Month: March 2006

"I had not recollected that footnote. I will — I will find it. I don’t read footnotes, normally," – Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia.

A reader writes to someone else for a change:

"Dear Viacom,
I am outraged that religious extremists have caused you to not air the "Trapped in the Closet" episode of South Park. Scientologists and Tom Cruise intimidating Viacom like some radical Islamic cleric makes me lose all respect for your company. I will boycott everything but South Park and The Daily Show/Colbert Report that is owned by Viacom and am urging others to do the same.
Don’t knuckle under to religious extremism, especially from dopey Scientolologists. The word is being spread far and wide about your cowardice. It is already the talk of every major blog from the Drudge Report to Andrew Sullivan. com. I wonder what Jon Stewart and your good friend Howard Stern is going to say about it?
Wake up and cut your losses. Air "Trapped in the Closet" next week unedited or at a minimum we will keep spreading the word about what a bunch of chickens*** weenies you are. This is becoming the hottest story on the Internet, and is going to become even bigger in the next few weeks."

Email Viacom using the address press@viacom.com. Email Comedy Central using this page. Put "Protect Freedom of Speech" in the contents line. Don’t even think about seeing "Mission Impossible: 3". Keep these cowards on their toes.

It appears that the acronym for the torture site set up by the U.S. military in Iraq, and continued even past the abu Ghraib revelations, means: "Nasty-Ass Military Area." According to this email, it was "named by a general." Somehow, I don’t think Rumsfeld’s military will discipline him.

I finally got an email from Alasdair Palmer helping explain why his fascinating piece in London’s Sunday Telegraph on the radicalism of some Muslims in Britain was pulled from the web "for legal reasons" and then removed altogether. (Not his fault: My original email got swallowed up by the Telegraph’s dreadful email system). The explanation is relatively benign, it turns out, according to Palmer:

"The reason why the article was taken off the website is that there are alot of translations of the Koran which use the title "The Noble Koran". I failed to specify that the version Dr Sookhdeo was referring to when he talked about anti- Christian and Jewish passages and the updating of weaponry etc, was the Saudi-sponsored  "Interpretation of the Meanings of The Noble Qur’an in the English language, a summarised version of At-Tabari, Al-Qurtubi and Ibn Kathir with comments from Sahih Al-Bukhari, summarized in one volume",  by Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali & Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan of the Islamic University, Medina. Published by Darussalam, Riyadh, 1996.

Quite a mouthful. Anyway, a guy called Abdalhaqq Bewley has published a translation called "The Noble Koran" which does NOT have the offending passages. He wrote in, and threatened to sue on grounds that we had defamed him and his translation. The lawyer and the then editor, Sarah Sands, decided discretion was the better part of valour, and took the piece off the website. We published a letter from Mr Bewley in full, apologised to him, and he was satisfied – that seems to be the end of it.

I have suggested that we put the article BACK on the website with the correct title of the relevant translation of the Koran … Perhaps, eventually, it will reappear in a modified form."

Let’s hope so.

Those who still deny the clear record of administration-sanctioned abuse and torture in Iraq may eventually have to concede on these latest revelations:

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

Did Task Force 6-26 believed it was violating the wishes and commands of its commander-in-chief and defense secretary? Clearly, other government entities knew what was going on but looked the other way or couldn’t stop the torture:

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The Central Intelligence Agency was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

To recap: we have a president who for the first time decrees that torture and abuse is legal in the U.S. military if "military necessity" allows it; we have White House memos saying that anything short of death and major organ failure cannot be categorized as "torture"; we have "cruel, inhuman and degrading conduct" at Gitmo, conduct that is subsequently declared within military guidelines; we have the head of, in John Podhoretz’s phrase, the "excesses at Gitmo" assigned to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize" it; we have an outbreak across every theater of war of brutal torture and abuse practices; and we have what is a clear directive from Washington to get better intelligence on the insurgency – and fast. We now have much clearer evidence of an elite, secret unit setting up what can only be called a torture camp, and no one in authority seems able to put an end to it.

"Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp’s name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees’ clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club."

No, these aren’t Milosevic’s thugs; they’re Bush’s and Cheney’s and Addington’s and Gonzales’ and Rumsfeld’s. More to the point: they’re ours. And can anyone enlighten me on what "Nama" really means? The NYT seems to squeamish to explain. I’m not.

There are two credible explanations for the horror of seeing the United States military turned into a band of thugs more suited to Milosevic’s Serbia than a democratic liberator. The first is that there was direct authorization from the top, or near top, of the civilian and military hierarchy. Someone, after all, must have authorized this:

"Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.
Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said."

Who is that official? Was he responsible? Did he say who sanctioned this? But there’s that telling phrase: "Any means possible." Suddenly you see the meaning of the phrase "military necessity" signed by president Bush. We also have all the John Yoo-approved techniques:

"At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.
In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein’s bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited."

Induced drowning, hypothermia, repeated beatings, the torture of relatives of intelligence targets: we have seen all these already multiple times. They are always the same techniques, almost as if someone had figured them out and trained people in them. But that couldn’t have happened, could it? We don’t know. We do know that the Pentagon’s Steven Cambone tried to stop it, which implies the second explanation, which is that there were elite military units beyond the control of the Pentagon and the law, let alone the Geneva Conventions, who felt they had been allowed to enter the twilight zone.

Cambone’s efforts seem to have come up empty, by the way. We have the far-right Christianist, general William Boykin, telling Cambone on March 17, 2004, that he had "found no pattern of misconduct with the task force." (Boykin was the man who declared the Iraq war one between his God and the God of Islam. He suffered no discipline for that comment.) So the alternative explanation is simply a complete breakdown in the chain of command. Other agencies – even CIA officials some of whom had been trained to abuse inmates at Gitmo – tip-toed around this black hole. They acted as if they knew someone had sanctioned it; or that no one dared stop it; or that these troops were empowered to do whatever they wanted.

And then we get to the familiar punchline: the cover-up:

Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Abu Ghraib didn’t seem to change much:

On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured.

Does Mark Levin consider burn marks on a detainee’s body evidence of torture? How about "electric shocks to detainees with stun guns"? Or does he have some other Orwellian term to excuse this?

The administration continues its absurd public mantra that "we do not torture." It’s empirically untrue. The most generous explanation of it is that the president and his staff don’t know what they unleashed with their memos. But after Abu Ghraib, they have absolutely no excuse. Their refusal to acknowledge the McCain Amendment suggests, at best, continued denial and, at worst, a clear decision to allow this kind of behavior to continue on the down-low. In short: either Rumsfeld is a liar and a torture-enforcer or he is an incompetent whose management of the military has led to one of the darkest stains on the military’s honor in its history. Either way, it is a scandal he is still in office. Every day he remains defense secretary is an implicit statement by the president that the United States has and does practise torture. And that this president still has no interest in preventing it.

Oh, and there’s no evidence that this sadism produced any useful intelligence in any case. Most experts will tell you this is par for the course. As Orwell noted, the point of torture is torture.

I haven’t read a review as brutal as this one in a very long time. I enjoyed every word of it.

Ann Althouse has quite a discussion going.

They’re not dispositive, but they certainly are suggestive. What do they suggest? That there were nebulous links between Saddam and al Qaeda; that Iraq had elaborate methods for bribing French politicians; and that Saddam was intent on concealing and destroying all evidence that his regime had been trying to make WMDs. Hmmm.