Month: May 2005

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.

A geographic analysis of the House vote. Purple America struck back.

Der Spiegel points to an interesting irony: if the Christian Democrats and Free Liberals form the next German government, as the polls suggest, Germany will have as its top two leaders a woman and a married homosexual. All in support of more flexible employment laws, lower spending and lower taxes. Meanwhile, American conservatives are busy barring gays from marrying and serving their country and keeping women out of military combat. Max Boot has some smart comments on that.

It’s worth celebrating what seems to be the simple refusal of most French to go along with the monolithic policy of literally every elite institution in the country. Recall: almost every mainstream party in France is in favor of the E.U. constitution; the government and the opposition agree; no mainstream newspaper is urging non – and yet the public is still telling them to go shove it. This has got to be healthy. I’m not counting out the oui forces yet; but what we are watching is a kind of democratic protest. It may have less to do with the constitution itself than with the way in which the EU has made people feel powerless over their own destinies. The E.U. will survive a no-vote. European democracy will be deeply strengthened by a no.

“You are dead wrong (as well as sloppy and lazy) in your portrayal of Okrent and Mankiw’s statements about Paul Krugman. (For the record, I know both Paul and Greg. although not well.)
The Okrent case is the more egregious: he says that Krugman “slices and dices” data to support his point of view, without offering an example. I’m an economist myself, and know the macro data very well. I can’t think of single example to support Okrent’s statement. (Paul has published corrections regarding a couple of minor, and non-substantive, points.) Most conservative attacks on his arguments involve innumeracy or sheer ignorance of basic facts or basic principles of economics; many involve willful misrepresentation.
Now consider Greg’s statement (and I’m paraphrasing) that “Paul seems to think that everyone who disagrees with him is either fool or a liar.” To begin with, I’ll stick to economics. The plain fact is that the Bush Administration has been consistently and deliberately mendacious in its public portrayal of its economic policies. (This characterization, by the way, is the overwhelming consensus in the professional economics world, which includes many conservatives.) Capable policy apointees (like Greg or Glen Hubbard) have had no meaningful input in this Administration; nor has the professional staff at places like Treasury or CEA. All economic policy involves politics. But the politicization of the policy making process in this Administration is without precedent in my professional life.
Paul would have been called a moderate or even conservative Democrat prior to this Administration. (Read his classical essay, “In Praise of Cheap Labor,” if you’re under the illusion that he’s some sort of leftist.) So would I. Paul appears strident only because he’s had the bad manners to say that people are lying when they’re obviously lying. (A prominent case in point: many of the President’s public statements about the finances of the social security system have been plain, simple untruths.) And what’s maddening to Paul, and to me, is that there’s no core of conservative principle in this Administration. A conservative devotion to free markets has been displaced by reckless spending, reckless tax cuts, crony capitalism and special interest give-aways. What “balanced” take on these issues should Paul offer?
More generally, you should know better. Remember, I’ve confined myself so far to economic policy. Do you want to defend the honesty and integrity of this Administration on, say, abuse of detainees?”

John Cole wonders what the apologists for detainee abuse will have to say now. He forgot one option: complete silence. Only the true apparatchiks are spinning this one.

FBI documents provide countless claims by inmates that desecration or abuse of the Koran was deployed as an interrogation technique at Guantanamo. For good measure, we even have a toilet story. At this point: Did you really believe otherwise? Yes, these reports are from inmates; and, yes, those inmates are obviously biased, even trained to lie. But the sheer scope and scale of the protests, the credible accounts of hunger-strikes in Afghanistan and Gitmo, and the reference, cited below, of interrogators conceding that they too had heard of such techniques, seems to me to resolve the question. The U.S. has deliberately and consciously had a policy of using religious faith as a lever in interrogation of terror suspects. Is this “torture”? It is certainly part of psychological abuse. It is also beyond stupid. Do you really think that throwing the Koran around is likely to prompt an Islamist fanatic to tell you what he knows? Did anyone ask what the broader consequences might be of such techniques – in polarizing Muslim opinion against the U.S., in providing every left-wing hack rhetorical weapons against the United States, in handing the Islamists a propaganda victory that makes all our effort to spread democracy in that region that much harder? Still, we can be grateful for Scott McClellan for one thing: he dared the press to provide substantiation for the Newsweek claim. We’ve now got it. Will administration defenders finally concede we have a problem?

BUSH’S VETO: In my view, he’s right to veto federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. There is a very clear principle here: do you take life to save lives? My conviction is that you don’t, and that the human life in embryonic form is still human life. The idea of cloning embryos to experiment on them is morally repugnant; equally, using left-over, frozen embryos for the same purpose is using human beings as means, not ends. If that isn’t a clear, moral line, then I don’t know what is. My own religious faith in the dignity of human life is not necessary to support this argument, whatever the NYT says. We’re all humans; whatever we believe about our origins or destiny, we can all agree that each of us deserves to be treated as ends in ourselves, not material for others’ benefit. If we cede that principle, then we will slide (and have already slid) toward hideous forms of eugenics. Now I know many people disagree. But the pragmatic arguments they deploy – these embryos will be destroyed or kept in limbo anyway, they’re teensy-weensy – don’t circumvent the deeper moral issue. The only logical justification is an entirely utilitarian one, in which the use of “lesser” humans for the benefit of more developed ones is justified. But this begs an important question: in our society, there is no fundamental moral consensus any more, especially on contentious issues like these. Under those circumstances, it seems to me that the government should remain as neutral as possible between moral claims. The NYT interprets neutrality as funding embryonic stem cell research. That’s a funny form of neutrality. In this case, the president has carved out a policy that is, indeed, about as neutral as it could be. If the private sector wants to pursue this course, it can; if individual states want to, ditto. But no American taxpayer should be required to fund from her own dollars what she regards as a moral outrage. Keep the feds out of it. Let the states and private sector do as they will.

AND ABORTION? So how can I remain a very reluctant pro-choicer in the first trimester? Simply because the fetus is inside another human being’s body; her own liberty begins in her right to control her own physical being. Violating that freedom is another kind of slippery slope toward the erosion of liberty and property rights on which this country’s constitution is based. If your own body is not your property, what is? To clarify: I believe all abortion is morally wrong in every circumstance. But given our lack of moral consensus, the government should allow it to happen, while refraining as much as possible from facilitating it, and doing all it can to make it unnecessary (by expansive adoption practices). I know this view is, in many ways, philosophically unsatisfying; but it’s my best attempt to reconcile morality with politics in modernity. Most of our current political solutions to deep moral disagreement will be messy. This is not a reason to despise them.

IRAQ: Looking for the truly depressing view? Juan Cole has it, of course. It’s depressing largely because it’s not implausible.