Year: 2005

I’ve now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin’s comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable. The rank hysteria being perpetrated by some on the right is what is shameful. Hugh Hewitt should answer one single question: does he doubt the FBI interrogator who witnessed the appalling treatment of some detainees at Guantanamo? Here’s the report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold… On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”

Is Hewitt arguing that the interrogator was lying? Does he believe that the kind of tactics used against this prisoner are worthy of the United States? Does he believe that this happened without authorization? If he were told this story and informed that it occurred in, say, Serbia under Milosevic, would he be surprised? Hewitt should then answer the same question about the 5 detainees which the U.S. government itself has acknowledged were tortured to death by U.S. interrogators, and the scores of others who died in detention during or after “interrogation”. Does he deny that this happened? Does he honestly believe that removing the legal restrictions on cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees by our current president had nothing to do with this? Maybe he needs a little refresher on the extraordinary range and scale of the record of abuse that is still accumulating. I’m just amazed that some can view what has happened and their first instinct is to attack those who have criticized it, rather than those who have perpetrated it. It is this administration that has brought indelible shame on America, and it’s people like Dick Durbin who prove that some can actually stand up against this stain on American honor and call it what it is. Good for him. Thank God for him.

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Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush have just given us an interesting insight into where the Republican party is headed. Romney’s position on marriage rights has always been that gays should have none; he supported a state amendment that would have granted them civil unions instead. But his party’s base is insistent that gays get nothing whatever, that they be kept shut out of the family and of any legal protections for their relationships. So he now backs a referendum that would ban marriage and civil unions – timed for the next presidential election year. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, having been humiliated by the autopsy into Terri Schiavo’s death, wants to re-open ancient arguments about Michael Schiavo’s actions the night he found his wife unconscious. Has he lost all sense of perspective? The sheer immoderation of these people is staggering. But their base is adamant. They are now using arguments about gays – that they are diseased, and spread literal and figurative poison througout society – that were once echoed almost exactly by the most vicious anti-Semites against Jews:

Their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself.

Ah, yes. The danger of the Jews/Gays spreading their disease throughout society, their enormous power despite tiny numbers, their ability to pass, their threat to children, their flaunting of their disagreement with the New Testament. It’s all so familiar. I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews’ stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They’re the new Jews. And the Church, in both Catholic and Protestant variants, is dredging up its old anti-Semitism in new guises. The GOP is along for the ride.

You thought the pro-torture right couldn’t sink any lower? Think again.

Here’s an email from Iraq that gets to the heart of our current debate, it seems to me:

“First, let me start by saying how much I respect your opinions and that I enjoy reading your blog daily. I work at Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq, in the International Zone, where I’m a strategy development assistant for the Iraqi Security Forces.
I think that part of the problem in Iraq stems from the Administration’s fear that putting more soldiers in country would have made the case for going to war even more difficult. It was hard enough to sell the war on weak evidence of WMDs and Saddam’s involvement with the attacks of 9-11. By under-estimating the resources necessary to succeed, they avoided facing their critics and having a plan for a post-war reconstruction. Their goal was to simply get rid of Saddam and hope for the best. It would have been wiser to send a larger force to maintain stability in the country after Saddam’s fall since, if anything else, he did maintain order in the country (albeit, though fear and intimidation). The result is that the insurgents gained momentum and now it will take longer to train the nascent Iraqi Security Forces responsibility before any feasible reduction in troop levels. In the meantime, US soldiers will continue dying, not to mention innocent Iraqi civilians.
The lack of US troops in Iraq has been a disconcerting topic for many of us here. I still believe that we can defeat the insurgency with the current troop level … yet at what costs?”

