the United States military. As service members in a Humvee were giving presents to a group of children, a vehicle filled with explosives detonated. "There were some American troops blocking the highway when a U.S. Humvee came near a gathering of children, and U.S. soldiers began to hand them candies," a man named Karim Shukir told The Associated Press. "Then suddenly, a speeding car showed up and struck both the Humvee and the children."
One thing we need to remember: the carnage we just saw in London is happening in Iraq on a regular basis. Iraq's population is less than half Britain's. Part of me feels very angry that we have not been able to live up to our moral and military responsibility to provide better security for these people in the wake of liberation. But part of me also realizes that total security is impossible when facing these theocratic monsters. The only hope is that the sheer evil of these people will turn moderate Iraqis and Muslims against them. Maybe they will destroy themselves. But we need to keep our moral senses from becoming numb, and remember that the human casualties in Iraq are every bit as terrible as those in London. And they are committed by very similar forces.

- 10:43:00 AM
 
SANTORUM VERSUS BOSTON: The spat continues.

- 10:28:00 AM
 
ROVE AS HERO: The Wall Street Journal has begun the campaign - to thank Karl Rove for exposing a CIA operative because her husband's report on uranium in Niger was flawed:
Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.
Just a thought experiment: can you imagine the WSJ calling to give, say, Sid Blumenthal a medal for outing a CIA operative to counter misinformation in the Bosnia campaign? Fox's John Gibson echoes:
I say give Karl Rove a medal, even if Bush has to fire him. Why? Because Valerie Plame should have been outed by somebody. And if nobody else had the cojones to do it, I'm glad Rove did — if he did do it, and he still says he didn't.
For the partisan right, outing CIA operatives in wartime is the patriotic thing to do. There's only one real option worthy of Bush: give Rove the Medal of Freedom.

- 10:20:00 AM

Tuesday, July 12, 2005
 
THE SPIN FROM ROVE: NRO's Byron York has the scoop. John Podhoretz, Bush uber-loyalist, even suggests Judith Miller was the original source for the identity of Wilson's wife. I think that's called "going on the offensive." JPod has no actual evidence fingering Miller, just his usual eagerness to say anything that might please his political masters. But, hey, I have no idea who leaked this stuff. I guess it could be Miller. Or, say, any other journalist or appointee in Washington. This much I do know: the Bushies aren't going to go down without a fight. And this could get much nastier.

- 7:11:00 PM
 
HUFFPO'S DISSIDENT: Greg Gutfield listens to his fellow Huffpuffers and learns how to respond to terrorism (and get laid).

- 4:00:00 PM
 
CORRECTION: In "Animal House," the phrase was just "Double Secret Probation," not "Double Super Secret Probation." My readers' erudition never fails to impress.

- 3:52:00 PM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY: "[A] pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs. I did not know, but I might have guessed." - Eliot A. Cohen, one of the most decent and honest hawks in Washington. I echo everything he writes, and take the same responsibility for being too trusting of the Bush administration in advance.

THERE'S MORE: I especially share the following:
"disdain for the general who thinks Job One is simply whacking the bad guys and who, ever conscious of public relations, cannot admit that American soldiers have tortured prisoners or, in panic, killed innocent civilians. Contempt for the ghoulish glee of some who think they were right in opposing the war, and for the blithe disregard of the bungles by some who think they were right in favoring it."
It is inconceivable to me that Rumsfeld should still be defense secretary after one of the most botched wars in recent memory. But I do not live, as Cohen proudly does, with the knowledge of his own son being sent to war. If you need more reason to be angry at the Bush team, read this post. Money quote:
One story that really got me was the tale of former ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine suggesting to Rumsfeld in March of 2003 that it would behoove the Bush administration to develop a plan to pay Iraqi civil servants. Rumsfeld replied that American taxpayers would never go for it and that he was not concerned if they were paid for several weeks or even months; if they rioted in the streets in protest, he said, the US could use such an eventuality as leverage to get the Europeans to pick up the tab. Stunning, no?
Stunning, but at this point unsurprising.

- 2:11:00 PM
 
FLASHING AL QAEDA: A useful flash video presentation of al Qaeda's attacks in the last decade. Here's more context for those who still believe we would not be targeted if we never retaliated:
What does all this tell us? First, that if they aren't blowing us up, then they'll be blowing up someone else. And you don't get to choose who. Secondly, who or what they blow up is largely a matter of what's available. Jews anywhere, Americans after that, Shia next and Brits probably a distant fourth. Africans for fun.
And Australians, Indians, Hindus, Balinese, Saudis, Iraqis, and on and on. We will be bombed and murdered, whatever we do. So why not do all we can to stay on the offensive?

YES, YES, I KNOW: Many reasonable people argue that the Iraq invasion made matters worse, not better in the short term. Let's concede that, for the sake of argument. But deep down, how do we drain the swamp of Islamo-fascism? For all my criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq war, the reason I'm still glad we did it and still want us to get it right is that I see no fundamental solution to this unless we give the Muslim Arab world an alternative apart from Jihadism or the autocracy that fosters it. Democracy is the only cure; the only way for the silent majority of Muslims to regain power from the fanatics, to undermine this pathology and evil from within. I wrote the following before the London attacks for the Stranger in Seattle and I stand by every word:
The way ahead is undoubtedly brutal and unsure. But let's not delude ourselves that the alternative was that much better: an Iraq pulverized by still more sanctions, poverty and tyranny or one in which Saddam lived to see another day and gave aid and comfort to al Qaeda. We chose the better of two options. Both were and are still hellish. But this war is young and was always going to last a generation. We owe our government sturdy, even fierce, criticism but we also owe our civilization support. That civilization - one in which people live free from tyranny and suffocating theocracy - is being fought over in Iraq today; and I have not the slightest hesitation in knowing whose side I am on. Our enemy is targeting innocents daily; while we are doing our best to advance their freedom. The Iraqi people told us what they want last January - peace with democracy. We cannot afford to betray either them or our principles now.
So we must fight on. Especially in Iraq, where innocent civilians are experiencing the London bombings on an almost daily basis.

- 1:45:00 PM
 
ANIMAL WHITE HOUSE: An emailer prods my pop-cultural hypothalamus:
"Double super secret background" ... actually is a joking wink reference to the movie "Animal House". The fraternity had been placed on 'double super secret probation' by the evil Dean. Cooper probably just used that as joking slang (or Turd Blossom did :-).
Since Matt is one of the funniest and kindest men in D.C., I'll bet it was his joke. But my point stands. This leak wasn't a minor one, according to Rove. So why did he think it was major and didn't want his fingerprints anywhere near it? Another emailer asks who told Rove:
How did Karl Rove know that Ms. Plame was a CIA operative? I cannot imagine that the WH keeps a list of CIA personnel. If in fact Ms. Plame was an undercover CIA operative, her employment with the CIA should have been known by a relatively small number of people within the agency. Everyone else should have know her as her cover profession. I'm assuming undercover CIA operatives do not use a CIA desk job as their cover. Somewhere along this information trail someone knowingly released the identity of Ms. Plame as a covert employee. Was this at the request of Karl Rove or others within the WH? Did he have clearance? Should he have had clearance?
I don't know. But Fitzgerald may.

- 1:14:00 PM
 
SUICIDE BOMBERS? A new phase in the war on the West might just have been launched.

- 1:06:00 PM
 
THE ROVE MATTER: An emailer puts it as well as I could:
Two points, briefly:
1. People need to stop hiding behind Clintonian semantics here and understand that even if no actual technical violation of the law is found in the Rove/Plame case it will still be true, based on what we know now from the Time emails, that White House actions compromised a CIA asset during a time of war. What would Hannity, Limbaugh, Scarborough and all the cable loudmouths be saying if it had been Sidney Blumenthal?

2. Scott McClellan once told the American people that Karl Rove was not involved in any way, and that the President would remove anyone found to be involved. During the Lewinsky scandal many people insisted that it was not the sex that bothered them, but it was the lying, spinning, parsing, and direct misleading of the American people that offended them, and that came to define the Clinton White House. What would the cable loudmouths be saying if instead of McClellan it had been McCurry?

This isn't about technical violations or a game of gotcha. It's about character, and George Bush needs to show some.
I'm leery of saying anything yet about a case that is still so murky. But it does seem to me that doing what Rove seems to have done would, in peace-time, be sleazy. In wartime, it shows a contempt for our national security - or a willingness to put petty partisan sniping ahead of national security. No, I'm not shocked. But I'm also struck by one detail in Matt Cooper's email to his editors:
"Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..."
"Double super secret background" for just some guidance about a developing story? That sounds a little excessive to me. Why would Rove have insisted on such a super-tight confidentiality standard if he was not aware that he was divulging something he truly shouldn't divulge? Again, I don't know enough to say anything that definitive right now. But it seems clear to me that Rove leaked the CIA role of Wilson's wife (whether he named her or knew that she was under-cover is another matter). The president has said he would fire anyone who did such a thing. Ergo: the president must fire Rove or break his word. It's going to be an interesting few weeks.

