New FOIAed docs from the military, procured by the ACLU, suggest attempts to cover up and destroy evidence of abuse and torture. The good news is that many of the worst incidents do seem to have been investigated and culprits punished. The bad news is that many weren’t, many were actually ignored, and others actively covered-up. There’s a lot here and I haven’t had a chance to examine them yet. You make your own mind up.
– posted by Andrew.
I have to say that Senator Kennedy’s attempt to smear Samuel Alito with an article in a magazine he never even read, an article that was apparently meant as satire, was about as low as it gets. It was a smear. In some ways, it was a symbol of how some Democrats think of people like the Alitos, people with obviously conservative leanings, but also the kind of people who would never engage in the basest of ethnic or sexual slurs. Kennedy hurt himself more than anyone. But it was disgusting nonetheless – not that, after Kennedy’s performances in other hearings, it was particularly surprising. I’m not a Kennedy-hater. He’s done some good things in the Senate, and I’m close to members of his family. But this tactic was crude, inappropriate in a judicial hearing, and completely counter-productive. It reminded me again why, for all my alarm at what has happened to Republicanism, the left is always there to remind me why I couldn’t ever be a Democrat. I don’t think I’m the only one.
– posted by Andrew.
Next Monday night, we switch servers to our new home at Time.com. So this is the last (sniff) non-holiday weekday that I’ll be blogging from this site, with its current design. It’s been a tough week ironing out glitches and figuring out how to operate the new site, but I think it’s a big improvement. I know you’ll let me know. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank one of my oldest and dearest friends, Robert Cameron, who, from the get-go, worked tirelessly and diligently in creating this site, managing it, re-designing it, handling all the finances, fixing tech problems, and so much else. He’s the one who suggested I blog in the first place – way back in the spring of 2000. Sometimes people ask me why I say “we” when I mention this site. It’s not a royal prerogative. This venture has been run all the time by two of us; and one great advantage of the new home will be allowing Robert to be free of most of his current responsibilities, all of which he did gratis. I couldn’t have begun to do this without him; and, amazingly, our friendship has survived intact. We’re looking forward to hanging together in the future without mentioning bandwidth, blogads, server glitches, and on and on. Thanks, Robert. For everything.
GEN. GEOFFREY MILLER: He’s the key figure in the decision to introduce torture and abuse of detainees in the U.S. military. He’s the one who set up the abuse program at Guantanamo Bay and was then sent by Rumsfeld to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. He’s the one who told General Karpinski to treat detainees “like dogs.” He’s the one who organized the framing of Muslim chaplain James Yee, after once confiding in Yee that he had problems with Muslims in general. As usual, the Bush administration has done all it can to protect Miller, because he could explain who, higher up in the administration, sanctioned torture and abuse. Secure that no one in the real chain of command would contradict him, Miller has, in the past, cooperated with Pentagon investigations. Even so, the Fay report concluded that he had recommended policies that contravened the Geneva Conventions, which were supposed to apply in Iraq. But now, he’s gone silent. Hmmmm. Money quote:
General Miller’s decision to invoke his right not to incriminate himself came shortly after Col. Thomas M. Pappas, whose military intelligence unit was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib, was granted immunity from prosecution and ordered to testify in the dog handlers’ coming courts-martial. Major Crawford said she and General Miller were not aware that Colonel Pappas had immunity protection when General Miller invoked his military Article 31 rights.
Yeah, right. The good news is that, with painful slowness, even the military investigatory apparatus may eventually uncover the high-level policies that crafted the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and then blamed them on a few reservists. And hold someone accountable. Higher up, I hope, than General Miller.
– posted by Andrew
One of the more frustrating things about the many questions asked about Judge Alito’s dissent in Doe v. Groody [PDF], which concerned whether law enforcement officers were liable for searching for drugs persons not explicitly included in a warrant, is that they kept hammering, for rhetorical purposes, that the officers had strip-searched a 10-year-old girl. A ten year-old-girl. Strip searched. Strip searched! A ten. Year. Old. Girl! (I eventually started hearing the sing-songy refrain of Walter from The Big Lebowski in the back of my head: “Yeah, yeah… they’re going to kill that poor woman“)
Again, rhetorically, I suppose that emphasis made sense. But focusing on that aspect allowed Alito to respond, perfectly correctly, that there’s no special Fourth Amendment for ten-year-old girls, and that it’s a damn good thing, since if there were criminals would have even more incentive to stash all their contraband on young children. There’s no question that, had the warrant explicitly granted officers permission to search anyone they found on the premises, as well as their suspected drug dealer, that it would have been perfectly proper.
