From the Daily Telegraph, noticed by Sup Specie Aeternitatis blog. Money quote:
He enjoyed sexual innuendo, and teased the late Michael Wishart for describing Ali Khan as a great lover, pointing out that Khan’s idea of sex reminded him of Father Christmas: “He came but once a year,” and adding that any girl “not in a multi-orgasmic mood” would end up feeling “like Michelangelo after a hard day’s work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling”. Wishart was furious. Of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll’s memoirs, Forbes ventured: “Her father may have been able to give her some beautiful earrings, but nothing to put between them.”
More jolly fun about a dead guy here.
KEEPING UP THE PRESSURE: I’m glad to read this post decrying the abuses in Afghanistan. Joe Gandelman also makes the following points about his site:
# This writer has supported the war.
# This writer has been steadfast in condemning Newsweek’s report due to the poor confirmation.
# This writer doesn’t belong to either party and has to say in no uncertain terms that allegations of this kind of behavior must be investigated and if proven true prosecuted to the absolute fullest extent of the law – including up the chain of command if necessary. Those who try to defend it or dismiss it as soldiers blowing off steam or minimize the gravity of it deserve nothing but contempt from those from both parties who militantly believe in and cherish long-held American ideals.
Each of those statements also applies to me. The ACLU document dump on the latest abuses is one I’m spending the weekend poring over. The documents are previously classified appendices to the various military reports I reviewed here. I want to read them all before I comment, but after a mere hour, the picture is in line with much of the previous evidence. This really does go all the way up to the very top. Money quote from the ACLU’s summary:
This latest document supports detainees’ accounts that American soldiers routinely used religious symbols to degrade and humiliate them. In a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Human Rights First against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one Iraqi detainee charged that soldiers taunted him by having a military dog pick up the Koran in its mouth. Another Iraqi detainee claimed that soldiers threw the Koran on the floor and stepped on it. In addition, in a set of documents released by the FBI in response to the ACLU’s FOIA in December, a Guantánamo detainee alleged that a guard told him he beat him because the guard was a Christian and the detainee was a Muslim.
It just gets better, doesn’t it? The damage all this has done to our cause among moderate Muslims and democratic allies is incalculable. I’m sorry but throwing Laura at the problem is a pathetic response.
THE PURGE CONTINUES: Another writer for a Jesuit newsletter is fired – for urging a dialogue with homosexuals in order to better understand their experience and thus inform theology. Dialogue with those on the margins of society? What on earth is this guy thinking of? This is Benedict’s church. There shall be no dialogue with the “objectively disordered.” Isn’t that the whole spirit of the Gospels?
The Dish 