- 12:06:00 PM
 
THE VOICE OF JIHADISM: Ready to hear it? Here's the murderer of Theo van Gogh:
[T]ranscripts of recorded statements allegedly made by Mr. Bouyeri and introduced in the trial offered a window into his way of thinking. "I knew what I was doing," Mr. Bouyeri told his brother in a phone conversation shortly after the killing, according to the transcript. "I slaughtered him." Then Mr. Bouyeri laughed, said Judge Udo Willem Bentinck, who was reading the transcript aloud.
Then there's this, Bouyeri's address to van Gogh's mother in court:
He argued that he did not kill her son, "but I have chopped off his head according to the law that orders me to do so to everyone who offends Allah. I do not not feel your pain as I do not know what it is to suffer the loss of a child."
Can anyone seriously believe that not invading Iraq would have changed the mindset of this fanatic? Or leaving Afghanistan alone? What we're learning, especially from the home-grown bombings in London, is that our fundamental enemy is a medievalist theological fascism, buried in the recesses of a legitimate religious faith. It would be nice if we could talk these people out of it, or hand them concessions to buy them off, or hug them till they saw the joys of the New Age. Until then, we have to bring them to justice - on the battlefield or court-room. And the people who are most able to bring them to justice are Western Muslims; and the democratically-inclined Muslims in Iraq.

- 11:34:00 AM
 
THE NAACP AND BLACK PARENTS: In a word: condescension.

- 11:19:00 AM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Where are the country singers threatening to put boots up peoples' asses? ... Who grieves this privately? This American likes his sorrow in t-shirt form" - Rob Corddry, from the Daily Show, in reference to London. We don't have TV up here on the beach. It's good to detoxify for a couple of months. But I sure miss Jon Stewart.

- 11:16:00 AM

Monday, July 11, 2005
 
CRANKY ABOUT HUFFPUFFNSTUFF: Yes, there are some good posts on Huffington Post. In my cranky diss of the place, I cited one such by Irshad Manji. Anywhere Eugene Volokh contributes has something worthwhile in it. But even Rich B. has to concede that the place is dominated by paranoid Hollywood liberalism; and maybe it was reading guff like this, and this, and this on the day terrorists murdered dozens of Londoners that made me cranky. My claim that the blog is full of people in favor of "withdrawing from Iraq, and generally laying the blame for the mass murder of innocents on George Bush and Tony Blair" is fully documented by those posts. As for negotiating with al Qaeda operatives, I concede hyperbole. Deepak Chopra just wants us to give them a hug.

- 8:05:00 PM
 
THE BBC AND TERROR: A pretty devastating expose by Tom Gross. The Orwellian fixing of language - by going in and changing online wordage after the fact - is particularly amusing:
Early on Friday morning another BBC webpage headlined "Testing the underground mood," spoke of "the worst terrorist atrocity Britain has seen." But at 12:08 GMT, while the rest of the article was left untouched, those words were replaced by "the worst peacetime bomb attacks Britain has seen."... In its round-up of world reactions, BBC online was also quick to highlight the views of conspiracy theorists. The very first article listed by the BBC started by quoting Iranian cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani saying Israel was behind the London attacks. It was followed by a commentary on Iranian state radio explicitly blaming the Mossad.
I guess we should be grateful that for around 24 hours, the BBC saw reality, called it terrorism, and reported it accurately. Then the p.c. police took over.

- 7:40:00 PM
 
POLLING THE BRITS: They're a pragmatic bunch, but they're not natural appeasers. The latest YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph finds that 72 percent blieve that Britain's role in Iraq helped make the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. But that's statistically unchanged from before 7/7. The change has been in the following question: "Do you think that Britain should retain its close alliance wth the United States in the war on terror or should it distance itself to a much greater extent from US policy?" Last March, 44 percent said stick with the US; 47 percent said: more distance. Today, 52 percent say stick with America; and only 36 percent say distancing would be a good idea. Al Qaeda's stupidity is revealed again. You don't bully Brits.

- 7:30:00 PM
 
HAPPY FIFTH: At some point earlier this summer, my webmaster and I were trying to figure out when we actually started this blog. Andrewsullivan.com went live in November 1999, but it wasn't till the following spring that we brainstormed and figured out we needed live updates to keep the thing fresh. Then we found Blogger; and the first blogged posts as such began (we think) in early July 2000. We're not sure exactly when, and maybe someone out there with more time on their hands could tell us. But I remember writing immediate responses to the conventions that year; and so, in semi-arbitrary fashion, we've designated this month as our fifth blogiversary. In blog years, that's a long time. As many of you know, I tried to put you all out of your misery last February but couldn't stop myself. And so here we are. I say "we" not simply because without Robert taking care of everything technical, financial and mind-numbing, this wouldn't have happened; but also because, this is a group phenomenon and some of you have been with me from the very beginning. It's you, the readers who have provided me with many of my best links, tips, ideas, facts and arguments. I'd like to say thank you again.

LOOKING BACK: In 2000, the word 'blog' barely existed in common discourse; and I had to beg TV producers to cite it under my name. Those were the Clinton years, believe it or not. And the last five years have contained as much news and drama as most decades. But looking back, I can honestly say I have not been taken completely by surprise by the blogosphere's amazing success. It seemed clear to me from the very start that once you allowed publishing independently of editors or publishers, a revolution was imminent. In the early days, I played a part in pioneering some blog tropes: media micro-criticism, instant news judgment, phony awards, political mini-campaigns (against Lott, Raines or torture), money quotes, etc. These are now staples of the genre. I also hoped that one day, a lone writer could finance himself this way - and so really break the MSM monopoly. It took a while, but advertising now pays most of the bills, and the expenses themselves have come down a lot since the early days. Five years is an infinity in technology. The site now looks dated (and is way more expensive than it need be), which is why we're in the middle of a sleaker, cheaper-to-run redesign, which we hope to unveil in September. But my main gain as a writer has been the ability to be part of pioneering a new way of writing provisionally and instantly, of thinking out loud, of changing my mind, of engaging in what amounts to a conversation rather than a monologue. That would not have been possible without you and so I consider this a joint anniversary as much as anything. We don't rely solely on pledge drives to sustain ourselves any more (and haven't had one in a long while), but if you feel like throwing a contribution in the tip jar at this point, feel free. After five years of daily blogging, donations from our loyal readers are still very much appreciated.

- 1:43:00 PM
 
THE USES OF STOICISM: My take in Time Magazine.

- 11:29:00 AM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: "How clever of the Los Angeles Times to propose that Judy Miller debate Mike Kinsley on the subject of press freedom. Sadly, Judy is not on a fellowship at some writers' colony. She is in JAIL. She is sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor, and her communications are, shall we say, constrained.
I have to tell you that Mike's contrarian intellectualizing on the subject of reporters and the law was more amusing when it was all hypothetical. Back then it was just punditry. But that was before Norm Pearlstine embraced acquiescence as corporate policy, and before Judy Miller braved the real-world discomforts of the moral high ground. Of course this is an important issue, and clever minds should wrestle with it. But at the moment Kinsley and Pearlstine seem perversely remote from the world where actual reporters work." - Bill Keller, the New York Times' executive editor, responding to the Los Angeles' Times' op-ed page editor, Nick Goldberg.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: "I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them.
But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West - and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors.
Islamism stops being an ideology intent on building an empire from Andalusia to Indonesia, destroying democracy and subjugating women and becomes, by the magic of parochial reasoning, a protest movement on a par with Make Poverty History or the TUC.
Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid that's what the record shows." - Nick Cohen, writing yesterday in London's Observer.

THE FEVER SWAMP ON THE RIGHT: Tom Palmer's been on the case for a while now.

CONSERVATIVES AND EVOLUTION: Want to figure out which conservative intellectuals are actually intellectuals and which ones will say anything to placate fundamentalists whose support they need to maintain political power? Here's one useful guide.

- 11:27:00 AM

Sunday, July 10, 2005
 
RECRUITING IN UNIVERSITIES: More evidence that the poison of al Qaeda's Islamist fascism is not a function of poverty, but often of affluence. The Brits have been too tolerant of these fascists operating in plain sight. Michael Portillo disagrees.

