Author: Andrew Sullivan

The last time I checked, the official number of murders by torture in U.S. custody was five, with 23 other deaths under investigation. Now we have 26 criminal homicides of detainees. There will be more to come. The standard conservative defense is that this was restricted to one night in Abu Ghraib and that even that wasn’t torture. Anyone who has read even the white-wash reports, like the Church report, knows that what happened at AG was torture under any definition. Anyone who reads the NYT this morning will note that only one of the murders took place at Abu Ghraib. This was systemic mistreatment of detainees. It still is. And this doesn’t even deal with the CIA, which has been given carte blanche to torture or kidnap anyone it suspects of terrorism, even if innocent, or to send them to Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia to get hung from hooks in the ceiling. The second conservative response is that this has nothing to do with official policy and that therefore no one in the administration should be held accountable. First, Donald Rumsfeld didn’t think so. He offered to resign twice because of his responsibility (he had signed two torture warrants by then and known of Abu Ghraib for months). Second, the administration’s reversal of its own 2002 memo sanctioning torture implicitly acknowledges that it had responsibility for this astonishingly widespread phenomenon of torturing prisoners to death or treating them so badly they died. The numbers of detainees tortured or mistreated who didn’t die is, of course exponentially larger. The administration included as part of its war-plan legal memos arguing that the usual ban on mistreatment of prisoners was no longer operable and that any “military necessity” could justify torture or abuse of detainees. How much more evidence do we need? Now we have the latest ACLU document dump in which one soldier reports that General Ricardo Sanchez said, “”Why are we detaining these people, we should be killing them.” Well, why should anyone be surprised when these prisoners were indeed killed? The reports so far have been very helpful. But they have been all subject to Pentagon influence. It seems to me we have to have an independent inquiry into all this. Even some conservatives have begun to question what has gone on. (No, not Glenn Reynolds. He has said he won’t link to reports of torture, since the mainstream press is doing a decent enough job. Or National Review, one of whose contributors actually wanted to join in the torture at Abu Ghraib.) On the other hand, here’s Mark Shea, a Ratzingerian Catholic who actually believes that torture is morally inexcusable. Imagine that. A member of the Catholic right openly confronting the moral horror of what this administration has permitted and will not stop. All is not lost.

Hitch has what I think is an important piece in Slate. The news that several weapons sites in Iraq were plundered immediately before and after the allied invasion is deeply worrying. There is a real possibility that serious weaponry was purloined by other Arab dictators or by very organized terrorist entities or some combination of the two. What this says about the competence of the invasion is once again unnerving. It means that the war may actually have ensured the occurrence of the one thing it was designed to prevent. Hitch counters that if Saddam could bring this off in wartime, he could have done it in peacetime, which makes the invasion just as necessary. Agreed. But it seems to me more confirmation of my essential position: that the war was right, but that the execution came close to undermining it. But it’s also true that you cannot both lament the plundering of al Qaqaa and other sites and insist that there were no WMDs in Iraq before the war. Both sides have some reckoning to do.

THE BIG GOVERNMENT BINGE: Yes, it’s continuing. The three lasting Bush domestic legacies will, I think, be the Medicare drug entitlement, the huge tax increases that will be enacted as soon as he leaves office (if not before), and the huge new bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. The invaluable Veronique de Rugy has just completed a study of how the DHS is spending its vast sums of your and my money. To say the least, it’s not encouraging. What is encouraging is that AEI is supporting this work. Fiscal conservatism is not quite dead, however hard Bush and Rove are trying to kill it off. Hey, there are even some sane conservatives still in the Senate.

AN IRAQ BLOG: From a soldier who quotes Niebuhr.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In this context, the existence of marriage-like rights without marriage actually cuts against the existence of a rational government interest for denying marriage to same-sex couples. California’s enactment of rights for same-sex couples belies any argument that the State would have a legitimate interest in denying marriage in order to preclude same-sex couples from acquiring some marital right that might somehow be inappropriate for them to have. No party has argued the existence of such an inappropriate right, and the court cannot think of one. Thus, the state’s position that California has granted marriage-like rights to same-sex couples points to the conclusion that there is no rational state interest in denying them the rites of marriage as well.” – San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, in a ruling yesterday. I should reiterate that in principle, I’d like the courts to be more restrained. But in practice, the logic of equality is so over-powering, and the arguments against it so fragile, that judges have little choice but to state the obvious. Like many other judges in these cases, Kramer is not a radical. He’s a Catholic Republican appointed by a former Republican governor. But his intellectual honesty simply compels him to state that equality means equality. And when state constitutions insist upon it, you have to have a much stronger argument to keep a minority disenfranchised than the current anti-marriage forces have been able to marshall. Tradition? So was the ban on inter-racial marriage. Procreation? Non-procreative straight couples can get civil licenses. The potential collapse of civilization? Impossible to prove or even argue convincingly. Once you have accepted that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, the arguments against same-sex marriage collapse. And since the only coherent moral difference is the likelihood of non-procreative sex, and that is now the norm in traditional heterosexual civil marriage, there is no moral case against allowing gay couples to have civil marriage. The rest is fear and prejudice and religious conviction. None should have a place as a legal argument in the courts.

My take.

