Author: Andrew Sullivan

“I was being told by my leaders that these people were not enemy prisoners of war, and therefore, we could really sort of do whatever we wanted, but I don’t know if that’s even true. I don’t know.” – former U.S. Army interrogator Specialist Tony Lagouranis, explaining how the detainee abuses throughout the theater of war were ordered and condoned by the chain of command, which, of course, includes someone known as the commander-in-chief. The official line from the Bush administration is and was that all prisoners in Iraq were covered by the Geneva Conventions. They were and are lying. From the interview with lefty Amy Goodman on a lefty radio station:

TONY LAGOURANIS: 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.

AMY GOODMAN: Where is the SEAL Compound.

TONY LAGOURANIS: It was in the same place. It was at the Mosul airport, but I never actually went inside the compound myself.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you use hypothermia as a means of interrogating?

TONY LAGOURANIS: We did. Yeah, we used hypothermia a lot. It was very cold up in Mosul at that time, so we — it was also raining a lot, so we would keep the prisoner outside, and they would have a polyester jumpsuit on and they would be wet and cold, and freezing. But we weren’t inducing hypothermia with ice water like the SEALS were. But, you know, maybe the SEALS were doing it better than we were, because they were actually even controlling it with the thermometer, but we weren’t doing that.

Who were these detainees? Money quote:

We all talked about it. I discussed this with my team leader all the time. The people I was working with all the time. You know part of the problem back then too, is that I was still under the impression that we were getting prisoners who had intel – who had intel to give us, and you know, I still thought that these were bad guys.
I was believing the intelligence reports that came in with the prisoner. I believed the detainee units, but later it became clear to me that they weren’t — they were picking up just farmers, you know, like these guys were totally innocent and that’s why we weren’t getting intel. And it just made what we were doing, like, seem even more cruel.

Torturing the innocent. No useful intelligence. Alienating our allies. Setting back our cause. And still Cheney won’t relent.

It’s now posted.

HABEAS CORPSES: Julian Sanchez connects the dots.

“This war has become the Democrats’ best hope for 2006 and they are going to do whatever it takes to get the maximum advantage from it. The more American lives that are lost between now and then, the better they think it will be for them. That is the sad truth. Hopefully, not even the mainstream media will not be able to disguise that strategy.” – Lorie Bird, standing in for Malkin herself. (Hat tip: The Reaction.)

Key West is going straight. This emailer makes a salient point about the limits of acceptance:

I’m happy for the 20-year-old poli sci major at UCSB. I’m happy that his coming out was easy, and that his friends have accepted him for who he is. That’s all good. But it’s not quite the reality for most gay kids in America.
For starters, he lives in LA. Although acceptance of gay people has improved everywhere in the country it’s still a very different situation for someone coming out in rural Arkansas or suburban Detroit or a small town in Upstate New York.
More important, our hero is an athlete, straight-looking, straight-acting, popular, and all that. Things tend to come easily for guys like that. Try being a scrawny, effemiate high school drama queen. You might not surprise anybody by coming out, but chances are you’re not going to feel like “one of the guys,” either.
Gay culture as we have known it may be fading away, but I suspect it will be with us for a long time in some form because there will always be some of us who can never feel like one of the guys.

Point taken. Because I consider myself a political integrationist, I have sometimes been accused in the gay world of slighting gay men who do not conform to gender norms, or even disparaging them in some way. I truly hope that I have not left that impression. I’m a classical liberal in many ways, and do not believe that government should be in the business of affecting culture through law, in so far as that is possible. I believe it should restrict itself to treating all citizens equally under the law, and that’s it (hence my opposition to hate crime laws, for example). That means that some cultural and social unfairness, even cruelty, will endure. I don’t endorse it; I loathe it; anyone who knows me knows I harbor no hostility to effeminate men, drag queens, trans-gendered people, and others. I need to do a better job of understanding their issues. But I also believe in limited government. One of those limits is eschewing the temptation to alter the hearts of minds of free people. That job should be left, in my view, to private institutions and human interaction. Anything else gives government too powerful and invasive a role in our lives. (If you want my extended take on this, Chapters Four and Five of Virtually Normal make the case.)

A Republican fights back:

“Why do Democrats get a free pass? Why isn’t anyone else entitled to their opinion? Murtha is obviously pressing the Democrats’ attack on President Bush. His past heroism doesn’t make him right when he engages in partisan politics. Are you so naxefve as to think he wasn’t picked to deliver the surrender message because of his past military history? Passing on another marine’s opinion is just as relevant as his and just as fair. Liberals like you won’t be happy until President Bush is impeached. You can’t win an election legally, so you resort to slimy tactics in an effort to win. If it takes losing the war and wasting all those who gave their lives in the cause of freedom, it is worth it for you. What do you care? You live a privilege life made possible by our military’s sacrifice. And you show your appreciation by stabbing us in the back.”

I think this email does indeed represent the bitter core of the Bush-Cheney GOP.

Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt called Jack Murtha a coward this afternoon, unworthy of the Marines, on the House floor. Money quote:

The fiery, emotional debate climaxed when Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel. “He asked me to send Congress a message – stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message – that cowards cut and run, Marines never do,” Schmidt said.

She later withdrew her remarks from the record. But those words linger as a reminder of what these Republicans have become. For the record: Murtha served 37 years in the Marines, and has Purple Hearts to his name. He visits wounded soldiers at Walter Reed every week. Three years ago, he won the Semper Fidelis Award of the Marine Corps Foundation, the highest honor the Marines can confer. Every time you think these Republicans can sink no lower, even after their vile smears against Kerry’s service last year, they keep going. They make me sick to my stomach.

Here’s what strikes me as the salient question right now. Why won’t the Republicans force a vote on the Murtha proposal – a phased withdrawal over six months – rather than “immediate” withdrawal? If the GOP wants to demonstrate a backbone on the war, let them force that vote. I’d passionately vote it down, if I were a Congressman. But the GOP’s proposal is again not a sign of strength. It’s a straw-man: as cheap and tawdry as the current GOP leadership. Let me add something more. How pathetic is the credibility of a commander-in-chief that while he is abroad, all hell breaks loose on the war he is allegedly waging? Bush has lost the country on this. It’s not the media’s fault, not the Democrats’, not the military’s. It’s Bush’s, and his sad excuse for a defense secretary.

If only there were more like this. But, alas, it doesn’t end well. Think of it as a story of what might have been.

ON MURTHA: I guess I should make it clear that I strongly disagree with Murtha’s notion that we should withdraw troops from Iraq, and strongly disagree with the Senate’s recent amendment all but committing us to troop withdrawal in 2006. I just believe that Murtha is a good guy, a patriot, and utterly undeserving of the partisan and vicious attacks now being leveled against him.

“One thing about Rep. Murtha that I haven’t seen in the recent news yet is that he has been visiting our wounded troops weekly at Walter Reed Army Medical Center since the war began. I reported this last year in Wired, in a story about a new kind of battlefield anesthesia pioneered in Iraq that was funded by Murtha. This man walks the talk, and Cheney and McClellan should hang their heads in shame.” I couldn’t agree more. I have to say the right-wing’s attempt to belittle, marginalize and even question the patriotism of Mutha is one of the most disgusting things I’ve yet seen from people who get more shameless by the day. Real conservatives deal with something called “reality.” They listen to critics; they worry about worse-case scenarios; they care about long-term consequences of, say, piling up debt or going to war with no real plans for peace; they respect good men like John Murtha. The people running the country right now are not conservatives. They have highjacked that tradition for their own ends. And one day, we will recover it from their hands.

We have a contender.