Author: Andrew Sullivan

Fascinating and encouraging piece by Lawrence Kaplan in TNR on the emergence of a real, actual strategy to defeat the insurgency in Iraq. Change is finally happening:

Battalion commanders who prepared against a conventional enemy at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, prior to their first deployment to Iraq say that, when they returned to prepare for their second deployment, nearly all of the exercises involved guerrilla warfare. From West Point to the War College, the service schools have all added courses on the subject. As well as releasing a counterinsurgency field manual last year, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command has a draft counterinsurgency doctrine waiting to be approved, and, last month, a counterinsurgency school even opened in Iraq, which incoming company and battalion commanders will attend as soon as they arrive in theater. Meanwhile, at the top, despite Casey’s insistence that “we’re applying counterinsurgency doctrine to the situation in Iraq, and doing it fairly well,” his approach is, even now, undergoing a profound revision. Tellingly, the shift comes as much at the behest of retired officers, think tanks, and civilian policymakers as it does from the accumulation of the Army’s own experience. The impetus also comes from two reviews of military strategy in Iraq, one commissioned by Casey himself and one by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. Casey’s review, launched this summer, concluded that U.S. forces “generally have it about it right,” in the general’s own telling. Khalilzad’s review, also launched during the summer, concluded they don’t.

I have a feeling that Zalmay Khalilzad may one day be seen as the critical figure who turned the tide in Iraq.

He salami-slices Krauthammer’s case, while Rumsfeld tries one last gambit. Money quote:

There is no reason to suppose that if Krauthammer’s reasoning was accepted, the result would be Krauthammer’s rules. Once we are rid of the childish notion of an absolute ban on torture, there is no telling where adult minds may take us.

The trouble with salami-slicing is that it doesn’t stop just because you do. A judicious trade-off of competing considerations is vulnerable to salami-slicing from both directions. You can calibrate the viciousness of the torture as finely as you like to make sure that it matches the urgency of the situation. But you can’t calibrate the torture candidate strapped down before you. Once you’re in the torture business, what justification is there for banning (as Krauthammer would) the torture of official prisoners of war, no matter how many innocent lives this might cost? If you are willing to torture a “high level” terrorist in order to save innocent lives, why should you spare a low-level terrorist at the same awful cost? What about a minor accomplice?

What about the child of a terrorist? If you need to save lives, why not? You may think no one in America would go there, right? Not so fast. Here’s AEI’s John Yoo, as recorded in a recent debate with Douglass Cassel at Notre Dame:

Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Just keep slicing the salami until you’re torturing innocent children. And we deposed Saddam for what again?

When all else fails, check the legal definition. The U.N. Convention on Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory, defines it thus:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession … when such pain or suffering is inflicted at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

The dictionary definition is the following:

1. a) Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
b) An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.
2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.

The Vatican seems to know what it means. Here’s the CIA definition of waterboarding:

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

Rich Lowry argues that this is not the infliction of severe physical or mental anguish or pain. The Wall Street Journal believes this isn’t “anything close” to torture and today argues that “if practiced properly, it does no lasting physical harm.” That’s the WSJ’s standard for America. Let’s just say it isn’t mine.

An apologia. I second every word of it. And this week, we can only pray that the Iraqi people get a chance to move their country forward in ways unthinkable five years ago.

From bugged phone records of an Italian Islamo-fascist, who rejoiced at the beheading of Nick Berg:

In the May 28, 2004, conversation about the Berg tape, Ahmed’s co-defendant, 22-year-old Egyptian Yahia Ragheh _ described by authorities as a would-be suicide bomber _ questions Ahmed’s assertions.

“It’s not a sin?” he asks.

“Who said this?” Ahmed replied. “It’s never a sin … because the cause is never a sin … Are you scared? Are you shocked?”

“No no, I think it is a sin, I only think it’s a sin,” Ragheh said.

“When you enter a movement it’s never a sin because there’s a cause, the Islamic cause, all in hell … everyone finishes in hell, everyone. For those who wound Islam the end is this.”

This is about as brilliant an exposition of what evil can come from people who believe they are sanctioned by God and a “cause” that renders any means permissible. That evil is not restricted to Muslims. It is a universal human temptation. And, in the torture debate, it has infected us as well.

