Year: 2005

Here’s an astonishing sentence from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, a group whose support for cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of military detainees is persistent, unalloyed and enthusiastic. Notice this language:

As for “torture,” it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to “torture.” The “stress positions” that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.

Notice that the gold-standard for American conduct is now set by Saddam Hussein! And “water-boarding” is merely a “psychological technique” that “induces a feeling of suffocation.” No physical coercion at all – unless you mean being tied to a plank and near-drowned. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of the tactic as currently used:

The most-current practice of waterboarding involves tieing the victim to a board with their head lower than their feet so that they are unable to move. A piece of cloth is held tightly over their face, and water is poured onto the cloth. Breathing is extremely difficult and the victim will be in imminent fear of death by asphyxiation; however, it is relatively difficult to aspirate a large amount of water since the lungs are higher than the mouth, and the victim is unlikely to actually expire if this is done by skilled torturers. This is the technique demonstrated on U.S. military personnel, by U.S. military personnel, when they are being taught to resist enemy interrogations in the event of capture (see SERE). It is this technique the U.S. military and CIA interrogators are suspected of using.

The WSJ doesn’t think this is torture. The technique was widely used in Algeria by the French and dates back to interrogation techniques developed in the sixteenth century religious wars. Here’s an image:

Remember: the Wall Street Journal disagrees with the notion that this is “anything close to torture.” (In this, their sixteenth century forefathers disagreed. They called this technique torture, as the engraving shows.) The Journal editors want water-boarding to be a legal interrogation technique. Well, at least we now know exactly what they believe – about torture and about America.

I’m sympathetic to the president’s case that he was not the only one who supported war against Saddam because of the threat of WMDs. The consensus at the time – and it was shared by opponents and supporters of the war – was so overwhelming that Saddam’s WMDs were a premise of everyone’s case, pro and con. Maybe Scott Ritter and Baghdad Bob get a pass on this. But not many others. Nevertheless, all the rest of us were wrong. Were we lied to? I see no reason yet to believe we were – in the strong sense that deliberate untruths were consciously uttered. Was the post-9/11 atmosphere sufficient to blind many people to the possibility that they might be wrong about this premise? Certainly, that’s the case for me. I wasn’t skeptical enough. I followed the groupthink. I shouldn’t have. It’s also true, I think, that in the effort to ensure that the CIA was doing its job, some around the veep’s office and elsewhere may have seized on materials of dubious, if not discredited, validity. In retrospect, they were not skeptical enough either – and they have a much higher responsibility in this respect than bloggers or even Democrats who do not have full access to the full intelligence.

HIS NO-WIN BOTTOM LINE: But what I’m describing here is a failing, not a sin. It may deserve criticism on the grounds of incompetence, but not, I think, moral condemnation on the grounds of duplicity. The “Bush Lied!” screams are as cheap as they are very hard to substantiate. Moreover, it’s easy to get lulled into the fact after four years of no further atrocities on the mainland that we do not face grave dangers. After 9/11, I give government officials a pass on over-estimating threats to the country. Moreover, I don’t doubt the sincerity of Bush and Cheney in making their case for war on the WMD grounds (although, again, it’s baloney to say that that was the only ground they based their argument on). I’m open to debate on the Niger stuff and the aluminum tubes, but these are not central to the broad WMD case. I’m also open to the argument that the administration could have been more careful in their rhetoric. Talk of mushroom clouds was not exactly conducive to calm debate. But my bottom line is: These guys made a hard call in perilous times for good reasons. It turns out they were also wrong in one critical respect. That’s the judgment we have to grapple with – and it’s not very emotionally satisfying for either side. Above all, it’s not good for the president. In this debate, Bush has to choose between being called a liar or someone who made a profound, if forgivable, misjudgment in the gravest decision a president ever has to make. That’s no-win. “Hey, guys, I’m not a liar. I just got the intelligence completely wrong, and waged a pre-emptive war partly on the basis of that mistake. Sorry.” Not exactly a strong position. Oddly enough, I think Bush would have been more easily forgiven by the public if he’d been less defensive about it at the moment the WMD argument collapsed after the invasion. But he refused to acknowledge the obvious, dismissed the embarrassment, tried to change the subject and then just went silent. Once again, he mistook brittleness for strength. These many small decisions not to trust the American people with the full, embarrassing truths about the war has, in the end, undermined trust in the president and therefore support for the war. For that lack of candor, the president is paying dearly. So is the war in Iraq.

