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War and Freedom
 How to Have Both
- Sunday Times, (November 13, 2005)


The End of Gay Culture
 And The Future of Gay Life
- The New Republic, (November 1, 2005)


An American Hero
 Ian Fishback Steps Forward
- Sunday Times, (October 2, 2005)

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Thursday, November 17, 2005
 
BLACKS, AIDS AND THEOCONS: Among the best news on HIV lately is the drop infection rates among African-Americans. Much of the drop can be attributed to needle-exchange programs which have drastically cut infection rates. The response from the religious right? Here's the Family Research Council: "The AIDS virus is spread through voluntary behavior. An unlimited supply of needles will not alter behavior patterns of irresponsible and often psychotic addicts." Now, there's the spirit of the Gospels. How many lives would have been lengthened and saved if these needle exchange policies had been put in place years ago? How much African-American health is worth FRC's version of "morality"?

- 4:41:00 PM
 
FALLOWS ON IRAQ: I missed this a couple of days ago. My bad. It's fair, excellent, and thereby all the more brutal.

- 3:23:00 PM
 
MURTHA SPEAKS: We have a crisis of confidence in the war. Read Congressman Murtha's speech. (Hat tip: Rod.) He's no MoveOn lefty. The president and vice-president are fighting back on the issue of their alleged deception before the war. As I have written here, I believe that the WMD intelligence fiasco was an honest and forgivable mistake, not a conspiracy or pre-meditated deception. The worst the administration was guilty of was occasional rhetorical excess in a very emotional period. But I do believe that the failure to prepare for the post-invasion phase, the far-too-late acknowledgment of the insurgency, the amateurism and pig-headedness of the early occupation, and the sanctioning of torture: all these required even those of us who believed in the war to call the administration on its incompetence and arrogance. What we need now is a very clear indication that our effort to train the Iraqi military is progressing, that the troops are well-equipped and cared for and that the political process isn't degenerating into sectarianism. The fact that Bush's and Cheney's recent fight-back speeches were not about these vital matters is not a sign of their regaining strength. it's a sign of their continuing and deepening vulnerability.

- 1:25:00 PM
 
WOODWARD AND FITZGERALD: Josh Marshall cites an important nuance.

- 11:47:00 AM
 
THE ANTI-INTEGRATIONISTS: Bruce Bawer on what motivates many of Europe's Muslim immigrants:
A [French] government report leaked last March depicted an increasingly two-track educational system: More and more Muslim students refuse to sing, dance, participate in sports, sketch a face, or play an instrument. They won't draw a right angle (it looks like part of the Christian cross). They won't read Voltaire and Rousseau (too antireligion), Cyrano de Bergerac (too racy), Madame Bovary (too pro-women), or Chrétien de Troyes (too chrétien). One school has separate toilets for "Muslims" and "Frenchmen"; another obeyed a Muslim leader's call for separate locker rooms because "the circumcised should not have to undress alongside the impure."

Many Muslims, wanting to enjoy Western prosperity but repelled by Western ways, travel regularly back to their homelands. From Oslo, where I live, there are more direct flights every week to Islamabad than to the US. A recent Norwegian report noted that among young Norwegians of Pakistani descent, family honor depends largely on "not being perceived as Norwegian - as integrated."
This is not a case simply of an ethnic minority denied integration; it's a case of a religious minority refusing integration, indeed attacking and denying the very values of secularism and liberalism upon which the West rests.

- 11:42:00 AM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: "Any deep-rooted prejudice against others, such as homophobia or misogyny, would be grounds for rejecting a candidate for the priesthood, but not their sexual orientation." - Timothy Radcliffe, OP, Master, Dominican Order, 1992-2001, Blackfriars, Oxford. It's great to see the former leader of the friary where I once attended mass standing up against bigotry in the Church.

- 11:37:00 AM
 
MY LOBOTOMY: No, I'm not describing my decision last year to endorse Kerry (although the opposite choice looks more and more deranged each day, doesn't it?). I'm talking about this story of a man's attempt to find out the story of his own legal lobotomy as a child. Weirdly fascinating.

- 11:24:00 AM
 
DEPARTMENT OF TOUGH ISSUES: Andy McCarthy seems to believe that this administration does not practice or condone what any rational person would call "torture". Here's his latest credulous statement:
First, the administration does not "reserve the right to torture" anyone. Torture is against the law, and even if it weren't the administration has said, repeatedly, that it won't be countenanced - it will be prosecuted. There are many of us - including no less a Bush-basher than Alan Dershowitz - who think a total ban on torture is a bad idea. But the administration has shown no stomach for such a discussion. It says torture is prohibited. Period.
What the administration has reserved the right to do - or, better, what congress reserved the right of the United States to do when it enacted significant reservations in its 1994 ratification of the UN Convention on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (UNCAT) (reservations that -- as I mentioned this week -- the McCain Amendment preserves) - is coercive interrogation. That is, forms of physical and mental pressure that fall short of torture (which, as a matter of law, is limited to the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering).
Just to clarify matters. Does McCarthy believe that repeated beating to the point of near-unconsciousness is "torture"? Does he believe that "torture" includes breaking a detainee's ribs, tying his hands behind his back, hooding him, and then hanging him by his hands until, after being released, blood gushes from his mouth and nose? (I ask this question because the CIA officer responsible for this has yet to be even charged and the Bush-Cheney CIA has thrown away critical evidence.) Does he believe that "waterboarding" is torture? Does McCarthy believe that "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment for prisoners should be practised by those who wear the uniform of the United States? Does he believe that the religious faith of detainees should be abused and used against them in interrogation? McCarthy gallantly says he admires me for my "willingness to take on the tough issues." Will he give me the pleasure of returning the compliment?

- 11:17:00 AM
 
A CASE OF THE INNOCENT: Just in case you think that habeas corpus does not matter, please read this detailed and harrowing post over to Obsidian Wings. It details the case of two Uighur detinees who have been cleared of all charges. They are innocent and the government accepts that they are innocent. But they are kept in Gitmo, in chairs, with their hands chained to the floor, in definitely. Money quote:
The government thinks it is perfectly acceptable not to inform counsel or the court when it determines that detainees are not enemy combatants, even though the allegation that they are enemy combatants is central to the justification for holding them. They seem to think, in addition, that it is acceptable to mislead counsel and the Court about the status of those detainees. They also think it is fine to keep those detainees at Guantanamo, to chain detainees who are not enemy combatants to the floor, and to deny them the right to communicate with anyone in the outside world, including relatives who think they are dead, and to confiscate things like photographs of their families as contraband. They claim that they cannot discuss the efforts they are making to place those detainees, and that they cannot release those detainees until those efforts, whatever they are, are completed, which will be "'soon' in kind of the hopeful sense of the word."
Remember that this occurred while these people still had some basic habeas corpus rights:
Had these detainees not had the right to file for habeas corpus, none of us would know that they existed, let alone be able to read details of their incarceration, and what our government had to say in its own defense.
But habeas rights do not solve everything. To the best of my knowledge, the Uighur detainees are still at Guantanamo. The detainee Willett described as "the sleepy-eyed young man with the shy smile and the gentle manner" is still in jail, cleared of all charges but unable to go free.
The Graham/Kyl/Levin amendment that just passed is better than Graham's first proposal. But it is important to remember that, as of now, these innocent men, handed over by bounty hunters in Pakistan, would have no access to courts. We would never have heard of them. They would be America's "disappeared". Anyone who cares about liberty in this country - a category that does not seem to include the bulk of Republicans any more - should be proud that the original Graham amendment did not pass. But chilled about what can now happen. In a free country. Whether you're innocent or guilty.

- 11:00:00 AM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY: "Setting a date would mean that the 221 soldiers I've lost this year, that their lives will have been lost in vain," - Maj. Gen. William Webster, in charge of much of Baghdad.

TIMES DELETE: Every now and again, I check in on how the Times columnists are doing in their padded Internet cells. Yesterday, none of them made the top 25 emailed stories. I hope the padding is thick. Way ahead of the columnists: "Pumpkin Pots de Crème With Amaretti-Ginger Crunch."

- 12:01:00 AM

Wednesday, November 16, 2005
 
DRUM VERSUS REYNOLDS: A reader chimes in:
One of the problems I see in the Drum vs Reynolds argument is that Reynolds has completely bought in to a White House conflation, and Drum hasn't drawn the necessary distinctions.

Here's the Instapundit version of the current administration position: "Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements."

This defense only works if you agree to conflate all WMDs as equivalent. The Bushies specifically inflated claims about nuclear weapons; in particular, the Niger yellowcake, and the aluminum tubes. It was the "mushroom cloud" issue that they pimped. Without that, Iraq's WMD threat boiled down to weak stuff like mustard gas and non-weaponized anthrax. Those kinds of WMDs were dealt with perfectly well by an ongoing containment strategy. The only WMD scary enough to justify invasion was a nuke, and the administration hid all the strong doubts about Iraq's nukes. The Bushies also pimped one other reason for war: a non-existent link between Saddam and al Qaeda.
I actually side with Glenn on this. I never believed that nukes were the main threat. I was much more concerned with anthrax or smallpox. And I didn't get the impression before the war that nukes were at the heart of the Bush argument. I can see now how people who weren't as keen on taking the battle to the enemy as I was could have seized on the nuke issue as the peg on which to hang the war. But that's their perspective, not mine, and, I suspect, not Bush's. This debate is a draw. The bottom line is that the president was wrong and waged a war on the basis of intelligence that was soon disproven. Leave all the mind-reading out of it. The public is responding to those facts. And the facts are not really in dispute. We screwed up in a massive way in front of the whole world. If the invasion had gone well, we would have put it behind us by now. But it hasn't. The key thing now is to do all we can to get a free Iraq in place. We do owe it to the troops not to pull the rug from under them, which is why, despite all my anger at Bush, I still support him as commander-in-chief, and find the Senate vote yesterday repellent. We have no other commander-in-chief for three years. And we must still win.

- 4:20:00 PM
 
GAY IN THE HEARTLAND: Maybe I'm under-estimating red state tolerance:
I'm 26, and an out gay male living in Grand Junction, Colorado. It's my hometown, and a very conservative place to live. Western Colorado is not known for its tolerance. The airport is named for the founder of the local KKK branch.
I came out 6 years ago in the big city of Dallas, TX and had the comfort of a huge "gay community" that included our own "gayborhood," two city-council members and a supportive public. I moved back home to Western Colorado for various reasons about a year ago. I was dreading the idea of being "out" in the place I was born and raised...but I decided to be completely honest with anyone who asked.
Within a few weeks of course people asked about me. "Do you have a girlfriend? Why not? " or simply, "Are you gay?" I was honest with everyone and expected a backlash. Nothing. Well, I say nothing...but what really happened was a lot of cool straight people smiled and said "Thats awesome" or "Oh yeah? Got a boyfriend? I know someone you should meet!"
I would say that no one cared, but in a sense, they all cared. They cared about me and wanted me to be honest and happy. I've even had a few of my straight guy friends say "You're the coolest dude we know...gay or straight." A few offered to kick any homophobic ass that says or does anything to harm me. Luckily that hasn't happened...but the sentiment was nice.
I have had only one negative experience. I was at a club recently. Some random guy yelled "Faggot" in my direction. I'm not sure who it was, but they didn't do anything else to cause trouble. Once I told my straight friends who were with me, they nearly started a riot. I had to hold them back from attacking anyone in that vicinity for calling me that name.
There I was, a gay man in the heart of straight country. And every person around me was willing to fight for my sake. I never thought that would have ever happened in my hometown. But it did. And I'm glad.
I'm glad too. The religious right is fighting a losing battle on this one. And they're also fighting the compassion and love of the Jesus they claim to represent.

- 4:07:00 PM
 
THE IMMUNITY QUESTION: Of course, one critical reason that Dick Cheney will not relent in maintaining his right to order torture, even though he is increasingly isolated within the administration and has isolated the United States even further from its allies and friends around the world is ... his concern for immunity from prosecution for past actions and decisions. The truth is that crimes have been committed against detainees - and those crimes were sanctioned all the way up the chain of command. If we agree to end the torture and abuse, the question then emerges of actually holding the really guilty men accountable. Pathetic show-trials of grunts, like the Abu Ghraib disciplining, won't wash. Those thugs were obeying orders. Those orders came from their commanders and those commanders were given the green light from the very top - or at the very least were acting in a meltdown of confusion that their superiors created. There will undoubtedly be pressure from the White House to trade their own immunity - and immunity for the top brass - in return for new legal bars on torture and abuse. In my view, such a trade would be deeply wrong. After we stop the torture and abuse, there will come a time to hold officials in the executive branch responsible for what they have done and enabled. No deal, Mr Vice-president. You sanctioned these actions; and you need to take responsibility for them. If not now, then later.

- 3:58:00 PM
 
83,000???? Just when you think you have heard the worst about this administration's chaotic, ad hoc, incompetent and intermittently criminal detention policies in the war on terror, a trap-door opens and you fall down another story. It is important to recognize that this administration reserves the right to detain anyone, include American citizens, anywhere, for any amount of time, without charge, sometimes without even documentation, and reserves the right to torture them as well. There are now close to 4,000 held without charge for a year. It is past time for the legislature and the courts to fight back and restrain - or at least bring some kind of order and legality - to this astonishing record. If the administration will not grant these prisoners POW status, it must agree to new rules that allow the innocent to be distinguished from the guilty, and to bar torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for ever. Pass the McCain Amendment now.

- 3:49:00 PM
 
FAIRER SCHOOL FUNDING: Eduwonk tries to get ahead of a looming debate.

SERMON WATCH: The Onion notices a very detailed homily. Meanwhile, a bishop faces reality in a humane and orthodox fashion.

- 1:15:00 PM
 
SEXIEST MAN OF THE YEAR: I'm second to no-one in revering Matthew McConaughey, especially the image of him stoned, naked and on bongo drums. I can dream, can't I? But I would like to dissent nonetheless.