ROVE WAS COOPER'S SOURCE: Well, we kinda knew this already, but it's good to have it confirmed. The salient fact is that Rove appears to have told Cooper about Wilson's wife working at the CIA before the Novak column appeared. Rove was clearly coordinating a message to discredit Wilson by linking him to his wife, and implying that Wilson had no real authorization from the senior levels of the administration. Rove may not be guilty of a crime, if he did not disclose her name and did not know she was undercover. He is guilty of sleaze and spin. But then that's also hardly news, is it? Kinsley differs from the NYT in an interesting piece of counter-intuitive reasoning here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "[M]ore than two years after the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted, there is much we do not know about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We do know, however, that there was one. We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war--documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.
We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service." - from an article in the Weekly Standard that is well worth reading. Some of the material presented strikes me as unpersuasive - at least beyond a reasonable doubt. But that some relationship existed between Saddam's government and agents and Osama bin Laden's operation seems to me indisputable. What's at issue is the depth or coordination of the relationship. Much of the new evidence makes the connection seem stronger, not weaker. What might have transpired if we had not deposed Saddam is anyone's guess.

CATHOLICS AND EVOLUTION: A lively debate over at Amy Wellborn's.

ON THE FAR RIGHT: Not enough attention is paid, I think, to the paleocon attacks on the war against terrorism. The loony left is rightly exposed, but the loony right is more often ignored. This week, they have peddled theories that the Jews knew about the London bombings in advance; and Paul Craig Roberts, writing in the right-wing website, Newsmax, calls Blair "a war criminal under the Nuremberg standard." The religious right leaders, Falwell and Robertson, as well as Watergate criminal, Charles Colson, have also blamed America's alleged depravity for 9/11. Fred Phelps, a religious nutcase, delighted this week in the London massacres. I see little to distinguish these people from the Democratic Underground types. Except that the mainstream right is too squeamish sometimes in condemning them. Ever seen one of these guys ripped up on O'Reilly? Thought not.

RURAL METH: More important coverage of how this drug is ravaging rural America - in this case, Kitsap County, Washington.

- 11:43:00 AM

Saturday, July 09, 2005
 
BRIT MUSLIM YOUTH RESPOND: More encouragement, as well as some cowering, and Blair-blaming.

- 1:23:00 PM
 
BENEDICT STRIKES AGAIN: One the great distinctions between Roman Catholicism and protestant fundamentalism in recent times has been Catholicism's respect for free scientific inquiry, specifically comfort with evolutionary biology. Reason and faith are not in conflict, the Second Council told us, and the Church has nothing to fear from open scientific inquiry, based on empirical research and peer-reviewed study. Not for us Catholics the know-nothingism of the literalist fundamentalists, who still hold that the world was made in seven literal days, or that Adam and Eve literally existed, or that God somehow directed the random process of natural selection. Well, now we have Benedict in charge and the rush back to the Middle Ages, already seen in fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Protestantism, looks as if it is going to be endorsed in the Vatican. I expected reactionary radicalism from Benedict. But this kind of stupidity? I fear there's much more to come. Remember that Ratzinger was an anti-intellectual intellectual. Free thought not controlled by Vatican diktat is anathema to him. And so we return to the nineteenth century. The thinking may also be nakedly political. Benedict - in order to pursue his secular war against freedom for gays, or reproductive freedom - needs an alliance with the Protestant right. This is exactly a way to bolster the new anti-modern Popular Front. It would be depressing if it weren't also infuriating.

IRSHAD: The Huffington Post is full of part-time bloggers calling for negotiating with al Qaeda, withdrawing from Iraq, and generally laying the blame for the mass murder of innocents on George Bush and Tony Blair. But as part of Arianna's attempt to credentialize her blog as something more than a collection of far left paranoids and Bush-haters, she does have a few non-Fiskies. Among them is my friend Irshad Manji. Here's her post demanding a stand from Muslims, and not just public rhetorical blather. It was written on the day of the massacres in London:
The preachers will express condolences for the victims and condemnations of the criminals. Then they'll add, "But Britain should have never invited this kind of response by joining America in the invasion of Iraq."

The trouble with this line of reasoning is that terrorists have never needed an Iraq debacle to justify their violent jihads. What exactly was the Iraq of 1993, when Islamic radicals tried to blow up the World Trade Center? Or of 2000, when the USS Cole was attacked? Hell, that assault took place after U.S. military intervention saved thousands of Muslims in Bosnia.

If staying out of Iraq protected anyone from terrorism, then why did "insurgents" last year kidnap two journalists from France -- the most anti-war, anti-Bush nation in the West? Even overt solidarity with the people of Iraq, demonstrated by CARE's top relief worker in the area, Margaret Hassan, didn't shield her from assassination.

These are the facts that ordinary Muslims must take to their preachers at Friday's sermons. A clear repudiation of the London bombings will not bring back the dead. What it can do is help the rest of the world differentiate between the moderates and the apologists.
You can find some encouraging responses here. One step, as Irshad implies, could be to abandon the noxious bill now before parliament making it a crime to "defame" Islam. In effect, the bill would make it a crime to abhor Islamist terror and to ascribe murderous intent it to a twisted, but still vibrant, part of modern Islam. In other words, the bill would make it much harder to make distinctions between legitimate Islam and murderous Islamism. Such a distinction is critical to winning this war. Making it legally perilous to speak out about this is a step quite firmly in the wrong direction.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised." - E. O. Wilson, "Consilience."

- 1:13:00 PM

Friday, July 08, 2005
 
WE'RE NOT AFRAID: Another wonderful collective blog of images - sending a message to the medievalist murderers of New York, Bali, Aldgate and Baghdad. Check it out.

- 8:14:00 PM
 
WHERE'S THE MUSLIM GANDHI? Charles Moore asks an important question. I have to say I'm disappointed by how weak the Muslim response seems to have been in Britain. Money quote:
It is only when you start thinking about what we are not getting from leaders of British Muslims, and indeed Muslim religious leadership throughout the world, that you start to see how much needs doing. The moderates are not pressed hard for anything more than a general condemnation of the extremists.
When did you last hear criticisms of named extremist groups and organisations by Muslim leaders, or support for their expulsion, imprisonment or extradition? How often do you see fatwas issued against suicide bombers and other terrorists, or statements by learned men declaring that people who commit such deeds will go to hell?
When do Muslim leaders and congregations insist that a particular imam leave his mosque because of the poison that he disseminates every Friday? When did a British Muslim last go after a Muslim who advocates or practises violence with anything like the zeal with which so many went after Salman Rushdie?
That last question is particularly acute, I think.

THAT BRITISH COP: You may have seen him on TV. Always calm, authoritative, he's Brian Paddick, London's Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, and the chief police spokesman in Britain's capital. And yes, he's openly gay. It really isn't an issue over there any more. One more reason to be proud of my homeland.

- 7:55:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "JOE SCARBOROUGH: Mr. Hitchens, is Senator Clinton correct?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I have no idea. My presumption would be that she's just fooling with the numbers. But that's just because I don't like her and can't stand the sight of her."

Give him points for honesty. (Hat tip: Crooks and Liars, who, of course, have no sense of humor.)

- 5:01:00 PM
 
DUMB MEDIA CRITICISM: Here's a piece of idiocy, approvingly quoted by Glenn Reynolds:
I bet if the media voluntarily stopped showing any pictures of all terror attacks, that the terror would stop. Thus ending the GWOT without a shot. This policy would be NO DIFFERENT than how they cover folks who run on to baseball fields: they do NOT show them on TV; they ignore them. Would the media ever put peace above their ratings/profits? Never.
Glenn comments: "Sadly, that's probably right." I suppose I see the underlying point: that terror needs media oxygen to survive. But the notion that we should somehow not cover mass murder, or that it's equivalent to misbehavior at sporting events, or that the only reason for covering it is "ratings/profits" is nutty. People have a right to know what's going on in their own countries and around the world. If the MSM decided to stop reporting terror attacks, bloggers would fill the gap. Yesterday, for example, was remarkable for the first-hand accounts of terror we were able to read - within hours of the massacres - by citizen journalists. Would Glenn like to see them silenced? Yes, these events shouldn't be hyped; yes, they should be put in context. But this out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality is a form of denial. The same goes for abuse and torture accusations. Instapundit won't actually link to credible accounts. By ignoring them, he somehow thinks they don't exist or will go away. They won't. Similarly, exposing the violence perpetrated by the Islamists is simply what the media does. Moreoever, it doesn't always help the terrorists; it also hurts them. We need to see the atrocities these fanatics commit, however appalling, however vile. The job of the media, even in wartime, is to relay facts, not to skew coverage for purposes of morale.

- 4:54:00 PM
 
FIXING GITMO: What Washington needs to do. Jon Rauch brings his usual clarity to the legal question, although I'm not as sanguine as he is about what may have happened during Gitmo interrogations.

- 4:35:00 PM
 
GERMAN REAX TO LONDON: Some encouraging realism about the Jihadists in the German media are detailed here.

- 4:24:00 PM
 
THE T-WORD: The BBC's original references to "terrorist" bomb attacks seem to have now been removed from the news service's material. Harry's Place investigates.

- 4:20:00 PM
 
THE METH CRISIS: Some encouraging signs that the Bush administration may shift priorities in the drug war.

