Year: 2005

A take on Rich Lowry’s latest take.

ONLY IN ENGLAND: The Church of Englad will allow its priests to marry their partners under Britain’s looming civil partnership provisions, civil marriage in all but name. But they will have to promise they’re not having sex. Of course, if they’ve been married for many years, that might not be such a sacrifice.

ANOTHER DEMOTION: A longstanding general with a largely exemplary career gets a quick exit from the military, with a reduced rank. Hmmm:

]W]hat cost Riggs his star? His Pentagon superiors said he allowed outside contractors to perform work they were not supposed to do, creating “an adverse command climate.” But some of the general’s supporters believe the motivation behind his demotion was politics. Riggs was blunt and outspoken on a number of issues and publicly contradicted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by arguing that the Army was overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan and needed more troops.
“They all went bat-shit when that happened,” recalled retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, a one-time Pentagon adviser who ran reconstruction efforts in Iraq in the spring of 2003. “The military part of [the defense secretary’s office] has been politicized. If [officers] disagree, they are ostracized and their reputations are ruined.”

Not a way to win a war. But then we knew that already, didn’t we?

“I would hope to see you over here in theater running your pie-hole about your calls to remove Marines from their post for the ‘New Testament’ inscription on the main battle tank. You would be buried with your insurgent ‘friends’ that you support, through your criticism of our men and women dying for this mission with a bulldozer.
For your safety, I would not even be around soldiers, airmen, or marines. Treason is a high crime and misdemeanor and the price is quite high. Your actions border on treason. You could not survive the long days, enemy in-direct and direct fire, and high demands that our soldiers today execute in 100 degree weather. You would have to have a rucksack full of Vagisil for your clam pal to make it a week here.
Most of us are Christians and will continue to support our faith in any way we see fit. Do the right thing: support us or STFU !!!!!!!!!!” – from a soldier in Iraq.

It’s a Bush administration meme. If you screw up, you get promoted, as long as you’re a team player. If you really screw up, you get a Medal of Freedom. If you screw up to such an extent that it cannot be ignored, then you find a couple of low-level grunts to scapegoat. If you get something right, but Cheney got it wrong, you’re fired. Is this really a way to win a war?

AIRFORCE ACADEMY NEWS: Some promising signs that the military is taking Christianist intolerance seriously.

HOMELAND SECURITY: They’re hard at work protecting movie copyrights. Thank God for a new government agency.

COUNTRY CLUBS AND MARRIAGE: Right-thinking gets my point.

“PEOPLE SEEDS”: Ambivablog makes a case for drawing the moral line for human life at successful implantation in the womb. Worth pondering.

Sometimes I’m asked why I’m so confident that sooner or later gay citizens will have equality in America. And the answer is someone like Andrew Goldstein. He’s the lacrosse goalie for Dartmouth College and openly gay. His team-mates don’t care; he’s valued for what he does. He’s the team’s MVP and an all-American. He was the first goalie to actually score a goal in three decades. The hard right can try to demonize him, declare him “objectively disordered” or prevent him from ever having a legally secure relationship with another guy. But he will still exist, evidence of the truth: that gay people are human beings, citizens, and eager to become a full and equal part of society. If only others will allow them.

Guantanamo and Bagram continue to undermine our cause around the world. Good going, Mr Gonzales, Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Bush.

Many thanks for your many emails. The best defense of embryonic research in this respect that I’ve read was in Slate’s Fray. Check it out here. On the fundamental point, I do indeed concede that there is a distinction between embryos that never make it to implantation in the uterus and those that do. Left alone, the former will never become a human being; the latter, by and large, will. The female body disposes of countless such embryos; IVF would be impossible without them. So, in fact, would regular sex and conception. I don’t believe that such embryos constitute the same moral weight as a fetus. I’m also only mildly worried by the inevitable over-production of such embryos in sex or IVF. Nevertheless, actually using such embryos for medical research, and creating them for that purpose, does strike me as more morally problematic. I don’t think I could personally engage in it. Still, none of this invalidates the president’s position. In such morally difficult waters, I favor the conservatism of doubt: keep the federal government as far away from such activities as possible, but allow private entities and even state governments, with popular consent, to finance them. I don’t see why this position is so unreasonable. In fact, to demand aggressive government endorsement of what some sincerely and resonably believe is the taking of human life is to push the envelope. Of course, some conservatives of faith might well argue that such research should be positively banned. I disagree with them as well; and wonder why they are not arguing for bans on IVF as well. Has anyone asked Santorum whether he believes IVF should be made illegal? It would be a good question to pose to him. Bush as well.