- 11:00:00 AM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY I: "The alleged mistreatment of detainees and the inhumane conditions at an Iraqi Ministry of Interior detention facility is very serious, and totally unacceptable," - from the U.S. commanders who have uncovered torture by the Iraqi army. We led by example, didn't we? Immediately following that horrific story is the following one:
Army officials said Tuesday that they were looking into claims by two former Iraqi detainees that they had been put into cages holding lions to terrify them during interrogations in 2003. Thahe Mohammed Sabar said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union that soldiers had pushed him and Sherzad Khalid, a friend, into the cage, then pulled them out when a lion moved toward him. Mr. Khalid said soldiers had forced him into the cages after repeatedly asking where to find Saddam Hussein and unconventional weapons.
There you have what's left of our moral authority in Iraq - and around the world. Rumsfeld called the latter allegation "far-fetched." This from a man who sat on the evidence of Abu Ghraib for months. He should have resigned then. And he should resign now.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: "Not all Americans wanted to do these things [i.e. treat prisoners humanely]. Always some dark spirits wished to visit the same cruelties on the British and Hessians that had been inflicted on American captives. But Washington's example carried growing weight, more so than his written orders and prohibitions. He often reminded his men that they were an army of liberty and freedom, and that the rights of humanity for which they were fighting should extend even to their enemies. Washington and his officers were keenly aware that the war was a contest for popular opinion, but they did not think in terms of 'images' or 'messages' in the manner of a modern journalist or politician. Their thinking was more substantive. The esteem of others was important to them mainly because they believed that victory would come only if they deserved to win. Even in the most urgent moments of the war, these men were concerned about ethical questions in the Revolution." - David Hackett Fischer, from "Washington's Crossing."

- 12:52:00 AM
 
BUSH AND THE POLLS: Some interesting context from MysteryPollster. What strikes me in the numbers is not so much the slightly waning GOP support for Bush and the intense Democratic opposition, but the shift among Independents. Last October, in response to the question: "Please tell me whether you agree or disagree with president Bush on the issues that matter most to you," 46 percent of Indies agreed with Bush and 50 percent disagreed: a pretty even split. The numbers now are: 28 percent agree, 63 percent disagree. In the end, the center counts. And Bush has lost it. All hail the genius of Karl Rove.

TOP VICTIMS OF 2005: John Leo has some candidates.

END OF GAY CULTURE WATCH: More response from readers. They all tend to resonate with the point. Email one:
The local gay organization here in Seattle announced last week it is moving our annual Pride parade from Broadway Avenue, the spine of the gay community for 30-some years, to Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle. Broadway has been dying a slow death for several years now, evidenced by the closing down of businesses, and an exciting literal and symbolic exodus out of the ghetto for countless gay men and lesbians. Broadway and Capitol Hill in general were rites of passage for most of us. We did our time in the bosom of our community, within walking distance of countless bars, meeting rooms, clubs, clinics and bathhouses. But for a number of reasons, Broadway is in decline, and it former inhabitants (graduates, even) are integrating thrillingly into the region at large.

The parade, however, has continued to draw crowds, and the annual post-parade rally at Volunteer Park has grown too big. The new route downtown will culminate in a rally on the Seattle Center grounds, in the shadow of the Space Needle. While Capitol Hill businesses are hollering that community leaders are now abandoning Broadway, and others lament the break from the traditional, I hear a fascinating bit of fear in those cries.

It was easy to grab a sign and show myself in the old Broadway parades. It was home, it was comfortable. It was our turf and those on the sidewalks were our guests. But next summer, we take our team on the road for what feels for some like an away-game. We are facing yet another coming-out - hundreds and hundreds in a single day. I have no doubt the community will turn out, but the event will take on deeper meaning for the intention and thought that will go into it this time. No one is stopping us - any resistance is our own. We are being asked to step out of our comfort zone and show our brave, tender, loving faces to a larger, more diverse crowd lining the sidewalks. It should be a fascinating, exciting day.
The same thing happened in Washington a few years ago. Now, we have pride right on Pennsylvania Avenue. Here's another straw in the wind:
I'm a psychologist, age 61, in West Hollywood, CA; I've been in practice for 30+ years. I'm also a gay man, which I readily acknowledge when asked. Over the past 2-3 years, since insurance companies have been putting their provider panels on the Web, I get many clients who've found me themselves, rather than thru referral by telephone intake workers. People choose me because I'm close to their work, their home, or for some other reason of convenience.

As a result, I've been getting quite a few 20-something straight men who otherwise would not have been referred to me. Now, most of my straight clients figure out, sooner or later, that I'm gay. What I find interesting is that these young men just don't care. It's not that they're gay friendly - they're gay indifferent, gay whatever. There might be some curiosity, but for the most part, it's not a relevant piece of information for them. When I've asked a few of them about this attitude, they all point to television as the familiarizing and normalizing influence. That's it: television. This change is already and unstoppably happening.

Re: "less glamorous...than it now appears" reminds me of the old farmer's saying: I'm not the man I used to be, and if the truth be told, I never was.
Of course, as I wrote in my essay, none of this means that homophobia is over, that fear and loathing of gays is defunct, or that discrimination and cruelty, especially in many red states and enclaves in blue ones, no longer exist. What it does mean is that change is happening extremely quickly. And it is happening among straight people as much as among gays. In fact, sometimes I wonder if the straight ones aren't further ahead.

- 12:07:00 AM

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
 
THE INSTA-STANDARD: This is what I don't get about Glenn Reynolds, who is a fine man and a great blogger. Responding to Matt Welch's superb denunciation of the growing attempt to blame the media for the manifest fuck-ups in Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, Glenn writes the following:
Reporting on things that are actually going wrong, without the "see, Bush is horrible!" spin, and false facts, that we're getting elsewhere, is actually helpful, and we could use more of it.
A classic attempt to sound reasonable, but, upon inspection, hooey. Why, after all, should the president somehow be excused from reponsibility for the war he launched and has conducted with such glaring incompetence? Maybe Bush is horrible as a war-leader. Has that occurred to Reynolds yet? Maybe if he'd had the balls to point that out last year, instead of cowering behind the "Kerry-is-worse" meme for months on end, and hyping the Swift-Boat attacks, we'd have had more pressure to change course. For the record, it is not unpatriotic to call this president on the mistakes he has made - the grotesque recklessness of invading a country with no serious plan for the post-invasion, the wrecking of the United States' reputation for humane treatment of prisoners, the debunked intelligence on which he relied (oh, sorry, we're not supposed to criticize the guy who assured us that there were stockpiles of WMDs as a fact, because others were wrong as well). Reynolds simply won't criticize the president for the mistakes for which this president is responsible. Worse, he's arguing that anyone who points out that, yes, Bush is horrible as a commander-in-chief is somehow unhelpful or unpatriotic. One day, denial and distraction from reality will finally collapse at Instapundit. And it won't be pretty. (UPDATE: David Adesnik has some helpful comments on other aspects of this here and here.)

- 8:50:00 PM
 
THE GRAHAM-LEVIN COMPROMISE: Marty Lederman provides analysis here and here on the habeas corpus compromise.

- 12:21:00 PM
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY: A dissent from my opposition to torture:
I understand and sympathise with the dilemmas you posed in your column on war and freedom. However, except for the point about forbidding criticism of Islam or even telling the truth about Islam (which is the point of the bill to protect religion - no one seriously expects any other religion to be so protected), your arguments while pointing to a real problem are illogical and way off base.
Like most people today you judge western society by how well monsters and evil people are treated, especially if they fall into a couple of protected categories. This is false - it is how well ordinary people - especially the vulnerable and the weak - are treated that counts. There is a time for everything, including brute force. Indeed, there is an ancient saying that he who is merciful to the cruel will end by being cruel to the merciful.
You mentioned cruelty to the SS by the British during WWII. The only cruelty was to the world around by permitting such monsters to live. The SS had no human rights - they forfitted them when they perpetrated what they did. Islamofascists are in the same category. Indeed, if you want to understand the sociological origins and nature of Islamofascism look to the rise and background to the German variety.
The behaviour by the Americans you denigrate may well be counterproductive at several levels, and this is reason not to do it. The enemy being fought is undeserving of humane treatment, and the Arabs and Muslims must be made to understand this. Indeed, it is an affront to morality and decency to so treat people with humanity. All war is nasty, and this war is particularly nasty and cannot be made pretty. It is the reluctance of the Americans and the British to use the appropriate level of force that is a cogent reason why Iraq should never have been fought.
It may be complex, but there are times when cruelty is just and mercy is unjust. To figure out when what is appropriate is what makes us human and is our responsibility.
I draw the line at cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of people who are defenseless. And I draw the line at conflating the guilty with the innocent. Right now, we are crossing both lines - and severely damaging our cause because of it.

- 11:50:00 AM
 
GUINNESS FOR GEEZERS: There'll always be an Ireland.

- 11:14:00 AM
 
SCIENCE OR RELIGION? Those who worry that, in the Bush administration, science tends to lose out if religious interests dictate another outcome, will not be reassured by this news. Karl Rove doesn't seem to understand that there's a limit on what non-evangelical Republicans or conservatives will put up with. Making a mockery of FDA deliberations may be one of those things, like the Schiavo case, in which people simply lose patience.

MORE THAN VIRTUALLY NORMAL: Here's a revealing email from a 20-year-old poli sci major at UCSB. If I wanted proof of my argument in "The End of Gay Culture," this is somewhat definitive:
I came out about a year ago while I was still living at home in Valencia (a suburb of Los Angeles in northern LA County). I am your typical guy, I played football in high school; I surf, snowboard, hunt, and fish. When I came out it was a shock to everyone who knew me. The suburb in which I lived was a close knit community centered around the family - like most suburbs I guess. Because of my football skills I was well known around my High School campus and my town. When I decided to come out, about a year after I graduated from high school, I thought it would be a big deal. But to my surprise, it was not. Of course it was gossip and word spread quickly, but it wasn't as bad as I had previously expected. It was shocking because no one had expected it. But in the end no one cared one way or the other. I have tons of straight male friends who treat me the same now as they did when I was in the closet. Actually a group of my ex-teammates and I went to TigerHeat - a Thursday night club in West Hollywood - a few months ago and had a great time! TigerHeat is mostly the younger crowd; there are the typical drag queens and Go-go dancers. I was so relieved and pleased to see that my friends, who are ultra-hetro, were still my friends whether I was gay or straight. It's like I am one of them, one of the guys. My one friend, Eric, asked me who I thought was cute out of our group of friends. I couldn't stop laughing! I had named a few and then he replied, "Hey man what about me? You dont think I'm hot??"

I can remember when I was still in High School laying in bed at night telling myself that there was no way on earth that I could be gay. Not me I would say, I'm not GAY. I don't act gay, I don't dress gay. How can I be gay? I play football and I kiss girls! I'm not gay! But, like every gay man out there, I had to take it in strides; I had to deal with it my own way. And I did just that. The rest was history. I am out to pretty much everyone I know and meet. I am so much better for it. I had made a big deal out of something that was not a big deal.

I am writing you because I am living proof of what you are taking about. I have no idea what the Gay Culture of the 70s and 80s is about. I had no idea that AIDS had such a huge impact on gay life. I am completely ignorant of the pain and tragedy endured by the older generation. I respect what they did. I live my life the way I want. I am who I am. I have the freedom to be 'out' and not have to worry or hide who I really am. I guess I take it for granted. I guess I am guilty of that. I HATE the stereotypes and the labels put on gay people. I hate the idea of West Hollywood and the Rainbow. I am normal. I do not like the idea that I have to identify myself as gay. Homosexuality is still a touchy subject with some people, but it is definitely not taboo. Most of the time I don't even think about my sexuality, it's just not an issue anymore. When I really think about it, to me it's odd that I don't even know what the gay generation before mine accomplished. I have absolutely no comprehension of what the ones before me and my fellow boys put up with. The battle they fought, and won, for me. I can't even imagine living back in the 70s, if I did live back then - I say that as if it were hundreds of years ago - I'd probably still be in the closet. How long ago are we talking about here? Two to Three decades, that's it.

I am gay. I am different, but I am not weird. I am not inferior. I am normal, I am one of the guys.
And making history. The great challenge for gay people in the next decade or so will be, in many places, taking yes for an answer.

- 11:04:00 AM
 
NON-VIOLENCE AGAINST TERROR: Pakistani Christians face down Islamist terror - peacefully. There are two responses to the barbarism now threatening so many across the world. One is to fight back aggressively with military and police power, as we should. But in the civil sphere, we can also simply defy the terror - worship as we see fit, speak what we believe, and refuse to live in fear. These Pakistanis whose church was burned to the ground are doing what they can, by worshipping in the open air. And showing what real faith is.

- 10:47:00 AM
 
WAR AND FREEDOM: We can craft a better balance than we now have. My latest column is now posted opposite.

LEO STRAUSS AND AMERICA: Few thinkers have been subjected to as many ignorant smears as Leo Strauss. He was, in my view, an exceptionally gifted, funny, shrewd and daring interpreter of some of the most critical texts in the Western canon. I'm proud to have been taught by some of his students, and wish I could attend a conference at the New School later this week. It's open to the public, and looks riveting.

- 10:29:00 AM

Monday, November 14, 2005
 
HABEAS AND THE INNOCENT: The U.S. is currently holding many completely innocent men in indefinite detention. Remember that around 90 percent of Abu Ghraib inmates were later deemed innocent of any crime. Here's an important piece by a lawyer for an innocent detainee that I missed today, but is well worth reading.

- 8:37:00 PM
 
LESS TRUSTED THAN CLINTON: That's the news for president Bush from the latest Gallup poll. Money quote:
A 53% majority say they trust what Bush says less than they trusted previous presidents while they were in office. In a specific comparison with President Clinton, those surveyed by 48% - 36% say they trust Bush less.
People aren't fools. When a president says "We do not torture," and the evidence is overwhelming that we do, and have done, repeatedly, then your credibility suffers. The president has to put this issue behind him - soon. (Hat tip: Mike.)

- 7:57:00 PM
 
KOS AND HIATT: Armando has an unseemly fit about Fred Hiatt. Hiatt's point seems completely legit to me. Money Hiatt quote:
The Democrats could be responsible and fiercely critical, too, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has shown throughout the war. When they pull a stunt such as insisting on a secret Senate session, it could be to debate Bush's policies on torture and detention. They could ask whether everything possible is being done to furnish the Iraqi army with protective armor. They could question whether anyone inside the administration is focusing with the same urgency on prodding Iraqi politicians toward compromise as are America's ambassador and top generals in the field.
Individual Democratic senators have focused on individual questions such as these (for example, Michigan's Carl Levin on torture), but for the caucus and its leader, Harry Reid (Nev.), the key questions are all about history.
I have no problems with investigating the pre-war intelligence process. But we are still at war, and a responsible opposition does more than oppose: it offers an alternative for the future. How do we win? What do we do now? What specific reforms are needed? Better training for Iraqi forces? Better monitoring of the Syrian border? An end to torturing detainees? More Dems need to be making positive pro-active arguments for winning this war. Until they do, they will deserve the label of 'unserious.'

- 2:04:00 PM
 
FISKING JUAN COLE: A classic of the genre.

- 1:26:00 PM
 
BUSH'S CREDIBILITY GAP: One consequence of the WMD intelligence fiasco in Iraq is that no one in the international community gives the U.S. the benefit of the doubt any more on intelligence. We may have come across the mother-lode of computer evidence of Iran's nuke program. But why should anyone believe us now? They keep suspecting it's faked.

