Month: January 2007

Michael Totten reports from Lebanon on Hezbollah’s latest shenanigans.

(Photo: Michael Totten.)

The beginning of the struggle for accountability. No surprise that the CIA won’t comply with Congressional inquiries.

Los Alamos, New Mexico, 9 am.

The witnesses this time are FBI agents who saw abuse. Not terror suspects. FBI agents. Money quote:

The reports describe a female guard who detainees said handled their genitals and wiped menstrual blood on their face. Another interrogator reportedly bragged to an FBI agent about dressing as a Catholic priest and "baptizing” a prisoner …

The agency asked 493 employees whether they witnessed aggressive treatment that was not consistent with the FBI’s policies. The bureau received 26 positive responses, including some from agents who were troubled by what they saw.

"I did observe treatment that was not only aggressive but personally very upsetting," one agent wrote, describing seeing a man left in a 100-degree room with no ventilation overnight. "The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently literally been pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

Another agent said he heard several "thunderclaps" then saw a detainee lying on the floor with a bloody nose. Interrogators told the agent the man was upset and had thrown himself to the floor.

In one report, an agent said he saw a detainee draped in an Israeli flag in a room with loud music and strobe lights. A note on the report said the Israeli flag "may be over the top but not abusive." The words "may be" were then crossed out and replaced with "is."

The baking of a human being in a virtual oven overnight is torture, plain and simple. But the deliberate effort to use affronts to Islam as a way to disorient Muslim prisoners is just sickening. It’s also beyond stupid. Here we are attempting to persuade moderate Muslims that the U.S. stands for them, and is not a cover for "Zionist crusaders," while we wrap prisoners in an Israeli flag and blasphemously baptize them as Catholics. It’s so unhinged it could only have emerged from the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld. You can read the FBI documents here.

(Photo: the remnants of a "coercive interrogation" at the U.S.-run prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, 2003.)

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts did the right thing, it seems to me, in upholding the duty of the commonwealth’s legislature to vote on a possible 2008 marriage amendment. (I await the howls about judicial activism from the theocon right.) Yes, there will be a huge surge of Christianist money into Massachusetts to keep gay couples stigmatized under the law. Yes, there will be another round of bitter and emotional debate. But advocates for marriage equality are far too defensive in fearing such a vote. We should be relishing it. So far, very few can argue that marriage equality in Massachusetts has been a failure. On the contrary, it has united many once divided families, it has strengthened many relationships, it has brought more stability to gay culture, it has given children more security, and it has opened hearts and minds. We have close to two years to use this evidence to persuade the people of Massachusetts that civil equality is something to be proud of. By the end of 2008, civil marriage may well be fully legal in California by legislative action – and de facto marriage in the form of civil unions available in several states. I doubt whether Massachusetts will forgo the honor of being the first state to grant gay couples legal equality with their straight peers. But there’s one way to find out. Let’s debate and campaign. The national gay groups, whose record on marriage has been spotty at best, need to make this the first priority of the national movement. Winning a democratic vote on marriage is a huge opportunity – and well within our grasp. We have the arguments. We have the evidence. Now let’s have the vote.

Hitch nails it:

According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d’√©tat. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida’s dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame.

Hitch seems surprised that this U.S.-financed execution was carried out with scant regard for the Geneva Conventions. I guess I’m surprised that Hitch is surprised. This is the Bush administration. Since when did they care for proper judicial procedures? My fear is that this execution gives us an insight into the real forces in Iraq and in the Maliki government. This was the reality of Maliki captured by a cell-phone camera, not the spin. And the reality is that Moktada is emerging as the new thug, and the civil war is just getting going. Which is why we need to get out of its way. Soon.

My take on the shifts in religious thought and practice in 2006 – across the globe.

(Photo of the Samarra mosque by Getty.)

No big deal in the Anglican church, which has long allowed married priests. Except the fifty priests have married other men.

I really do get under his skin, I guess. He argues that all my positions on every topic are related to my "obsession" with marriage rights for gay couples. He also insists that my own record of passion on such subjects as marriage and torture renders my espousal of a "conservatism of doubt" insincere. (Earth to Mickey: Why on earth was I was studying Oakeshott in the 1980s before I’d even heard of gay marriage?) Of course, there’s not much I can do to deny an unrebuttable assertion that my view of everything is a function of my sexual orientation. But I think any reader of "The Conservative Soul" will see that the question of homosexuality is a minuscule part of my argument, and that reductionism of the Kaus-type says much more about the reductionists than it does about the quality of the arguments I proffer.

As for my passion about marriage equality, I plead guilty but I do not plead dogma. My first argument for marriage was occasioned by my worry about the impact domestic partnerships could have on marriage as a heterosexual institution. My book, "Virtually Normal" is about as reasoned as any public argument can be. My discussion of the origins of homosexuality – the chapter, "Virtually Abnormal", in "Love Undetectable" – is extremely respectful of even the theories of "reparative therapists." Moreover, a dogmatist would surely not go to the lengths of editing an anthology on marriage equality, and publishing Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager, Maggie Gallagher, Stanley Kurtz and David Frum on the question, in the spirit of open debate. As for torture, I guess it is so basic an issue of individual liberty and human decency that it is indeed one area where I am adamant – but again, I have done all I can to amass the empirical evidence and historical record to make my case.

Then there’s Mickey’s attempt, along the lines of Glenn Reynolds, to dismiss the notion that there is a religious right in America at all. The influence of Biblical inerrantism, the explosion of mega-churches, the increasing strength of fundamentalism, the incorporation of the religious right into the heart of the GOP: all this is hooey, according to Kaus. There are other reasons, he argues, for opposing gay coupling:

Even in a highly Republican town like Plano, in other words, the religious objection to gay marriage isn’t the crucial objection. Fear that moral entropy will envelop your family’s children is the crucial objection.

A question: what does Mickey mean by "moral entropy"? And why does allowing gay marriage correlate with it? Wouldn’t encouraging marriage be an antidote to "moral entropy"? And if you concede that, then how is the opposition to such marriages not, at root, a religious one? Over to you, Mickey.

The best obit I have read. Money quote:

Hassan Ibrahim took to extremes local Bedouin notions of a hardy upbringing. For punishment, he beat his stepson with an asphalt-covered stick. Thus, from earliest infancy, was Saddam nurtured – like a Stalin born into very similar circumstances – in the bleak conviction that the world is a congenitally hostile place, life a ceaseless struggle for survival, and survival only achieved through total self-reliance, chronic mistrust and the imperious necessity to destroy others before they destroy you.

The sufferings visited on the child begat the sufferings the grown man, warped, paranoid, omnipotent, visited on an entire people. Like Stalin, he hid his emotions behind an impenetrable facade of impassivity; but he assuredly had emotions of a virulent kind – an insatiable thirst for vengeance on the world he hated.

To fend off attack by other boys, Saddam carried an iron bar. It became the instrument of his wanton cruelty; he would bring it to a red heat, then stab a passing animal in the stomach, splitting it in half. Killing was considered a badge of courage among his male relatives. Saddam’s first murder was of a shepherd from a nearby tribe. This, and three more in his teens, were proof of manhood.

Two million were to follow.