Year: 2005

Greg Djerejian reads the tea-leaves. My bet is that Gitmo will be closed within a year.

GULF STREAM: An emailer suggests one more pee possibility:

I gather from the photograph that the air vent is the grate on the lower left. Imagine if you will a soldier from inside walking to the nearest exit, not even stepping outside, he just props the door open slightly, he’s not even cognizant of the air vent, and he relieves himself. I can visualize the arc of the stream, he’s a kid, it’s hot in Guantanamo and he’s drinking lots of fluids, he pisses like a racehorse. It’s not an obvious truth but a strong gust of wind, a westerly, could have lifted his urine and splattered it across a detainee’s cell. Keep in mind, the detainee was probably situated as close to the vent as possible to take advantage of the breeze. And he, the detainee, like you, the slightly histrionic journalist, was incensed and viewed the splatter of piss as a deliberate insult. Word then spreads among the detainees. The easiest thing to do is to reassign the guard. What are you going to do to convince detainees it was an accident, wait for the winds to shift and try for a reenactment? Next time you’re in Aruba, take a piss into a headwind.

Okay. More plausible than the official version.

No, it won’t happen. My old friend Alan Duncan knows he has a very distant chance. But it does say something that an openly gay man can run for the leadership of the British Conservatives. Can you imagine that ever happening among Republicans?

“I couldn’t agree more with your comment on ‘secularism gone nuts,’ and hope nobody complains about my Virginia license plate. It reads 16 EZK 49 for the Biblical definition of the sin of sodomy (Ezekiel chapter 16, verse 49): “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Who knew so many Republicans are sodomites??”

As you know, I’m a secularist and believe religion is best kept to the private sphere. But this kind of suppression of religious belief is truly noxious, and merely gives the religious right more grist for paranoia.

LIBERTY BEFORE DEMOCRACY? A tweaking of the Bush doctrine.

CAVUTO: Not only knee-pads but several contributions to the Bush campaign, up to $2000 in 2002. Here, here, and here. Hey: fair and balanced.

LOWER OFFICER STANDARDS: The military, facing a recruitment crisis, is lowering standards for officers, allowing people who have committed minor crimes. Obvious commentary from a retired army officer here.

THE ANSWER, MY FRIEND: Thanks for all your theories about the military pee blowing in the wind. Just to recap, here’s the official description of what happened:

The guard had left his observation area post and went outside to urinate. He urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into the block. The Sergeant of the Guard (SOG) responded and immediately relieved the guard. The SOG ensured the detainee received a fresh uniform and a new Koran. The Joint Detention Operations Group (JDOG) 2 commander reprimanded the guard and assigned him to gate guard duty where he had no contact with detainees for the remainder of his assignment at JTF-GTMO.

Here’s a useful picture of what we might be dealing with. A little pee splatter is not uncommon. But there are many places to take leaks. I’ve taken advantage of trees, bushes, dark urban corners, alleys, and all sorts of places in my time. But I tend not to pee near an air-vent that leads directly into a someone’s living quarters. I don’t scout around for a basement apartment, look for an airvent and pee just nearby. Even if I did, and some pee drifted in the wind into an open air-vent, what are the chances that even a small amount would make it on to an individual inside? If I were a soldier and this was an absurd mistake, I can see being disciplined. But I don’t see why I’d be forbidden access to any detainees for the rest of my time in Gitmo. The obvious truth is that a guard decided to humiliate a Muslim prisoner by pissing on him through an airvent. The military cannot say that because the story would then read: Koran not flushed, but pissed on. So they came up with the magic pee, whose ability to swerve left then right into the designated wind vent rivals the smartest of smart bombs. Our military sure is high-tech these days. And no, this isn’t a huge deal. It’s just a petty lie that makes us suspect bigger ones.

An emailer informs me:

Your reference to Jesus’ closes friend as a ‘former prostitute’ I assume is Mary Magdalene. Please know there is nothing to suggest she was a prostitute. Even the Vatican, many years ago, acknowledged the mistake of previous teaching. The assumption of sexual sin when women are described in the Bible as sinners is evidence of the patriarchy that continues today. I’ve heard it preached about the woman at the well, the woman who anointed Jesus and Mary Magdalene, all being guilty of sexual sin or being prostitutes. There are no facts in evidence to support that. The woman at the well, having five husbands, could just as easily been her first four died and she was handed off to brothers as property – the custom in those days. There have been other suggestions that the five husbands stood for five different iterations of God in Samaritan culture…etc. In future writings when you mention Mary Magdalene, don’t fall into the trap of a centuries old mistake. Give her a break. She’s had the worst press of anyone in the Bible.

Point taken.

I was onto something.

Neil Cavuto seems to have conducted this interview with knee-pads on. But my favorite piece of slobbering sycophancy is the following attempt to get at why the president’s campaign for social security reform has not won much public support. Over to the man who makes Larry King look like an interrogator at Bagram:

CAVUTO: But in the meantime, the news channels then hear what you’re saying, and then later on, we have this Michael Jackson update. I mean, his trial and his ongoing saga has gripped the nation for the past four-and-a-half, five months as you’ve been on this campaign.

CAVUTO: I know this is a little outlandish, Mr. President…

BUSH: No, that’s all right, Neil.

CAVUTO: Do you think that the focus on Michael Jackson has hurt you?

Good grief.

The big downside of the Democrats’ winning the next presidential election is that they will have to raise taxes. A lot. Matt Yglesias is honest enough to say he has no idea how they’re going to get away with it.

It takes another blow from the do-gooders.

PISSING IN THE WIND: Maybe I should get this off my chest. I don’t believe the military’s account of how a Koran got splattered by a guard’s urine. The reason is not that I have completely lost trust in the military’s credibility (although I have a lot less faith than I did a couple of years ago, and that goes for Pat Tilman’s parents as well). It’s that the story, in its face, seems like something obviously made up. We are supposed to believe that a guard was relieving himself outside near the open window of a cell. His pee was allegedly carried by a gust of wind, which somehow managed to guide the pee around and into an open window, where the Koran and a detainee were unfortunately placed. I mean: come off it. They have no latrines? There are ground-level open windows for prisoners? Our military is so high-tech that their pee can now turn corners? Maybe someone out there can help me understand this story better. Have I missed something? Or is this as laughable on its face as it appears to be?

It turns out that the Alger-Hiss-loving lefty, Victor Navasky, has been running the Columbia Journalism Review for a year already! Nick Lemann was instrumental in hiring the almost comically old left dinosaur as a “distinguished journalist” to supervise the publication. It remains, of course, strictly unbiased, if a lot less transparent than, say, blogs. Mediacrity has the details. Now can you imagine the fuss if they had hired Bill Buckley? And kept it on the DL for so long?