- 1:25:00 PM
 
THE ILLUSTRATED MODO: A picture-guide to her prose.

- 1:20:00 PM
 
MADONNA, POP GENIUS: The great virtue of Madonna, apart from her Catholic roots, is her lack of musical pretension. She's a pop artist, not a "rock star." I loathe most rock criticism, as I loathe most of rock and roll, because of its absurd pretension to seriousness. Madonna isn't innocent here, of course. She has made her fair share of dumb-ass pronouncements in her time. But at her best, she is a pure pop performer. Her new album is the best she has ever done, in my opinion. You can't stop enjoying its shameless superficiality, its joyous rhythms, its '80s disco uplift. Yeah, I know this will look like a suck-up to my new hosts, but Time's Josh Tyrangiel gets it exactly right:
Over a pulsing synthesizer, a ticking clock, a rumbling timpani and countless other perfectly calibrated whirs and beeps, Madonna declares, "I don't like cities, but I like New York/Other places make me feel like a dork." This is not the most ridiculous lyric ever uttered in a pop song--that remains "Yummy yummy yummy/I got love in my tummy." Still, it is awfully silly, and before you press on with the album, you will need to ask yourself, Am I a serious person who listens to music for intellectual enlightenment and makes it a point of pride not to dance under any circumstances? Or am I merely a semi-serious person who makes it a point not to be seen dancing under any circumstances? If you're the former, Confessions on a Dance Floor is not for you. If you're the latter, close the blinds.
The DP and I have had the blinds closed for a while now. The groove goes on ...

- 1:05:00 PM
 
NEWSPEAK AT THE WHITE HOUSE: This morning's NYT has an insightful op-ed on how the interrogation techniques now used by the U.S. were actually first developed by the Communist interrogators of the Soviet-controlled world. They were designed not to get actionable intelligence but to destroy a person's soul and enforce ideological conformity. In this "Animal Farm" moment, where the United States has literally adopted the immorality of its erstwhile enemy, it's hard to improve on this email:
The audacity of what the WSJ and the White House are trying to do is staggering. What they are attempting to do is one of the most profound moral outrages that Orwell (and myself) ascribed to the left, which is simply redefining a word and insisting on that redefinition in the political discourse, until that word has lost its original primary function. The academic establishment has gone a long way in changing the word "tolerance" to have overtones of being sympathetic to a thing, whereas it used to have a meaning similar to this: "In the use of torture, many people have a threshold of pain beyond which they cannot tolerate it and will give in to the demands of their captors." I will not be a part of this debate anymore, because anybody with an 8th grade education knows exactly what both "torture" and "tolerate" mean here. The president and his allies are (characteristically) pulling one out of the Orwellian left playbook to redefine the word into irrelevance. In other words, if "torture" means "organ failure" or "death" as the White House has argued (and let's open our eyes and notice that organ failure is a corrolary to death without immediate, radical medical treatment, e.g. a liver transplant or permanent dialysis), then the above statement becomes nearly nonsense, because dead people are by definition unable to give in to the demands of their captors. A good way to settle a dispute among rational parties is to find an impartial, mutually respected source to arbitrate. I often find that people go around spilling a lot of words in a discussion without resolution in cases where consulting the definitions of words provides so much clarity that people are rendered without argument. From the "Shorter Oxford English Dictionary," torture:
A noun 1. Originally, (a disorder characterized by) contortion, distortion, or twisting. Later, (the infliction of) severe physical or mental suffering; anguish, agony, torment. b transf. A cause of severe pain or anguish. 2. The infliction of severe bodily pain as a punishment or as a means of interrogation or persuasion; a form or instance of this. b transf. An instrument or means of torture. B verb trans. 1. Subject to torture as a punishment or as a means of interrogation or persuasion. 2. Inflict severe mental or physical suffering on; cause anguish in; torment. Also, puzzle or perplex greatly. 3. figuratively, to force violently out of the original state or form; twist, distort; pervert. Also followed by /into/. 4. extract by torture.
Torture is defined purely in terms of inflicted suffering. These people who want to argue the point in the face of the definition are not engaging in a rational discussion, and should be treated as such. I will point out that the one sense of torture here that is not referring to concrete torture describes their tactics. They are, in fact, attempting verb form number 3 of torture on the word torture. They are trying to twist, distort and pervert the word out of its agreed definition.
Yes, they are. And they are doing so because what they have done and permitted to be done is so outrageous to civilized norms that they have no option but to destroy the very language that we use. We do not have to be a party to this. We have to expose it for what it is.

- 12:35:00 PM
 
THE GRAHAM AMENDMENT: The strongest arguments against can be found here.

ALITO AND ABORTION: Professor Bainbridge claims vindication over Harriet Miers.

- 12:12:00 PM
 
THE DISH RE-LOADED: I'm glad to say that in the near future, this blog will have a new home. We're moving to Time.com's home-page and will be hosted by their server. My invaluable business partner, Robert, who has managed all the technical and financial aspects of running a blog for over five years will be able to focus on other things; and I will continue to be able to concentrate on the writing. The blog has gotten far bigger than I originally believed possible - and much bigger than I want to handle on my own. Time.com, with all sorts of internet links, technical support and a huge potential audience, will, I hope, make this blog more accessible to more people, bring more advertizing and marketing to the site, and take the blog to a new level of exposure. We have plans to add new features to make the site more interactive and more easily read and searched. As for my new home, I've been a contributor to Time for a while and think the world of their editors. As for the deal, I can simply assure you that I have retained exactly the same editorial control as I have had since the beginning. This is a blog. I won't be running posts before any editors before they appear. I will continue to write simply what I believe or think, however misguided I may be. I will continue to correct any errors in the full light of day and change my mind if new events demand it or new facts compel it. I will try and air counter-arguments as often as possible. In other words: the essence of the blog won't change. You will still like it for the same reasons or hate it for the same reasons; or, as many of you keep telling me, both.

THE DISH AND THE MSM: As for you, you don't have to change a thing either. If you've bookmarked this page, it will automatically redirect into the new page after a certain date. (Because of technical issues yet to be worked out, I don't know the precise date yet, but I'll keep you posted). If you haven't bookmarked it, and want to make sure you'll transition smoothly, just bookmark it now. This kind of deal has happened before, of course - when Mickey Kaus's blog, kausfiles, went to Slate. He didn't change; I won't either. The only difference is that the blogosphere is a lot bigger now; and the distinction between the mainstream media and the blogosphere is diminishing a little. I won't be a Time staffer; I will retain ownership of my URL - www.andrewsullivan.com. This is a lease, not a sale. It's possible that at some point in the future, the blog could move again (although I certainly hope to stay at Time indefinitely). Others will perhaps be better able to describe what this kind of deal means, if anything. I like to think of it as a moment when the blogosphere and the MSM made touchdown. We're distinct but more connected. Maybe others will follow; others still may stay where they are. Good for them. May a thousand bloggy flowers bloom. But this one will now get a real gardener to nurture it.

- 12:13:00 AM

Sunday, November 13, 2005
 
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND POL POT: What do they have in common? They both believed that "water-boarding" wasn't "anything close to torture." More on the Khmer Rouge's use of the "psychological interrogation technique" of waterboarding here. Here's a picture of the Khmer Rouge doing something now authorized and endorsed by Dick Cheney. Imagine someone wearing the uniform of the United States doing this. And remember who authorized it.

- 5:18:00 PM
 
SLATE ON TORTURE: They have a very useful primer. My own review-essay of government documents and reports is also available here.

- 1:00:00 PM
 
THE TORTURE VICTIMS: How credible are their stories? Jake Tapper investigates.

- 12:50:00 PM
 
TORTURE AND WATER: One of the experts on torture, especially that practised in Iran, professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, emails an exhaustive account of the various techniques involved, including their gruesome nuances:
This specific water torture, often called the "water cure," admits of several variants:

(a) pumping: filling a stomach with water causes the organs to distend, a sensation compared often with having your organs set on fire from the inside. This was the Tormenta de Toca favored by the Inquisition and featured on your website photo. The French in Algeria called in the tube or tuyau after the hose they forced into the mouth to fill the organs.

(b) choking - as in sticking a head in a barrel. It is a form of near asphyxiation but it also produces the same burning sensation through all the water a prisoner involuntarily ingests. This is the example illustrated in the Battle of Algiers movie, a technique called the sauccisson or the submarine in Latin America. Prisoners describe their chests swelling to the size of barrels at which point a guard would stomp on the stomach forcing the water to move in the opposite direction.

(c) choking - as in attaching a person to a board and dipping the board into water. This was my understanding of what waterboarding was from the initial reports. The use of a board was stylistically most closely associated with the work of a Nazi political interrogator by the name of Ludwig Ramdor who worked at Ravensbruck camp. Ramdor was tried before the British Military Court Martial at Hamburg (May 1946 to March 1947) on charges for subjecting women to this torture, subjecting another woman to drugs for interrogation, and subjecting a third to starvation and high pressure showers. He was found guilty and executed by the Allies in 1947.

(d) choking - as in forcing someone to lie down, tying them down, then putting a cloth over the mouth, and then choking the prisoner by soaking the cloth. This also forces ingestion of water. It was invented by the Dutch in the East Indies in the 16th century, as a form of torture for English traders. More recently it was common in the American south, especially in police stations, in the 1920s, as documented in the famous Wickersham Report of the American Bar Association (The Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 1931), compiling instances of police torture throughout the United States.

Perhaps the main thing to remember here is that all these techniques leave few marks; they're clean tortures and so people who are unfamiliar with them are in genuine doubt as to whether there is much pain. In the absence of a bloody wound, who is to say how much pain there was?
It seems the method that the U.S. has authorized is closest to c), the Nazi one, or d), the one developed by the Dutch and deployed in the American South. Remember that this is authorized for use in the secret black sites, exposed by Dana Priest. It is this CIA-directed torture that Dick Cheney is so adamant on retaining and codifying into law.

- 12:30:00 PM
 
WAR AND FREEDOM: We should be able to fight one without surrendering the other. My take in the Sunday Times of London.

THE WSJ ON WATERBOARDING: They have, of course, changed their tune on the matter. Brendan Nyhan elaborates.

- 12:21:00 PM
 
BOWDEN ON TORTURE: He's right, of course. Except in one respect. What has happened under Bush is not the predictable, occasional mistreatment of detainees that may well occur in every war. What has happened is that, for the first time, the commander-in-chief, instead of creating clear boundaries against abuse and mistreatment and insisting on complete compliance, gave the military confusing instructions, signed memos that would sanction abuse and outright torture, and then acted as if the metastasized pattern of abuse was somehow a function of a few "bad apples" at the bottom of the chain of command. You cannot understand Abu Ghraib without reading the Yoo memo that justified it or the policies at Gitmo that were transferred to Abu Ghraib by Genera Miller. It would comfort some to believe that the massive evidence of abuse we now have was and is merely a function of the kind of abuse inevitable in any conflict. No reasonable assessment of the evidence, however, could come to that conclusion. This president re-made the rules that made torture not just an emergency measure or an occasional failure - but a policy. Where torture was once tolerated, at worst, in some of our allies in the past, it has now come to be endorsed by the commander-in-chief of the United States as a policy inflicted by men and women in the uniform of the U.S.

- 12:05:00 PM

Saturday, November 12, 2005
 
WATERBOARDING: An emailer thinks I am under-estimating the horrors of the technique backed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Wall Street Journal:
If anything, the now standard description of water-boarding understates the cruelty of the method. Those who were subjected to this method by South American security forces report that "they had been held under water until they had in fact begun to drown and lost consciousness, only to be revived by their torturers and submerged again. It is one of their worst memories" (Jennifer Harbury, 'Truth, Torture, and the American Way," pp. 15-16). As you note, the French used it in Algeria (there is a vivid depiction in the movie "The Battle of Algiers"). The United States used it heavily in the Philippines a hundred years ago; they called it "the water cure." The person who probably knows the most about this is Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College and author of a new history of torture, soon to be published by Princeton University Press.
Marty Lederman discusses the depraved, Orwellian editorial at the Wall Street Journal here. We do, in fact, have a documented case of the tactic. I discussed it earlier this year in reviewing the Schmidt Report. That Pentagon report confirmed that at Gitmo, one 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."
The latter is a polite word for "water-boarding." Later in the report, we are informed that this technique was deployed "regularly" as a "control measure." All this was "legally permissible under the existing guidance." Medical doctors were on hand to ensure that the victim didn't die. Water-boarding, in other words, is a specific technique directly authorized by Rumsfeld, described in the Schmidt Report, under the John Yoo rules, as legally permissible even for POWs under the Geneva Conventions. The Schmidt Report described this treatment as "humane." It is very important to focus on the specifics of what this president has authorized. When he says "We do not torture," he means that this technique is not "torture". A technique used by South American dictators is fine by Bush. This from a president who had the chutzpah to respond to Abu Ghraib by saying that the abuses did not reflect America's values. He was right. They reflect his administration's.

- 9:18:00 PM
 
AN EMAIL FROM IRAQ: The father of a marine stationed in Iraq wrote me an email about his son's impressions. It's complicated and credible. But I found this part the most interesting:
The Iraqis are a mixed bag. Some fight well, others aren't worth a shit. Most do okay with American support. Finding leaders is hard, but they are getting better. It is widely viewed that Zarqawis use of suicide bombers, en masse, against the civilian population was a serious tactical mistake. Many Iraqis were galvanized and the caliber of recruits in the Army and the police forces went up, along with their motivation. It also led to an exponential increase in good intel because the Iraqis are sick of the insurgent attacks against civilians. The Kurds are solidly pro-American and fearless fighters.

According to [my son,] Jordan, morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. They are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see shit like Are we losing in Iraq on TV and the print media. For the most part, they are satisfied with their equipment, food and leadership. Bottom line though, and they all say this, there are not enough guys there to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren't enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Iran and Syria. The Iranians and the Syrians just cant stand the thought of Iraq being an American ally (with, of course, permanent US bases there).
I've brought up sealing the border directly with "senior administration officials." They all say it cannot be done. I say: it can. We have the troops and technology to stop the insurgent influx from Syria. Why are we not stopping it? More troops on the border wouldn't alienate the Iraqi population. It would be a sign we are finally protecting them. So why not more troops and equipment for that vital mission?

- 2:10:00 PM
 
36 PERCENT: POTUS keeps sliding down. Worse: there's a 68 percent "wrong track" number during a period of economic growth. 29 percent believe that Cheney is honest and ethical.

