Month: September 2006

Even the White House’s own Office of Legal Counsel is now at war with the Bush-Cheney cabal on interrogation. Money quote from the AP:

The high court’s ruling in June, in a case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, essentially said that the Geneva Conventions on the rights of wartime prisoners [actually, that should only be Article 3 of those treaties] should apply to the suspected terrorists in CIA custody. That meant that for the first time since the interrogation program was born in 2002, the Justice Department could not give the CIA a written opinion on whether its techniques still were legal. Spy agencies rely on such opinions to justify activities that get little, if any, public scrutiny.

As Marty Lederman explains:

This Administration has been willing to rest its terrorism policies on plenty of unorthodox legal interpretations – such as that that waterboarding is not "torture" – but the ridculous notion that the CIA techniques in question comply with Common Article 3’s prohibition on cruel treatment is simply a bridge too far, even for this OLC.

Eventually, even the hand-picked cronies cannot go along with the madness of King George. Thank God that the constitution is not without its allies in the Senate.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

The Times of London points out something that strikes me as important about the Pope’s remarks about Islam:

His address is undermined further by a serious error in regards to the Koran. "Sura 2,256 . . . is one of the suras of the early period, when Muhammad was still powerless and under threat." In fact, this sura [Koranic chapter] is held by Muslim scholars to be from the middle period, around the 24th year of Muhammad’s prophethood in 624 or 625, when he was in Medina and in control of a state. Contrary to what the Pope said, this was written when Muhammad was in a position of strength, not weakness.

This undermines the one passage where the Pope clearly speaks in his own words, as I explain below. And it undercuts his point almost completely.

"Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence," – Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam. Somehow, I don’t think he quite grasped the irony.

That’s the ineluctable conclusion from the president’s speech yesterday. Marty Lederman sees through the usual lies and obfuscation:

In a story today, Jeff Smith of the Washington Post quotes one "well-informed source" as saying that the techniques [the president is asking to authorize] "include prolonged sleep deprivation and forced standing or other stress positions," and that the techniques "match the techniques used by the agency in the past," which I describe here.

Smith identifies "a notable exception: The CIA no longer seeks to use a notorious technique called ‘waterboarding,’ which is meant to simulate drowning." Note the phrasing: Merely that the CIA no longer "seeks to use" waterboarding. Not that waterboarding would be unlawful under the Administration bill. To the contrary, "[p]rivately, the administration has concluded that [enactment of the Bush proposal] would allow the CIA to keep using virtually all the interrogation methods it has employed for the past five years, the officials said." So perhaps, if Congress were to enact the Administration bill, even waterboarding would be back on the table, should the CIA once again "seek to use it."

This is why McCain, Warner, Graham, Powell and every decent, sane conservative with military experience refuse to give in. There is already clarity in the law, the Geneva Convention, and the McCain Amendment. What the Bush administration wants is to introduce vagueness to get away with exactly the same barabarism they have deploying illegally for the past five years. They must be stopped. And eventually, they must be prosecuted for war crimes.

(Photo: David Y. Lee/Time.)

Oxford, Ohio, 10.30 am.

A reader writes:

I’m sorry your soldier is a moron.

Iraqis had a choice, surrender and receive fair and humane treatment. Fight us?  Cross us?  Hide behind civilians?  You will receive no quarter, no kindness, you will forfeit your life and your humanity.

It’s imbecilic to think that they surrendered because they knew our kindness.  They surrendered because of the hellatious ass-whomping they would receive.  Prostrate yourself and be treated kindly.

Fight us and die. Those we detain and torture are those that chose the second path. This makes them a good lesson for those contemplating the first.

Well, some Cheney-supporters read this site, don’t they? Here’s another reader’s observations:

I hear the most dreadful things from Americans I’d thought had decency. These are women, mind you, middle aged women who’ve never known anything but comfort and privilege. They’re women who have raised children and done a good job of it, women who do charity work and who go all out to help dogs and cats and any other animal in need.  But they don’t see this issue as you and I see it. They talk about the people tortured as if they’re not human beings.  They see every Muslim, every Arab, as another species. Their usual term is "scum" but "murdering bastards" is also a favorite. Yes, all of them are guilty, all terrorists. These are women who’ve traveled extensively, some who were even born in other countries. Thus it’s not all foreigners who come under this sub-species heading, only the people they’ve labeled terrorists without knowing what they’re talking about. It’s racism at its worst and that, sadly, is what Bush and his cronies are playing to.

None of the people I know who think torture appropriate would admit to being racists, of course. High IQs, high incomes, no brains at all — or is it no hearts? Perhaps no empathy is the key. To one of them, I said, "This sort of thing can escalate and next they’ll be coming for us." She replied, "Oh, for God’s sake!" with disgust, the implication being that such methods would never, ever be used for us fair white middle class people.

As I wrote yesterday, I wrote extensively about the Pope’s remarkable recent address on reason and faith and Islam as soon as the text was released. You can read my analysis here and here. I do not believe that the issue is an inflammatory quote or some unfortunate misunderstanding. Benedict said something in his own words that are at the center of the controversy:

In the seventh conversation ("di√°lesis" – controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.

The obvious inference from the pope is that the Koran does indeed sanction violence, i.e. "holy war," in the cause of its own religion; and that the passages about peace can be explained in part by the fact that they belong to the early days of Islam, when Muhammed had no other practical option. Subsequently, Muhammed endorsed and practised war. One thing you can say about Jesus: he didn’t kill anyone, however bloodthirsty his subsequent followers might have been. Today, in many Muslim countries, apostasy remains subject to the death penalty. That in itself is the use of murderous violence to impose faith. Christianity has, of course, been just as bad in the past. But it has reformed itself. Moreover, the nature of the Muslim revelation, according to Benedict, is that it was God’s word channeled unmediated through the Prophet. The Christian tradition of logos or reason does not therefore have the same salience in Islam, according to the Pope. A Muslim reformation, Benedict seems to say, is very unlikely because of the intrinsic irrationality of Islam.

I will pass on the ironies of this Pope commending reason in faith. He has done a great deal to stifle reason within the Church by policing and suppressing free debate. But his fundamental point about Islam and logos cannot be dismissed as a glitch or merely bad manners. I’m not a scholar of Islam and so I am not prepared to say whether his appraisal of the role of reason and violence in Islam is accurate. But it’s pretty clear that he’s saying something substantive about the core meaning of Islam. And the violent reaction of some Muslims to his address doesn’t exactly prove him wrong, does it?

(Photo: Wolfgang Radke/AP.)

Here’s a great lesson on how to deal with an asshole with a cell-phone. I feel better for having watched this. Maybe the university is still a healthy place, after all.

I already blogged his address on Islam, reason and faith here and, especially, here. More tomorrow.