Month: October 2005

The man who ran that Iraqi-corpses-for-amateur-porn site has been arrested. The deeper question is: why hasn’t the military disciplined those soldiers who violated the Geneva Conventions?

Remember those little blue people from the 70s? They’re finally getting what they deserve, courtesy of Unicef. Yes: Unicef. (Hat tip: the Walrus.)

There are, of course, other variables affecting high growth rates in Eastern Europe and Russia, where flat taxes have taken off as a trend. But the average growth rate now in flat tax countries is 8 percent. Here are some updated stats.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I have been an avid fan of Bill Maher and his talk shows for years now, and I have always enjoyed your appearances on his current show.

I especially wanted to thank you for your eloquent comments on this past Friday’s show about faith and people of faith. As a recovering alcoholic and survivor of rape and childhood sexual abuse, there has been nothing but faith at times that has allowed me to continue living (sober!) in a world I have frequently wished to desert. I discovered a higher power through the 12 steps and continue to know that power in my life; I often come across people who misunderstand, who consider reliance on a higher power to be weak and cowardly, or even stupid, as Bill said.

One thing I have learned through all of my experiences in dealing with matters of the spirit, is that the word “God” has meanings attached to it that have undermined it and spoiled it, and that when people use that word, they have one concept in mind, which of course is very limited. One other thing I have learned is that people who have never found themselves in a situation that they could not possibly comprehend or conquer through their own wills and resources (or resources they’ve been given by others) are the quickest to say that there is no God. Not that I wish them to experience that – okay, maybe sometimes. Anyway, your comments about learning to love and be in this world were so very important for me to hear and truly validated my personal work and the message I carry to other women and those who may be suffering.”

We now have very clear testimony from someone at Guantanamo Bay who probably saw more of what was going on than anyone else: James Yee, the Muslim chaplain at the base. My paper, the Sunday Times of London, has reprinted part of his must-read book, “For God And Country.” Check it out. Yee is particularly acute about Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander ordered by Rumsfeld to transfer the torture and abuse techniques developed at Gitmo to Abu Ghraib. Neither Miller nor Rumsfeld, of course, have suffered any repercussions for their actions. Only the grunts get scapegoated in Rumsfeld’s military. Miller, according to Yee, was fighting what he saw as a religious war against Islam:

The man in overall charge was Major General Geoffrey Miller, a slight but self-confident Texan in his late fifties. He was later sent to Iraq to make recommendations on improving intelligence collection at Abu Ghraib prison in the months before it became infamous for the maltreatment of its inmates. If there was trouble with the prisoners, guards were supposed to restore order calmly. But Miller said when visiting Camp Delta or whenever seeing troopers around the base: ‘The fight is on!’ This was a subtle way of saying that rules were relaxed and infractions were easily overlooked.
Miller was a devout Christian. In one of the first private conversations that he and I had, he invited me for a stroll under the watchtowers and told me that several of his friends and colleagues had been killed in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. He had felt a deep anger towards ‘those Muslims’ who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – such anger, he explained, that he had sought counselling with a chaplain. I appreciated his candour but I sensed there was a subtle warning behind his words.

Yee was onto something.

TARGETING FAITH: Miller’s rules at Gitmo were precisely to target the prisoners’ religious faith for random retribution and cruelty:

Violent episodes were increasing. In one incident a guard had to be hauled off a handcuffed detainee whom he was beating on the head with a handheld radio. By the time I arrived the detainee had been taken to the hospital, but his blood was fresh on the ground and what appeared to be large pieces of flesh were soaking in it.

Bad as this violence was, many soldiers discovered a weapon far more powerful than fists: Islam. Because religion was the most important issue for nearly all the prisoners in Camp Delta, it became the most important weapon used against them.

Guards mocked the call to prayer and rattled doors, threw stones against the cages and played loud rock’n’roll music as the prisoners prayed.

Knowing that physical contact between unrelated men and women is not allowed under Islamic law, female guards would be exceptionally inappropriate in how they patted down the prisoners or touched them on the way to the showers or recreation. Detainees often resisted and were IRFed.

The guards knew that Muslims believe that the Koran contains the actual words of God and is to be treated with the utmost respect. I never heard of an incident where a detainee hid anything dangerous in the Koran; doing so would be considered an insult. Yet the guards shook the prisoners’ Korans violently, broke bindings, ripped pages and dropped the book on the floor, all on the pretext of searching them… Translators with the Joint Intelligence Group (JIG) also confirmed that some prisoners were forced to prostrate themselves in the centre of a satanic circle lit with candles. Interrogators shouted at them, ‘Satan is your God, not Allah! Repeat that after me!’

I’m waiting for Michelle Malkin and Heather Mac Donald to describe all of this – which verifies widespread abuse of the Koran at Gitmo – as enemy propaganda. It isn’t. It’s true. Yee knew the truth which was partly why he was disgracefully framed and smeared by the Pentagon. But what matters now is that this kind of abuse be stopped. It only hurts us in the war by making it a battle between Christianity and Islam rather than between freedom and theocracy. And what matters now is that someone be held accountable. Surely we can all agree that the new guidelines for humane treatment of detainees (which were the old ones), set by the Senate, need to be passed by the House. The president’s threatened veto is an open acknowledgment that this administration abuses detainees as a matter of policy and refuses to be reined in. We have to choose between the integrity of an Ian Fishback and the sadism of General Miller, and his enablers, Bush and Rumsfeld. There is no choice, as long as this is still America.

I know that at some point, the poet Philip Larkin, in a letter or review or essay, wrote something to the effect that he regretted the civil rights movement in America because it was ruining jazz. It was a joke, of course, but you can see the deeper point he was making. I’ve tried to nail it down, but can’t, and I’m now worrying I may be completely wrong. Is there anyone out there who knows the source?