“In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it before the torture started again.” – George Orwell, “Nineteen-Eight-Four.” As so often, Orwell describes the dehumanization and deception that is integral to torture – and to all who suffer and practise it.

Gary Rosen wonders if the Jihadists aren’t defeating themselves. Here’s hoping.

There is a troubling aspect to the otherwise laudable campaign to provide basic civil and legal equality to gay citizens in this country and around the world. That aspect is the attempt to prevent or even criminalize the expression of hostility to homosexuality, or gay rights, or indeed any other form of anti-gay speech. This is inimical to the principles of freedom on which the campaign for gay rights must rest. For centuries, the First Amendment was the only security for gay people; without freedom of speech, there would have been no gay rights movement. The idea that that movement would now attempt to restrict the rights of our opponents is truly disgraceful. You see it in Canada, and there is a recent grotesque example in England. It seems to me that gay groups need to end their silence about this and rigorously defend the free speech rights of our opponents, as well as their right to practice their religious faith in any way they see fit, and to proselytize within the law as aggressively as they want. We need to defend the free association rights of groups like the St Patrick’s Day parade organizers and even the Boy Scouts, however repugnant their views of gay people. Words cannot harm people; in fact, because those in favor of gay equality are telling the truth, we have every incentive to magnify and extend the debate. Silencing opponents is a sign of weakness, doubt and intolerance. Gay groups can and should do better.

Mark Levin is in such denial it’s almost painful to read. He describes my attempt to educate him about the widespread abuse and torture of military detainees as a series of “looney” links. Those links are to four government reports, the Red Cross, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, CBS News, the Guardian, and the New York Times. I know that the right believes all those organizations are now officially “looney,” especially the Red Cross, but really. Levin goes further and accuses me of lying. I’ll take just one outrageous charge – that I have been

“falsely contending that interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay found their way to Abu Ghraib (as if those convicted of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib, including putting underwear on a prisoner’s head, were tutored by honorable soldiers interrogating terrorists at GITMO), and on and on.’

Well, he hasn’t read the reports and doesn’t want to. But let me quote from the Schlesinger Report, ordered up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:

We noted earlier that migration of interrogation techniques from Afghanistan to Iraq. Those interrogation techniques were authorized only for Operation Enduring Freedom [the Afghanistan campaign]. More important, their authorization in Afghanistan and Guantanamo was possible only because the President had determined that individuals subjected to these interrogation techniques fell outside the strict protections of the Geneva Conventions.”

My italics. There is also a direct link from the abuse and torture authorized at Guantanamo and that at Abu Ghraib: General Geoffrey Miller, who was sent from Cuba to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib, where he told Janis Karpinski to treat detainees “like dogs.” Memos exist detailing commands to “break” the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Miller has never been disciplined. He was doing what Rumsfeld told him to do – which is why Rumsfeld’s own profession of “shock” at Abu Ghraib was itself a shocking piece of dishonesty or, again, denial. These are simply the facts, as reported by the Bush administration itself. Levin must withdraw his assertions that I am “falsely contending” anything, and his depraved attempt to argue that what happened at Abu Ghraib amounted to no more than a few panties on a few heads. He also asserts that Ronald Reagan authorized the torture of military detainees. That is a slander against the former president, which Levin must also withdraw. The strange thing is that I really think he believes what he’s writing. That level of denial and ignorance is necessary to keep a certain cognitive dissonance alive. But it has nothing to do with journalism; and even less to do with reality.

Politics and the Wallaces. Painful.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Tony, that is a recipe for losing this war. We are fighting against an idea – jihadi fundamentalism – and at the heart of this philosophy is the idea that democracy is a fiction, a sweet sugar-coating that quickly melts away to reveal a torture chamber. Over the past three years, your buddy George Bush has made this claim ring true in every home in the Muslim world. So why are you cowering on a runway below a CIA flight, holding your hands in your ears, humming Condy’s denials until the plane – and the screams of its passengers – are far, far away?” – Johann Hari, fierce defender of the war on terror, but horrified by the Bush administration’s deployment of torture.