- 12:49:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: J.R.R. Tolkien's tribute to the stoicism of Little England:
"[Merry and Pippn] turned and walked side by side slowly along the line of the river. Behind them the light grew in the East. As they walked they compared notes, talking lightly in hobbit-fashion of the things that had happened since their capture. No listener would have guessed from their words that they had suffered cruelly, and been in dire peril, going without hope towards torment and death; or that even now, as they knew well, they had little chance of ever finding friend or safety again.
"'You seem to have been doing well, Master Took,' said Merry. 'You will get almost a chapter in old Bilbo's book, if ever I get a chance to report to him. Good work . . . But I wonder if anyone will ever pick up your trail and find that brooch. I should hate to lose mine, but I am afraid yours is gone for good . . . '"
Very English chit-chat. From the "Two Towers."

- 12:46:00 PM
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY: "I really appreciated what you wrote this morning regarding the nature of your blog. As a reader, I can say that it has been very refreshing to know that there is at least one political commentator who has not firmly and blindly allied himself to one of the two camps in our bipolar political climate. I absolutely love that you have shown, repeatedly over the years, an ability to actually change your mind, which again, is a precious commodity in the times in which we find ourselves.

That being said, I want to raise something regarding that quote from your blog from 2002:
"These terrorists are not soldiers. They are beneath such an honorific. They are not even criminals. In that respect, Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's contempt for the whines of those complaining about poor treatment is fully justified."
Since you held this attitude then, is it not possible that the same kind of attitude animated the actions of those who committed or abetted the system of torture that eventually emerged? I must say, back in 2002 I held this attitude as well. I think at that time the anger over 9/11 was still very acute in my mind. But the passing of time brings a different perspective, doesn't it? Not that we all should forget about 9/11, but that in our anger we should never push aside the values that make our society unique. I fear that in our collective post 9-11 rage, most of us, including you, including myself, forgot this. And I think the timing of this discussion is important, coming as it does one day after the attacks in London. In the face of such violence, anger is acceptable. But I hope Londoners don't make the same mistake many of us did after 9/11, and allow their anger to overcome their principles. Given what little I know about the spirit of the British people, somehow I sense that they will pull this off better than we did.

This subject also reminds me of an article I read recently about Abraham Lincoln, which discussed his unique emotional intelligence, chief among which was his ability to empathize with his enemies. Near the conclusion of the Civil War, he told Sherman that he hoped that leaders of the Confederacy, such as Jefferson Davis, could somehow escape the country without his knowing it. Even after a long, tremendously bloody civil war, Lincoln still had the capacity to sympathize with those who had caused so much bloodshed. In fact, in one speech he indicated that if the situations had been reversed, and if Northerners had found themselves forced with the decision to either protect the slavery system or give it up, that Northerners probably would have come to the same conclusion Southerners did. Perhaps that spirit should reside in us during these difficult times as well. Like Lincoln, we need firm resolve, but we also need his essential humanity, and we need to recognize the essential humanity of those who would do us harm."

- 12:33:00 PM
 
APPEASEMENT ROUND-UP: Here's a selection from Britain; here's a three-part round-up of surrender-now pieces from the Guardian. Robert Fisk sinks to the occasion with this interesting formulation (for subscribers only):
'If you bomb our cities,' Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, 'we will bomb yours.' There you go, as they say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush's 'war on terror' and his invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned.
It's Blair's fault. But notice one word that does not appear: Afghanistan. That's a war Fisk also opposed. The solution? Give them what they want. And hope they don't want more.

- 12:29:00 PM
 
EPIPHANY WATCH: Just as in the U.S. after 9/11, some who once dismissed terrorism as an over-rated threat have begun to change their minds a little.

- 12:09:00 PM
 
THE BBC AGAIN: Back to the old ways. According to the Beeb, the bombings were apparently a response to the re-election of Tony Blair. His support for the Iraq war is somehow responsible. Money quote about Britain's support for democratizing Iraq:
Britain therefore remains in the front line, and the option of withdrawing from Iraq and minimising the risk of further attacks is not presently open to British voters. They have taken their decision and must accept the consequences.
But didn't the al Qaeda group claiming responsibility also cite intervention in Afghanistan as a grievance? And does this BBC editorialist believe that somehow the Jihadists are interested in some kind of deal with Britain, rather than being fanatically opposed to all forms of government that allow for religious and political freedom? Here's his attempt to answer that question:
There are those who argue that it does not matter what Western governments do these days, that they are all under threat and some will come under attack. However, that discounts the level of political thinking which is evident among al-Qaeda groups. They certainly have their political strategy and judge governments accordingly. Al-Qaeda might not have a detailed political manifesto but it does have aims.
No space left for him to detail those aims. One of them is making sure that a writer for the BBC will never write freely again. You can, of course, infer some kind of political strategy behind this BBC argument: deflect the attacks to America or the Middle East; if we can keep our heads down, they won't target us first; if we withdraw from Iraq, they'll leave us alone. Sure, we can agree to disagree about the Iraq war. But the notion that al Qaeda needed such a war as a pretext for murdering Westerners is simply belied by history; and it represents a failure to understand even the basics of their ideology.

- 12:03:00 PM
 
RESPONDING TO CRITICS I: Nothing I'm not used to. Yesterday, James Taranto took yet another dig at my early attitude to reports of "poor treatment" of terrorist captives. In January 2002 and for a while thereafter, I somewhat summarily dismissed reports of mistreatment of detainees as probably enemy propaganda and certainly not something that should worry us too much:
These terrorists are not soldiers. They are beneath such an honorific. They are not even criminals. In that respect, Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's contempt for the whines of those complaining about poor treatment is fully justified.
I'm not proud of those sentences, but they rested on a basic level of trust that of course enemy combatants might be treated roughly, but would not be subject to systematic abuse, torture or beatings. This was the American military. This was the Bush administration, people I trusted. I had no idea - and perhaps I should be held responsible for my naivete - that memos were being written allowing for torture and abuse to occur under the legal cover of a president's wartime authority. Abu Ghraib had not yet been exposed. The hundreds of incidents of abuse, the dozens of prisoners who died while in captivity, the smaller number who have indeed been confirmed as tortured to death: these facts I did not then know. But after Abu Ghraib, I obviously changed my tune. If that could happen, I worried about what else could have occurred. I read the record. I explored the evidence. I came to a different conclusion. The facts available to me changed; and so I changed my mind. Why is that open process to be mocked? When you blog half a million words a year, and you do so for five years, and you use the blog form as a way to think out loud, the notion that your views will remain identical throughout strikes me as preposterous. When the facts available to me change, I change my mind. But then I guess I'm not James Taranto.

RESPONDING TO CRITICS II: Now for some criticism from the left, i.e. from Atrios and Kos. (Atrios Dowdifies my quote, making it seem as if I wrote it, while in context I'm actually relating the arguments of someone in the Bush administration.) I've long written about the "flypaper theory," the idea that somehow it's a good thing to attract terrorists to Iraq to fight them there, rather than here, and to deploy an aggressive American force to counter Islamist terror in Iraq. From the beginning, I've written about the potential benefits and costs of such a strategy. And to be honest, I still don't know how to judge it. I'm not prepared to dismiss it out of hand; but the evidence against its efficacy also seems to me to have accumulated over the past couple of years. You can read my treatment of the issue over the years here, here and here. I'd say that the weight of the evidence now bears against this idea; but I don't think the debate is over, or that the concept was obviously nutty from the start. If you want to read a blog that will always take the position of the Bush administration on the war, there are plenty out there. Ditto if you want to read a relentlessly anti-Bush blog, like Kos. But this blog is a little different. It's an attempt to think out loud, which means there will be shifts over time in argument and emphasis. It may appear wishy-washy or excitable or whatever. But it's my best attempt to figure things out as I go along. If you don't like it, read someone else. If you have a point to make, please email me. I try and read as much criticism of my fallible work as I can.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: "We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and, our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members... Today, the Spanish society answers to a group of people who, during many years have, been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied, and their liberty oppressed. Today the Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity, and restores their liberty. It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone's triumph. It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet: because it is the triumph of Liberty. Their victory makes all of us (even those who oppose the law) better people, it makes our society better. Honorable members, There is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married. To the contrary, what happens is this class of Spanish citizens get the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: this law enhances and respects marriage." - Spanish prime minister Luis Zapatero, hailing the inclusion of homosexual couples in his country's marital laws.

- 11:48:00 AM

Thursday, July 07, 2005
 
TEAM BRITAIN: Fuck yeah, they explained. Money quote:
Driving on the wrong side of the road! FUCK YEAH!
Greasy fish dripping through a newspaper! FUCK YEAH!
Page Three! FUCK YEAH!
Alfred Hitchcock! FUCK YEAH!
Eric Clapton! FUCK YEAH!
Going to see Mark Knopfler Tonight in London! FUCK YEAH!
Crabtree and Evelyn! FUCK YEAH!
Shortbread from Marks and Spencer! FUCK YEAH!
Rudyard Kipling! FUCK YEAH!
Lord Stanley and his Cup given to Canada! FUCK YEAH!
Tweed with patches on the elbows! FUCK YEAH!
And The Magna Carta! BIG FUCK YEAH!
That's enough fuck yeahs - ed.

