Month: May 2005

Total sense from Applebaum. Compare her reasoned position with the rationalizations and excuses for military abuse made by Instapundit. Money quote from the latter:

I do confess that I think that winning the war is much more important than Abu Ghraib, and that viewing the entire war — and the entire American military — through the prism of Abu Ghraib is as unfair as judging all Muslims by the acts of terrorists.

This sentence is one I can fully agree with. But one has to ask: where has he been for the past year? Accusations – and convictions – of torture and abuse can be found in literally dozens of detainment facilities, across Afghanistan, in Tikrit, Camp Cropper, Basra, Gitmo, and on and on. Thirty six inmates have died under interrogation. No cases of abuse were found in any detention facilities that were not geared toward interrogation. Abu Ghraib is therefore one smidgen of the problem, hyped because of highly selective visuals. Furthermore, I did not describe wrapping someone in the Israeli flag as torture. Glenn should correct the record. I cited it as one instance among many (including torture) in which offending someone’s religious and cultural identity was deployed by U.S. interrogators, as Applebaum and the factual record testifies. Glenn has one sub-clause in his rejoinder that even says: “when Andrew was a champion of the war on terror.” Excuse me? My careful, fully documented criticisms of the U.S. treatment of detainees have been made not because I am anti-war or anti-military. They are because I am pro-war and pro-military. Does Glenn really believe for a second that idiotic tactics like brandishing fake menstrual blood or Stars of David at Muslim inmates are good interrogation practices? Does he think these excrescences have helped gain any useful intelligence in any way? The problem with these abuses is that they are evil and stupid; immoral and counter-productive, as so many experts in interrogation will testify. All of this is the gift to bin Laden that keeps on giving. But it wasn’t Newsweek who gave him the gift. It was this administration. And, indirectly, those who shill for it.

My reference to threats to liberty in acquiescing to government abuse and torture of prisoners had nothing to do with freedom of the press, pace Jonah. It had everything to with a creeping expansion of government power in wartime – and public indifference, aided and abetted by some pundits. When a government commits abuses and the rest of us yawn, or decide it’s irrelevant or justified for other reasons, liberty is indeed lessened. I’ll leave John Podhoretz’s rhetoric for others to judge. But I’d wager I know much less about Joan Crawford, Mae West or Bette Davis than John does.

Do you have a secret? Write it on a postcard and post it here. I couldn’t stop reading them.

Here’s a decent point, correcting me:

In one of your postings today, you said “So we are left to ask whether to believe al Qaeda terrorists, trained to make such accusations, or American Pentagon officials.”
The people released from Guantanamo who have stated that the Qu’ran was abused are not al Qaeda terrorists. If they were, they would still be incarcerated.
In most cases, these people were deemed, after a long period of investigation and interrogation by the American military, to have been mistakenly swept up in a dragnet. Some were humanitarian workers. Some of them were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. If there were any shred of evidence against them, they would not be free. At least I hope not. If they have been set free and are al Qaeda, where is the outrage and what is the rationale?
So, tell me again. Why can’t we believe these people?

Well, if they weren’t al Qaeda supporters before they got into Guantanamo, maybe they are now.

Don’t you need to abolish the filibuster on changing Senate rules to abolish the filibuster on judicial nominees? I found this Norm Ornstein piece really interesting, and I’m sorry to say I just read it. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the filibuster question; I can see the points on both sides and generally favor up-or-down votes on judicial nominees. But setting a precedent that any Senate rule can be changed by a simple majority now strikes me as the core issue. Anyway – well worth reading. Money quote:

To get to a point where the Senate decides by majority that judicial filibusters are dilatory and/or unconstitutional, the Senate will have to do something it has never done before.
Richard Beth of the Congressional Research Service, in a detailed report on the options for changing Senate procedures, refers to it with typical understatement as “an extraordinary proceeding at variance with established procedure.”
To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation–debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say–regardless of the view held since the Senate’s beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents–they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority…
By invoking their self-described nuclear option without changing the rules, a Senate majority will effectively erase them. A new precedent will be in order–one making it easy and tempting to erase future filibusters on executive nominations and bills. Make no mistake about that.
The precedent set–a majority ignoring its own rules to override longstanding practice in one area–would almost inexorably make the Senate a mirror image of the House, moving the American system several steps closer to a plebiscitary model of government, and the Senate closer to the unfortunate House model of a cesspool of partisan rancor.

As a conservative of doubt, I’m worried.

“Allah has tormented us with ‘the people most hostile to the believers’ – the Jews. “Thou shalt find that the people most hostile to the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists.” Allah warned His beloved Prophet Muhammad about the Jews, who had killed their prophets, forged their Torah, and sowed corruption throughout their history. With the establishment of the state of Israel, the entire Islamic nation was lost, because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and because the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers.
You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations…
We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews – even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.” – Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, in a sermon, aired by Palestinian television on May 13, 2005. The Nazis live again.