But, of course, that’s not the point—or ought not to be. The point is that Alito bent over backwards to squish in some kind of tacit approval for a broader search than the explicit text of the warrant sanctioned. And that’s troubling whether the subect was a 25 year old man or a nonagenerian hermaphrodite. I’d have liked to have seen less senatorial fixation on nude prepubescents and more on whether Alito takes a fast and loose, “so long as they meant well” approach to the Fourth Amendment.
—posted by Julian
A friend who’s spent some time grappling with alcoholism passes along this quote, from AA’s Big Book, which seems appropriate for the case of James Frey:
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty.
In a similar vein, Seth Mnookin’s Slate piece on Frey is worth a read. This passage, in particular, sums up the case against Frey’s anti-self-help self-help book:
. . . because A Million Little Pieces-one of the best-selling books about drug addiction ever written-has been trumpeted as an unflinching, real-life look into the world of a drug addict, it has helped to shape people’s notions about drug abuse. Ironically, the very abundance of its clichés has likely helped make it a runaway best seller: People, after all, like having their suspicions confirmed. For nonaddicts, Pieces reinforces the still dangerously prevalent notion that it’s easy to spot a drug addict or an alcoholic-they’re the ones bleeding from holes in their cheeks or getting beaten down by the police or doing hard time with killers and rapists. For those struggling with their own substance-abuse issues, Pieces sends the message that unless you’ve reached the depths Frey describes, you don’t have anything to worry about-you’re a Fraud. And if you do have a problem, you don’t need to necessarily get treatment or look to others for support; all you need to do is “hold on.” In building up a false bogeyman-the American recovery movement’s supposed reliance on the notion of “victimhood”-Frey has set himself up as the one, truth-telling savior. In fact, it seems clear that Frey would have been well-served by taking the kind of unflinchingly honest look at his own life that most recovery programs demand.
This makes me want to take back my earlier quasi-praise for Frey’s tough-guy writer act. Poseurs can be harmless; poseurs who cast themselves as experts on how to beat addiction are bad, bad news.
– posted by Ross
Move over, bears. The new threat is a declawed 14-year old cat.
James Frey’s tattoo deconstructed.
GOD’S WEATHER: A reader writes:
Isn’t the Bible replete with examples of God inflicting natural disasters on people? Some because they do not act righteously (Sodom, Gomorrah, Egypt, etc.) and at least one, very famously, to test his faith (Job)?
My point is not that Robertson is right, but rather that people who want to maintain their belief that the Bible is the word of God and yet disbelieve in Robertson have an awful lot of rationalizing to do.
I wish I had put it as simply as that. By the way here’s a very helpful clarification of the differences between premillennialists and dispensationalists.
BROKEBACK IN LONDON: A massive hit.
– posted by Andrew.
This brave, celibate and well-loved gay priest has dealt with the emotional issue of gay priesthood not with anger, but with honesty. Honesty matters – especially in the priesthood, which is why the policy of keeping celibate gay priests in the closet is so destructive to the integrity of the Church. When I see such a figure, I feel enormous hope and solace, and I also feel some self-criticism. Most of the time, I’ve been painfully honest, calm and reasoned as a gay writer in a fraught time. But I’ve also succumbed to anger occasionally. The anger doesn’t persuade anyone; and it doesn’t do me much good either. I have prayed to overcome it. It springs, I guess, from being so profoundly rejected by a Church I love and a faith I cherish. But that faith also teaches us to resist that anger and to translate it into constructive argument. There’s a spectrum here – from the righteous rage of Act-Up to the calm honesty of Father Morrison. But we now have a role model in the Church. What a difference more would make. It’s time for gay priests to confront the new policies by simply telling the truth – an assertion that would in itself, I think, help them remain celibate. Secrecy and shame perpetuate pathology. Honesty and self-respect bring you maturity and the strength to do what God may ask of you. To gay priests, the late John Paul II had a message that, while he never intended it for them as such, rings ever more true:
"Be not afraid! Of what should be not be afraid? … We should not fear the truth about ourselves."