- 8:45:00 PM
 
A MUSLIM EMAILS: "Leading a sort of James-Bondy-but-'extremist muslim' lifestyle with lots of sneaking around and secret passwords and high explosives and Manichaean struggles between the collosal forces of Good and Evil is so much more fun than the actual process of creating goodness, justice and peace in the world, which lie in the small struggles of everyday life.

As a Muslim, I am horrified by these attacks in Britain."

- 6:21:00 PM
 
"LET ME COUNT THE WAYS": Pro-war British leftist, Norm Geras, details how terrorists kill. And yes, today, on the BBC, they're "terrorists". Yesterday they were "militants." I guess it's all part of a learning process.

- 6:18:00 PM
 
"THE JEWS KNEW": Yes, this hideous tired old canard pops up again.

- 6:10:00 PM
 
POEM OF THE DAY:
"London pride has been handed down to us,
London pride is a flower that's free.
London pride means our own dear town to us,
And our pride it forever will be.
Grey city
Stubbornly implanted,
Taken so for granted
For a thousand years.
Stay, city,
Smokily enchanted,
Cradle of our memories and hopes and fears.
Every Blitz
Your resistance
Toughening,
From the Ritz
To the Anchor and Crown,
Nothing ever could override
The pride of London Town."
- Noel Coward, "London Pride."

- 4:52:00 PM
 
FAILURE: The Economist makes a good point today:
What the attacks also show, however, is that well co-ordinated though the four explosions were, they were not terribly effective. Chance plays a big role in such attacks. The bombs in Madrid last year which killed 191 people might have killed many more had the station roof collapsed. The September 11th hijackings might have killed fewer than the eventual 2,752 had the twin towers of the World Trade Centre not melted down and collapsed. As The Economist went to press, the toll in the four London bombs was not clear, but the estimate of at least 33 deaths was thankfully far smaller than in Madrid. By the terrible calculus of terrorism, the attacks should thus be counted as a failure - sign of weakness, not strength.
And no WMDs. For that, relief.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: "You are right to point out the British stoicism in the face of the attacks; it's quite admirable. However, your expat Brit emailer from London stretches his comparison too far. Perhaps if Westminister Abbey had a plane rammed into its side and over 3,000 people died, the sports commentators might feel the need to make a mention of it. It's wonderful the Brits are going on with their lives as normal and the Americans might indeed do well to take note, but spare us comparisons between the attacks, because they aren't at all comparable." Point taken. I should add that celebrating British stoicism does not imply that somehow the American response is inferior. It isn't. Americans see a problem and want to fix it; Brits sometimes endure it. Some synthesis of these two approaches may be helpful in dealing with Islamo-fascist terror. I don't see either as somehow better than the other - just different.

- 4:39:00 PM
 
WHY CRICKET MATTERS TODAY: An emailer reminds me of another Englishman's commentary on seeking pleasure and diversion even in wartime, perhaps especially in wartime:
"I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun... The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature."
C.S. Lewis, of course, in a 1939 sermon at St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Yes, England beat Australia today - by nine wickets.

- 4:10:00 PM
 





- 3:43:00 PM
 
OR CRICKET ...: Another compellingly British response to terror from an emailer in London:
I'm in London today... was on my way to Covent Garden from Paddington when they closed down the tube. I'm an ex-pat Brit (18 years in New York) who was in the Big Apple for the World Trade Center attacks.
I've been alternating between home and down the pub since lunchtime, and in my local the BBC news coverage is on one channel, while the cricket is on another... England well on the way to beating the Aussies in a one-day match. Coming from America, where sports commentators felt compelled to litter their coverage of the most meaningless event with pious platitudes and references to the attacks, it's quite remarkable... every now and again Sky Sports runs a very subtle trailer on the screen advising people that there has been an attack and they can watch the coverage of Sky News, but the commentators have made almost no reference to the bombings.
No one has suggested that we stop playing cricket because of events in London. No one has said, "Of course this game fades into insignificance compared to events in the real world." Nor has anyone offered up the inane idea that if we stop playing cricket the terrorists will have won. The idea of stopping the game appears not to have occurred to anyone, which I think is wonderful and yet another example of the British stoicism of which you write. It makes me realize how much I've missed London.
They will, of course, break for tea.

- 3:36:00 PM
 
DOWN TO THE PUB: More reax from Londoners, especially commuters:
Work's over but there's little chance of getting home right now. Most of us are just going to go to the pub until the traffic has died down. It's not callousness or indifference to carry on as normal, it's quiet defiance.
As in the olden days, as Churchill once said.

- 3:33:00 PM
 
ATTACKING BRITISH MUSLIMS: Johann Hari makes a good point, as so often:
In the scarred miles between each explosion – walking from Moorgate to Liverpool Street down to King's Cross – you could see several fights taking shape yesterday that will grip us for years. The fight against Islamic fundamentalism became clearer. Anybody who tells you these bombers are fighting for the rights of Muslims in Iraq, occupied Palestine or Chechnya should look at the places they chose to bomb. Aldgate? The poorest and most Muslim part of the country. Edgware Road? The centre of Muslim and Arab life in London and, arguably, Europe.
Does anybody need greater evidence that these Islamic fundamentalists despise Muslims who choose to live in free societies, and they would enslave Muslims everywhere if they were given the opportunity? Nor is this tit-for-tat revenge for deaths in Iraq: very similar jihadist plots have been foiled in France and Germany, countries that opposed the invasion. Anybody who doubted that the fight against Islamic fundamentalism – a murderous totalitarian ideology – was always our fight should know better now.
I wonder if this attack will be in some ways a reverse Pearl Harbor, when Britain rouses itself to a fuller commitment to the war that was already underway elsewhere, the way America finally threw its full weight behind Britain in 1941. Britain, of course, has already been deeply involved, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this war has now struck home - in one of the most diverse and liberal and dynamic cities in the world. May the lion roar back.

- 3:25:00 PM
 






QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: "What the fuck do you think you're doing? This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.
Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.
All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.
And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds.
Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.
And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.
So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city." - London News Review.

- 1:05:00 PM
 
ANOTHER BRITISH RESPONSE: If not tea, beer:
14:05 - I tell you what, if this is an "Islamic" terrorist attack, they're doing a piss-poor job. The pubs are all packed out, people sipping their pints happily, all a tad pissed off, but basically fine with it. Nice one, Al Quaeda - you profess to be from a teetotal religion, and you've given the pub trade a massive mid-week boost.
Have one for me, will you? Nice and warm.

- 12:44:00 PM
 
THE CARRIAGE BEHIND: A first-hand blog account of terror:
Travelling just past Edgware Station the train entered a tunnel. We shook like any usual tube train as it rattled down the tracks. It was then I heard a loud bang.

The train left the tracks and started to rumble down the tunnel. It was incapable of stopping and just rolled on. A series of explosions followed as if tube electric motor after motor was exploding. Each explosion shook the train in the air and seems to make it land at a lower point.

I fell to the ground like most people, scrunched up in a ball in minimize injury. At this point I wondered if the train would ever stop, I thought "please make it stop", but it kept going. In the end I just wished that it didn't hit something and crush. It didn't.

When the train came to a standstill people were screaming, but mainly due to panic as the carriage was rapidly filling with smoke and the smell of burning motors was giving clear clues of fire.

As little as 5 seconds later we were unable to see and had all hit the ground for the precious air that remaining. We were all literally choking to death.

The carriage however was pretty sealed; no window could open, no door would slide and no hammers seemed to exist to grant exit. If there were instructions on how to act then they were impossible to see in the thick acrid black smoke.

In the end I opted to do something about the problem and began shouting to find out in which direction the fires were emanating from. I then tested with the inter-carriage door to see if venting the smoke caused fire to spread. It didn't so I held the door open trying to clear the carriage and look for escape routes.

The train was packed and so there was no escape to the other carriages. Through the gap between the carriages however I saw an escape route and it calmed me from panic; if things got bad I could see an exit along the tunnel wall.

The fire concerned me and the acrid smoke never seems to fully dissipate. I calmed passengers playing down the issue as a bad tube network and a network derailment. Naturally people were in a mixture of states from quiet to abject panic in all its colours.

People could be heard screaming from all around; people were trapped, yet no-one could move and do anything.

After an eternity a guard moved through the carriages and asked everyone to move in the opposite direction. No one however moved, I think they were all in shock.
May the murdered rest in peace.