- 2:02:00 PM
 
THE 'WATERBOARDING' TEST: Here's an astonishing sentence from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, a group whose support for cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of military detainees is persistent, unalloyed and enthusiastic. Notice this language:
As for "torture," it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to "torture." The "stress positions" that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized "waterboarding," which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.
Notice that the gold-standard for American conduct is now set by Saddam Hussein! And "water-boarding" is merely a "psychological technique" that "induces a feeling of suffocation." No physical coercion at all - unless you mean being tied to a plank and near-drowned. Here's Wikipedia's definition of the tactic as currently used:
The most-current practice of waterboarding involves tieing the victim to a board with their head lower than their feet so that they are unable to move. A piece of cloth is held tightly over their face, and water is poured onto the cloth. Breathing is extremely difficult and the victim will be in imminent fear of death by asphyxiation; however, it is relatively difficult to aspirate a large amount of water since the lungs are higher than the mouth, and the victim is unlikely to actually expire if this is done by skilled torturers. This is the technique demonstrated on U.S. military personnel, by U.S. military personnel, when they are being taught to resist enemy interrogations in the event of capture (see SERE). It is this technique the U.S. military and CIA interrogators are suspected of using.
The WSJ doesn't think this is torture. The technique was widely used in Algeria by the French and dates back to interrogation techniques developed in the sixteenth century religious wars. Here's an image:



Remember: the Wall Street Journal disagrees with the notion that this is "anything close to torture." (In this, their sixteenth century forefathers disagreed. They called this technique torture, as the engraving shows.) The Journal editors want water-boarding to be a legal interrogation technique. Well, at least we now know exactly what they believe - about torture and about America.

- 1:31:00 PM
 
BUSH DIDN'T LIE: I'm sympathetic to the president's case that he was not the only one who supported war against Saddam because of the threat of WMDs. The consensus at the time - and it was shared by opponents and supporters of the war - was so overwhelming that Saddam's WMDs were a premise of everyone's case, pro and con. Maybe Scott Ritter and Baghdad Bob get a pass on this. But not many others. Nevertheless, all the rest of us were wrong. Were we lied to? I see no reason yet to believe we were - in the strong sense that deliberate untruths were consciously uttered. Was the post-9/11 atmosphere sufficient to blind many people to the possibility that they might be wrong about this premise? Certainly, that's the case for me. I wasn't skeptical enough. I followed the groupthink. I shouldn't have. It's also true, I think, that in the effort to ensure that the CIA was doing its job, some around the veep's office and elsewhere may have seized on materials of dubious, if not discredited, validity. In retrospect, they were not skeptical enough either - and they have a much higher responsibility in this respect than bloggers or even Democrats who do not have full access to the full intelligence.

HIS NO-WIN BOTTOM LINE: But what I'm describing here is a failing, not a sin. It may deserve criticism on the grounds of incompetence, but not, I think, moral condemnation on the grounds of duplicity. The "Bush Lied!" screams are as cheap as they are very hard to substantiate. Moreover, it's easy to get lulled into the fact after four years of no further atrocities on the mainland that we do not face grave dangers. After 9/11, I give government officials a pass on over-estimating threats to the country. Moreover, I don't doubt the sincerity of Bush and Cheney in making their case for war on the WMD grounds (although, again, it's baloney to say that that was the only ground they based their argument on). I'm open to debate on the Niger stuff and the aluminum tubes, but these are not central to the broad WMD case. I'm also open to the argument that the administration could have been more careful in their rhetoric. Talk of mushroom clouds was not exactly conducive to calm debate. But my bottom line is: These guys made a hard call in perilous times for good reasons. It turns out they were also wrong in one critical respect. That's the judgment we have to grapple with - and it's not very emotionally satisfying for either side. Above all, it's not good for the president. In this debate, Bush has to choose between being called a liar or someone who made a profound, if forgivable, misjudgment in the gravest decision a president ever has to make. That's no-win. "Hey, guys, I'm not a liar. I just got the intelligence completely wrong, and waged a pre-emptive war partly on the basis of that mistake. Sorry." Not exactly a strong position. Oddly enough, I think Bush would have been more easily forgiven by the public if he'd been less defensive about it at the moment the WMD argument collapsed after the invasion. But he refused to acknowledge the obvious, dismissed the embarrassment, tried to change the subject and then just went silent. Once again, he mistook brittleness for strength. These many small decisions not to trust the American people with the full, embarrassing truths about the war has, in the end, undermined trust in the president and therefore support for the war. For that lack of candor, the president is paying dearly. So is the war in Iraq.

- 12:14:00 PM

Friday, November 11, 2005
 
MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE (for unhinged right-wing hyperbole): "Today, when most of the country thinks of who controls Massachusetts, I think the modern-day KKK comes to mind, the Kennedy-Kerry Klan," - Federalist Society member Gerald Walpin, introducing Mitt Romney in a speech yesterday.

- 5:51:00 PM
 
THE ECONOMIST ON TORTURE: It's a great editorial.

- 5:45:00 PM
 
THE HEROISM OF MARINES: Here's a link to a podcast of a former marine's harrowing account of what he witnessed in Fallujah. On this Veterans' Day, an account of the courage that is defending us is worth listening to. And being grateful for.

- 4:57:00 PM
 
GOOD NEWS ON METH: The latest study from San Francisco indicates that 10 percent of gay and bisexual men have used crystal meth in the last year. A year ago, that number was 18 percent. The sample size is 4,000. So the decline seems real. It's a tribute to the common sense of most gay men. But somehow the news that they're controlling this drug epidemic will never get the same exposure as claims that they're hooked for good.

- 4:50:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "...If al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead," - Bill O'Reilly, unplugged. I think we should be able to discuss divisive issues without urging al Qaeda to target anywhere in America, don't you?

- 4:29:00 PM
 
AL QAEDA KILLS A FRIEND: Andrew Breitbart remembers the latest victim of these barbarians.

- 3:45:00 PM
 
ROSEN ON ALITO: A must-read, as always. Money quote:
Here, then, is the dilemma posed by Judge Alito: His federalism opinions suggest that he might be a conservative activist like Thomas with an agenda to restrict congressional power; many of his other opinions suggest that he might be a cautious incrementalist, as Roberts is likely to be, nudging the law in a more conservative direction rather than rewriting it from the ground up. Given the conflicting evidence, how can senators decide what kind of justice Alito would be? The questions to ask Alito are obvious enough. They're many of the same ones that have been asked in Supreme Court confirmation hearings for nearly two decades, and they involve the nominee's attitudes toward congressional power, previous judicial precedents, and the original understanding of the Constitution.

The contrast in the answers given by Thomas and Roberts suggest clues for senators to look for as they try to decode Alito's responses. If Alito is evasive, as Thomas was, about a) how often the Court should strike down federal laws; b) how much weight it should give precedents that have been repeatedly reaffirmed; or c) how rigidly it should follow the original understanding of the Constitution, run for the hills. If he answers those questions precisely and candidly, as Roberts did, breathe a sigh of relief.
I hear that Alito already has 65 votes wrapped up.

LINCOLN AND LIBERTY: An emailer dissents from my respect for Lincoln's concerns for liberty even as he faced a uniquely grave crisis in American history:
You may be underestimating the scale of arbitrary arrests (arrests with no right of release, either by habeas or otherwise) during the Civil War period. Mark Neely, an admirer of Lincoln and a respected scholar, cites estimates that there were over 14,000 arbitrary arrests from the beginning of the war until its conclusion -- and this amounts to the staggering total of 1 in every 1,500 Americans. And Lincoln was not at all apologetic about this policy. As Neely says:
"He did not apologize. In his public letter of June 12, 1863, to Erastus Corning and others, Lincoln said with characteristic toughness: "... the time [is] not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many." He argued that the Confederate States, when they seceded, had been counting on being able to keep "on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, supplyers, and aiders and abettors of their cause" under "cover of 'Liberty of speech' 'Liberty of the press' and 'Habeas corpus.'" Nicolay and Hay, who were not given to overstatement, noted that "few of the President's state papers ... produced a stronger impression upon the public mind than this." Little wonder. Elsewhere in the letter, the president used even stronger language, saying that he could never "appreciate the danger ... that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the rebellion, lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence, trail by jury, and Habeas Corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future ... any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life."
The questions before us, however, are: does the current situation approximate the crisis of the Civil War; and how "temporary" is our new war? One reason to be particularly concerned is that this war has been defined without any termination point or any enemy who could surrender and end our temporary illness. We are applying emergency powers to the executive indefinitely. Our only recourse is to trust the president. After the past three years? You've got to be kidding.

- 3:38:00 PM
 
McCAIN ON THE WAR: Our shadow president makes the case - and so much better than the real one. And with so much more credibility.

- 3:14:00 PM
 
RAMESH RESPONDS: He thinks that the communion question for judges and Justices should be left to the confessional and individual reconciliation with a priest, if the judge sincerely believes that the constitution protects abortion rights with which he personally disagrees. I couldn't agree more. But I fear Benedict has other ideas.

- 3:10:00 PM
 
THE POPE AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN: Here's an intelligent defense of Benedict XVI. I hope he's right, and I'm wrong.

JONAH'S POINT II: Two readers respond:
Goldberg's argument is a non-starter. Our torture policy is not just immoral - it's been implemented on people who are far, far from "mass murderers." Just look at Abu Ghraib ... or Ashcroft's pathetic record on, you know, actually prosecuting real terrorists. Our torture policy is the worst of all worlds--it inflicts torture on innocent people thus creating far more many terrorists than would have existed if we had not tortured anyone at all.
I agree. We have many instances of sanctioned abuse (and even murder) of completely innocent people. The extreme case - the ticking bomb scenario - is, to my mind, another red herring. If such a situation were to emerge, the president's emergency executive powers could allow him to violate the law in an exceptional circumstance. Those who made such a call might face criminal sanction of even resignation. But they wouldn't be stopped from doing the right thing in such an extreme case. The current system, where torture and abuse are lawfully permitted by the military and the CIA, has been a disaster on every level. Then there's the profound moral point that Jonah's remarkable relativism obscures. A reader explains:
[Goldberg's] logic leaves me with a feeling of despair. Has he intentionally created a place where there is no morality other than within a particular context, a context that is always changing? Is this what the neo-conservatives (in the broad sense) have left us with? 'The difference was that the people we put in prisons were criminals. The people they put in the Gulag were men of conscience like Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky.'
So torture is okay dependent on the moral standing of the tortured? And who decides such standing? And after what due process?

- 3:04:00 PM
 
JONAH'S POINT I: Here's a specific point of disagreement. Jonah writes:
One can make the argument that we should not torture mass murderers on moral or pragmatic grounds without elevating the moral status of mass murderers.
My argument would be that you cannot raise or lower the moral status of mass murderers with respect to torture. The only salient moral status with respect to torture is that the mass murderers are human beings. And what this hideous policy has necessarily done is to create a new class of prisoners that are regarded as sub-human, i.e., beneath the most basic of Geneva protections for even illegal combatants. My second argument would be that this is not about the moral status of terrorists or mass murderers. It's about us, the moral status of the West, and places where as a civilization, we simply will not go as a matter of policy. I guess others will differ and I am glad at last that they are now prepared to say so. But for me, this is a clear line. And we cannot cross it, by enshrining the right to torture into law.

- 11:33:00 AM
 
THE CHURCH AND EVOLUTION: Like many other Catholics, I was relieved last week when Cardinal Poupard insisted that there was no fundamental conflict between Catholicism and evolution: "Fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim." This has long been the Church's position, and its re-statement came at a moment when the loopy right is trying to undermine science education in the United States. The London Times' Rees-Mogg even wrote:
Cardinal Poupard’s statement clarified the acceptance of Darwinism and rightly asserted that religious belief is compatible with the theory of evolution. He also gave a further indication that the mindset of Benedict XVI may be a good deal more modern than had been expected. One should have foreseen that with a German pope. The German Church has a strong tradition of theological inquiry in which Benedict XVI has been educated.
Alas, not so fast. Almost immediately, the Pope came out with a statement that clearly signals the hierarchy's flirtation with intelligent design. Rees-Mogg argues that Benedict is an intellectual. Maybe. But he is a politician first.

- 11:20:00 AM
 
LINCOLN: The scoffing from the back row from my quoting Lincoln deserves, I guess, a response. Yes, I am, of course, well aware that he briefly suspended Habeas Corpus. It was re-reading about those years and decisions in Doris Kearns Goodwin's book that brought me upon that quote. Lincoln's decision is still debatable, but it was made at a time of national meltdown. My point here is that even Lincoln, in the most perilous political situation imaginable, still recognized the vital importance of defending the liberties that the Constitution is fundamentally constructed to protect. I have never heard president Bush extol the importance of civil liberties for Americans, and the need to guard against the criminal arm of government. It would be good to know that he even appreciates the trade-off. Maybe I've missed his defense of civil liberties for Americans. If someone finds a quote from him in that respect that isn't pro forma boilerplate, I'll gladly post it.

- 11:07:00 AM
 
HABEAS CORPUS GUTTED? The just-passed Graham Amendment may be voided in its worst manifestations by an upcoming vote on an extra amendment, offered by Senator Bingaman next week. There may be complicated parliamentary maneuvring going on. What am I saying? May be. There is. The reasons to worry about the Graham bill are ably set out by Marty Lederman here, whose expertise vastly exceeds my own. I can see why enemy combatants might be denied the usual habeas corpus protections of citizens, if not minimal protections under Geneva. But the removal of all judicial oversight of their cases - which is what the Graham amendment would mean - leaves the entire question of detainee rights in the hands of the Pentagon. Rummy is asking us to trust him. At this point, why would any sane person do so?

- 10:52:00 AM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: "I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens," - Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a national insurrection. It's on page 523 of Doris Kearns Goodwin's wonderful new book, "Team of Rivals." The italics are in the original.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: "We do not torture," - George W. Bush, earlier this week.

- 1:22:00 AM

Thursday, November 10, 2005
 
RUMMY'S LAST STAND: He's working very, very hard to maintain the policy enabling the torture or abuse of military detainees. His latest gambit is a new DoD directive that claims to address the concerns raised by Senator McCain. Money quote from Scott Horton:
No one who has tracked this issue is misled even for a second as to the major goal of this effort: it is to preserve the CIA's ability to use highly coercive techniques – cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and yes, torture – in their intelligence gathering process. But a careful examination of the new directive shows that it is more an effort to entrench current abusive policies than a recognition of criticisms and resolve to fairly answer them.
A full analysis here.

- 6:02:00 PM
 
FRIST ON TORTURE: He doesn't want to know:
Frist told reporters Thursday that while he believed illegal activity should not take place at detention centers, he believes the leak itself poses a greater threat to national security and is 'not concerned about what goes on' behind the prison walls.
Beyond belief.