And that truth will set us free.
Andrew quotes the loathesome Abu Hamza below. What I’ve read about his case persuades me, first, that I would not be terribly upset if this man were slowly gnawed to death by rabid hamsters tomorrow, and second, that his prosecution is nonetheless pretty troubling. The most serious charges against him involve “soliciting” murder—which seems to involve saying a lot of appalling things about, well, everyone but adherents of his necrotic brand of Islam, and talking about the duty to “fight” and “bleed” the “enemy,” declaring at one point that “killing the kafir for any reason is OK.” There are an additional four counts of “using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred”. And he had a book regarded as “useful to terrorists.”
None of the accounts I’ve read have suggested that they’ve got, to put it crudely, a body—someone who was killed or some act of violence committed at Hamza’s prompting—or that there was any kind of direct involvement with any particular plan or target. And it seems to me that there’s a big difference between a narrow command, with an expectation that it will be obeyed, to harm some particular persons, or a direct incitement to riot (“They’re over there, get ’em!”) and this kind of general advocacy, which seems to be (if only barely) within the ambit of speech a free society ought to countenance. The new British policy is to go after those who seek to “justify” or “glorify” terrorism. And it’s hard to see how you draw a bright line that stops you short of putting in that category, for instance, Pat Robertson’s implication that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was divinely inspired.
ISLAMO-FASCISM This isn’t directly related, but since Andrew defends the term “Islamo-fascism” in passing, I’ll chip in that I’ve been persuaded by Olivier Roy’s excellent Globalized Islam that this is not a terribly helpful term. That’s not to say it’s never apt—it might be well suited for Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini—but that using it in a blanket way for any radical Islamism of an authoritarian stripe elides more than it illuminates. (And I know that as an Orwell fan, Andrew will be acutely sensistive to the problem alluded to in “Politics and the English Language” of watering down terms until “[t]he word Fascism has…no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.'”)
One of Roy’s key points (one of many in an insight-rich book) is that the modern terrorists he dubs neo-fundamentalists represent an important break from state-focused Islamism as we previously understood it. One central trend he identifies among these newer groups, for example, is de-territorialization: What is in many ways radical and dangerous about these new doctrines is that they reject the local and national accretions that different forms of Muslim practice have picked up over the years in favor of an ostensibly purer, trans-national, trans-racial Islam. The driving force here is a desire for a practice not embedded in any local or national culture. In a perverse way, it is more individualist than traditional Islamism, and, argues Roy, the neo-fundamentalists’ “quest for a strict implementation of sharia with no concession to man-made law pushes them to reject the modern state in favour of a kind of ‘libertarian’ view of the state: the state is a lesser evil but is not the tool for implementing Islam.”
Of course, this description too is a broad one that won’t accurately capture every sort of violent fundamentalist—and probably some will regard all this as picking nits. But as Sun Tzu advised, if you “know the enemy and know yourself, in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” And however rhetorically satisfying it is, “Islamo-fascism” as an umbrella term doesn’t seem like a helpful tool for knowing the enemy.
—posted by Julian
At the end of a piece about the rare occasions on which Alito sided with the poor, the downtrodden, and the huddled masses in his lower court rulings, Emily Bazelon writes:
In almost none of these cases, though, does Alito seem like a little-guy champion. He seems like a judge who dutifully follows the law. When the law instructs him to find for the criminal defendant or the plaintiff, he does so. When you get to the Supreme Court, though, you get to rip up the instruction manual and rewrite it. There’s very little in Alito’s record that suggests his revisions will favor the little guy.
Just so we’re clear: Alito’s record as a judge indicates that he only rules for the little guy when the law dictates that he should. And this is really bad, because we need Supreme Court judges who are willing to “rip up the instruction manual” (I believe it’s known as “active liberty” jurisprudence these days, but maybe Bazelon didn’t get the memo) to help the little guy, or at least the little guy as defined by Ted Kennedy. And the way we should pick them is by nominating lower court judges who have . . . torn up the instruction manual on the lower courts? (Like this guy, I guess.)
MORE FREY: Why he – and many “memoirists” these days – probably meant to write a novel.
– posted by Ross
The Dish 