- 12:32:00 PM
 
THE BRITS AND STOICISM: Here's one cultural difference between Brits and Americans. Brits regard the best response to outrage to carry on as if nothing has happened. Yes, they will fight back. But first, they will just carry on as normal. Right now, a million kettles are boiling. "Is that the best you can do?" will be a typical response. Stoicism is not an American virtue. Apart from a sense of humor, it is the ultimate British one. Neveratoss captures this perfectly today:
Went to the pub at lunchtime to see the latest new on events in London. Three young guys were sitting directly in front of the TV as details of a major terrorist attack on London were emerging – all three avidly reading the Sun's account of the Steven Gerard/Liverpool fiasco.
That's a reference to a soccer story. Do not mistake this attitude for indifference. It's a very English form of determination.

- 12:13:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I have a prediction to make, that tomorrow we'll find out whether Britons are, still, in fact, Britons. Many years ago I was working in The City and there were two events that made travel into work almost impossible.
The first was a series of storms that brought down power lines, blocked train routes and so on. Not surprisingly, the place was empty the next day. Why bother to struggle through?
The other event was an IRA bomb which caused massive damage and loss of life. Trains were disrupted, travel to work the next day was horribly difficult and yet there were more people at work than on a normal day. There was no co-ordination to this, no instructions went out, but it appeared that people were crawling off their sick beds in order to be there at work the next day, thrusting their mewling and pewling infants into the arms of anyone at all so that they could be there.

Yes, we'll take an excuse for a day off, throw a sickie. But you threaten us, try to kill us? Kill and injure some of us?

Fuck you, sunshine.

We'll not be having that.


No grand demonstrations, few warlike chants, a desire for revenge, of course, but the reaction of the average man and woman in the street? Yes, you’ve tried it now bugger off. We’re not scared, no, you won’t change us. Even if we are scared, you can still bugger off." - Tim Worstall, Brit blogger. Priceless. I love my homeland.

- 11:58:00 AM
 
ANOTHER CLASSIC BRIT: Here's a great one from a blogger:
I just rang up Lord Coe to be the first to congratulate him and to nominate a new, typically British, Olympic Sport – War! We're very good at it and the French are, quite frankly, merde! Germany are pretty good but lack a decent finish, the Italians don't quite get the "half time no changing sides" rule and Argentinians are rubbish even when playing at home. Did I miss anyone out?
He wrote that yesterday. Now we know who he missed out.

- 11:47:00 AM
 
LIVINGSTONE RESPLENDENT: Yes, it's old Red Ken himself, the famously left-wing mayor of London. Here's what he just said:
"This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful; it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers; it was aimed at ordinary working class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christians, Hindu and Jew, young and old, indiscriminate attempt at slaughter irrespective of any considerations, of age, of class, of religion, whatever, that isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it's just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder, and we know what the objective is, they seek to divide London. They seek to turn Londoners against each other and Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack... I wish to speak through you directly, to those who came to London to claim lives, nothing you do, how many of us you kill will stop that flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another, whatever you do, how many you kill, you will fail."
Amen a million times. How dumb are these fascists to take on the Brits and the Americans? Sure, we fight with each other; but up against this kind of evil, our divisions are petty. I also admire Livingstone's ability to see how liberal and left-wing Londoners who have helped build an amazingly vibrant, diverse and tolerant city are particularly affronted by these medieval monsters. Maybe this will help build support for a war that is as unavoidable as it is unlosable. I don't mean we won't continue to differ over means and methods and tactics and strategy. We will. That's our strength. But right and left, we are in this together.

- 11:19:00 AM
 
ONE BRIT RESPONDS: I liked this email from one of the Brits:
Londoners (Brits) will fight back. That is obvious. Always have always will. One thing I've got to disagree with you on is that there will be a push for policy change but not for the reason Galloway and others suggest. Brits will demand that we hand over the calm south to Iraqis and move troops (in particular SAS) to Afghanistan. There are some people in the mountains that we need to settle a score with.
That's the spirit.

- 11:13:00 AM
 
SUICIDE BOMBERS? Scuttlebutt from friends in London. Just passing along: cell-phones don't work on the tube, so the likelihood of suicide bombers is that much higher; ditto the bus. The bus behind the one attacked was packed with school-kids. "There's a surprising lack of panic," my sister tells me. When it's really serious, Londoners calm down. On the bright side, seniors are reminding the young that this is nothing compared to the Blitz. It's the anniversary of victory in World War II, so the memories are particularly fresh. My sister is taking care of a neighbor's child whose mother is stranded in London (but ok). What's she doing? Making him tea.

- 11:04:00 AM
 
THE VOICE OF APPEASEMENT: Of course, George Galloway had to offer the following statement:
The loss of innocent lives, whether in this country or Iraq, is precisely the result of a world that has become a less safe and peaceful place in recent years.
We have worked without rest to remove the causes of such violence from our world. We argued, as did the Security Services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings.
We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East.
Only then will the innocents here and abroad be able to enjoy a life free of the threat of needless violence.
The opposite, of course, is true. If we give in to these forces of murder in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, their determination to attack us will only grow. While Brits may well have strong disagreements about the war and the conduct of the war, as Americans do, I do not believe that they are in any doubt as to who is responsible for these barbaric acts; and will not flinch from fighting the real enemy. That enemy is not our own flawed, fallible but elected governments. It is the people who would remove our ability to elect anyone.

- 10:59:00 AM
 
NOW, LONDON: I guess this was inevitable at some point; but, of course, it is still horrifying and barbaric and a reminder of the terrible danger we still live under. My brother, who works in London, is fine. I found these images, taken by ordinary people and posted by them, to be among the most distressing and necessary. This one reminds me, as it must, of the blitz. Londoners, unlike New Yorkers on that September morning, have dealt with this kind of violence before and have endured. My father's response will perhaps be typical of many, as it often is. He told me not to worry, that this was "not nice," and that "we're too bloody p.c. over here." From one blog, an eye-witness account:
I'm fine, but I was in a tube at King's Cross when when one of the explosions happened. I was stuck in a smoke-filled, blackened tube that reeked of burning for over 30 minutes. So many people were hysterical.
I truly thought I was going to die and was just hoping it would be from smoke inhalation and not fire. I felt genuine fear but kept calm (and quite proud of myself for that).
Eventually people smashed through the windows and we were lifted out all walked up the tunnel to the station. There was chaos outside and I started to walk down Euston Road (my face and clothes were black) towards work and all of a sudden there was another huge bang and people started running up the road in the opposite direction to where I was walking and screaming and crying. I now realise this must have been one of the buses exploding.
The coordination is like Madrid. But Britons will not respond by blaming their government. They will respond by stiffening their will to fight back.

AN EMAIL FROM IRAQ: This is as good a time as any to print an encouraging email from a military medic in the field. Some excerpts:
We are riding out the ninth month in country and it seems like I have been here for half of my life. I have even started to recognize the faces of ordinary Iraqi citizens when we pass through the local villages. I have watched this country change over the last few months. When we first arrived, the main mission was to gain control over the area. Terror was rampant and gunfights, ambushes and IED's were all we seemed to deal with. The unit we replaced had not done as good a job as they could have (or maybe we are just better trained for it), and as a result, we got the impression that we were in for a rough ride. My battalion commander is an awesome leader, though, and we quickly started to gain control. As an example of this, when we first arrived, the newly formed Iraqi units were afraid to even show their faces while in uniform. In November, when threatened by the insurgents, they all left their posts and hid. Since then, we have trained three new battalions of soldiers. We have run four basic training classes and are on our fourth NCO course. We used to have to practically drag the IA (Iraqi Army) soldiers along on missions. Now it is hard to keep up with them.

For my medics and me, the daily mission was usually at night and was to root out and capture the bad guy. Now, it is daytime MEDCAP's (medical civil action program) where I usually spend an hour or two playing football with the kids out on their front lawn after seeing to a few cases of arthritis in the elderly. We have set up and supplied each of the three IA battalions with the same supplies I run my aid station with and have started training their medics to take care of their own. One of my proudest moments was recently when, in the middle of the night, an IA team brought in a terrorist (yes, we still treat them) who had multiple gun shot wounds to the leg and arm. I started the routine of assigning my medics the tasks of vitals, IV, airway and such. The IA medic grabbed me by the arm and asked why I didn't give him a position. I showed him a particularly nasty wound on the leg and told him to go to town. He cleaned, wrapped and splinted it as good as any of my medics could have done. When we were done, I told him he did an awesome job and asked him why he even bothered to bring the guy to me instead of taking care of him himself. He told me that he has such respect for us that he thought he would let us get in on the action because he knows we like doing our job so m uch. It was then that I reminded him that the more he shows his country that he can fend for himself, the sooner it will be that we can get back to our own families.