- 3:08:00 PM
 
APNEA AND STROKES: The sleeping disorder can double your risk of strokes and death. And the bad news is: we have no solid data that proves that CPAP treatment make a difference in this respect. They sure do help you live a more productive and alert life, though.

- 3:05:00 PM
 
DERBYSHIRE ON TORTURE: I'm glad NRO's curmudgeon just linked to an old piece of his on torture. That it was written in November 2001, at the height of our post-9/11 fears, speaks a great deal about the integrity of the argument. Torture, of course, is not restricted to cliches about finger-nails or electrodes. Derbyshire writes of one of the techniques deployed by Communist China:
Ian Buruma gives some similar pen-portraits in his new book about Chinese dissidents. Chia Thye Poh, for example, was kept in solitary confinement for twenty-six years by the Singapore authorities for having resigned his seat in parliament to protest the policies of Lee Kuan Yew. In their attempts to get him to sign a confession that he was a Communist, which he wasn't, Chia's jailers inflicted on him such peculiarly modern tortures as forcing him to stand naked in a freezing room with the air-conditioning going full blast, and piping loud Muzak into his cell day and night. Chia never cracked. Why not? asked Buruma, at a meeting with Chia. "He was much too polite to say so, but it was clear my question had baffled him. I wished I hadn't asked. 'How could I have signed?' he said, very softly. 'It wasn't true.'"
Those techniques - of freezing or heating detainees into despair or pain or psychological collapse - have now become part of the U.S. government's armory. This must end. We can win this war without destroying the very civilization we are fighting for. We can win without losing our soul. Any other kind of victory is a euphemism for defeat.

- 2:53:00 PM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there." - Pat Robertson, on a school district that decided to teach science in its science curriculum. Before I get emails from conservatives saying that Robertson represents no one in the Republican coalition, let me remind you that he was one of the religious leaders phoned by Karl Rove to discuss Supreme Court nominees. My rule of thumb is that I will trust the good faith of any Republican politician who is prepared to criticize Robertson publicly. Until then, he's their problem.

- 2:38:00 PM
 
TURNING ON ZARQAWI: After another brutal slaying of Muslims, the Jordanian public seems to turn against al Qaeda. The one constant in this war is the evil of our enemies - and their stupidity. With any luck, enough Sunni Arabs in Iraq will look into the abyss that Zarqawi offers them, and turn back as well.

BLAIR'S CASE: It would be wonderful if the debate in the U.S. were between a 90 day detention without charge for terror-suspects and a 28-day limit. But one British reader believes that Blair is right, and that the vote yesterday is pure politics:
The strange situation here was Blair had carried the vast majority of public opinion on this issue. Regular polls, discussions and letters backed the 90 day proposal. Since the July attacks Blair had seen a rise in his standing, a strong, firm stance after the atrocities obviously the cause.
Where I disagree with you, is your assessment of the 28 day compromise as 'sane'. The people who thought Blair was right here had listened to the security services and Met Police Chief Ian Blair. They understood the sheer mountain of work in front of those protecting us. Just off the top of my head, these people are uncovering networks that have computer set-ups with 750 gigabyte memories, and it takes more than a little time for those code crackers to find the keys and such for those sites.
This is the most painstaking, methodical, eye for detail work I can imagine. We can't be half-arsed about this stuff.
Anti terrorist cop Andy Hayman reckons that alone takes weeks. This is why the majority here saw the news that Blair had lost from a jubilant media, but asked themselves just who exactly had won? MPs here ask why voters are apathetic, then just turn their noses up at their constituents. Make no mistake this wasn't a victory for the mother of all Parliaments, merely a lynch mob who have been waiting to see Blair fall.
Its sad when personal vendettas and grandstanding trump a nation's security.
Other British observers I've spoken with said that Blair never made a clear, convincing case for the 90 days. Like Bush and Cheney, he simply insisted that he alone knew what was right and necessary. In a democracy, that's not good enough. With something as fundamental as habeas corpus at stake, the burden of proof must be on the executive.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: "I will quote to you (from memory) a talk with a Latin-American revolutionary who told me about torture in Brazil.
I asked: 'What is wrong with torture?' and he said:
'What do you mean? Do you suggest it is all right? Are you justifying torture?'
And I said: 'On the contrary, I simply ask you if you think that torture is a morally inadmissible monstrosity.'
'Of course,' he replied.
'And so is torture in Cuba?' I asked.
'Well,' he answered, 'this is another thing. Cuba is a small country under the constant threat of American imperialists. They have to use all means of self-defense, however regrettable.’ Then, I said: ‘Now, you cannot have it both ways. If you believe, as I do, that torture is abominable and inadmissible on moral grounds, it is such, by definition, in all circumstances. If however there are circumstances where it can be tolerated, you can condemn no regime for applying torture, since you assume that there is nothing essentially wrong with torture itself. Either you condemn torture in Cuba in exactly the same way you do for Brazil, or you refrain from condemning the Brazilian police for torturing people. In fact, you cannot condemn torture on political grounds, because in most cases it is perfectly efficient and the torturers get what they want. You can condemn it only on moral grounds and then, necessarily, everywhere in the same way, in Batista's Cuba, in Castro's Cuba, in North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.'" - Leszek Kolakowski, the great critic and student of Marxism, from an exchange with leftist E. P. Thompson, in his book, "My Correct Views on Everything."

- 2:27:00 PM
 
MILLER'S CASE: A maligned journalist now has another option in her self-defense. She can post one online. Here are Judy Miller's responses to Keller, Dowd and Calame. (Hat tip: Mediacrity.)

- 11:07:00 AM
 
THE NEXT CONSERVATISM? It's a long essay in the new Weekly Standard, but well worth reading. Authored by Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat (who are friends and former guest-bloggers in this space), the essay is so wide-ranging I'm not going to summarize it. But here's a proposal I like a lot. It's to do with taxes. Reihan-Ross raise the idea of reforming the curent system and would
remove all families earning less than $100,000 from the tax rolls. For those who want to see a daring tax reform that leaves an impression in voters' minds and pocketbooks, this would be an avenue worth exploring.

Recall that the income tax was originally designed as a single-rate tax on a relatively small number of high earners. We still have something like it today, in the form of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which was designed to ensure that the affluent pay at least some income tax. Bush's tax commission has called for the abolition of the AMT, which isn't indexed to inflation and will start biting into middle-class paychecks within the decade. But perhaps the GOP should consider an alternative: Why not reform the AMT and abolish the regular income tax instead?

Michael J. Graetz of Yale Law School, hardly a wild-eyed utopian, has called this the "back to the future" plan. Graetz would raise the AMT exemption to $50,000 for single-earners and $100,000 for joint returns, and impose a single rate of 25 percent on all earnings over those thresholds. To replace the lost revenue, he would also--and this is the controversial part--introduce a consumption tax of 14 percent.
The essay is packed with provocative ideas like these. It grapples with health-care in a way that avoids the pitfalls of socialism but moves us toward a more rational, universal insurance system. It's also pro-family in a manner that makes a lot of sense to me. We need to support those who are rearing the next generation more effectively than we now do (and I'd include, of course, gay parents in this). Anyway, read the piece. You'll find plenty to agree and disagree with, but the debate itself is overdue.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: "As a student of history and a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, I long have been impressed by the example of George Washington, who was a strong believer in fiscal discipline. In his 1796 farewell address, Washington admonished the nation to avoid 'not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.' Americans today would be wise to heed Washington's timeless wisdom." - David Walker, Comptroller General of the U.S., in a piece titled, "Spending Is Out Of Control."

- 10:45:00 AM
 
JUDGES AND COMMUNION: Ramesh elaborates the questions about Catholicism he believes are legitimate in a Senate hearing:
"Would you hesitate to re-affirm Roe and Casey because you would be afraid that your church would deny you communion?" ... "No. If I voted to re-affirm Roe, it would be because I believed that it was the correct legal conclusion — because I concluded that the combined force of constitutional provisions and precedent made it so — and not because of any moral views I hold about abortion policy; and I am confident that my church would understand that. Indeed, if I conclude that Roe is correct as a matter of constitutional interpretation, then I would be morally bound to say so. If I pretended that Roe was wrongly decided, while knowing better, I would be guilty of the sin of lying, and would not be able to present myself for communion.'
Here's the question I'm still wrestling with. If a judge were to say that he supports Roe because he believes that there is a right to privacy in the Constitution and that that right applies to a woman's ownership of her own body, and thereby the right to abort an unborn child, would that trigger the church hierarchy's removal of that judge from the communion rail? And how could that threat not affect a judge's rulings as a matter of fact?

CHURCHES AND THE IRS: A liberal church gets its tax exempt status pulled because of a sermon last October called "If Jesus Debated Senator Kerry and President Bush." I'm with the IRS. Now let's be consistent and start pulling tax exemptions from all churches that conflate their spiritual mission with campaigns for various candidates and parties.

- 10:22:00 AM

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
 
ARIANNA GLOATS: I feel bad even linking. But, well, oh, all right then ...

- 7:03:00 PM
 
IN MONTANA: A police outreach to the gay community in the heartland. The times they are a-changin'.

THANKS, AMERICA: The Kurdish region in Iraq now has ads to convey the hope that liberation means. See them here.

- 6:59:00 PM
 
TOLES ON BUSH: A classic.

- 5:00:00 PM
 
CHRISTIANS FOR THE McCAIN AMENDMENT: Sojourners website sets up a way to contact your representatives and Speaker Hastert directly.

- 4:39:00 PM
 
CONSERVATIVES FOR THE McCAIN AMENDMENT: Greg Djerejian notes a shift in the blogosphere.

- 4:03:00 PM
 
FROM AN IRAQ WAR ALUM: An email examines the objective dehumanization of "the enemy":
I am a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and an increasingly liberal defector from the GOP, and like you I have been confused by the GOP's simultaneous promotion of a 'culture of life' and of torture.
I was in Iraq in 03-04 and was really disheartened when Abu Ghraib broke in the media; I didn’t think the war was justified, ex ante, and the revelations of what was happening at the prison really made me feel like a Nazi. I employed a number of Iraqi laborers, and after the Arab media showed the photographs it was very difficult to look those guys in the eye.
As to balancing the seeming contradiction between torture and life, the only conclusion I can reach is that the pro-torture lobby has taken the rhetorical construction of 'The Terrorists' that was the centerpiece of administration pronouncements from 2001-2003 to its logical extreme – 'They' (that is, 'The Terrorists') are unworthy of life because 'They' don’t respect life. 'They' behead people, while all we do is beat them to death. 'They' hate us for 'what we are,' while we hate them for – well, I guess because of 'what They are.' But because we are a Benign Force, it's different.
In class, I compared the construction of The Terrorists to the construction of Japanese identity during World War II, assigning the John Dower book, "War Without Mercy." The enemy is so alien that he has abandoned any consideration as a human being. Consequently, exterminating him is appropriate.
Or torturing him for that matter. Wars are dangerous things. They corrupt us unless we remain vigilant. And one real worry is that because the president sincerely believes that his motives are good, he can find ways to dismiss or ignore or even condone things that are objectively wrong. This is especially a danger for those who believe their actions are sanctioned by their own God. If their motives are pure, they can do no wrong ...

THE P.C. LEFT AND SCIENCE: Some readers have written in to say that John Derbyshire's description of the editors of ScienceWeek as "intellectual Left-fascists" is overblown. I have to agree in this instance. There is a snooty liberal snobbism in the editorial, but it does not oppose unfettered research into the evolution of the human brain. Money quote:
There is certainly no reason to believe that the human brain has stopped evolving, and certainly brain size is a biological parameter that may indeed be changing, but we don't think this work is of much particular anthropological significance. We would say the work needs to be done (and supported), but we are not at the point yet of making important conclusions from such studies.
There are, however, many on the left who object to any study of human genetic differences as inherently racist or sexist or bigoted. Science can be none of those things. Either the data exist and support conclusions, or they don't. That, I think, is Derbyshire's broader point, even if he's off-base in this particular example.

- 3:56:00 PM
 
A CATHOLIC DEMOCRAT: Tim Kaine seems to be leading the way:
Kaine defended himself against Kilgore's attack on the subject by saying that it is his beliefs as a deeply religious Catholic that lead him to oppose the death penalty and abortion. But he also said he would follow the law on capital punishment and advocate laws that protect the right to abortion.
"The elite never really got that argument," said David Eichenbaum, one of Kaine's media advisers, referring to columnists and others who wondered how Kaine could be, in his words, "morally" opposed and yet pledge not to try to change the law. "But people who heard him got it."
And Benedict XVI wants him denied communion.

- 1:51:00 PM
 
THE ELECTIONS: I'm leery of seeing a national trend, but the GOP certainly has little to celebrate today. The Schwarzenegger losses are the most dispiriting to me. Texas's enshrinement of anti-gay prejudice in its own constitution is depressing but hardly surprising (they're still proudly naming their towns "white"). The vote in Maine, moreover, confirms the federalist approach to gay issues. Let tolerant states compete with intolerant ones - and lead the way toward a more inclusive America. One thing I would say to my Democratic friends: if you think merely opposing Bush will win you back the Congress next year, dream on. Or, better still, read on. You need constructive ideas, not more Kossian rants.

- 1:40:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I have the tall, bony English physique that Heinrich Himmler admired so much," - John Derbyshire, NRO, today.

- 1:27:00 PM
 
BLAIR REBUFFED: Terror suspects in Britain can now be detained without charge for 28 days, not the 90 days as proposed by Blair (and the 14 days required previously). The country that invented habeas corpus keeps a sane balance between security and freedom. I wish it were true in the U.S. Politically, the Commons vote is a stinging rebuff for Blair. I give him twelve more months in power at this rate, before his own party cashiers him.

- 12:37:00 PM
 
CONSERVATISM AND SCIENCE: I agree with John Derbyshire that science is being attacked by an unholy alliance between the religious right and the p.c. left. I think he under-estimates the danger from the right, but his broader point is correct. The deeper reality is that the religious right and p.c. left are merely two sides of the same coin: both have contempt for truly liberal education. They both put their own notions of virtue above the principle of unfettered thinking and research. Both require resisting, just as the fundamentalist distortions of Islam and Christianity deserve resisting.

