Year: 2005

My readers are better than Google. Here’s handy explanation:

The logic of Fitzgerald has sound basis in the American legal system. Despite the noble work journalists sometimes do, reporters, much like any other citizen/resident, do not have carte blanche to aid in the concealment of a criminal act simply on the basis of their profession. In a case based on federal law (such as the law at issue for Fitzgerald, Cooper and Miller, one making it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert agent of the United States), the Federal Rules of Evidence hold that the privileges against compulsory testimony that apply are the privileges that arise under the Common Law. Examples of these are the attorney-client privilege, the privilege against self-incrimination, the priest-penitent privilege, and the marital communications privilege. The courts have refused to recognize new privileges, such as an accountant-client or reporter-source privilege, which have never been recognized under the Common Law. For historical reasons, the ultimate value to society in ferreting out the truth in a case or controversy (here, a criminal case) through the obtainment of evidence has been ajudged paramount. Note that Judge Hogan’s ruling here is based on Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that “the First Amendment interest asserted by the newsperson was outweighed by the general obligation of a citizen to appear before a grand jury or at trial, pursuant to a subpoena, and give what information he or she possesses.” For more information on privileges, try the handy run-down here.

Thanks. Still, it seems to me that Fitzgerald’s bald statement that no one in America can rely on confidentiality is excessive.

“I remain opposed to torture, as I understand the term, and as I believe the common understanding of the term has been in Anglo-Saxon democracies this past 100 years or so.” – John Derbyshire, today.

“My mental state these past few days: 1. The Abu Ghraib “scandal”: Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let’s have a couple of courts martial for appearance’s sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB.” – John Derbyshire, May 9, rejoicing in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Up to 90 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib, who were by any definition protected by the Geneva Conventions, were innocent.

“What really bothers me right now is the political self-protection in place of moral values that happens on the right and left. The left demonstrated this with their rallying around Clinton during Monica-gate. While Clinton probably did not deserve to be impeached, he certainly did not act presidential and was not worthy of the support he received. With the Democrats out of power, the Republicans have been front and center with their political self-protection. Where is the outrage about torture? Honestly, they impeach Clinton over sex and lying, but actual incidents of human beings from around the world being treated with Nazi stye torture is responded to with circling of political wagons. At what point does humanity trump politics? Those who committed the horrors of 9/11 showed no humanity, and only looked to serve their political agenda of terror. We are better then that. Both parties need to be. I am not calling Republicans Nazis or saying they are the same as 9/11 terrorists, but I am saying the moral fiber of our nation is called into question with government sanctioned torture of people, incident or guilty. It is one thing to get into debates about what it means to be patriotic, a silly debate the right and left get into all the time, but it is another thing for our humanity to be at stake. Where is the outrage? Both parties have men and women of great moral conviction. May of those Democrats were missing during Clinton’s presidency, and it seems many Republicans are missing now.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

Here’s a very insightful essay by leftist gay writer, Michael Bronski, on the question of Susan Sontag’s closetedness. What he homes in on is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of her work, a contradiction betwen her public commmitment to elucidating the political implications of personal cowardice – and her own cowardice in refusing to deal honestly with a central fact of her own identity, a fact that had huge public consequences in her own time:

But if she could not have come out in 1969 after the Stonewall riots, couldn’t she have done so in the 1970s as feminism became mainstream? Couldn’t she have done so in the 1980s as AIDS ravaged a generation of gay men, something she wrote about so movingly in her short story “The Way We Live Now” and her book “AIDS and Its Metaphors?” Couldn’t she have done so in the 1990s as the secret nature of her relationships with other women evolved into an “open secret” (open to everyone, that is, except for the intrepid reporters at the Times)? Of course, she could have. But she didn’t. She obviously decided – this was a woman who took all of her decisions very seriously – not to.
This raises some complicated questions: What does it mean to set yourself up as an arbiter of moral issues who plumbs the intersections of public action and personal responsibility even as you avoid discussing vital, personal issues? In most of her political writings Sontag explicated how institutionalized power structures – racism, colonialism, state-sponsored violence – hurt individual people as well as nations. It is not as though she did not understand how homophobia works.

Coming out as a public intellectual who is also gay entails risk. I have dealt with this for years. A huge amount of criticism of my own work (on the right) is tinged with homophobia, and the ransacking of my private life (by the left) was imbued with homophobia and HIV-phobia as well. If I had not come out as gay at the beginning of my career, or as HIV-positive a decade ago, I would have had to deal with none of it. But so be it. If you are an honest public writer, you deal with the person you are, not the person it would be easier to be. You fight through the attempt to marginalize and belittle you and your work. Look, for example, at Camille Paglia, an openly gay woman whose eclectic and universal interests, whose plumbing of high and low, whose capacity for analysis of art and literature and candor and history easily rivals – and often surpasses – Sontag’s. The difference between Paglia and Sontag is courage and integrity. Just don’t expect many on the so-called left to point this out. Kudos to Bronski for going there.