You can see a potential future scenario in this Koran-abuse business. There are several independent claims by released Gitmo inmates that interrogators abused the Koran or otherwise targeted their religious sensibilities. The Pentagon denies it, as they now have. Almost no one in a position to know the truth is free from Pentagon influence; or not employed by the Pentagon. So we are left to ask whether to believe al Qaeda terrorists, trained to make such accusations, or American Pentagon officials. I know whom I’d rather believe. At the same time, we know that other incidents as bad as the Koran incident have indeed occurred, including the truly bizarre one about female interrogators and fake menstrual blood. In the New York Times today, we find reported as a throw-away line that

[i]n another case, a soldier was investigated for taunting a Muslim detainee with a Star of David.

We have evidence that detainees in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were forced to eat pork and had liquor poured down their throats. We know that abuses and torture occurred throughout the military prison system; that the rules for interrogation were deliberately made more lax; that we have 36 deaths-in-interrogation; and so on.

THE BALANCE OF DOUBT: So when we have reports of an alleged desecration of the Koran, whom are we supposed to find credible? Before this war started, I wouldn’t have even considered the possibility that the U.S. was guilty. But, given the enormous evidence of abuse that stares us in the face, doubt is now the only operative position to take. The sad truth is: this administration has forfeited our trust in its management of the military’s interrogation processes. They forfeited it not simply because of the evidence of widespread abuse and memos that expanded the range of interrogation techniques, but by the record of accountability. Anyone with real power or influence was let off the hook in the Abu Ghraib fiasco; no serious external inquiry was allowed; Rumsfeld wasn’t allowed to resign; Sanchez is in place; Gonzales is rewarded for loyalty; the Republican Congress completely looked the other way; last year, John Kerry cowardly avoided the subject. We couldn’t even get a law passed forbidding the CIA from using torture. And what I find remarkable is that interrogatory abuse is now taken for granted, even by defenders of the administration. Here’s Jonah Goldberg today:

But what on earth was gained by Newsweek’s decision to publish the story – whether it was true or not? Were we unaware that interrogators at Gitmo aren’t playing bean bag with detainees?

No we were not unaware. We were just looking the other way. So yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s world-weary assumption. This is how liberty dies – with scattered, knee-jerk applause.

“You really need to cool it with the naive self-righteousness; your latest postings remind me of something that a bitter freshman at Yale might write. I think you need to get away from your computer, take a trip to the Middle East and get a sense of the real world we’re living in. And after you get back, talk to some federal prosecutors you trust about the veracity of 99% of complaints by inmates. Your relentless and redundant commentary on abuses at Abu Graib and Guantanamo are out of proportion to what is going on there, and obscenely out of proportion relative to what is going on in the Muslim world. Over-aggressive law enforcement and military has always existed, and will always exist. I’m not faulting you for pointing it out and discussing it — you should — but you are way overdoing it. You should follow the lead of Thomas Friedman and actually visit these countries, talk to the people and see how utterly insane the fundamentalists/insurgents/terrorists are. 400 Iraqi citizens have been murdered in the last couple of weeks by fellow Muslims, yet you spend much more time talking about a woman interrogator faking a period. There is nothing close to moral equivalence here. Now, if the interrogators lined up 400 prisoners at Guantanamo and summarily beheaded them, that would be a different story.”

Andy McCarthy makes a good point that we shouldn’t blame Isikoff for the murderous anger of Islamist mobs. It says something very wrong about contemporary Islam that its followers behave this way. Isikoff should be held responsible for relying on one wobbly, anonymous source – not for murder. At the same time, the point made by some that alleged flushing of the Koran, or peeing on it, or tearing it, is not much different than the artistic excesses of people like Theo van Gogh or Andres Serrano strikes me as flawed. The Gitmo allegations are different for a simple reason. The claim is that blasphemy was deliberately deployed by a government in order to extract information from detainees. This is a big difference. Blasphemy by free citizens is one thing in an open society; the deliberate deployment of blasphemy by government in order to place extreme psychological pressure on religious inmates is quite another. You’re an anti-Semite? In a free country, you are free to speak your mind. But if the government were to desecrate Jewish symbols in front of Jewish inmates (imprisoned without trial), or force them to eat pork, or burn a Torah as part of interrogation procedures, we’d be outraged. Wouldn’t we? Here’s what I don’t get about the religious right in this. They are rightly sensitive to possible government discrimination against sincere religious faith. But here there is a case of the most atrocious anti-religious discrimination imaginable. And what is their response? Do they say: “This is obviously untrue. If it were true, we’d be outraged. Our military would never behave this way.” No; their fear is that the evidence will not back them up on this. So they say, “Look at the liberal media, feeding unsourced stories to discredit America.” Is this a form of denial or mere avoidance? Maybe their defense of religious freedom doesn’t go as deep as it might. Maybe it depends on whose religion is under attack.

Norm Geras examines the latest case. It occurs, of course, in Israel.

NOW – WORLD DOMINATION!: You thought the fudnamentalist right couldn’t get nuttier? You were wrong. Christianism is now, for some of its fringe adherents, a full-fledged political ideology, aspiring to world domination. Just like Communism. And Islamism.

THE GANNON NON-STORY: Here’s a sane piece on the non-story that the left-wing blogosphere tried to turn into Watergate. There was no scandal here whatsoever. In the end, the campaign against Gannon was sustained by pure homophobia – pioneered, as it sadly often is, by the gay far-left.