Here’s an extremely persuasive case for a kinder, gentler flat tax that would gut the IRS, energize the economy, force the wealthy to cough up more and encourage savings and health insurance. All for a mere 14 percent. The flat tax is for this decade what equal marriage rights was for the last: an idea whose time has come.

I saw the movie Saturday in L.A. at the beautiful Arclight theaters. It’s easily the finest movie I have seen this year (with “MurderBall” a close second), but my fascination by it is probably colored by my chosen profession. In most movies about writing or even intellectual life – the comically bad “Good Will Hunting” or the moronic “A Beautiful Mind,” come to mind – there is not the slightest indication that the writer, director or actors have a clue about the simple dynamics of the writing or thinking process. “Capote” catches it with unnerving, restrained skill. I cannot improve on Daphne Merkin’s pitch-perfect review in Slate so let me merely echo this judgment:

Capote enables us to grasp, more than any movie on the subject I have seen, what it is exactly that a writer does when he or she writes, how observation leads to perception leads to the crafting of sentences. In so doing, it gets far closer to the complicated, elusive heart of this strange calling-the way it is both an explicitly private but implicitly public act, a means of rendezvousing with the self but also of showcasing the self-than any cinematic depiction until now.

Merkin, oddly, does not acknowledge Capote’s homosexuality, which permeates the movie, and sets the gay writer even further apart from the rural, straight world he has to confront and immerse in. Capote navigated straight society the old way: by a “talent to amuse” in high society, even while he was deadly serious about his work. Funny fags have always been acceptable in certain circles. But what helped connect him to his murderous subjects? A shared history of an awful childhood, but also surely an intuitive understanding of what it means to be an outsider. That’s a gift – made all the more compelling by the way in which the movie did not flinch in the face of Capote’s alloyed character and ethics. But the loneliness and sadness of the man remains. Did he ever know love? And if it had been offered, would he have ever been able to say yes?

The Miers hearings are going to be key. And I’d say there are a couple of possibilities. The first is that she’ll be revealed in some fashion or other as completely unprepared or unqualified for her proposed job. Specter or Leahy or Biden may get a moment when she is revealed as simply too small for the shoes she is trying to fill. But she’s a very smart woman, from all accounts, and she will be trained well. The second and, to my mind, likelier possibility is that she’ll come off as Ross Perot in a Talbots dress. She’ll be direct, folksy, and the Senatorial inquisition will rally the public to her side. A little lady from Texas versus hair-transplanted blowhard from Delaware? No contest. Bush will play the populist card, while playing the evangelical card to the base beyond his base. “See,” he’ll say. “She’s just what I said and all you pointy-headed neocon intellectuals don’t run the country. I do.” It would not be hard for her to exceed expectations at this point; and every comment I have ever heard about her from within the White House is tinged with a mixture of fear and wonder. There is something we don’t yet know about Miers – and it’s what she’s actually like as a person on television. That could well alter the dynamic of everything.

WHAT IT SAYS: Of course, assuming that this tactic works, and I’m just hypothesizing, it says something less about conservatism or Miers or the Senate, than about Bush. In the matter of the Supreme Court, Bush’s fundamental motives are sticking a finger in the eye of his intellectual supporters, and keeping a crony so close to him that his executive running of the war on terror will never be subject to real Congressional oversight. (Miers is insurance for the executive-branch-worshipping Roberts). Kitty Kelley notes how this president has sealed off from the public decades of presidential data that are vitally important to making democracy work. But this president is and always has been as much a dauphin as a president. He’s responsible for a dynasty as much as a democracy. Miers is the dynasty’s constitutional guardian – as well as potentially a minimalist Justice, in line with Roberts. No other candidate could fulfill both roles. Bush, in other words, is treating the Court as a means for personal protection and dynastic noblesse oblige. The question is simply whether the GOP wants to become the vehicle for a crony-ridden aristocracy or something more transparent and meritocratic. I know which GOP I prefer. But those days keep receding further and further into the past.

Here’s a spectacularly relevant quote from the Federalist Papers, where Hamilton argues for the Senate’s important role in vetting presidential appointments to bodies such as the Supreme Court. Someone should cite it at the Miers’ hearings:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entire branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing. The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other. He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

My italics. There are two reasons to vote against Harriet Miers. Someone who needs a “crash course” on constitutional law should not be selected to be a Supreme Court Justice required to make decisions, if confirmed, in a short period of time. The second reason is simply that this president has abused his power by picking someone who “worships” him, whose fundamental qualification is that she is an indentured servant to him, and whose fundamental loyalty has long been to a political dynasty, rather than a serious, settled judicial philosophy. I’m still waiting for the hearings to give her a fair shot. But in some ways, this nomination tells us little about Miers, and a lot about Bush. From the Federalist papers, no. 76.

More evidence that a flat tax should be the central issue of the conservative movement.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “This newspaper is second to none in its pro-American sentiments; in the early Bush years it devoted much ink to defending the President against the often malevolent and ignorant attacks of a congenitally anti-American European media. But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamt of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed in the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.” – editorial in the conservative British newspaper, The Business.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Good Show on Bill Maher last night. It was nice hearing conversation from three individuals who I knew had different political beliefs than my own but were able to convey enough pieces of thought that resulted in a consensus.
For myself, as someone who views himself as “eclectic in thought”, you reminded me last night of days gone by when I enjoyed watching William F. Buckley on “Firing Line”. I would listen, agree or disagree, but actually understand someone and their personal position without throwing up. Too often today, the chasm of ideologies has forced those who earn their living from the “political entertainment field” to seek outrageous positions, void of rational thought, just simply to provide more kindling for the cultural war fire. Why do they do that? So they can perpetuate their employment?”