Year: 2005

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.

Here’s the money quote from the president’s spokesman:

[O]ur military goes out of their way to handle the Koran with care and respect. There are policies and practices that are in place. This report was wrong. Newsweek, itself, stated that it was wrong. And so now I think it’s incumbent and — incumbent upon Newsweek to do their part to help repair the damage. And they can do that through ways that they see best, but one way that would be good would be to point out what the policies and practices are in that part of the world, because it’s in that region where this report has been exploited and used to cause lasting damage to the image of the United States of America. It has had serious consequences. And so that’s all I’m saying, is that we would encourage them to take steps to help repair the damage. And I think that they recognize the importance of doing that. That’s all I’m saying.

Does McClellan really want the press to report more widely on what has been going on at Guantanamo Bay? Does he really want more stories about forced nakedness, female interrogators using panties and fake menstrual blood, and many reports from former inmates about deliberate misuse of the Koran? Well, let it rip, I say. The press’s response should not be to whine about the Bush administration pestering them. It should be call McClellan’s bluff. Demand far greater access to inmates at Gitmo. Demand that former interrogators be allowed to speak freely to the media. Ask for interviews with CIA interrogators at Gitmo and in Afghanistan. Get military permission to debrief Muslim military chaplain, James Yee. Run long, detailed stories debriefing released Gitmo detainees and try to confirm or debunk their allegations of abuse. Pull together all the reports of abuse of religion in U.S. facilities and explain the full context for readers. And when the administration and Pentagon resist such efforts for deeper exploration of “policies and practices,” refer to McClellan’s briefing. The administration has now opened the door for a fuller exploration of their policies and actual practices regarding detainees. Let’s walk in and see what’s in there, shall we?

This one is on Glenn Reynolds’ comparative coverage of the Newsweek error and the original Abu Ghraib revelations:

Like yourself, I was particularly struck by the suggestion made by Instapundit that Newsweek’s error was “the press’s Abu Ghraib”. Initially, I interpreted the parity as one of moral fault: the idiotic idea that similar consequences make similar crimes. But in considering its relation to the surrounding arguments – i.e. Reynolds’ not-so-subtle premonitions about the future of free speech – I arrived at a more cynical interpretation: namely, that it ultimately didn’t matter whether the reports of torture were true or not (since we now know that Muslims will riot and hate us either way) and so just as Newsweek shouldn’t have reported its story, the original Abu Ghraib story should have been likewise silenced. This also fits with Reynolds’ recent musings that other documentation may also be fake, thus calling into question the legitimacy of the entire torture story.
To evaluate these two interpretations, I went back to the week in May ’04 when the torture story broke, and took a random sample (as a social scientist, such are my habits) of Instapundit’s posts/updates to compare his reaction to that of the Newsweek scandal. The Newsweek story was the subject of 22 of the 40 posts/updates, all of which expressed admonishment. In contrast, the sample of 40 posts from the Abu Ghraib weeks contained only 2 expressing admonishment of the abuse (and even there, it is qualified), while the 12 other posts/updates on the abuse scandal either: A) Attempted to minimize its moral and practical significance, or B) Tried to discredit the evidence as fake or exaggerated by anti-troop, liberal media bias.
In other words, Reynolds’ treatment of the real torture story was almost indistinguishable from his treatment of the fake torture story. For Reynolds, a false report of torture represents the same, basic problem as its demonstrable, photographic truth: namely, the subordination of the media’s liberal agenda to that of the U.S. in wartime. This, it seems to me, is the real implication of the notion of “the press’s Abu Ghraib”: the tendency to view The News, not by the criteria of empirical validity, but by the patriotism and political pragmatism of its consequences.

I think the emailer is being too kind. Instapundit’s coverage suggests that he believes that the erroneously-sourced Newsweek story is actually more offensive and important than what happened at Abu Ghraib. A more direct expression of an even more hardline position is given by LaShawn Barber:

Let me clear up one thing. Whether Americans flushed the Koran down the toilet is irrelevant. Newsweek should not have reported it, even if true.

Now there’s a new standard.

Today is the first anniversary of the full civil liberation of gay citizens in one state in the United States. I’m celebrating. I do not believe for a second that we are going to lose this battle, because I deeply believe in the truth and justice of the cause of equality, and I believe that, in America, that cause always wins in the end. Setbacks are inevitable. But the progress we have made is astonishing by any historical standard:

Above all, we have changed consciousness. In civil rights movements, that’s what matters and that’s what endures. People forget that two decades ago, homosexuality meant simply sex for most Americans – and unsavory sex at that. Or it meant counter-cultural revolution. Or left-wing victim politics. By fighting the marriage fight, we changed the terms of that debate. We co-opted the language of our enemies – the language of family, love, responsibility, commitment. We did this not simply because it helps us win over the middle of American politics. But because it’s actually reflective of the reality of many of our lives … The next generation will grow up – gay and straight – fully aware of the existence of marriage as an option for gay couples, even if that option is in another state or another country. That will deeply and subtly change social expectations for gay men and women; it will alter sex and dating; it will counter some of the homophobia and low self-esteem that strangles some gay youth. It will tell the next generation of homosexuals: you have a future. That future is one of love and commitment and social integration. It is not assured. But it is conceivable.

Time to thank all those people – gay and especially straight – who have had the courage to support us, and to see that, in America, equality, fairness and human dignity is everyone’s business.

Europeans agree with Americans, it seems.

EVANGELICALS AND TORTURE: Not everyone is gung-ho. The position of the religious right in this developing story is going to be fascinating.