(for unhinged right-wing hyperbole): “Today, when most of the country thinks of who controls Massachusetts, I think the modern-day KKK comes to mind, the Kennedy-Kerry Klan,” – Federalist Society member Gerald Walpin, introducing Mitt Romney in a speech yesterday.

It’s a great editorial.

Here’s a link to a podcast of a former marine’s harrowing account of what he witnessed in Fallujah. On this Veterans’ Day, an account of the courage that is defending us is worth listening to. And being grateful for.

The latest study from San Francisco indicates that 10 percent of gay and bisexual men have used crystal meth in the last year. A year ago, that number was 18 percent. The sample size is 4,000. So the decline seems real. It’s a tribute to the common sense of most gay men. But somehow the news that they’re controlling this drug epidemic will never get the same exposure as claims that they’re hooked for good.

“…If al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead,” – Bill O’Reilly, unplugged. I think we should be able to discuss divisive issues without urging al Qaeda to target anywhere in America, don’t you?

Andrew Breitbart remembers the latest victim of these barbarians.

A must-read, as always. Money quote:

Here, then, is the dilemma posed by Judge Alito: His federalism opinions suggest that he might be a conservative activist like Thomas with an agenda to restrict congressional power; many of his other opinions suggest that he might be a cautious incrementalist, as Roberts is likely to be, nudging the law in a more conservative direction rather than rewriting it from the ground up. Given the conflicting evidence, how can senators decide what kind of justice Alito would be? The questions to ask Alito are obvious enough. They’re many of the same ones that have been asked in Supreme Court confirmation hearings for nearly two decades, and they involve the nominee’s attitudes toward congressional power, previous judicial precedents, and the original understanding of the Constitution.

The contrast in the answers given by Thomas and Roberts suggest clues for senators to look for as they try to decode Alito’s responses. If Alito is evasive, as Thomas was, about a) how often the Court should strike down federal laws; b) how much weight it should give precedents that have been repeatedly reaffirmed; or c) how rigidly it should follow the original understanding of the Constitution, run for the hills. If he answers those questions precisely and candidly, as Roberts did, breathe a sigh of relief.

I hear that Alito already has 65 votes wrapped up.

LINCOLN AND LIBERTY: An emailer dissents from my respect for Lincoln’s concerns for liberty even as he faced a uniquely grave crisis in American history:

You may be underestimating the scale of arbitrary arrests (arrests with no right of release, either by habeas or otherwise) during the Civil War period. Mark Neely, an admirer of Lincoln and a respected scholar, cites estimates that there were over 14,000 arbitrary arrests from the beginning of the war until its conclusion — and this amounts to the staggering total of 1 in every 1,500 Americans. And Lincoln was not at all apologetic about this policy. As Neely says:

“He did not apologize. In his public letter of June 12, 1863, to Erastus Corning and others, Lincoln said with characteristic toughness: “… the time [is] not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.” He argued that the Confederate States, when they seceded, had been counting on being able to keep “on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, supplyers, and aiders and abettors of their cause” under “cover of ‘Liberty of speech’ ‘Liberty of the press’ and ‘Habeas corpus.'” Nicolay and Hay, who were not given to overstatement, noted that “few of the President’s state papers … produced a stronger impression upon the public mind than this.” Little wonder. Elsewhere in the letter, the president used even stronger language, saying that he could never “appreciate the danger … that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the rebellion, lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence, trail by jury, and Habeas Corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future … any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.”

The questions before us, however, are: does the current situation approximate the crisis of the Civil War; and how “temporary” is our new war? One reason to be particularly concerned is that this war has been defined without any termination point or any enemy who could surrender and end our temporary illness. We are applying emergency powers to the executive indefinitely. Our only recourse is to trust the president. After the past three years? You’ve got to be kidding.

Our shadow president makes the case – and so much better than the real one. And with so much more credibility.