This past Saturday, an event took place that could be remembered as another milestone in the history of the new Iraq. In Quyarrah, over a thousand citizens and police held the first "march against terrorism". It was led by sheiks, mukhtars, and imams. They are the mayors and religious leaders from the local areas. The crowd was composed of people from all over the Ninewah Province. That is the whole area my battalion covers (basically all land south of Mosul for about 60 miles). Although we had Special Forces in and around the area, the only other US presence was my medics. Even then, we were well out of sight on the edge of town. The people have said they are tired of the terrorism and are not afraid any more. Kudos to them. There was not a single casualty at the event. If you are interested, there should be a ton of press coverage floating about. I hear there were over 10 different news crews on site.
My emailer tells me this guy is not a dreamer; that his previous emails have been pretty gloomy. He sees progress. If he does, so should we. The war in London will be won in part in Iraq. Resolve in one place is indistinguishable from resolve in the other.

- 10:42:00 AM

Wednesday, July 06, 2005
 
ARE BLOGS THE NEW SHIELDS? Jeff Jarvis poses an interesting question.

- 6:21:00 PM
 
FITZGERALD IS (LARGELY) RIGHT: My readers are better than Google. Here's a handy explanation:
The logic of Fitzgerald has sound basis in the American legal system. Despite the noble work journalists sometimes do, reporters, much like any other citizen/resident, do not have carte blanche to aid in the concealment of a criminal act simply on the basis of their profession. In a case based on federal law (such as the law at issue for Fitzgerald, Cooper and Miller, one making it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert agent of the United States), the Federal Rules of Evidence hold that the privileges against compulsory testimony that apply are the privileges that arise under the Common Law. Examples of these are the attorney-client privilege, the privilege against self-incrimination, the priest-penitent privilege, and the marital communications privilege. The courts have refused to recognize new privileges, such as an accountant-client or reporter-source privilege, which have never been recognized under the Common Law. For historical reasons, the ultimate value to society in ferreting out the truth in a case or controversy (here, a criminal case) through the obtainment of evidence has been ajudged paramount. Note that Judge Hogan's ruling here is based on Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that "the First Amendment interest asserted by the newsperson was outweighed by the general obligation of a citizen to appear before a grand jury or at trial, pursuant to a subpoena, and give what information he or she possesses." For more information on privileges, try the handy run-down here.
Thanks. Still, it seems to me that Fitzgerald's bald statement that no one in America can rely on confidentiality is excessive.

- 5:40:00 PM
 
WHY POT AND NOT METH? A reader provides an obvious answer:
There is a drug problem. The police will be judged by how many arrests they make, and how many tons of drugs they confiscate. It is easier and safer to arrest a bunch of hippies and college kids then it is a bunch of crazed meth producers who operate out of the trunks of cars, one of which killed an Oklahoma police officer a year or so ago. The way the police are rewarded is based on the wrong measurement. Thus the result is not ideal.
The same holds true on DUI offenses. DUI is a problem, people die from it. Most DUI fatalities are caused by people driving with a blood alcohol level of .18 or above. So what is the answer? The police are judged not by DUI fatalities, but by the number of arrests they make. So the governments lower the acceptable BAC limit from .10 to .08. Now, the cops arrest a bunch of regular guys who had two beers after work, most of whom they stopped for reasons like speeding. They get to up their DUI arrest rates, simply by changing the law to ensnare more people. However, it does nothing to reduce the damage. Changing the law is easier than having more shifts out at midnight following people home from bars.
People will always respond to the benchmarks by which they are judged, and governments in conjunction with the media and the public are usually focused on the wrong benchmarks.
That's why the legalization of marijuana makes so much sense. It can help law enforcement concentrate on the real drug problems, not the phony ones.

- 5:28:00 PM
 
RE-THINKING CIRCUMCISION: The data seems clear enough to me; and certainly clear enough for there to be a push for widespread circumcision of males in those parts of Africa where the procedure is rare. Some skepticism is in order, however:
Although the apparent protective effect of circumcision has been noted for more than 20 years, doubts linger as to whether circumcision itself is protective, or whether the lower risk may be the result of cultural practices among those who circumcise. HIV rates are low in Muslim communities, for example, which practice male circumcision but also engage in ritual washing before sex and frown on promiscuity.
Does all this prompt me to reverse my view that the circumcision of infants is a violation of every man's right not to have his body mutilated without his consent? In principle, no. The studies involved adult men who agreed to be circumcised; and my position was always primarily about consent, not the procedure itself. But in practice, in Africa, obviously yes: for convenience's sake. The key thing here is reverse transmission, i.e. from women to men. If you can stop or slow the process of infection both ways, you can make a real dent in the epidemic. So as Keynes once said, when the facts change, I change my mind.

- 5:01:00 PM
 
THE LOGIC OF FITZGERALD: I'm as intrigued as anybody by the identity of the person who called Matt Cooper today to release him from the pledge of confidentiality he gave as a journalist to a source. The suspicion, obviously, is that Cooper's source is not the same as Miller's. I'm in awe of Miller's courage as she faces jail; and equally dumbfounded by the zeal of the prosecutor. This quote from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald struck me: "Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality — no one in America is." Does that mean, for example, that the doctor-patient and priest-confessee confidentiality pacts are now up for grabs by zealous prosecutors? Or that between two spouses? Just asking.

- 4:51:00 PM
 
ON THE OTHER HAND ... The Schadenfreude is irresistible. I hope they serve Chirac a nice, steaming slice of black pudding at Gleneagles.

- 1:56:00 PM
 
THE OLYMPICS: I'd comment but I find the entire event a crashing bore. I'm glad that Britain beat France. But I'd be glad if Britain beat France in a turtle race. I just hope London isn't crippled by the wrong kind of development. But if they survived the Millennium Dome, I guess they can survive anything. Even the tedium and cant of the "Olympic Spirit." Grouchy enough for ya? Bah: humbug.

- 1:37:00 PM
 
O'DONNELL AND ROVE: The questions multiply. The semantics remain. I'd almost be enjoying this, if two good people weren't facing jail-time for doing their jobs with integrity and class.

- 1:15:00 PM
 
TRADE, NOT AID: I'm relatively dismayed by the way in which some of the most paleo-liberal notions of aid to developing countries have gained traction with the antics of Live-8 and other lame pop-star posturing. There's something actually racist, I think, in arguing that Africans somehow cannot work and trade their own way to prosperity. And there's something truly dumb in not focusing on one area where the wealthy continue to punish the poor. Anne Applebaum puts it well:
[A]mong those who work seriously on Africa, it has long been clear that what Africans need isn't only cash, which can be stolen or wasted, but the opportunity to trade their way out of poverty, just as Asians did over the past several decades. Yet the current regime of agricultural tariffs, quotas and export subsidies, whether for American cotton or European sugar, so reduces the price of African agricultural products that African farmers cannot compete. Each European cow costs taxpayers $2.20 a day, while half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. Withdraw the subsidies for the cows, and Africans might even be able to make competitive cheese.
I hope the president is not too defensive at Gleneagles and points out the cheap sanctimony of the Live-8 mentality. I hope also that he revamps his own views on agricultural subsidies, which he has expanded dramatically. Charity for others often begins at home. Let's cut off wealthy agri-business first, shall we, and then talk about targeted, effective aid.

ZARQAWI ATTACKS MUSLIMS: It strikes me as actually a helpful, if of course also awful, development that the Jihadists in Iraq are now targeting diplomats from other Arab and Muslim countries. The Jihadists are not just fighting us - they're fighting any Muslims who do not hew to their murderous, medieval ideology. Jeff Jarvis makes the point with his usual eloquence and concision.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: "I hope when your time comes - I pray for you to die a slow, agonizingly painful, and lonely death due to complications from your HIV. Be sure to thank your pal Ronnie R. for his part in allowing AIDS to become what it did - when you see him in HELL. You are a dangerous AIDS - ridden maggot. - An HIV Negative Guy who is proud to be that way and stay that way - safely." It's worth saying that I get my fair share of homophobic emails from the right. Whatever. But many of the most vicious and personal and hateful come from the gay far left. They suffer from what many other parts (but not all) of the left wallows in: an addiction to bad news, a loathing for success, a bitterness that corrodes any ability to talk positively to people who disagree with you. Most depressing. And the intolerance! It's not like the brutal attacks I endured in the early 1990s - when my espousal of gay marriage earned the ire of the hard left. But it's still around. And they hate me and other non-left-wing gays with an intensity that is so often the hallmark of those who have lost the argument.

