Month: April 2006

Mary McCarthy "categorically" denies that she was the source of the leak about the secret CIA detention and torture camps in Eastern Europe.

There has been much harrumphing on the right side of the blogosphere about the Mary McCarthy CIA leak case. Another McCarthy wants the former CIA official in chains. Hugh Hewitt has a useful round-up of anti-leak bloggers. And, in principle, of course, they’re all right. It is against the law for CIA officials to be leaking extremely classified information – especially information as sensitive as secret detention facilities. But all these comments seem to me to have ignored the critical and unmissable context. Yes, leaking is against the law. But what if the leaker is exposing something as grave as illegal torture? Isn’t that when a leak becomes the blowing of a whistle? Wouldn’t you want law-abiding officials within the CIA to do something if their own government is breaking American law, violating treaty obligations, breaking the law of other countries – and using the secrecy of the executive branch to conceal it?

Recall the story McCarthy is accused of leaking. Better still: go read it. It just won the Pulitzer Prize, and it richly deserved to. What Dana Priest reported was that the Bush administration had taken over former Soviet camps in Eastern Europe and adapted them to abuse and torture terror suspects. The detainees’ innocence or guilt was never verified by anything approaching due process. For me, it represented the quintessence of Bush’s betrayal of Reagan. Ronald Reagan helped liberate Eastern Europe from Communist tyranny. He wielded the moral authority of freedom and tore down the walls of Communism, a system where people could be detained without trial, "disappeared", and tortured. In an inversion as hideous as at Abu Ghraib, Bush’s CIA was twisted into a reflection of our former enemy.

Many, many people in the military and CIA are in close-to-open revolt against these policies; many, many more have been placed in morally excruciating positions: they have been forced to choose between loyalty to their country and their conscience. They hate what this president has made them do: every fiber of their being as Americans and as moral individuals rebels against it. This doesn’t necessarily excuse McCarthy legally. If she is guilty as charged, she probably should have quit first, disclosed all she knew and faced the legal consequences. But when the government itself breaks the law, when it violates ancient moral standards that Americans have fought and died for, sometimes people within the government have to stand up and be counted. McCarthy may well be one of those people. And, if that’s true, I have a feeling that history will be much kinder to her than to her hyper-ventilating critics.

After kissing up to Falwell, John McCain is now taking money from the Wyly brothers, George W. Bush’s former "coyotes," to quote the good senator from a while back. This is what McCain once said of the siblings who are now financing his campaign:

"Are we going to allow two cronies of George W. Bush to hijack this election? Tell them to keep their dirty money in the state of Texas, my friends. Don’t spread it all over New England and America."

I’m no purist. The simple fact is that the GOP is now a religious fundamentalist organization, tethered to a corrupt corporate money machine. If McCain has any chance of winning the nomination, he has to come to terms with these forces. Would we rather Brownback or Allen won them over? On the other hand, of course, it is nauseating to see McCain kowtow to a Christianist like Falwell, a man he rightly once equated with Louis Farrakhan in terms of extremism. What would the American mainstream say if Hillary Clinton went to a Farrakhan rally to shore up her "base"? Yet that is exactly what McCain is now doing. My own acid test will be a simple one. What will McCain actually say at Falwell’s university? Will he challenge them on their bigotry? Or will he acquiesce to it?

I have a strange personal history, as far as home is concerned. 21 years continuously in England; 21 years and a bit continuously in America. When I go back and see my old friends and family, I see them move on, age, or mature perhaps more clearly than if I were there all the time. But some things stay eternally the same – especially the countryside I grew up in as a boy.

I don’t think of myself as a product of a rural place. But I see now that I was. As a child and teen in the fields and woods of Sussex, I spent much of my salad days in the terminally damp, intricate rural beauty of England’s deep south. My brother just bought a house ten minutes’ walk from where we grew up. It’s pictured below – dating from 1575. When my altitudinous spouse-to-be walked in, it was like Gandalf at Bilbo’s. It’s not quite full spring in England yet, but the daffodils are out, the fritillaries and primroses blooming (see above), and on one day out of nine, we even saw sun. I was able to show my other half this lovely little place. Thanks to the miracles of digital photos and blogs, I can now share it a little with you.

Matthew Parris, an old friend I caught up with last week, writes in this week’s London Spectator (sub req):

If Jesus Christ had not existed, it would almost certainly not have been necessary for the Church to invent someone like him. What does the Church want with a man who plainly despised ritual? Can you imagine the man who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey wanting anything to do with bells and smells and frocks, with gilt and silver and semi-idolatry, and repetitive chants and chorused inanities? The man who said he had come to break up families being paraded as a paradigm of family values? The man who had absolutely no interest in politics or administration and preached forgiveness, not ‘the rule of law’, wanting anything to do with the Conservative party or the Third Way? …

When we consider all those painfully counter-intuitive sayings and parables – the Prodigal Son, the idea that it is no good restraining your actions if your thoughts are bad, the impatience with good works (‘the poor always ye have with you’) except as a means for personal purification – and when we consider how Jesus keeps saying … the wrong thing, it becomes even clearer that he must have been real: if Jesus had been a hoax, the Church could have invented someone so much more convenient."