- 12:31:00 PM
 
THE IRAQI ARMY: Jim Fallows has a deservedly great rep right now as someone who saw, before a lot of other people (including me), that the post-invasion situation in Iraq would be far harder than deposing Saddam. He has a new report out on the critical task in Iraq: training the new army. Alas, it's firewalled away at the Atlantic, but the magazine is worth buying for the piece alone. Fallows describes the now-unbelievable insouciance of the Bush administration to the role of the Saddamite army in keeping some semblance of order in post-invasion Iraq, and its reluctance to throw enough resources into the military side of nation-building. By sending too few troops to keep order in 2003, and disbanding the entire previous army shortly thereafter, the Bush administration threw gasoline on simmering flames and created the chaos we are now trying to beat back. Critical time was wasted before this mistake was both recognized and anything like enough attention was paid to rectifying it. In 2003, this is what Fallows reports:
Throughout the occupation, but most of all in these early months, training suffered from a "B Team" problem. Before the fighting there was a huge glamour gap in the Pentagon between people working on so-called Phase III — the "kinetic" stage, the currently fashionable term for what used to be called "combat" — and those consigned to thinking about Phase IV, postwar reconstruction. The gap persisted after Baghdad fell. Nearly every military official I spoke with said that formal and informal incentives within the military made training Iraqi forces seem like second-tier work.
The truth is we embarked on a war that required significant nation-building and we had a defense secretary who didn't believe in it and a president who couldn't or wouldn't over-rule his defense secretary. In 2004, things did not improve:
All indications from the home front were that training Iraqis had become a boring issue. Opponents of the war rarely talked about it. Supporters reeled off encouraging but hollow statistics as part of a checklist of successes the press failed to report. President Bush placed no emphasis on it in his speeches. Donald Rumsfeld, according to those around him, was bored by Iraq in general and this tedious process in particular, neither of which could match the challenge of transforming America's military establishment.
Too bored to win.

THE FRUITS OF CHAOS: None of this should detract from the heroic work of many soldiers on the ground who performed astonishingly in trying to train and retrain neophyte Iraqi troops. (Thanks, General Petraeus - but why has been brought home??) That valuable work is still going on. It is the most critical work now underway. It's hard. The disorder fostered by Rumsfeld made it much harder, because in chaotic situations, the old allegiances - tribe, family, clan, sect - get stronger. Fallows lets soldiers speak to this:
Half a dozen times in my interviews I heard variants on this Arab saying: "Me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against my village; me and my village against a stranger." "The thing that holds a military unit together is trust," T. X. Hammes says. "That's a society not based on trust." A young Marine officer wrote in an e-mail, "Due to the fact that Saddam murdered, tortured, raped, etc. at will, there is a limited pool of 18-35-year-old males for service that are physically or mentally qualified for service. Those that are fit for service, for the most part, have a DEEP hatred for those not of the same ethnic or religious affiliation."
This was always going to be a long, difficult venture. The incompetence of Rumsfeld has made it that much harder.

STILL HOPE: It seems to me, and it does to Fallows, that the new prescription - "We will stand down as the Iraqis stand up" - depends on a new and massive focus not just on the political process (thanks, Zalmay!), but on training the new army. That will take at least a decade and it's time the president told the American people that. It also requires various reforms. Fallows lays out some suggestions:
If the United States is serious about getting out of Iraq, it will need to re-consider its defense spending and operations rather than leaving them to a combination of inertia, Rumsfeld-led plans for "transformation," and emergency stopgaps. It will need to spend money for interpreters. It will need to create large new training facilities for American troops, as happened within a few months of Pearl Harbor, and enroll talented people as trainees. It will need to make majors and colonels sit through language classes. It will need to broaden the Special Forces ethic to much more of the military, and make clear that longer tours will be the norm in Iraq. It will need to commit air, logistics, medical, and intelligence services to Iraq — and understand that this is a commitment for years, not a temporary measure. It will need to decide that there are weapons systems it does not require and commitments it cannot afford if it is to support the ones that are crucial. And it will need to make these decisions in a matter of months, not years — before it is too late.
For all that, it seems to me we need a new SecDef. Urgently.

- 11:27:00 AM
 
EXEMPTING THE CIA: A former general counsel for the agency argues against Dick Cheney's case for legally codifying torture as a lawful activity for the CIA. Meanwhile, new evidence emerges that individuals within the CIA have warned that illegality was occurring. Here's one question I hope the press asks the president some time soon: does he believe that "waterboarding" constitutes torture and has he ever authorized it himself? Since we know that the CIA has been granted permission to water-board detainees, this doesn't violate anything classified. And since no specific case is mentioned, it doesn't tell us anything but general policy. So why not ask the question? An important element of this debate has been euphemism. The terms "coercive interrogation" or "aggressive interrogation" or even "abuse" can obscure as much as they reveal. These techniques need to be described as Orwell would have demanded. What is actually done to another human being? Exactly? And who specifically authorized which techniques? There's a reason that politicians use Orwellian formulations as Bush does and Clinton did: to obscure reality. Except Clinton used them to cover up sexual embarrassment and perjury. Bush has used them to cover up rape, murder, near-drowning and torture of defenseless detainees.

- 10:50:00 AM

Tuesday, November 08, 2005
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY: From Christopher Meyer's new book, a story about former British prime minister, John Major, on September 11, 2001:
John Major was due to head off to a meeting of the Carlyle Group, one of the most powerful private equity firms in the US, whose European arm he chaired.
Catherine urged him not to go downtown [in Washington], but he did. He returned at lunch to say there had been a brief meeting of the Carlyle Group people, who had then gone their separate ways. "I met Mr Bin Laden this morning," he reported. This was, it transpired, one of Osama's many siblings, a major Carlyle investor.
Business must go on, I guess.

- 5:46:00 PM
 
LIBBY AND LEWINSKY: Polling contrasts and compares the public's reaction to two perjury cases. Memo to the GOP: stop digging.

A REPUBLICAN AGAINST TORTURE: There's growing sentiment in the House to follow the Senate and pass a version of the McCain Amendment. Chris Smith is among those in the forefront. Smith, of course, is also pro-life. Good for him. How anyone purporting to support a culture of life and human dignity could back a policy that has resulted in over a hundred deaths in U.S. detention is beyond me.

- 5:38:00 PM
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY II: "I'll say this much: the last time I read about someone being hung by their hands, with their hands tied behind their back, it was the Nazis who were doing it. Of course, that was before reading this. And people like Peggy Noonan wonder why it seems like everything's going to hell in a hand-basket. It's because we're really acting like fascists."

- 5:26:00 PM
 
BUSH'S HUMOR: Mike Crowley ponders how far away the president really is from Will Ferrell's parody.

- 3:17:00 PM
 
THOSE SPURS SHIRTS: Not too surprising on French Muslim youths, according to this reader:
Your reference to the Spurs shirts caught my eye ... Don't know if you know but the Spurs have a very culturally diverse team (as much of the NBA is becoming these days - in Europe they teach 'em from an early age the right way to play) and one of their young stars is Tony Parker who was born in Belgium and raised in France ... probably the reason those kids chose Spurs t-shirts. That and the fact he scored Eva Longoria.
For some reason, all this background had eluded me until now.

- 1:46:00 PM
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY: A reader finds a solution for Dick Cheney:
"I've figured out a way to solve this. The administration is looking for ways to "physically abuse" prisoners "without intent to to cause permanent injury or loss to vital organs." I've got just the thing:
Sharpened reeds jammed underneath the fingernails. It hurts like a bitch. The nails will turn black and fall off, but they'll eventually grow back. No permanent injury and no organ failure. In other words, it's not torture.
Or how about sticking their head in mud for a minute at a time, letting them come up for air for a second, then plunging them back down again, over and over? Our South Vietnamese friends used to do this to captured VC. It's like water-boarding, only more messy. No permanent injury and no organ failure, unless you mess up and you kill him by mistake. No worries, though. You didn't *intend* to kill him. In other words, it's not torture.
Or if you're not that creative you can always stick with the old standby: breaking the bones in their arms and legs. No permanent injury and no organ failure. Bones eventually heal, and last time I checked bones are not organs.
In other words, it's not torture.
Repeat after me: "we do not torture."

- 12:59:00 PM
 
QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: "Bassam's English is pretty good. He had no trouble distinguishing between Americans and their government. The former he liked, the latter he did not. It all had to do with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, these places of abuse and alleged torture. Here his English started to fail him. The degradation of Muslims -- not Iraqis, mind you, but Muslims -- appalled him. He started to say why, but he could not. I kept my eyes on the road as he fumbled for the right words. "We are Muslims," he said haltingly. I looked over. He was visibly upset." - Richard Cohen, in the WaPo, today.

- 12:55:00 PM
 
TOLD YOU SO: Dan Drezner writes about Dick Cheney.

- 12:16:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The vice president's office will never be quite as independent from the White House as it has been. That will end. Cheney never operated without a degree of [presidential] license, but there are people around who cannot believe some of the advice [Bush] has been given." - a key Bush associate, according to Thomas DeFrank in the Daily News.

- 12:06:00 PM
 
PONNURU ON McCAIN: The right position, in every respect. Meanwhile, NRO, as a whole, backs Cheney and the current system.

- 11:55:00 AM
 
THEY STILL DON'T GET IT: Secret CIA prisons are now licensed to torture detainees in former Soviet camps in Eastern Europe. And Frist and Hastert are more concerned about punishing the leak than stopping the torture? It's good to know they have their moral priorities straight, isn't it?

- 11:48:00 AM
 
CARL SCHMITT AND JOHN YOO: Some distressing similarities between the worldview of a twentieth century German political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, and that of John Yoo, the intellectual who crafted George W. Bush's detention and torture policies.

- 11:38:00 AM
 
TOCQUEVILLE AND THE RIOTS: Some interesting insights here. Money quote:
For [Olivier] Roy, political Islam is very much a modern phenomenon because it is driven by masses of displaced or deterritorialized Muslims who have left their traditions and are searching for an "essential" Islam. Roy notices a strongly individualistic streak among them. For instance, he observes that 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta's suicide note contained significantly more references to himself than to Allah, which he takes signifies a modern obsession with the self. The rioters are indeed Islamists, as evidenced by their frequent chant, "Allahou Akbar!" — "God is great!" Of course, it is difficult if not impossible to identify the "essence" of a 1,500 year old tradition. Ironically, Islamists do what Westerners do when the latter express their "Orientalism" in reducing that complex tradition to a few slogans such as, "Islam is a religion of peace" and "Islam is a religion of war." Islamists paradoxically, and perversely, treat themselves as "the Other" in reducing their own tradition to some kind of "pure Islam." Doing so enables them to identify (and destroy) those deemed apostate but also because Muslims can no longer take their religion for granted as something connected with the soil. Their traditions have been uprooted over the past several generations, which contributes to a radicalized sense of identity politics.
This is also related to Paul Berman's insight that Islamism as a political ideology was born in Europe, not the Middle East.

- 11:10:00 AM
 
"NI PUTES NI SOUMISES": Behind the masked angry young Muslim immigrant men in France, there are the often beaten, raped and imprisoned Muslim women. Margaret Wente writes of their plight.

- 10:55:00 AM
 
YES, AN INTIFADA: A blog refutes the NYT's assertion that "the violence in France has not taken on religious overtones." The guy's got links.

- 10:49:00 AM
 
THE "INTIFADA"? Here's one take on what's going on in France:
"The disturbances are thus being portrayed as race riots caused by official discrimination and insensitivity. But this is a gross misreading of the situation. It is far more profound and intractable. What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state.
When the police tried to take back the streets, they were driven out with the demand that they leave what the protesters called the 'occupied territories'. And far from the claim that the disturbances have been caused by French policy of segregating Muslims into ghettoes, this is a war being waged for separate development.
Some Muslims have even called for the introduction of the ancient Ottoman ‘millet’ system of autonomous development for different communities."
That's from British writer, Melanie Phillips, on her blog.

THE "SIXTH REPUBLIC"? An alternative view of the riots is available here. Money quote:
[T]hey are going to continue, one suspects, for as long as the political establishment presumes to deliberately and systematically misunderstand why they are occurring. At the moment, the governmental call is for 'above all, the return of good order'; scant mention is yet to be made of even the possibility of making some effort to correct the absurd embedded racism of France's so-called meritocratic power-structures, whose professed egalitarian ethic could not be further from practical truth. Headlines moronically blurt out: 'how long will this go on?' as if it is the temper tantrum of an infant, not the organised scream for help of an entire and dismembered portion of society. Senior ministers have been threatening longer jail-terms of all things, in blackly comic, American justice style.

d) the immigrants may soon be joined in the pillage by a host of left-wing organisations. Since the riots of 1968 made the error of not going far enough and thus resulting in minimal long-term change, there is implicit consensus that for this action to be justified it must be pursued to its natural extreme: all-out civil disobedience, until the government falls. While official opinion seems to be that this political activity will quickly run its course, there is evidence that it is steadily mounting and indeed heading from outside the city into the centre. I have noticed in my very central quartier here that there has been a steady and ominous thickening on street corners and among shadows of determined looking folk from the banlieues (it reminds me a little of Hitchcock's The Birds).
These two views convey the spectrum of analysis on what's happening. But there's a broader context as well ...

POLITICAL PARALYSIS: This editorial from the London Telegraph also highlights the backgrounf of political ennui in Europe as a whole:
France is marked by fin de régime rivalry between Mr Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister. Germany faces the sclerosis of a grand coalition. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is more discredited than ever. In Britain, while Tony Blair defiantly bangs the security drum, the electorate waits for him to step down. And all this is taking place against a chronic inability to boost sluggish growth. 1968 or 1848 it may not be, but there is in western Europe a general feeling of malaise, of disillusionment with politicians, expressed by low voting figures. On this, the riots rocking France could feed.
What we are witnessing may be the beginning of the collapse of the old regime in Europe.

MULTI-DETERMINED? A reader upbraids me on my fashion judgments:
Well, the people who did the bombing on the London underground weren't wearing Osama-wear, either. They were wearing exactly what they always wore, and liked wearing: izod shirts, blue jeans, running shoes. That didn't protect the 53 people who they blew up.
The "Islamic" point here is that being stopped to show papers to (non-Muslim) police, even for reasonable reasons, is a "humiliation" for an Islamic male. They call interference from the police "the occupation". Meanwhile, the call from the "mature Muslim leadership" in France is explicitly for an Ottoman-style "millet" system of "separate development": i.e., you French give us tons of money and we'll rule ourselves in these apartment blocs around Paris with Sharia. Even as it is, for a decade or more these places have been mostly "no go" areas for the police, which is part of the problem.
This is the intifada brought home from the West Bank to Western Europe. In Aarhus, Denmark, the rioting is because of a cartoon in a newspaper making fun of Mohammed. It doesn't matter what the specific issue is that is touching it off: the issues are different everywhere. But it is definitely a Muslim/non-Muslim clash.
Of course, it could be what my shrink helpfully calls "multi-determined." It could be Islamism and underclass violence and the French economic model. The situation is also dynamic. Ideologues are very good at exploiting violence and disorder for their own ends. In this respect, this video, showing masked men burning cars and screaming "Allahu Akbar" is not exactly encouraging.