- 12:42:00 PM
 
METH OR POT?: For some unaccountable reason, the vast majority of resources in the "drug war" have recently been focused on the least harmful herb, marijuana, even while the meth epidemic continues to explode - across poor communities in the heartland and urban enclaves on the coasts. Crystal meth is light-years more destructive, more addictive and more socially corrosive than pot will ever be. Here's the reality:
The problem is seen as particularly bad in the Southwest, where 76 percent of counties surveyed said methamphetamine was their largest drug problem; in the Pacific Northwest, where 75 percent of those surveyed said it was; and in the Upper Midwest, where 67 percent of county officials declared methamphetamine their worst drug problem. Seventy percent of counties reported increases in robberies and burglaries because of methamphetamine; 62 percent reported increases in domestic violence; 53 percent reported an increase in assaults; and 27 reported an increase in identity theft. Half the counties surveyed said one in five inmates were in jail because of methamphetamine crimes. Many counties reported that half their jail populations were incarcerated because of methamphetamine.
This actually is a crisis. So why the misplaced emphasis on marijuana? Even opponents of the drug war, like yours truly, would make an exception for the instantly addictive, body-destroying, mind-frying chemical cocktail called meth. Why not drop the war on largely harmless pot and fight the real menace?

- 12:01:00 PM
 
PALESTINIAN FREE SPEECH: Be careful what you say, as one academic found out.

- 11:49:00 AM

Tuesday, July 05, 2005
 
THE BRITS IN IRAQ: A British reservist differs with Juan Cole on the role of his forces in Southern Iraq. Good for Cole for posting the email. Cole also notices the hopeful Jihadist-Sunni clashes on the Syrian border, reported in greater detail in the Telegraph.

- 5:22:00 PM
 
ON SANTORUM: Another emailer reaches that asymptotic bloggy synthesis:
I agree with your last emailer that Santorum's comments aren't exactly a harbinger of the apocalypse (which seems an apt analogy when dealing with the good senator), but, like you, I found his commentary on the role of women and the importance of education highly troubling. The reactions that neocons like you and I are feeling probably have less to do with the factual accuracy of what Santorum said (of course kids would be better off with stay-at-home moms) and have more to do with our ability to view his attitudes against the backdrop of what we know Santorum believes about society. Santorum is a paleocon in the truest sense. He's the latest incarnation of Pat Buchanan. In fact, he may be more accurately described as a paleoliberal of the pre-1960s variety. The man reminds me of many older folks back in the small midwestern town in which I grew up. He thinks that gender roles should have greater societal definition. He scoffs at the need for the universality of higher education, even in this post-industrial age. He considers the pursuit of happiness to be ultimately selfish. Santorum is the opposite of a forward-thinking conservative. To the contrary, he is perpetually rooted in a time gone by, convinced that if we just bring back antequated mores and close the doors to trade and feed organized labor, the desolate factory-towns and emptying churches of Catholic Pennsylvania will boom once again and the age of innocence will return.
Rooted in 1930s economics and 1950s social norms, Santorum is the past, not the future of the conservative movement.
Here's hoping.

- 5:12:00 PM
 
NOT SO FAST: David Corn examines the evidence allegedly fingering Karl Rove as Matt Cooper's source for outing Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative. He's underwhelmed.

- 3:53:00 PM
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY: "Calm down, there, tiger. I'm no fan of Santorum, but what exactly is so wrong with those excerpts you linked to? They are certainly not worthy of the mullah comparison.
Are children better off when one parent stays home to raise them, as opposed to a daycare provider? I'd be surprised if you believed that they are not. Is the feminist movement partly to blame for more mothers leaving the home to pursue professional careers at the expense of their children? Of course. Even if you disagree, is that such a radical or nonsensical position to hold? On number three, Is college the right path for everyone? I know many people who have been pushed needlessly into college only to end up with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and a tough job market to deal with. Of course, one will have more opportunities with a college education, but do you really think the solution to every single mother's woes is to pack up and go to school?
Seriously, I think you are overreacting here. Just remember to take a deep breath and count to ten from now on whenever you see Santorum's name."

- 3:46:00 PM
 
THE GOOD NEWS: I'd say that this piece of news from Iraq is encouraging. Perhaps the real news from that country is that the insurgency is very slowly being divided between nationalist Sunnis and the Jihadists from abroad. I certainly hope so. We'll see as the constitutional process continues.

- 3:42:00 PM
 
SANTORUM UNPLUGGED: The Senator from Pennsylvania explains his views on the role of women. Benedict XVI - and a few mullahs in Iran - would approve.

- 2:03:00 PM
 
"KNOWINGLY": Lawrence O'Donnell parses Karl Rove's lawyer.

- 1:25:00 PM
 
THE STILL-NUTTY LEFT: The new claim is that the United States' occupation of Iraq has led to 300,000 Iraqi deaths. Tom Elia elaborates.

- 1:18:00 PM
 
WHO CHANGED MARRIAGE?: The heterosexuals, of course! Stephanie Coontz will find few dissenters on the social right. The revolution in civil marriage - in which it became about love, not property, in which women and men were equal, in which children were not necessary - all occurred before the gay revolution. Since marriage has already been redefined to make the exclusion of gays logically absurd, the campaign against letting gays into the human family necessarily raises the suspicion of mere animus. It's not bigotry to say that these are the rules that govern civil marriage and too bad if you can't live up to them (i.e. procreation, or traditional gender roles). But it is suspicious when you abolish all those rules for straights and then use the old rules to bar gays. I don't see how gay marriage opponents manage to get round the logic of this - except by resorting to purely religious arguments (which would invalidate most heterosexual marriages today as well), or simply reiterating the definitional case that marriage is for straights, dammit. This glaring hole on the argument must have something to do with the fact that an idea that was novel in the 1980s is now the law in several civilized countries and one state in America. Reason eventually finds a way.

FRUM ON MIERS: Another cold day in hell, but I think David Frum has a point on Harriet Miers. In my occasional interactions with the Bush brigade, I have discovered she is revered as well as feared. Not much of a paper trail; but hard as nails.

- 1:14:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I stand up and challenge them when they say things that are anti-gay. I haven't given up on them yet," - Luis Ibarcena, a 32-year-old Spanish security guard, on why he still attends mass, despite now being married to his husband.

JOHNNY APPLE DOES MY HOME COUNTY: I grew up in the rural idyll of West Sussex. Gardening was the religion. The NYT's Johnny Apple regularly eats and drinks his way through much of it each summer. Enjoy. He sure does.

- 1:10:00 PM
 
THE TERROR-MASTER: More information on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran and a theocratic criminal of epic proportions.

- 12:26:00 PM
 
HOW GREED SAVES: Another case for the miraculous work of profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies.

- 12:15:00 PM
 
THE CANCER AT GITMO: It's extremely frustrating that the New Yorker hasn't made Jane Mayer's superb reporting on the use of medical doctors to facilitate and monitor abuse of detainees at Gitmo avilable online. But the detail and scope and meticulousness of the piece make it must-reading for those concerned about what is going on in U.S. military detention centers across the world. Gitmo, however disturbing its methods, is almost certainly the best run and least abusive of such centers. Mayer's key point is that the military has redeployed its own training for resistance to enemy torture into a blue-print for inflicting torture on "illegal combatants" at Gitmo and elsewhere. The cooperation of military doctors, monitoring exactly how far a detainee can be physically and psychologically pushed until he dies, is about as unethical a process as can be imagined. But it's yet another one of George W. Bush's innovations in American warfare. What I also found fascinating was Mayer's account of some of the techniques U.S. troops are trained to withstand - a program known as SERE: "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape." One of them was trashing of the Bible, as a way to unsettle and destabilize the psyches of prisoners. Sound familiar? One graduate recalled:
"One of the most memorable parts of the camp experience was when one of the camp leaders trashed a Bible on the ground, kicking it around etc. It was a crushing blow, even though this was just a school... [T]he Bible trashing happened when this guy had us all in the courtyard sitting for one of his speeches. They were tempting us with a big pot of soup that was boiling - we were all starving from a few days of chow deprivation. He brought out the Bible and started going off on it verbally - how it was worthless, we were forsaken by this God, etc. Then he threw it on the ground and kicked it around. It was definitely the climax of his speech..."
Gee, I wonder why there was an alleged mass suicide attempt by Muslim prisoners at Gitmo in August 2003 to protest systematic abuse of the Koran in interrogation techniques. One such incident, denied by the Pentagon, was one in which the text was "allegedly wrapped inside an Israeli flag and stomped on." I wonder where on earth one American trainer of prison guards gave an affidavit where s/he informed an interrogator at Abu Ghraib: "I told him of a story of an interrogator using and Pride and Ego Down approach. The interrogator took a copy of the Koran and threw it on the ground and stepped on the Koran, which resulted in a detainee riot." I guess that since the Koran is treated with the utmost respect at Gitmo, all these things are simply invented by enemy propaganda and stab-in-the-back lefties. Just a few bad apples - with meticulous, and completely coincidental, legal cover from the White House memos.

- 12:03:00 PM

Monday, July 04, 2005
 
THIS I BELIEVE: It's July Fourth, a day to reaffirm life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My NPR essay can be read here.




- 12:04:00 PM




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