I don’t think there’s much doubt any more that our occupation has been dangerously under-manned from the very beginning. Almost everyone with direct experience of the situation says so. Reading John Burns these past few days only confirms what struck me as pretty obvious from the first wave of looting. Money quote from Burns:

Among fighting units in the war’s badlands – in Falluja and Ramadi, in Haditha and Qaim, in Mosul and Tal Afar – complaints about force levels are the talk of officers and enlisted personnel alike.
The scope of the problem can be taken from the garrison in the Baghdad area. Maj. Gen. William G. Webster, commander of the Third Infantry Division, recently gave a rundown of the troops available to meet the surge of suicide bombings, buried roadside explosives and ambushes that have killed more than 600 people in the city since the new Shiite majority government took office in early May: 27,000 American troops, 15,000 Iraqi policemen and 7,000 Iraqi soldiers. Saddam Hussein, he said, had a regular garrison for the same area of 80,000 troops and 50,000 police.
Mr. Hussein ran a totalitarian state and had to worry about invasions, so direct comparisons can be misleading. Still, the fact that an American general had the statistics at his fingertips told its own story. The pattern of thin force levels seems to be replicated, in differing ways, almost everywhere Americans confront insurgents.

We’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back – and Rumsfeld tied the knot. We can only hope that our amazing troops and the Iraqis’ evident desire for a new future can somehow manage to wrestle victory from the incompetent, self-serving hands of their political masters.

“At any rate, we can see that [animals] are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God’s creatures . . . Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.” – Pope Benedict XVI, on animal welfare, back in 2002.

The good news – no, make that great news – is that the Bush tax cuts have clearly boosted growth and so helped government revenues in the short term. The budget deficit has now shrunk far more than previously expected this year. But check out the other significant figure:

But Bush’s and Congress’s profligacy remains largely unchecked, with government spending in May hitting $188bn, up 5.7 percent from the same month of last year.

Spending increases amount to an extra $110 billion over last year; and the full impact of the Medicare entitlement hasn’t begun to be felt. Imagine what could have been achieved if we’d had a modicum of spending restraint from the Republicans. As I’ve said before. I’m a big supporter of Bush’s tax cuts (except the estate tax). But we need far greater spending discipline for fiscal health.

FRUM AND MARRIAGE: David Frum argues that the fact that gay and straight marriage rates in Canada are roughly comparable at this point means that gay couples don’t really want the right to marry. He would expect a disproportionately huge burst of marriages among gays, after decades of pent-up frustration. In fact, what happened was a more gentle entering into the mainstream, with rates almost indistinguishable from straights. Unlike David, I’m not sure you can infer a huge amount from this. People have very personal approaches to marriage and every couple is different. Some long-standing gay couples from older generations have defined their relationships, faute de mieux, as non-marital and it would take a big shift in their consciousness to change at this point. Others aren’t ready for the same reaons straight people aren’t ready: this is a personal, not a political decision. More important, there are no gay people in Canada yet who have grown up with the possibility of marriage as a moment in their futures. They don’t yet have family expectations or nagging mothers. All this is complicated, and it will take a generation or so to see how it ultimately shakes out. But let’s say David turns out to be correct, and marriage is less popular among gay men than straights or lesbians. If, as David believes, the fact of gays settling down, and building marital relationships will be so destructive for society, wouldn’t it be a good thing, from his perspective, that fewer gay couples get married? Shouldn’t he be thrilled that gays are staying away from stability and integration? My view is the opposite: that the option of marriage will transform gay lives, relationships and psyches in ways we will not know for years, but certainly for the better. It also seems to me that even if only a few couples want to commit to each other, they deserve our support. In any social movement, a few are in the vanguard, breaking old social habits and pathologies, forging new realities and opportunities. It beggars belief that conservatives would want to actually discourage gay couples from this kind of commitment. Conservatives should surely be celebrating this more than anyone else, as they rightly laud African-American couples who break historical patterns of family breakdown and build stable marriages. Rather than seeing the first wave of married gay couples and using them to dismiss the whole idea, why wouldn’t you find their example inspiring and do all you can to support them and help their example to spread?

That’s the fraction of Americans who pay no income taxes at all – an all-time record. Another reason why the president, in my view, should have pushed tax reform rather than social security reform as his primary second term objective. Too late now, of course. The tax prof explains.

Yes, its important. But here’s some perspective: new research has found that Europe was as warm between 800 and 1300 as it is today. Then we got a Little Ice Age. Just solar variability.

Sorry for the lack of blogging this weekend. We were moving to the Cape for the next three months; and then spent the weekend doing the usual fix-up of the unwinterized condo. It couldn’t be more beautiful this morning: the tide creeping in, and as I look above the laptop, the sun sparkling on the surface of the water. Lucky man I am.