- 10:41:00 AM

Monday, November 07, 2005
 
EMAIL OF THE DAY: "If Brokeback Mountain starred two macho, hunky, out, gay actors, it would be much less of a cultural moment, with much less chance of drawing a general audience. It's the straightness of the male leads playing gay that generates the energy and the buzz. Will they kiss? You betcha. Will they go further? Probably not, that would be too gay. From at least as far back as Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, the straight-playing-gay setup functions as the evidence of exceptional commitment, exceptional acting ability: if they're willing to play gay, in spite of how repellent they must, as real straight men, find it, well obviously they're artists of the highest, purist level. So on the one hand I'm grateful to these two actors for making what, from all I hear, is likely to be a terrific movie that I will love for the way it portrays gay people with individuality and authenticity. And on the other hand, I resent these two actors for leveraging gay people's outsider status to show how talented and hip they are."

- 9:00:00 PM
 
PRESIDENT CHENEY: We may not yet fully understand how weird this administration has been. And how powerful the "Number 2" really is - and how utterly unaccountable to anyone but his putative boss.

- 8:58:00 PM
 
NOT EXACTLY ISLAMIST: I'm concerned about Muslim extremism in Europe and fear the worst. But I have to say that the reporting so far from France does not conform very closely to fears of an explicitly Islamist insurrection. I found this post by Iain Murray very helpful. And this quote struck me as telling:
They complained that police manhandle them during identity card checks, even claiming that some officers plant hashish on them as a pretext for arrests, and that they regularly fire off rubber pellets during sweeps. "You wear these clothes, with this color skin and you're automatically a target for police," said Ahmed, 18, pointing to his mates in Izod polo shirts, Nike sneakers and San Antonio Spurs T-shirts.
San Antonio Spurs? Not exactly Osama-wear.

- 4:51:00 PM
 
SOCIAL MELTDOWN IN MASSACHUSETTS: A year and a half after legal civil marriage in one state, the Daily Show investigates the evidence for social and moral disintegration.

- 4:45:00 PM
 
JUDGES AND COMMUNION: Ramesh refines his position. Money quote:
Most of my commentary in this matter has concerned judges who hold views about judging that constrain their discretion. If the judge practices a Dworkinian 'moral reading' of the Constitution, then he is, whether or not he admits it, playing a legislative role. A Catholic Dworkinian who reads a right to abortion into the Constitution would have sinned in the same way as (and perhaps in more ways than) a legislator who votes for abortion.
So a Catholic Justice who believes in the right to privacy as a moral as well as a constitutional matter could be denied communion, if such a right were construed to include the right to abort an unborn child. Or am I missing something? That strikes me as a big deal. And the bishops' threat to withhold communion not just from elected officials but "public" ones seems to me to include judges. The upshot of Benedict's church will be indeed to dictate to Catholic public officials, including judges, what they can and cannot do and still be allowed to receive communion. Under those circumstances, a judge's religion would indeed be fair game for Senate hearings, it seems to me. Sad to say.

- 4:35:00 PM
 
A MAP OF THE RIOTS: This graphic helps illustrate the extent of the immigrant Muslim uprising in France.

- 3:48:01 PM
 
AVIAN FLU IN CANADA: It's on this continent. Sebastian Mallaby also has an excellent summary of why the U.S. is so far behind other countries in Tamiflu acquisition. Part of the answer, of course, is that we have a profoundly incompetent administration.

- 3:45:00 PM
 
THE RULE OF LAW: Great news that SCOTUS will take on the critical Hamdan case. The president, in my view, should have lee-way to exercize executive power in wartime as he sees fit, in emergencies when the legislature cannot be expected to act with sufficient speed or secrecy. But broad detention policies in a war that is now defined as permanent should not be in the hands of one man outside of legal, judicial or legislative review. I agree with Churchill on this matter, as he expressed himself in a speech on November 21, 1943:
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whther Nazi or Communist."
Of course, among some of today's Republicans, Churchill would be considered a whining liberal. Not by me.

- 3:29:00 PM
 
IRAQ'S CASUALTIES: Here's some useful context on the tragedies that accompany all wars. Here's a chart comparing deaths in all America's wars. If you take the 2,000 death toll of the current war in Iraq, and average out over the 30 months of combat in that country, you arrive at the grim tally of 68 deaths a month. If you only count deaths caused by hostile forces, the number goes down to 53 deaths per month. That remains the lowest ever military death rate of any war in U.S. history. It's below even the first Gulf War. Part of this may be attributable to remarkable advances in medicine for the wounded - which leaves many, many more individuals alive but badly injured. And part of it is a consequence of the Rumsfeld decision to let Iraqi civilians be murdered in the thousands, rather than provide basic order and stability in an occupied country. But it's important to keep some context in mind. Every death is an incalculable tragedy for the families and friends left behind. In no way am I attempting to minimize this appalling toll. At the same time, this has been an historically low-military-casualty conflict. That's worth knowing.

- 2:46:00 PM
 
THE SILENCE OF THE BLOGS: Marty Lederman reviews the state of play among right-of-center blogs on the torture question, and asks some salient questions. Kieran Healy focuses on the Volokh blog's increasingly tangled knots. Not all freedom-lovers have looked the other way, of course. But loving freedom and opposing government torture is no longer, sadly, a unifying theme on the right.

- 11:57:00 AM
 
CHENEY'S SHRINKING ISLAND: The avalanche of embarrassing CIA leaks in the last couple of weeks is a sign that within the Bush administration, the proponents of torture are finally losing the debate. They are losing the debate because torture is morally wrong, deeply damaging to the United States, terribly dangerous for U.S. servicemembers and counter-productive in the war against Islamist terrorism. Today, we get even more info. From Jane Mayer's must-read New Yorker piece, we find that the White House Office of Legal Counsel had indeed opined that Iraqi insurgents were originally not covered by Geneva, and that that opinion had lasted until October 2003. Now does it make more sense why abuse and torture migrated so easily from Gitmo to Iraq and Abu Ghraib? And why we lost the hearts and minds of many Iraqis so soon? We also find out more about the critical 3/14/02 memo written by John Yoo, still classified but now being leaked. According to Mayer, the memo
"dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated."
Surely the public has a pressing right to know the contents of that memo. Meanwhile, many others in the administration are trying to reverse the hideous Cheney policy. According to Newsweek, Condi Rice, as I would have expected, now opposes this insane policy, along with humane and smart hawks like national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Gordon England, Donald Rumsfeld's new deputy. Even Gonzales and Miers refuse to support torture any longer. The Washington Post also highlights a neoconservative hawk who has not gone over to the dark side:
[I]n a reflection of how many within the administration now favor changing the rules, Elliot Abrams, traditionally one of the most hawkish voices in internal debates, is among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy in his role as the deputy national security adviser for democracy, according to officials familiar with his role.
Those of us who recall the Reagan legacy and who believe in America's vital role in fighting terror while preserving its values of human treatment of detainees and human rights are finally gaining ground. The soul of conservatism is at stake here - and the soul of America as well.

- 11:40:00 AM
 
BUSH DIGS IN DEEPER: Here's a fascinating quote:
"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law. We do not torture," - president Bush, today.
If that's the case, why threaten to veto a law that would simply codify what Bush alleges is already the current policy? If "we do not torture," how to account for the hundreds and hundreds of cases of abuse and torture by U.S. troops, documented by the government itself? If "we do not torture," why the memos that expanded exponentially the lee-way given to the military to abuse detainees in order to get intelligence? The president's only defense against being a liar is that he is defining "torture" in such a way that no other reasonable person on the planet, apart from Bush's own torture apologists (and they are now down to one who will say so publicly), would agree. The press must now ask the president: does he regard the repeated, forcible near-drowning of detainees to be torture? Does he believe that tying naked detainees up and leaving them outside all night to die of hypothermia is "torture"? Does he believe that beating the legs of a detainee until they are pulp and he dies is torture? Does he believe that beating detainees till they die is torture? Does he believe that using someone's religious faith against them in interrogations is "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment and thereby illegal? What is his definition of torture?

SOME MORE QUESTIONS: What does the president think of Ian Fishback's testimony that abuse and torture was routine and that no one in the military hierarchy would say they were not permitted during eighteen months of his trying to get an answer? What does the president make of the following quote from another servicemember of his time in Iraq: "I think our policies required abuse. There were freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used dogs." Since the president signed the finding of September 17, setting up a series of secret CIA detention camps where "waterboarding" is permitted, does he believe and will he state categorically that no torture has ever occurred at those camps?

Watching and listening to this man, it seems to me we have a few possible interpretations in front of us. Either the president simply does not know what is being done in his name in his own military or he is lying through his teeth to the American people and the world. I guess there is also a third possibility: that he is simply unable to acknowledge the enormity of what he has done to the honor of the United States, the success of the war and the safety of American servicemembers. And so he has gone into clinical denial. Or he is so ashamed he cannot bear to face the truth of what he has done. None of these options are, shall we say, encouraging. But there is, of course, an easy way forward for the president if this is truly what he believes: support the Congress in backing the president's own position. Pass the McCain Amendment. Given what he said today, why on earth would he not?

- 11:18:00 AM
 
END OF GAY CULTURE WATCH: The movie, "Brokeback Mountain," looks set to be a fascinating cultural moment. What's interesting to me is that it takes the question of same-sex love and places it firmly in the center of American folklore, especially the cowboy West. Now, of course gay cowboys existed and exist. But that two very hot Hollywood leading men would be prepared to take on these roles, that a director as accomplished as Ang Lee would direct the movie, and that a studio as mainstream as Universal would produce it strikes me as a significant development. A few years back, it would have been unthinkable for bankable, heterosexual stars like Ledger and Gyllenhaal to have embraced such a venture. But they are of the generation that is mercifully over the bigotries of old Hollywood. Think of the greatest actor of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Three of his most powerful, accomplished, career-making performances - in "Boogie Nights," "Flawless," and "Capote," - are of gay men, each very different, each very human, each poignantly and brilliantly brought to life. In his case, taking on homosexual roles has helped Hoffman reach the career heights he now commands. Ledger and Gyllenhal take this to a new level, because, unlike Hoffman, they are handsome beyond measure, and have played macho heterosexuals for years. Now they get to play macho homosexuals - itself an inversion and abolition of a certain stereotype. I have yet to see the movie, so I cannot judge it on its merits. But so far, its potential cultural impact looks riveting. If it wins a wide audience, it will be one more sign that the old cliches of "gay culture" are indeed dying fast. I think Red State America is less fearful of the truth than its political representatives. But we'll see, I guess.

- 10:29:00 AM
 
CHRISTIANISM AND THE LEFT: The emergence of Christianism in this country - a political movement founded on evangelical doctrine - is arguably the most significant political development of the new millennium. And what's critical about this new movement is its relationship to government: there's nothing Christianists like more than active, interventionist government to right wrong, police private lives and uphold their version of morality. Now take a moment to ask yourselves: who do they resemble? This busy-body, moralizing tendency was once the province of what we once called the left. Like the old left, Christianism puts virtue before freedom, even if its idea of virtue is very different than those in the old left. But the usual facets of leftism - massive public spending and borrowing, growth in regulations, tampering with the constitution for political ends, use of churches for political campaigns - are now just as powerfully represented on the Christianist right. Eventually, it was inevitable that they would join forces in a common cause - and the environment is one of them. What's interesting here is not whether the policy proposals have merit; but the confluence of these two interventionist, big government philosophies. Some parts of the environnmental movement - the loopy parts - are very similar to eschatological religious phenomena in any case. Their fusion is a sign of our new politics - where bigger and bigger government and less and less freedom is now the ruling consensus.

- 10:12:00 AM
 
SUNNI ARABS MOVE FORWARD: This is important and good news from Iraq. The critical things to watch in the next couple of months are, it seems to me, the potential splintering of the Sunni Arabs, between die-hard dead-enders and pragmatic pols, and the pace of reconstruction. Developments in Syria and Iran matter too. More here.

- 10:00:00 AM

Sunday, November 06, 2005
 
HOBBLING SOLDIERS: There is a critical distinction between forbidding abuse of detainees already in captivity and micro-policing all military combat. The British troops in Basra are apparently demoralized because they fear legal consequences for shooting insurgents. That's nuts. These soldiers have enough stress dealing with Baathists and Jihadists and Sadrites without worrying about being prosecuted by their own courts for casualties in legitimate combat. Money quote:
The combination of knowing that death might come at any time from a roadside bomb and that shooting back at Iraqis who attack them might result in their being court-martialled is putting immense pressure on young soldiers.
The doctors described morale in some units as very low with soldiers cynically suggesting they needed a solicitor with them before they shot back at any Iraqi who attacked them.
Blair needs to back his own troops on this one. So does the British public.

- 12:07:00 PM
 
MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE (for shrill right-wing hyperbole) : "I don't understand it, and neither does Bill Kristol. The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War." - Powerline blogger, John Hinderaker.

- 11:59:00 AM
 
OPPORTUNITY IN IRAQ: I haven't given up yet. My latest mood-swing in the Times of London.

THE LITTLE LIES: Two stories in the NYT this morning point to a paradox at the center of the administration's case for war. Since, in my view, they got the big issue right, why did they get the little things so wrong? Two examples: if they knew that the captured Qaeda operative, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was fibbing as early as February 2002, why did they include his tainted info in subsequent arguments for war? If they knew the real story behind the tragic death of Pat Tillman, why did they immediately lie about it? The same goes for the Niger connection. In my view, the case for not trusting Saddam with our security was solid without these embellishments. A candid, clear laying out of what we knew and didn't know for sure would have won majority support for war against Saddam. So again, why these cut corners and shaded spin?

LIBBY AND LIBI: The same goes for the absurdly petty attempt to exact revenge on Joe Wilson. To put it bluntly: why did anyone in the administration give a flying turd about Joe Wilson? He was a bit-player, a liar, a non-entity, whose information did not even undermine the very carefully crafted words about Brits, uranium and Africa in the State of the Union. How paranoid, bitter, and defensive do you have to be to do what Libby did (in my view, almost certainly with Cheney's permission)? Worse: these unnecessary fibs, spins, and deceptions have inevitably come back to haunt the very people who committed them - and to weaken public support for a war that it is still critical to win. A reader sharpens the point here:
There is an enormous difference between what you describe -- "insufficient skepticism" -- and what the evidence before us (some of which has been on the table for ages, some of which is now appearing to supplement the original case) suggests. You seem to think that there are only two options: willful deception and innocent "insufficient skepticism." But there is a lot of room in between for reckless and irresponsible doctoring of the evidence. You keep mentioning the great risk (and consensus at the time) as if that justifies suppressing evidence that runs the other way. You've got it exactly backwards! In the face of such risk, it's all the more important for our leaders to level with us about what they know! It's not as if the only choices were to recklessly disregard opposing evidence or sit on our heels. The administration could have been upfront about what it knew, and what it didn't know. It could have come forward with the opposing evidence, and made a strong case that, even despite this evidence -- even despite Chalabi's obvious lack of reliability, etc. -- still the dangers were too great to do anything but invade. The public probably would have been on board -- and if not, that would reflect the public's judgment about what the right thing to do was.