BEAGLE LIT: A lovely little new book from Emily Yoffe has given me some reassurance that my own miscreant beagle isn’t the only one ransacking the trash and puking on the carpet afterward.

ANOTHER CATHOLICISM: Benedict XVI isn’t the only definer of Catholic witness to the marginalized. Here’s another: a bishop in Kentucky.

The military spokesman said categorically last week that there had been no “credible allegations” of Koran abuse at Gitmo. Money quote:

Q: Larry, just to be clear, there have been numerous allegations by detainees who have been released —

MR. DI RITA: Mm-hmm.

Q : — by attorneys who have talked to detainees, alleging mistreatment of the Koran, including instances where it was supposedly thrown into a toilet. Are you saying that none of those allegations were credible, and that none of them have — have any of them been investigated, and were any substantiated?

MR. DI RITA: We’ve found nothing that would substantiate precisely — anything that you just said about the treatment of a Koran. We have — other than what we’ve seen, that it’s possible detainees themselves have done with pages of the Koran — and I don’t want to overstate that either because it’s based on log entries that have to be corroborated… When we have received specific, credible allegations — and typically that’s not what we see when we see a lawyer speaking on Al- Jazeera — but when a specific, credible allegation of this nature were to be received, we would take it quite seriously. But we’ve not seen specific, credible allegations.

(My italics). It’s pretty clear at this point that Di Rita was not telling the truth. Thirteen credible allegations were investigated and five turned out to be valid. Someone had already been disciplined. The Red Cross had made repeated complaints. If the Red Cross isn’t “credible”, then why allow it into Gitmo? I’m sorry to say that the Pentagon’s credibility is shot. Why should we believe anything Di Rita says any more? David Corn elaborates here.

“When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantánamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: ‘That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial.'” – Husain Haqqani, a Pakistani scholar sympathetic to the war on terror.

CONFIRMED: The military concedes three incidents of deliberate abuse of the Koran and two incidents of accidental abuse of the Koran in interrogations at Guantanamo. A much more detailed report is in the works. Moreover, “none of these five incidents was a result of a failure to follow standard operating procedures in place at the time the incident occurred,” according to General Hood. So deliberate abuse of the Koran was within “standard operating procedures” at Gitmo. And yet one soldier has already been disciplined for his actions. If what he was doing was within “standard operating procedures,” why the discipline? And do you remember last week when we were told there were “no credible allegations” of Koran abuse? I’m beginning to see what Pat Tillman’s parents were complaining about. Why the lies?

THE SPIN CONTINUES: The toilet incident allegation has been withdrawn, after the detainee was “reinterviewed.” The detainee was never asked specifically about the toilet allegation in his “re-interview”. Reassured? Still, it’s progress to have the military concede what others still refuse to see and what the miitary was denying outright only a week ago. Remember also that at Gitmo, none of the interrogators was an amateur. They cannot pull the Lynndie England defense. Someone somewhere thought this was a good idea. Who? Did anyone explicitly authorize this? Or was it a function of unclear guidelines? In which case, who was responsible for unclear guidelines? Did the memos allowing for far greater leniency in interrogatory abuse have anything to do with this? We currently have many more questions than answers. Frankly, we need an independent inquiry into all this. The military is deeply hobbled by its past errors in this area. Now watch the spinners: this couldn’t happen; this didn’t happen; it’s Newsweek’s fault; it only happened five times; the military says that eight allegations didn’t pan out; even if it did happen, it’s a “much-ado-about-not-much story“; whose side are you on anyway?

WHAT’S COMING: We could also soon be facing the prospect of many more photographs coming out from the hell of Abu Ghraib prison. What we have seen so far – horrifying though it was – is the least of it.

“IT HAPPENS IN WARTIME”: Yes, some things do escalate in the heat of battle; people make wrong decisions, but those decisions are completely understandable under dangerous conditions. That’s why I’m greatly relieved to see Second Lt. Ilario Pantano acquitted of wrong-doing. There is a world of difference between difficult moments in the heat of battle and premeditated, approved abuse of people completely under your control. The torture-spinners need to stop conflating these arguments. They exonerate the inexcusable while tarring soldiers doing their best in extremely difficult circumstances.

We trashed DailyBrowse.com’s server. Here’s the map cited below.

AND SOMETIMES …: It really is a theocracy.

“The religious right’s position on embryonic stem cell research is clear: consign Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s sufferers to death on the off chance that a blastocyst will crawl out of the garbage pail to work the breakfast shift at Burger King.” – Jerry And Joe Long, at Huffblog.