Author: Andrew Sullivan

Among the best news on HIV lately is the drop in infection rates among African-Americans. Much of the drop can be attributed to needle-exchange programs. The response from the religious right? Here’s the Family Research Council: “The AIDS virus is spread through voluntary behavior. An unlimited supply of needles will not alter behavior patterns of irresponsible and often psychotic addicts.” Now, there’s the spirit of the Gospels. How many lives would have been lengthened and saved if these needle exchange policies had been put in place years ago? How much African-American health is worth FRC’s version of “morality”?

I missed this a couple of days ago. My bad. It’s fair, excellent, and thereby all the more brutal.

We have a crisis of confidence in the war. Read Congressman Murtha’s speech. (Hat tip: Rod.) He’s no MoveOn lefty. The president and vice-president are fighting back on the issue of their alleged deception before the war. As I have written here, I believe that the WMD intelligence fiasco was an honest and forgivable mistake, not a conspiracy or pre-meditated deception. The worst the administration was guilty of was occasional rhetorical excess in a very emotional period. But I do believe that the failure to prepare for the post-invasion phase, the far-too-late acknowledgment of the insurgency, the amateurism and pig-headedness of the early occupation, and the sanctioning of torture: all these required even those of us who believed in the war to call the administration on its incompetence and arrogance. What we need now is a very clear indication that our effort to train the Iraqi military is progressing, that the troops are well-equipped and cared for and that the political process isn’t degenerating into sectarianism. The fact that Bush’s and Cheney’s recent fight-back speeches were not about these vital matters is not a sign of their regaining strength. it’s a sign of their continuing and deepening vulnerability.

Josh Marshall cites an important nuance.

Bruce Bawer on what motivates many of Europe’s Muslim immigrants:

A [French] government report leaked last March depicted an increasingly two-track educational system: More and more Muslim students refuse to sing, dance, participate in sports, sketch a face, or play an instrument. They won’t draw a right angle (it looks like part of the Christian cross). They won’t read Voltaire and Rousseau (too antireligion), Cyrano de Bergerac (too racy), Madame Bovary (too pro-women), or Chrétien de Troyes (too chrétien). One school has separate toilets for “Muslims” and “Frenchmen”; another obeyed a Muslim leader’s call for separate locker rooms because “the circumcised should not have to undress alongside the impure.”

Many Muslims, wanting to enjoy Western prosperity but repelled by Western ways, travel regularly back to their homelands. From Oslo, where I live, there are more direct flights every week to Islamabad than to the US. A recent Norwegian report noted that among young Norwegians of Pakistani descent, family honor depends largely on “not being perceived as Norwegian – as integrated.”

This is not a case simply of an ethnic minority denied integration; it’s a case of a religious minority refusing integration, indeed attacking and denying the very values of secularism and liberalism upon which the West rests.

“Any deep-rooted prejudice against others, such as homophobia or misogyny, would be grounds for rejecting a candidate for the priesthood, but not their sexual orientation.” – Timothy Radcliffe, OP, Master, Dominican Order, 1992-2001, Blackfriars, Oxford. It’s great to see the former leader of the friary where I once attended mass standing up against bigotry in the Church.

No, I’m not describing my decision last year to endorse Kerry (although the opposite choice looks more and more deranged each day, doesn’t it?). I’m talking about this story of a man’s attempt to find out the story of his own legal lobotomy as a child. Weirdly fascinating.

Andy McCarthy seems to believe that this administration does not practice or condone what any rational person would call “torture”. Here’s his latest credulous statement:

First, the administration does not “reserve the right to torture” anyone. Torture is against the law, and even if it weren’t the administration has said, repeatedly, that it won’t be countenanced – it will be prosecuted. There are many of us – including no less a Bush-basher than Alan Dershowitz – who think a total ban on torture is a bad idea. But the administration has shown no stomach for such a discussion. It says torture is prohibited. Period.
What the administration has reserved the right to do – or, better, what congress reserved the right of the United States to do when it enacted significant reservations in its 1994 ratification of the UN Convention on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (UNCAT) (reservations that — as I mentioned this week — the McCain Amendment preserves) – is coercive interrogation. That is, forms of physical and mental pressure that fall short of torture (which, as a matter of law, is limited to the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering).

Just to clarify matters. Does McCarthy believe that repeated beating to the point of near-unconsciousness is “torture”? Does he believe that “torture” includes breaking a detainee’s ribs, tying his hands behind his back, hooding him, and then hanging him by his hands until, after being released, blood gushes from his mouth and nose? (I ask this question because the CIA officer responsible for this has yet to be even charged and the Bush-Cheney CIA has thrown away critical evidence.) Does he believe that “waterboarding” is torture? Does McCarthy believe that “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment for prisoners should be practised by those who wear the uniform of the United States? Does he believe that the religious faith of detainees should be abused and used against them in interrogation? McCarthy gallantly says he admires me for my “willingness to take on the tough issues.” Will he give me the pleasure of returning the compliment?

Just in case you think that habeas corpus does not matter, please read this detailed and harrowing post over to Obsidian Wings. It details the case of two Uighur detinees who have been cleared of all charges. They are innocent and the government accepts that they are innocent. But they are kept in Gitmo, in chairs, with their hands chained to the floor, in definitely. Money quote:

The government thinks it is perfectly acceptable not to inform counsel or the court when it determines that detainees are not enemy combatants, even though the allegation that they are enemy combatants is central to the justification for holding them. They seem to think, in addition, that it is acceptable to mislead counsel and the Court about the status of those detainees. They also think it is fine to keep those detainees at Guantanamo, to chain detainees who are not enemy combatants to the floor, and to deny them the right to communicate with anyone in the outside world, including relatives who think they are dead, and to confiscate things like photographs of their families as contraband. They claim that they cannot discuss the efforts they are making to place those detainees, and that they cannot release those detainees until those efforts, whatever they are, are completed, which will be “‘soon’ in kind of the hopeful sense of the word.”

Remember that this occurred while these people still had some basic habeas corpus rights:

Had these detainees not had the right to file for habeas corpus, none of us would know that they existed, let alone be able to read details of their incarceration, and what our government had to say in its own defense.
But habeas rights do not solve everything. To the best of my knowledge, the Uighur detainees are still at Guantanamo. The detainee Willett described as “the sleepy-eyed young man with the shy smile and the gentle manner” is still in jail, cleared of all charges but unable to go free.

The Graham/Kyl/Levin amendment that just passed is better than Graham’s first proposal. But it is important to remember that, as of now, these innocent men, handed over by bounty hunters in Pakistan, would have no access to courts. We would never have heard of them. They would be America’s “disappeared”. Anyone who cares about liberty in this country – a category that does not seem to include the bulk of Republicans any more – should be proud that the original Graham amendment did not pass. But chilled about what can now happen. In a free country. Whether you’re innocent or guilty.

“Setting a date would mean that the 221 soldiers I’ve lost this year, that their lives will have been lost in vain,” – Maj. Gen. William Webster, in charge of much of Baghdad.

TIMES DELETE: Every now and again, I check in on how the Times columnists are doing in their padded Internet cells. Yesterday, none of them made the top 25 emailed stories. I hope the padding is thick. Way ahead of the columnists: “Pumpkin Pots de Crème With Amaretti-Ginger Crunch.”