He criticizes me for not explaining what I think is legitimate and illegitimate in the interrogation of prisoners. The reason I haven’t spelled it out is that I thought it was obvious. My position is that we should stick with the rules and regulations and procedures that have always been followed by the U.S. military – humane treatment, no physical coercion. These are all laid out in a series of treaties known as the Geneva Conventions. That position, by the way, is the president’s own official position. The burden of proof seems to me to lie with those who want to tear up the rules of humane treatment of prisoners of war, and erect new boundaries. That’s what the Bush administration did. And the boundaries for pain were about as extreme as you can imagine. In his own memo, Jay Bybee, assistant attorney general even found a way to justify the actions of some Serbian war criminals against Bosnian victims! And Glenn wonders why some talk about the “degeneracy” of the Bush administration. What amazes me is how so many supporters of the war would rather explain away or rationalize or ignore these evil and utterly self-defeating policies. They seem to care more about defending the administration than either winning the war or standing up to evil. I just don’t get it.

“The Jews in Central Europe welcomed the Russian Revolution but it ended badly for them. The tacit alliance between the neo-cons and the Christian right is less easily understood. I can imagine a similarly disillusioning outcome … The radical right and the radical left see liberalism’s appeal to reason and tolerance as the denial of their uniform ideology. Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this.” – Fritz Stern, scholar of Nazism, in the New York Times.

Today will be an important opportunity to see what this administration has wrought with respect to the humane treatment of prisoners in U.S. military custody. Let’s retire at the start the notion that the only torture that has been used by the U.S. has been against known members of al Qaeda. This is not true. Many innocent men and boys were raped, brutally beaten, crucified for hours (a more accurate term than put in “stress positions”), left in their own excrement, sodomized, electrocuted, had chemicals from fluorescent lights poured on them, forced to lie down on burning metal till they were unrecognizable from burns – all this in Iraq alone, at several prisons as well as Abu Ghraib. I spent a week reading all the official reports over Christmas for a forthcoming review essay. Abu Ghraib is but one aspect of a pervasive pattern of torture and abuse that, in my view, is only beginning to sink in.

PERVASIVE AND EVIL: This brutal treatment occurred, according to various government reports, only at internment facilities which were also designed to get intelligence. Up to 80 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib – which was used to get better intelligence – were utterly innocent. The torture was done by hundreds of different U.S. military officers and soldiers from almost every branch of the military. There is no assurance that it has stopped. And there’s plenty of evidence that many senior officials knew exactly what was going on. When Alberto Gonzales says he now backs a recently instituted anti-torture policy, it necessarily implies that he once supported a pro-torture policy. (If he didn’t, why the reversal?) Orwell urged us against the kind of terms favored by torture-justifiers as “coercive interrogation.” That’s why I’ve cited just a few of the methods. These methods are evil, counter-productive to the war effort and deeply wounding to the integrity and reputation of the United States and the entire free world. After Abu Ghraib, you might expect some kind of reckoning. But what’s stunning about this president is his complete indifference to these facts. His nomination of Gonzales to attorney general is a de facto statement that he believes that someone who enabled these things needs rewarding, not censuring. This from a president elected in part on something called “moral values.” If “moral values” mean indifference to torture, they are literally meaningless.

MERITOCRACY IN TROUBLE? In America, the omens aren’t good. The Economist explains.

An insight into how many Arab men appreciate rotund women and are force-feeding them into obesity. They start at the age of eight. Money quote about one of these victims:

Ms. Ethmane says she was required to consume four liters of milk in the morning, plus couscous. She ate milk and porridge for lunch. She was awoken at midnight and given several more pints of milk, followed by a prebreakfast feeding at 6 a.m. If she threw up, she says, her mother forced her to eat the vomit. Stretch marks appeared on her body, and the skin on her upper arms and thighs tore under the pressure. If she balked at the feedings, her mother squeezed her toes between two wooden sticks until the pain was unbearable. “I would devour as much as possible,” says Ms. Ethmane. “I resembled a mattress.” …
Force-feeding is usually done by girls’ mothers or grandmothers; men play little direct role. The girls’ stomachs are sometimes vigorously massaged in order to loosen the skin and make it easier to consume even greater quantities of food. … Local officials say some women are so fat they can barely move. In [a Mauritanian] survey, 15% of the women said their skin split as a result of overeating. One-fifth of women said one of their toes or fingers were broken to make them eat.