Whether or not the actions were deliberately intended to deceive, or simply reflective of a reckless disregard for what the evidence showed, the upshot is that Cheney and his supporters put the entire enterprise at risk by ignoring -- or attempting to suppress -- opposing evidence. We are now witnessing what happens when a public feels that it didn't get the full story about why it should send its sons and daughters to their deaths.
It seems to me that we are getting a better picture every day of how this administration screwed up its own war. They were defensive when they should have been candid; they were reckless when they should have been meticulously prepared for every outcome; they were insecure when they should have been forthcoming; they decided to divide, rather than unite the country. None of this means we should follow the anti-war movement and abort the mission. It simply means we have to be very skeptical of the key players in this war - Cheney and Rumsfeld above everyone - and try and prevent them from inflicting more damage on a noble cause.

- 11:16:00 AM

Saturday, November 05, 2005
 
CHENEY BUNKER WATCH: He's still furiously lobbying Senators to protect his right to torture. A man who avoided service in Vietnam is lecturing John McCain on the legitimacy of torturing military detainees. But notice he won't even make his argument before Senate aides, let alone the public. Why not? If he really believes that the U.S. has not condoned torture but wants to reserve it for exceptional cases, why not make his argument in the full light of day? You know: where democratically elected politicians operate.

- 2:18:00 PM
 
ALITO AND TORTURE: It seems that Judge Alito would regard the deliberate abuse of symbols of someone's religious faith as arguably tantamount to "torture." Since mockery of Islam has now been documented in many instances of the Cheney-Rumsfeld detainee-abuse policy, this strikes me as worthy of bringing up in Alito's hearings. A legal reader discovered Alito's opinion in Fatin v. INS, 112 F.3d 1233, where Alito held that asylum might be available for an Iranian immigrant who refused to wear a veil. Money quote:
In considering whether the petitioner established that this option would constitute persecution, we will assume for the sake of argument that the concept of persecution is broad enough to include governmental measures that compel an individual to engage in conduct that is not physically painful or harmful but is abhorrent to that individual's deepest beliefs. An example of such conduct might be requiring a person to renounce his or her religious beliefs or to desecrate an object of religious importance. Such conduct might be regarded as a form of "torture" and thus as falling within the Board's description of persecution in Acosta.
Alito should be asked whether Koran abuse, the forcible eating of pork, the mandatory swallowing of liquor, sexual humiliation, and other documented anti-Muslim instances of abuse under the Cheney-Rumsfeld rules constitute "torture." (In the end, Alito did not grant the woman asylum, however, because the record did not show that the exile refused to wear a veil under all circumstances. But he set a clear, new, progressive standard in asylum cases. More here.)

- 2:05:00 PM
 
A BEAUTIFUL SIGHT: Rows and rows of unbought Hummers.

- 1:52:00 PM
 
IF THE INSURGENTS ARE BAATHISTS: What if we have over-estimated the extent of Jihadist influence in the Iraq insurgency? The bad news is: we're still fighting Saddam. The good news: the insurgents are mainly rational actors trying to rule Iraq again, not crazy Wahabbists intent on Armageddon throughout the Middle East. This is why Zalmay Khalilzad has had some success at brokering some small deals with the Sunni elites. If this is the scenario, even Juan Cole might be hopeful. From a blogger's account of a recent Cole college talk:
From this theory, though, Juan Cole draws an improbably optimistic conclusion -- optimistic at least in a relative sense. Both the insurgency and the government are signaling that their objectives are political, not existential. They each want to rule Iraq, not exterminate the other side -- although both sides have their eliminationist wings.

This creates the hope that in Iraq, as in Clausewitz's doctrine, civil war is the continuation of politics by other means, not the opening salvo of the war of the all against the all. And this at least holds out the possibility (hope would be too strong a word) that the various sides will eventually realize they have to compromise -- just as the warring factions in Lebanon brokered a workable peace once the leaders of the major factions decided it was no longer in their interests to keep fighting.

If this is the case in Iraq -- if the war is essentially political -- then America might not face the Hobson's choice I've feared: Withdraw quickly, leaving behind a genocidal civil war, or stay, and get sucked into a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that itself could turn genocidal. U.S. forces could, in theory, be drawn down gradually, while disengaging from direct combat operations and playing more of a balancing role -- preventing the Ba'athists from shooting their way back into power, while trying to stop the Kurds and the Shi'a from overreaching in ways that could break up Iraq entirely and trigger a regional war.
That's exactly the scenario I lay out in a column tomorrow in the Sunday Times. We should by all means subject our own government to scrutiny. But we are still at war. And it would be insane to give up now, when all sorts of opportunities lie ahead.

- 1:47:00 PM
 
EMAIL OF ALMOST EVERY DAY: Here's an email typical of one I get all the time:
I have been a big fan of your blog for some time now, but I do have one major problem reading it - the white lettering on purple background makes it really hard for me to look at the site for any extended period of time. This is not an aesthetic problem - I absolutely no sense of color coordination and would not presume to criticize from that perspective. What I mean is that I find your site physically hard to read due some weird light dynamics related to the color scheme. Further, when I switch to a new site, I have to take a break for a minute or two until my eyes reset - like post-looking at a bright light or the sun.
I take the point. I actually like the color scheme and hope to retain it in an upcoming redesign. But I know it can be hard for some to read. That's why there's a little button up top of the Dish, just under the words "Daily Dish". It's easily missed but it says: "Black & White." Click on it and the colors reverse.

- 1:36:00 PM
 
MARRIAGE DEBATE ROUND-UP: Dale Carpenter finishes his superb defense of equality in marriage on the Volokh blog. Click here and scroll down for more. Jon Rowe has further thoughts (and if you aren't familiar with his blog, you should be). Meanwhile, don't forget that the most readable, funny, honest and persuasive book on the subject published this year is Dan Savage's "The Commitment." You know Dan from the summer when he guest-blogged here. The book is a rare blend of comic genius, frank memoir, and piercing, deadly forensics.

- 1:24:00 PM
 
OBAMA THE HAWK: Some tough talk from a future Democratic presidential contender.

CHENEY AND WMDS: It's the vice-president who's been most active in preventing any real investigation of the intelligence discussions before the war. Update from Mike Crowley:
[Harry] Reid also made it clear that he believes the delay in the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of prewar Iraq WMD--the underlying issue behind Tuesday's closed session--is entirely attributable to Vice President Dick Cheney. "Nothing happens regarding intelligence gathering ... unless it's signed off on by the Vice President," he said. "[Senate Intelligence chairman Pat] Roberts couldn't do it"--i.e., Roberts couldn't conduct a full investigation without Cheney's approval. When I asked Reid whether he meant to state so flatly that Cheney was personally and directly stalling the Intelligence Committee's work, he didn't pause a beat. In fact he almost stood from his chair. "Yes. I say that without any qualification ... Circle it."
Many already have. Meanwhile, there's more evidence that some pre-war WMD intelligence that might have undercut the administration was ignored or sidelined:
A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document
Worth emphasizing here: this is not necessarily evidence of deception. It fits into a pattern of insufficient skepticism in advance of the war. The consensus was so great and the risk so dangerous after 9/11 that debunking Saddam's claims was not on the agenda as much as, in retrospect, it should have been. It sure wasn't on mine; and I regret it. But then, I didn't have access to all the classified data, and the Bush people did. It's clear now at least that we could have done with a bit more "conservatism of doubt" in the run-up to the war.

- 1:16:00 PM

Friday, November 04, 2005
 
THE VATICAN AND GAY PRIESTS: The much-bally-hooed official document has been pushed back again, according to National Catholic Reporter's John Allen. (I should point out that some have tried to argue that earlier alarms about the policy were based entirely on reporting in the New York Times. Not true. They reports came from conservative Catholic sources and John Allen, one of the most clued-in Vatican journalists, and were confirmed by extreme statements - subsequently largely walked back - by Archbishop O'Brien). Money quote from Allen:
The official, who is familiar with the content of the document, told NCR its central message is that "homosexuals are not welcome in the priesthood." The official said it also sets out guidelines, however, such as the capacity for celibacy, avoidance of the "gay lifestyle," and the absence of an "overwhelming, permanent" orientation, which could make application less absolute than some of the document’s hard-line language may suggest.

This official said that the key to understanding the document is grasping its genre.

"This is not a matter of sacramental theology," he said. "It's not saying that homosexuals are intrinsically unworthy of being priests. It's a matter of prudential judgment, that this is not a good idea."
I'm going to wait for the actual document before commenting further. But there are both ominous and not-so-ominous signals coming from the Vatican.

- 5:28:00 PM
 
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It was very brave of MTV to start the show with a transvestite." - Borat, Kazakhastan media celebrity, on Madonna's amazing performance at the MTV Europe music awards. She's peerless.

- 4:22:00 PM
 
JUDGES AND COMMUNION UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru and Stephen Bainbridge respond to Amy Sullivan's worry that pro-life Catholic judges might be refused communion if they dOn't vote to overturn Roe or be less than categorical in abortion cases. Amy responds again. Ramesh says there's an obvious distinction between legislating a substantive issue, and making a legal judgment on constitutional law. I see his point. But if such a judgment effectively allows abortion to continue, isn't the judge de facto informally "cooperating with evil" and thereby liable to Church sanction with respect to the sacraments? Bainbridge argues:
There are cases--albeit only in those limited class of cases in which a judge's decision constitutes formal cooperation with evil--in which a Catholic jurist is religiously obligated to put his faith-based beliefs ahead of, say, his views of precedent. Conversely, however, it seems clear that judicial decisionmaking--even with respect to issues, like abortion, that raise very profound questions--under Church teaching does not per se constitute formal cooperation with evil.
That's a revealing per se qualification. Then he goes on to say:
[W]here a Catholic judge believes his participation in a particular case would constitute formal cooperation with evil, the judge should recuse himself--as often happens. The possibility that a judge (or justice) might have to recuse himself in occasional cases, however, does not strike me as a legitimate reason to deny the judge a seat on the bench.
I agree with the latter point. But what we are seeing are the political consequences of the Catholic hierarchy's slow collapse into fundamentalism. Once a Catholic is denied the moral capacity to separate her public duties from her private faith - or risk exclusion from the sacraments - then she is in an acute conflict between public duty and private conscience. Recusal may be her only option. But we now have five Catholics on the court. In Benedict's church, on critical Constitutional questions, we might face five recusals in abortion cases, which would make any ruling largely meaningless. This is the consequence of the Vatican's retreat from the Second Council's acceptance of religious freedom and conscience, and Benedict's deep qualms about a clear separation of church and state. The theocons want to reverse the Kennedy compromise. And in doing so, they may be forcing Catholics in public life to withdraw altogether or face the charge of a religious conflict of interest. In their zeal, the theocons are unwittingly breathing new life into anti-Catholic prejudice, and new force behind the exclusion of Catholics from public life in a pluralist democracy.

- 4:09:00 PM
 
BUSH'S CHENEY-ADDINGTON PROBLEM: The veep's office, with David Addington central to it, now has a long, long record of of creating awful problems for the president, the war and American democracy itself. Ryan Lizza gives a useful summary here (free subscription required).

- 1:57:00 PM
 
RIOT POLITICS: The French elite fights with itself. A helpful analysis from Bronwen Maddox.

- 1:01:00 PM
 
NO COMMUNION FOR JUDGES? Amy Sullivan asks why the Vatican is not demanding absolute pro-life reasoning from Catholic Supreme Court Justices. If the rule is good for pols, why not judges?

- 12:51:00 PM
 
CHENEY BUNKER WATCH: I'm starting a recurring watch feature on Dick Cheney's refusal to answer even the most basic questions about his conduct in office. We are now a week since his former chief of staff was indicted on five counts, with many, many questions related to his role in the affair. Still, radio silence from the veep. We are also reaching the end-game on his refusal to ban torture and abuse in military detention policies. And still: no comment. Here's something from the NYT today on Cheney's threatening to veto the McCain Amendment and leaning as hard as he can to kill it in the conferecne committe:
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said Thursday that Mr. Cheney frequently met with members of Congress to discuss legislative issues, but she declined to characterize his stand on Mr. McCain's provision or the proposed motion to instruct House conferees.
She declined? Who on earth does Cheney think he is? And when will the press get aggressive in pursuing him until he starts acting like an accountable elected official and not some monarch. If readers catch more instances of Cheney's preposterous refusal to be accountable to the people who elected him and who pay his salary, please let me know.

- 12:31:00 PM
 
FRANCE'S INTIFADA: A must-read piece from Amir Taheri. Money quote:
A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.

"All we demand is to be left alone," said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local "emirs" engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

President Jacques Chirac and Premier de Villepin are especially sore because they had believed that their opposition to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.

That illusion has now been shattered — and the Chirac administration, already passing through a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless about how to cope with what the Parisian daily France Soir has called a "ticking time bomb."

It is now clear that a good portion of France's Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into "the superior French culture," but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.
This is still a religious war: of fundamentalism versus secularism. And Chirac is discovering that no amount of appeasement can stave it off.

- 12:24:00 PM
 
McCLELLAN VERSUS ROVE: Ryan Lizza gets it right in seeing McClellan's anger at being lied to by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, and now having to lose credibility on their behalf. Hey, but if you work for Blackberry Machiavellis and alleged perjurers ... what do you expect? JPod concurs, but, of course, takes the side of the liars. Hey, that's what it takes to be a Republican these days.

- 12:16:00 PM
 
GETTING WARMER: If you're still mystified by vice-president Cheney's adamant refusal to allow a ban on "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees, this story might help you out. Colin Powell's former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, claims that there is a direct paper trail from Cheney's office directing abuse and torture in Iraq:
"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen." He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.

There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said. The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

"If you are a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things," Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that "they have to do what they have to do to get it." He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.

Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.
This argument backs up Brigadier General Karpinski's assertions that there were clear directives out of Rumsfeld's office directing abuse of detainees for intelligence purposes. Her account has back up from others in the military, currently too leery to go public. If we begin to get some of them to talk on the record, we could find evidence of profound deception on the part of the Cheney cabal to hide authorized torture on their watch. This is not over yet.

- 12:05:00 PM




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