Author: Andrew Sullivan

We may not yet fully understand how weird this administration has been. And how powerful the “Number 2” really is – and how utterly unaccountable to anyone but his putative boss.

I’m concerned about Muslim extremism in Europe and fear the worst. But I have to say that the reporting so far from France does not conform very closely to fears of an explicitly Islamist insurrection. I found this post by Iain Murray very helpful. And this quote struck me as telling:

They complained that police manhandle them during identity card checks, even claiming that some officers plant hashish on them as a pretext for arrests, and that they regularly fire off rubber pellets during sweeps. “You wear these clothes, with this color skin and you’re automatically a target for police,” said Ahmed, 18, pointing to his mates in Izod polo shirts, Nike sneakers and San Antonio Spurs T-shirts.

San Antonio Spurs? Not exactly Osama-wear.

A year and a half after legal civil marriage in one state, the Daily Show investigates the evidence for social and moral disintegration.

Ramesh refines his position. Money quote:

Most of my commentary in this matter has concerned judges who hold views about judging that constrain their discretion. If the judge practices a Dworkinian ‘moral reading’ of the Constitution, then he is, whether or not he admits it, playing a legislative role. A Catholic Dworkinian who reads a right to abortion into the Constitution would have sinned in the same way as (and perhaps in more ways than) a legislator who votes for abortion.

So a Catholic Justice who believes in the right to privacy as a moral as well as a constitutional matter could be denied communion, if such a right were construed to include the right to abort an unborn child. Or am I missing something? That strikes me as a big deal. And the bishops’ threat to withhold communion not just from elected officials but “public” ones seems to me to include judges. The upshot of Benedict’s church will be indeed to dictate to Catholic public officials, including judges, what they can and cannot do and still be allowed to receive communion. Under those circumstances, a judge’s religion would indeed be fair game for Senate hearings, it seems to me. Sad to say.

This graphic helps illustrate the extent of the immigrant Muslim uprising in France.

It’s on this continent. Sebastian Mallaby also has an excellent summary of why the U.S. is so far behind other countries in Tamiflu acquisition. Part of the answer, of course, is that we have a profoundly incompetent administration.

Great news that SCOTUS will take on the critical Hamdan case. The president, in my view, should have lee-way to exercize executive power in wartime as he sees fit, in emergencies when the legislature cannot be expected to act with sufficient speed or secrecy. But broad detention policies in a war that is now defined as permanent should not be in the hands of one man outside of legal, judicial or legislative review. I agree with Churchill on this matter, as he expressed himself in a speech on November 21, 1943:

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whther Nazi or Communist.”

Of course, among some of today’s Republicans, Churchill would be considered a whining liberal. Not by me.

Here’s some useful context on the tragedies that accompany all wars. Here’s a chart comparing deaths in all America’s wars. If you take the 2,000 death toll of the current war in Iraq, and average out over the 30 months of combat in that country, you arrive at the grim tally of 68 deaths a month. If you only count deaths caused by hostile forces, the number goes down to 53 deaths per month. That remains the lowest ever military death rate of any war in U.S. history. It’s below even the first Gulf War. Part of this may be attributable to remarkable advances in medicine for the wounded – which leaves many, many more individuals alive but badly injured. And part of it is a consequence of the Rumsfeld decision to let Iraqi civilians be murdered in the thousands, rather than provide basic order and stability in an occupied country. But it’s important to keep some context in mind. Every death is an incalculable tragedy for the families and friends left behind. In no way am I attempting to minimize this appalling toll. At the same time, this has been an historically low-military-casualty conflict. That’s worth knowing.

Marty Lederman reviews the state of play among right-of-center blogs on the torture question, and asks some salient questions. Kieran Healy focuses on the Volokh blog’s increasingly tangled knots. Not all freedom-lovers have looked the other way, of course. But loving freedom and opposing government torture is no longer, sadly, a unifying theme on the right.

The avalanche of embarrassing CIA leaks in the last couple of weeks is a sign that within the Bush administration, the proponents of torture are finally losing the debate. They are losing the debate because torture is morally wrong, deeply damaging to the United States, terribly dangerous for U.S. servicemembers and counter-productive in the war against Islamist terrorism. Today, we get even more info. From Jane Mayer’s must-read New Yorker piece, we find that the White House Office of Legal Counsel had indeed opined that Iraqi insurgents were originally not covered by Geneva, and that that opinion had lasted until October 2003. Now does it make more sense why abuse and torture migrated so easily from Gitmo to Iraq and Abu Ghraib? And why we lost the hearts and minds of many Iraqis so soon? We also find out more about the critical 3/14/02 memo written by John Yoo, still classified but now being leaked. According to Mayer, the memo

“dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated.”

Surely the public has a pressing right to know the contents of that memo. Meanwhile, many others in the administration are trying to reverse the hideous Cheney policy. According to Newsweek, Condi Rice, as I would have expected, now opposes this insane policy, along with humane and smart hawks like national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Gordon England, Donald Rumsfeld’s new deputy. Even Gonzales and Miers refuse to support torture any longer. The Washington Post also highlights a neoconservative hawk who has not gone over to the dark side:

[I]n a reflection of how many within the administration now favor changing the rules, Elliot Abrams, traditionally one of the most hawkish voices in internal debates, is among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy in his role as the deputy national security adviser for democracy, according to officials familiar with his role.

Those of us who recall the Reagan legacy and who believe in America’s vital role in fighting terror while preserving its values of human treatment of detainees and human rights are finally gaining ground. The soul of conservatism is at stake here – and the soul of America as well.