Month: January 2007

That’s the evidentiary basis for detaining an American citizen for three and half years, with no charges, and subjecting him to complete isolation and torture. Money quote:

Mr. Padilla’s voice is heard on only seven calls. And on those seven, which The Times obtained from a participant in the case, Mr. Padilla does not discuss violent plots.

His phone was tapped, of course. The government has accused Padilla of many things:

Senior government officials have said publicly that Mr. Padilla provided self-incriminating information during interrogations, admitting, they said, to having undergone basic terrorist training, to accepting an assignment to blow up apartment buildings in the United States and to attending a farewell dinner with Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected master planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, before he flew to Chicago in 2002.

But none of it shows up when they have to abide by basic evidentiary standards. Hmm. And crucial evidence comes from a torture victim. Those seven calls? No coded language, apparently:

Mr. Padilla’s seven conversations with Mr. Hassoun range from straightforward — Mr. Hassoun tells Mr. Padilla that his grandmother has died; Mr. Padilla tells Mr. Hassoun that he has found himself an 18-year-old Egyptian bride who is willing to wear a veil — to vaguely suggestive or just odd.

In one phone call, the two men talked about a dream. It appeared to be the dream that Mr. Padilla, according to his relatives, cites as having played a crucial role in inspiring him to convert to Islam: the vision of a man in a turban, surrounded by the swirling dust of a desert.

Padilla is an American U.S. citizen, and he may be involved in some way with Islamist terror. We don’t know. More importantly: neither does the president who detained him. And the appalling way in which this case has been handled may make it impossible for anyone to find the truth.

A reader explains:

I know that may be disappointing to hear, for a devout acolyte of Burke. But labels change, and the political compass has been turned. In 21st century America, you need only ask yourself two questions to determine if you are a true conservative.

First, do you believe that Jesus Christ ordained the US Constitution, and that there is no true understanding of that document except that one first believes in him? Second, do you believe it is America’s Christian destiny to save the world from the false religion of Mohammed? Since you clearly fail on both grounds, despite your lukewarm claim to believe in Jesus in some relativist, doubtful fashion, you are officially a liberal.

You think I’m gloomy? Try these guys:

The nub of the matter:

For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed. A growing number of religiously correct students consider this challenge a direct assault on their faith. Yet the task of thinking and teaching, especially in an age of emergent fundamentalisms, is to cultivate a faith in doubt that calls into question every certainty.

Until recently, many influential analysts argued that religion, a vestige of an earlier stage of human development, would wither away as people became more sophisticated and rational. Obviously, things have not turned out that way. Indeed, the 21st century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Religious conflict will be less a matter of struggles between belief and unbelief than of clashes between believers who make room for doubt and those who do not.

A reader writes:

I got a kick out that comment. "Mentally unstable" means, I suppose, searching for truth in reality using the tools God has given us, rather than accepting the version thereof dictated each day by the propaganda needs of the Republican National Committee.

In fact, your analysis of the dilemma in Iraq was the most even-handed and lucid I’ve read. How many other Americans must have spent portions of every day over the Christmas season wondering about Iraq, mentally choosing one direction only to encounter obstacle after obstacle and finally being left with nothing more than a gut instinct? Like you, I sometimes wonder whether a huge escalation of the war (150,000 more troops?) would do the trick. But like you, I finally conclude – based as much on gut instinct as anything else – that Americans can no longer do any good in Iraq, that some version of a civil war and sectarian separation is inevitable given Iraq’s history and current state of disintegration, and that both Iran and Syria are more likely to play stabilizing roles after we are gone.

It’s now been two months since the election, one month since the ISG report, and going on four years since the war began. The 3,000th American death has come and gone (can it really be that we reached this milestone on the last day of the year?). Sadam Hussein has been executed in what should have been a symbol of justice but, like everything else in Iraq, went horribly wrong and now looks like just another tribal killing, making matters even worse. And there is our President, the Decider, still sitting on the sidelines, clueless.

Somehow I take no comfort from seeing pictures of the President huddling with Cheney and Rice about Iraq. Perhaps that makes me mentally unstable, like you.

The best eulogy from yesterday:

Midwestern Republicanism. May it rest in peace.

Here’s a handy blog take-down of a column by Jonah Goldberg, in which the National Review writer defends absolutism and certainty against their multiplying critics. One of Jonah’s heroic dogmatists, it turns out, is … Socrates, which might have amused the man whose mode of discourse was a questioning and unending dialogue. And Jonah makes no distinctions about certainty with respect to different subjects. It is one thing to say that I am certain that my eyes are brown and another to say that I am certain that all non-Christians will burn in hell. We should surely make distinctions between what we can know and what we see through a glass darkly. But such nuances are to be dispensed with by many of today’s conservatives.

My main critique of certainty in "The Conservative Soul" is with respect to the divine. Since God is definitionally beyond human understanding, certainty about God’s will on specific matters is something to be treated with appropriate skepticism and humility. That especially applies to politics, as the apolitical message of Jesus and Paul insists. Moreover, Anglo-American conservatism, from Burke onward, has always emphasized the uncertainty of unexpected consequences, the need for empirical reasoning, and the indispensability of practical wisdom – all enemies of unyielding dogma and abstract ideology. But dogma and ideology are what now pass for Republican wisdom. So Jonah does his duty.

The immense pleasure of watching Larry Cohen’s 1973 masterpiece, "It’s Alive," is only amplified by the newly released DVD. The director commentary is beyond marvelous. Think Eugene Levy in a Christopher Guest movie talking about his days as director of three – count them, three – movies about a monster baby. CineSchlock-O-Rama summarizes the oeuvre thus:

No breasts. 13 corpses. Mournful toothbrushing. Gratuitous Gabby Hayes impression. Multiple shotgun blasts. Pinata attack. Comical guns-drawn-on-defenseless-infant gag. Leering press. Mangled kitty. Bitch slapping. Swarming squad cars. If mama only knew: "WHAT DOES MY BABY LOOK LIKE!?! WHAT’S WRONG WITH MY BABY!?!"

The president slept through Saddam’s execution and still hasn’t seen the video. He is, rather, focused on the "way forward." How can you go forward when you have no idea where you are – and tenaciously resistant to finding out?

Round One on God got a lot of bloggy attention. Round Two on Iraq, conservatism and the looming apocalypse may get more. I’m afraid I cannot blame Bob Wright for basking in my abject apology for passionately supporting the Bush-run Iraq war.