Month: May 2006

"I don’t think there’s anything wrong with singing it in Spanish. The point is it’s the United States’ national anthem. And what people want is it to be sung in a way that respects the United States and our culture. At the same time, we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of many, many languages," – Laura Bush on Larry King. She also said she thought the national anthem should be sung in English.

Remember when Rumsfeld and Bush professed shock, shock at the abuses at Abu Ghraib, when they were revealed? Among the latest cache of released government docs, we discover the following:

The ACLU also released an Information Paper entitled ‘Allegations of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan’ dated April 2, 2004, two weeks before the world saw the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The paper outlined the status of 62 investigations of detainee abuse and detainee deaths. Cases include assaults, punching, kicking and beatings, mock executions, sexual assault of a female detainee, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to ‘send a message to other Iraqis,’ stripping detainees, beating them and shocking them with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves and interrogations at gunpoint.
The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of ‘a few bad apples,’ the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

In one document, Sanchez is said to have given orders to take prisoners to "the outer limits" in interrogation. One investigation, to pick one out of dozens underway before Abu Ghraib was exposed, involved the following:

[A] doctor cleared a detainee for further interrogations, despite claims he had been beaten and shocked with a taser. The medic confirmed that the detainee’s injuries were consistent with his allegations, stating, "Everything he described he had on his body." Yet, the medic cleared him for further interrogation, giving him Tylenol for the pain. There is no indication that the medic reported this abuse.

Why would he, when abuse was policy? As at Gitmo, the medical professionals were brought into the abuse process, to determine how far prisoners could be tortured without dying. No, this is not Serbia or Saddam’s Iraq or Burma. This is the United States.

Many of you disagree with me. Here’s one typical but eloquent email:

I don’t think that those who say that the war was "about oil," literally think that we decided to invade Iraq in order to secure supplies and lower the price of crude. No one expected that the full invasion of an oil rich country in the heart of the Arab world was going to causes prices to drop, at least not right away. So in this sense, we did not go to war in Iraq in an attempt to get cheap oil right off the bat.
But are you arguing that oil played no part in our decision to go to war? I think most people look at the regime in Iraq and have a hard time distinguishing it from others around the world. Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Syria – all dictatorships, all enemies of the United States, all suspected of WMD’s, all with potential connections to Al Qaeda – yet we pick Iraq?
If we went to war to "transform the middle east" then we went to war over oil. The only importance the Middle East ever had, and will ever have, as far as the U.S. is concerned, are its massive oil reserves. You don’t hear neocons talking about transforming Africa or intervening militarily to oust dictators in nations with no vital natural resources – but you hear endless talk about transforming the Middle East. We’re trying to bring democracy to the region because we believe democracy equals stability, and stability equals cheap and free flowing supplies of oil.

Not so fast. The dreaded neocons supported intervention in Bosnia and Somalia, and I see no oil there. Many neocons support intervening in Darfur. Ditto. Of course, some weight must be given to a region with so much leverage over the essential substance for the world economy. But before 9/11, we have no evidence that Bush was seriously planning on war against Saddam. Al Gore was more vocally anti-Saddam than Bush was, and favored more defense spending. I stick to my point. This was about national security. Oil is a part of that, but it was never the primary mover behind the Iraq war.

"On television, Colbert is often funny. But on his own show he appeals to a self-selected audience that reminds him often of his greatness. In Washington he was playing to a different crowd, and he failed dismally in the funny person’s most solemn obligation: to use absurdity or contrast or hyperbole to elucidate — to make people see things a little bit differently. He had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear. But he was, like much of the blogosphere itself, telling like-minded people what they already know and alienating all the others. In this sense, he was a man for our times. He also wasn’t funny," – Richard Cohen, alienating many liberal readers, Washington Post today.

A reader writes:

It’s alleged that Hitchens has a drinking problem. If so, perhaps you’d be kind enough to pass on specifics regarding his daily intake, so I can emulate. Though I don’t always agree with him, I have nothing but admiration for someone who can knock out a weekly Slate column, an erudite review for the Atlantic each month, a longer, bimonthly piece for Vanity Fair and a book a year. I’m a journalist, and I just spent a week laboring over a relatively straightforward 1,200-word essay (on wine, coincidentally.) But I’m obviously not drinking the right stuff.

Me neither. The sheer quantity and amazing quality of Hitch’s output puts me to shame. And since I am not a member of the pleasure police, I have no problems with people actually enjoying their lives, rather than merely living them. Others, of course, clearly differ. And they are welcome to their asceticism. Just don’t mess with others’ recreation.

The Senator’s past keeps re-emerging. Ryan Lizza has two new details: 1) Allen had a Confederate flag on his truck at UVA. 2) An Allen campaign ad from 1993 had a Confederate flag in it. In today’s GOP, I wonder why anyone is surprised.

A reader comments:

I read this first with amusement then with a bit of irritation. Truth is, I like both Hitchens and Cole – they are way up on the list of writers I read compulsively. They both have strong suits – Hitchens is one of the most amazing wordsmiths of his generation, and a man of staggering rhetorical ability to boot. Cole runs a very interesting Middle East press clipping service with commentary (nothing quite like it) and he has an amazing depth of knowledge of Middle Eastern culture, religion and politics. Both Hitchens and Cole have an output which is little short of astonishing. And something which goes with the high volume output – both of them are quite frequently wrong, and are stubborn-headed when their errors are shown.

Surely Cole is wrong in defending Iran’s new nutcase president. On the other hand, Cole’s ideas about extending American influence in the region through soft power and education are spot-on and need to be listened to. Hitchens is in overdrive criticizing him. I am prepared to be forgiving to both of them, because they make important contributions to the discussion and are, in the end, educational and entertaining. Moreover, when I see someone with such immense output, I expect mistakes and am prepared to forgive them (though I’d wish for less pig-headedness). This is fundamentally the case for blogging, which I see as in a different category from print and broadcast media. It’s a more intimate medium. Somewhere in his notebooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson says that the best thing about friends is that one can afford to be stupid around them. This is very true for list-servs, and also true to some extent for blogging. So while I admire the pugilistic spirit, I say: enough already. Cole and Hitchens are both on my must-read list and no amount of intemperate assault is going to lead me to drop either one.

That’s the spirit of true liberalism – and the promise of the blogosphere.

Norelco unveils a WMD. I’m for a pre-emptive strike. 

Public support for one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in recent times is at an all-time low. But views on abortion itself have barely moved in over thirty years, and are roughly where they were in 1973. I think people are beginning to realize that saner abortion laws require legislative, not judicial action. And I say that as someone who opposes all abortion on moral grounds, but would prefer to see it kept legal in the first trimester, for prudential reasons and because of the valid interest of women’s freedom over their own bodies. I think legal, but restrictive abortion laws would be the end-result of a post-Roe world across much of America, although some states may have much more liberal laws than others. I support federalism in this as I do in marriage. And if some states were to ban all abortions, along theocon lines, then pro-choice groups should do all they can to expand access to contraception, the Morning After pill, adoption (including gay adoption) and access to out-of-state first trimester abortions if necessary.