Kudos for Daniel Pipes and the WSJ for bringing attention to this problem. Where, one wonders, are Western feminists?

EUPHEMISM WATCH: “Mitt Romney is going to have a hard time connecting with the social sonservative base of the party given his Mormon faith–just a fact of life. For what it’s worth…” – a GOP insider as reported by Rich Lowry in NRO. Lowry clarified with another less pronounced euphemism: “Yes, the point that insider I cited earlier was making was that a Mormon would have trouble connecting with the evangelical Christian base of the party.” It’s not a big deal, but it is interesting as an indicator of what the GOP now is: a sectarian base with political outreach. “Trouble connecting …?” Translation: a Mormon would not be accepted by the evangelical Christian base of the GOP because he’s a … Mormon. When your base is sectarian, it’s not surprising they have sectarian preferences. A simple question: will someone not “born again” be able to be a Republican candidate for president in the near future? The answer isn’t obvious.

I hope you remember Irshad Manji’s wonderful little book, “The Trouble With Islam.” At great personal risk, this Canadian woman has taken on Islamist intolerance. And when she reports progress and hope, it gladdens the heart. Here’s an email I received from her today:

Some of you haven’t heard from me in a while. Please forgive the silence. I’m barely keeping up now that I don’t have an assistant. But this isn’t a personal update — not exactly. It’s a note of hope. At a time when disasters from the natural to the man-made are on our minds, good news seems sparse. Key word: “seems”.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve tried to catch up on emails received through my site (www.muslim-refusenik.com). I’m happy to report that I’m hearing far more support than hostility from Muslims around the world. Even disagreement — of which there is plenty — tends to be more introspective than it was a year ago.

Now that the Arabic language edition of The Trouble with Islam is posted on my site, my inbox is teeming with messages of gratitude from Muslims in the Middle East (and, I might add, Europe). I’m hearing increasingly from Muslims in Turkey, Russia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa.

This week, the Urdu edition is being published in Pakistan. Some self-described “progressive” Muslims have already warned me and my translator that we’re on their “killing list.” They’re also contacting Pakistan’s clergy and government officials to stop the book’s distribution. But they can’t stop me from posting the Urdu version on my site.

Meanwhile, I take strength from the many Muslims who have written to ask where they can acquire the Urdu edition. As one young Pakistani put it, “My dad wants a copy sooo bad he’s read to pee in his pants!!” (Insert your own punch line here.)

Finally, in the spirit of hope, let me share two particular emails with you. One comes from the UK; the other from France. Both are written by Muslim women — who, in my own travels, have shown themselves to be the most passionate champions of reviving ijtihad, Islam’s lost tradition of independent thinking.

May 2005 be a year in which we not only respond to human crises, but prevent a few through open debate and honest discussion.

Salaam,
Irshad

***

“Hi Irshad,

I’ve lived in England throughout my 30 years of life. During that time, I have vigorously defended my faith and my culture against the Paki-bashers that pervade English society. I have always been a devout Muslim woman, respectful to my parents and my loving husband. It was my husband who first told me about you – a traitor amongst our midst. A woman who would give succour to our enemies and fan the flames of Islamophobia.

I was lent your book about a month ago – so I could find out what we devout Muslims were up against. Know they enemy – as Sun Tzu would say. The title made me furious and almost gag and the picture of you nauseated me; a typical wanna-be-white, MTV presenter bimbo with right-on trendy liberal credentials and a terrible haircut that only a lesbian could wear.

Then I sat down to read your book. And I read. I then went to your website to find out more about you. And I read.

The ideas that you present have left me stunned. The beauty of the vision of Islam that you present before me leaves me in tears. Your words are witty and self-deprecating, but they can’t hide the huge magnitude of what you put before us. For me the past month has been a a continuous wave of epiphany and awakening.

I’m embarrassed and humbled by how prejudiced I was before I actually got a chance to read your book. I now look at your picture and marvel that someone so young and beautiful can be so wise and articulate.

I still find it difficult not to instinctively justify and defend the (often barbaric) behaviour and beliefs of Muslims against the white infidels or try to deflect the blame from Islam as it is practiced today by a few misguided souls. But I see now that by doing so, I only harm our faith – and the possibility that it might sit in harmony with the world’s other great religions.

But more importantly, as my son and daughter grow up and ask me about life, the universe, and everything – I’ll encourage them to read not only the Koran, but every other book they can get their hands on. To research and to learn for themselves and to challenge all the ideas that are put before before them. Most of all to think.

From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!!” – N

***

Assalam alaikum, Ms. Manji:

I’m reading your wonderful and brave book for the third time now. I’m so happy to have in print something that deals with the same issues I’ve been struggling with and questioning ever since I converted to Islam. I tend to freeze up and turn incoherent when actually discussing them out loud; I find your book helps me express myself.