POT, KETTLE WATCH: “Republicans who throw up should grow up… Democrats have no reform ideas, but they have a slogan — ‘Fix it, don’t nix it.’ The spectacle of adults chanting such childishness is embarrassing …” – George Will, Washington Post.

That’s the word that came into my head reading this story. The Kifaya movement is no chimera. It’s real. And it’s close to miraculous.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Happily, most of the Andamans’ Negritos seem to have survived December’s tsunami. The fate of one tribe, the Sentinelese, remains uncertain, but an Indian coast guard helicopter sent to check up on them came under bow and arrow attack, which is heartening.” – Armand Marie Leroi, New York Times. Well, it made me smile. And this is as good a time as any to say how much much better the NYT’s op-ed page has become under David Shipley. Yes, I’m biased. David is an old friend and worked with me at The New Republic. But he has always had a commitment to genuine intellectual diversity, and the way in which the NYT has refused to kowtow to p.c. pressure to curtail open and free debate on such touchy matters as race and gender is clearly his achievement. This matters. Race and gender are real. How real they are is an open question. But we cannot find the answer if we will not allow the question.

Some interesting findings from Gallup, which their snarky writer spins. MysteryPollster provides must-read analysis. And the Blogads reader survey is also up. Two points from me: I’m struck by the youth of blog readers, their relative influence and wealth, and, again, the overwhelmingly male cast of the readership. Susan Estrich can’t ascribe that to Mike Kinsley’s bias. All in all: skewing young, educated, wealthy, politically balanced (39 percent Dems, 35 percent Republicans or Libertarians, 19 percent Independents), and influential. An advertizer’s dream.

He makes the case for equal citizenship for gays and lesbians as well as anyone. And in the Army Times. Money quote:

We can easily see why some people are physically disqualified for military service, but it is much harder to see why the fact of private consensual sex between adult citizens disqualifies them from military service. What democratic principle justifies this discrimination?
The law barring gay military service imposes private religious and moral commitment through the instrument of public law. Gays and lesbians are American citizens, and many are silently serving in our military now as they have in all of our wars. The war in Iraq highlights the shortsightedness of discharging Arabic linguists who happen to be gay. But far worse than this failure in reasoning is the more general democratic failure of refusing full citizenship to able and willing citizens making personal choices the majority does not like.

I think the substantive debate on gays in the military is largely over. Significant majorities among the public support lifting the ban. Britain, the U.S.’ closest ally, has done so – with no problems. My simple view is that anyone able and willing to serve his or her country should be able to do so, and be governed by the same rules as anyone else. We should be grateful to these people, not dismissive.

A year ago, the Islamo-fascists struck in Madrid. Worth taking a second today to remember the people murdered in the heart of a free society. And the pusillanimous response from some European leaders.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “After months of never-ending posts regarding the war, gay marriage and the evil that is iPod, it was refreshing to finally read something near and dear to my heart: obscure songs and bands from the ’80s. Not really a big fan of “The Office” (it’s my wife who likes Britcoms; she’s a big fan of “Cold Feet”) but I, and a whole generation of Filipinos, do remember Seona Dancing and “More to Lose.” Believe me, these guys were on every DJs’ playlist back then. Of course, we couldn’t really make out what the lyrics were (something about moving to new beginnings looking back to see what we might find). We just thought they sounded angst-y and cool, but we thought that about most U.K. bands during the ’80s. (Echo and the Bunnymen, anyone?) And when Ricky Gervais won the Golden Globe my first reaction was “Hey! The guy from Seona Dancing won!” And, yes, “More to Lose” is on my iPod. Now, The Lotus Eaters, they were a good band …”

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.” – H. L. Mencken.

Technology has enabled us to seal ourselves off from general social interaction – via iPods, cell-phones, and the like. But it has also made those new little homes completely transparent. No email is private; no website can be kept from dissemination; no secrets are allowed; no space for private communication really allowed any more. We have managed to combine social atomization while also destroying privacy. Way to go! My thoughts on this new world are now posted opposite.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “DEALING WITH COMMIE JOURNALISTS: Jonah – Seems to me the best advice one can offer our troops manning checkpoints in Iraq is the same as that given informally by friends & neighbors to me when I became an armed homeowner: If you have to shoot, shoot to kill. You’ll face much less trouble afterwards.” – John Derbyshire, arguing for an Eason Jordan approach to Iraqi checkpoints. He never disappoints, does he?

MORE ON RICKY: Yes, in the 1980s, he did well in the Philippines.

No comment necessary.

To yesterday’s email of the day, that is:

Two great things have happened in Beirut recently. First the opposition came out on the streets for a series of peaceful rallies. Then on Tuesday Hizbollah came out with peaceful rallies. Many people are treating the latter as setbacks for democracy. But in reality, they are democracy. It’s not only the people who we agree with who get to vote and mobilize. It’s everybody. In the Arab world there are going to be plenty of anti-American parties. If these parties’ first instinct is to try to rally public opinion and not unleash armies, that’s great. This is in a country where people used to kill each other, over such things, remember. Now they are rallying. This is part of what Wolfowitz was working for.

I tend to agree. But I also believe that any kind of triumphalism now is extremely foolish. This is just the beginning of the beginning. All sorts of obstacles lie ahead. But the course is, to my mind, right – even if the execution is sometimes inadequate.