Of course, contemporary Christianists are trying exactly that: to rectify Jesus’ obvious and embarrassing gaffes, and His clearly misplaced priorities.

Some quick pundit house-keeping on last week. It strikes me that there was one critical development. That was Jafaari’s withdrawal from the PM slot in Iraq and the selection of Maliki in his stead. One thing we’ve learned from Iraq: it’s obviously unclear at this point what this signifies. It has to be good news that the deadlock is broken; but it’s still sobering that Maliki is expected to take up to another month to staff a government. All the reports – and I got some updates in person in London – are that each day that goes by without a national government, the power of the militias grows – and the influence of Jihadist Shiites in the South waxes. These are very hard and very dangerous trends to reverse, and could prove fatal for the prospects for peaceful self-government in Iraq. Omar is unimpressed:

[W]ill the real problem be solved by this agreement on the top posts?
I guess not because if any of the two new candidates gets to be the new PM, Iraq will – in my opinion – continue to descend for the next four years in the same way it’s been doing since the interim government was installed last year. And after all, the UIA’s decision to replace Jafari with al-Adeeb or al-Maliki is a solution designed for preserving the brittle unity of the UIA and not for the creation of a unity government because they know very well that the rest of the blocs were hoping to see Abdul Mahdi replace Jafaari. Maybe the UIA is twisting arms with this new nomination and betting on splitting the lines of the anti-Jafaari mass, thinking those would not be willing to prolong the deadlock by refusing the new candidates.

The NYT’s analysis is here; Time’s is here. One benefit of taking a breather is that I don’t have to have an opinion on this stuff every day and can get a little more perspective. One thing lingers in my head, when all is said and done: Iraq was always going to be a very tough project, and, despite the criminal negligence – even malevolence – of Rumsfeld (more later), it is far too soon to come to any settled judgment on the outcome. We now look at Kurdistan as a success story. But it was effectively liberated well over a decade ago (by our no-flight zones) and endured a very nasty civil war thereafter. Moreover, in the absence of any really good options against Iran, Iraq is still the best potential lever against Ahmadinejad. If we can achieve a unified, reasonably democratic, and stable Iraq in the next few years, especially among Shiites, we will have shifted the dynamics in the Middle East in our favor – and in favor of freedom – profoundly. We will have achieved something good proportionate to the evil of 9/11. As time passes, our rage at the defense secretary (and the president who retains him) should grow. And our conviction that we must prevail – with or despite them – should deepen.

(Photo: Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

For the last nine days, I was forbidden by my other half, my shrink, my family and my own vestiges of sanity from reading the blog (or much else for that matter). As long-term bloggers know – how many of you out there have been at it for six years straight? (stop bragging, Mickey) – a little detox every now and again is well worth it. So my delight reading the past week’s entry in one go this morning is all the greater. I’d just like to thank Michelle and Walter publicly for filling in, and showing how it’s done. They’re both sharp as nails but also just decent, lovely people. That came through, and then some. As, by now, you know. Thanks.

Even as I type, a relaxed, rested, and rejuvenated Andrew is jetting his way back across the Atlantic, with a promise to be back in his blogging chair early tomorrow morning. Many thanks for your indulgence these past several days. As Andrew predicted, your emails were terrific. Only a few were vicious and profane enough to merit my contacting Homeland Security–but even those I enjoyed. And please don’t torture Andrew too badly for leaving you alone with me and Walter for so long. Even your Dish-master needs a holiday every now and again.

—Michelle

I finally picked up a copy of the first ever "Green Issue" of Vanity Fair. What is up with that cover? George Clooney, Al Gore, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are all sitting around in varying shades of green, with Julia Roberts looming over them in a poofy, green Bill Blass number and a garland on her head. With the greenish background and the greenish lighting, everyone looks a little ill. Or as a less charitable colleague put it, "They all look like pond scum."

I wouldn’t go that far. But they certainly do look silly, which probably isn’t what they should be going for if they want people to take them and their environmental causes seriously. Maybe Clooney and Roberts don’t care because, hey, they’re actors. (And, let’s face it, Clooney looks ruggedly delicious even as pond scum.) But I suspect Mssrs. Kennedy and Gore aren’t eager to be dismissed as preening loons. Maybe already committed greenies and Vanity Fair’s liberal readers will dig the cover, but my guess is that anyone who just happens to encounter it in the express lane at Safeway will just think the whole group, not to mention Graydon Carter, has gone round the bend.

Then again, five-plus years of Bush have had that effect on a lot of folks.

—Michelle

Slate’s Will Saletan has a smart take on "Big Love" that gets to the heart of why my extra-spouse fantasy would, in reality, be such a disaster. Heavy sigh.

—Michelle