Month: September 2006

You’ve probably read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s account in the Washington Post today of how the Iraq occupation became, in part, an employment agency for the children or relatives of well-connected Republican party operatives or ideologically correct hacks, with much less expertise than others turned down. In the immortal words of Abe Simpson, it’s a story that angers up the blood. The guy in charge? James O’Beirne, the husband of National Review’s Kate O’Beirne. So many pundits married to so many party officials – it gets hard to keep them straight at times.

As for the underlying story, it is simply of a piece with the impression that John DiIulio got when he quit the Bush administration in disgust. The only thing that matters in this White House is politics. The substance of policy is secondary. If Bush ran a war with the dedication, ruthlessness and attention to detail that he brings to bear on a political campaign, then he might actually have a strategy for winning one. And, as Jon Chait points out, the more we find out about the spectacular recklessness of this administration’s conduct of the war the less persuasive it is that this operation was always doomed to failure. In my view, although the war was always going to be extremely difficult, it wasn’t necessarily doomed from the start. It was the administration’s relentless, politicized incompetence that doomed it.

Here’s the letter General John Vessey wrote, as noted by Colin Powell (hat tip: Greg). If it’s hard to read, click on it for a larger version:

"The permissible methods for the spy agency remain classified, and on a visit to our offices last week Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would say only that the CIA would engage in no conduct that "shocks the conscience." He added that this concept was context-dependent, since the "shock" threshold may be higher with the likes of KSM – who planned 9/11 – than for ordinary detainees. At least we hope it is. In theory, this means there’s still room to employ some of the aggressive techniques – such as stress positions, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes – that have been used successfully against al Qaeda bigwigs. But in practice we fear those approaches are a thing of the past," – the Wall Street Journal editorial board, revealing that the Bush proposal leaves wide open all sorts of abuses to be regarded as "legal" under the Geneva Conventions.

Note the Orwellian euphemism: "temperature extremes." Let’s follow Orwell’s example and ask directly what that actually means in real English. Here’s one account from the field:

"When the Navy SEALS would interrogate people, they were using ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner and they would take his rectal temperature in order to make sure that he didn’t die. I didn’t see this, but that’s what many, many prisoners told me who came out of the SEAL Compound, and I also heard that from a guard who was working in our detention facility, who was present during an interrogation that the SEAL had done."

Here’s another account of "temperature extremes" as an interrogation technique:

"[T]he cells were entirely unheated. There were radiators in the corridor only, and in this "heated" corridor the guards on duty walked in felt boots and padded jackets. The prisoner was forced to undress down to his underwear, and sometimes to his undershorts, and he was forced to spend from three to five days in the punishment cell without moving (since it was so confining). He received hot gruel on the third day only. For the first few minutes you were convinced you’d not be able to last an hour. But, by some miracle, a human being would indeed sit out his five days, perhaps acquiring in the course of it an illness that would last him the rest of his life."

That example is from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "Gulag Archipelago." Bush’s version is arguably worse. The victim is stripped of clothes entirely, is shackled to a chair or from a railing, is kept in an air-conditioned room around the 50 degree mark, barred from sleeping, and repeatedly doused with water until hypothermia sets in. In one of the few actual logs we have of a high-level interrogation, of Mohammed al-Qhatani, this method was used repeatedly over 55 days of forced sleeplessness, and the use of threatening dogs. At one point, American medics – yes, the medical profession has been coopted into torture as well – had to administer three bags of medical saline to Qhatani, while he was strapped to a chair, and aggressively treat him for hypothermia in hospital. Then he was sent back into the torture coercive interrogation cell.

The important thing to remember: Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney authorized this. This was no alleged bunch of bad apples. This is an interrogation technique directly authorized by president Bush, as it was by the Soviets. Once upon a time, the Wall Street Journal pioneered resistance to Soviet barbarism. Now they "fear" that the United States won’t follow Stalin’s example. This is what we fought the Cold War for?

That’s John Yoo’s position:

The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents.

In the mid-1970s, with the Soviets moving missiles into Eastern Europe, with the invasion of Afghanistan looming, with thousands of nukes aimed directly at American cities by a fast destabilizing Soviet leadership … "we had no serious national security threats to U.S. soil"? Remember also that Yoo is the man who believes that the president has absolute constitutional authority to torture the children of captured terrorists, if the president deems it necessary.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on Colin Powell:

I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt that Powell is saying what he believes in that letter to McCain. But that doesn’t disprove the theory that he’s getting involved because he wants to sanctify himself amidst the Armitage-Plame controversy.

How generous of Jonah to remain so open-minded. It may have slipped his mind that Colin Powell’s objection to abandoning Geneva dates from very early in 2002. Money quote:

When Powell read the Gonzales memo, he "hit the roof," says a State source. Desperately seeking to change Bush’s mind, Powell fired off his own blistering response the next day, Jan. 26, and sought an immediate meeting with the president. The proposed anti-Geneva Convention declaration, he warned, "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice" and have "a high cost in terms of negative international reaction." Powell won a partial victory: On Feb. 7, 2002, the White House announced that the United States would indeed apply the Geneva Conventions to the Afghan war ‚Äî but that Taliban and Qaeda detainees would still not be afforded prisoner-of-war status. The White House’s halfway retreat was, in the eyes of State Department lawyers, a "hollow" victory for Powell that did not fundamentally change the administration’s position. It also set the stage for the new interrogation procedures ungoverned by international law.

If you want to download the memo from Powell defending Geneva, you can here. It’s prescient and inspiring. It shows that Bush was warned what all this would mean and went ahead anyway. He authorized torture deliberately with full awareness of what he was doing, and has subsequently adopted Clintonisms to talk about it. Powell, a man who actually served in the military and won a war, tried to stop this nightmare at the very beginning. And now his motives are being questioned?

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Anchorage, Alaska, 7.30 am.

Jeopardy meets Jackass: a Japanese TV show requiring contestants to say tongue-twisters extremely fast or face … well, see for yourselves.

Glenn Reynolds yesterday actually used the following words:

"… the currently-deteriorating situation in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Nancy Grace fails the absolute power test. Here it is. If Nancy Grace had absolute power, she could do whatever she wanted. If she were omnipotent, how many people would die? Many," – Tucker Carlson, on his show last month.

Michael Totten asks the Israeli military historian Yaacov Lozowick about the recent war against Hezbollah. You might be surprised by the response.