One of the issues that often comes up for me is the question of hijab. I live in France, and this is a charged topic. One side thinks it’s a symbol of oppression; the other side thinks that words like “symbol of oppression” signal racism and intolerance on the speaker’s part. So I get people at once telling me that I live in a free society and don’t have to wear ‘that thing’ on my head, while others tell me that people who use terms like ‘that thing’ are intolerant and hateful and will go to Hell. (umm…)

My standpoint is that I support a woman’s freedom to expose as much of herself as she likes (bravo for the law in Canada, where women can go topless!) In return, I ask that my freedom be respected to conceal as much as I would like. I wear hijab clothing because this way, no one can tell if I have belly-fat or whether my hair looks salon-perfect. (I like yours by the way! Very spunky!) And because no one knows, no one can care… It’s also nice that no one can claim I dress this way because I’m forced to by an older male relative: I’m of Anglo-Polish background, pale and freckled, and I live with my Catholic boyfriend who is supportive and CERTAINLY not demanding about what I wear!

Being a Muslim has been incredibly hard. Converts are not respected, especially white ones who believe in both freedom of religion and if desired freedom FROM religion. And questioning the perfection of the Qur’an is just not done by believing Muslim women, of course. And what’s with the worship of Arabic? I speak French and English and have always been proud of that; do I need a third, now? Does God not understand if I speak with I’m comfortable in?

I remember that in one of your responses to a nasty letter describing how Islam is the fastest growing religion in the West, you said many people come seeking the much-vaunted simplicity of Islam and never find it. I certainly haven’t found it in the community itself (no: in the MAJORITY of the community here. I have many fantastic brothers and sisters who love and support me). But despite the frustrations, I have never regretted my choice.

I’m so thrilled that you have been brave enough to write The Trouble with Islam [en francais: Musulmane mais Libre]. I was told that reading your book would weaken my faith and that I should avoid it at all costs. I find, rather, that it has strengthened my faith. It’s by using our God-given intellects and creativities that we get closer to the Divine. Thank you so much for your efforts – I hope to see more books soon!” – S

There’s hope. Thanks to heroes like Irshad. Her website is here.

Here’s a remarkable piece of reasoning:

I think the effort to turn this into an anti-Bush political issue is a serious mistake, and the most likely outcome will be, in essence, the ratification of torture (with today’s hype becoming tomorrow’s reality) and a political defeat for the Democrats. And the highly politicized way in which the issue is raised is likely to ensure that there’s no useful discussion of exactly how, in terms of incarceration, etc., we should treat potentially very dangerous people who do not fall readily within the laws of war.

Run that by me again. The point is not “an anti-Bush political issue.” It’s about whether the United States condones torture of prisoners (many of whom have turned out to be innocent) in its care. Since president Bush shifted U.S. policy to one which allows what any sane person would call torture, any criticism of the policy, by its very nature, has to be “anti-Bush.” And when the president responds to his egregious error – which has undermined the war – by rewarding those who helped him make it, like Gonzales and Bybee, are we all supposed to roll over? Is all legitimate criticism of the administration now reducible to this kind of inane partisanship? Glenn’s deeper point is that if you ask for torture to be stopped, the majority of Americans will respond by saying: ramp it up. But that amounts to complete capitulation to something no civilized person should tolerate, and no grown-up military officer would approve. Glenn cannot pretend to be anti-torture, while eschewing any serious attempts to stop it through the political process.If you won’t stand up to the Bush administration on torture, is there anything you won’t acquiesce to? And it’s not “hype.” Read the reports.

SONTAG WAS OUT: Here’s an interesting quote that helps illuminate things:

She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. “No, hang on,” she says. “Actually, it’s nine. Five women, four men.” She will talk about her bisexuality quite openly now. It’s simple, she says. “As I’ve become less attractive to men, so I’ve found myself more with women. It’s what happens. Ask any woman my age. More women come on to you than men. And women are fantastic. Around 40, women blossom. Women are a work-in-progress. Men burn out.” She doesn’t have a lover now, she lives alone. The rumours about her and the photographer Annie Leibovitz are, she says, without foundation. They are close friends.” Maybe it sounds foolish, she says. “Maybe everyone will think I have an aberrant life, or a low sex drive. Maybe I am consigning myself to the asexual here. But speaking candidly, and only for myself, there are so many things in my life now that are more important to me than my sexuality. My relationship with my son, David. My writing. Even my moral passions seem to me to be far more defining than my erotic life. People can conclude from this what they want.”

Why be so queasy after her death when she was not when she was alive?