Category: Old Dish

SOME RESPONSES

With the debate about Durbin, we’ve clearly reached a moment of some clarity. I’m not adding anything to what I’ve already said. But here are a few of your responses:

I’m surprised at your defense of Sen. Durbin. But maybe you’re on to something – I don’t know. We’ll see at the next election. We’ll have some races between those who defend Sen. Durbin’s comments, and those who think his insults were vile and unjustified. And we’ll see who wins. I predict the support-the-troops side will make headway. The left will sink further into oblivion the more they identify with Sen. Durbin and his supporters.

Point taken. I think this is a net political gain for the president and Republicans, if they really want to use it. I’m expected to be shocked by what Karl Rove will use in political warfare? What’s relevant is our deployment of cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, against the law of the land and the most basic principles of Western justice. My email bag has been evenly divided between those appalled by Durbin and others appalled by my defense. Here’s one from a Christian theologian:

I myself am in the midst of a scholarly writing project on torture. As a fellow Christian, I am grieved and appalled at what is going on. It is an ambomination, a desecration of the image of God which no child of God should allow to be undertaken in the name of their self-defense. I am also deeply disturbed at the rhetoric of those who would defend the administration’s ‘dirty hands’ policy. And at the way that, increasingly, criticizing the Administration is equated with anti-Americanism, immoralism and the like. Thank you for refusing to be cowed by these tactics.

Frankly, I’ve been amazed that the Christian right hasn’t been more vocal. But, hey, once faith has been transformed into partisan politics, you end up justifying any number of things. Here’s another point aginst my argument:

“A soldier sat in his barracks, shining his shoes. So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that soldiers had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s barracks, would you have believed it? Of course, you would.” This is the fundamental problem with Durbin’s analogy. The are many things that are “encompassed” in the behavior of those regimes. However, we remember those regimes for the worst of their behavior not the behavior slightly below the median. You know this, dude. Don’t play dumb.

I’m not playing dumb. Shining shoes is not the same thing as treating prisoners as animals. It’s not the same thing as smearing them with fake menstrual blood, or tying someone to the ceiling (as in Afghanistan) and beating their legs to a pulp while they scream for mercy until they die. It’s not the same thing as an emailed memo from a military intelligence officer in 2003, saying: “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.” According to the Red Cross, an organization that the U.S. still allows in its facilities, one prisoner in Iraq (where the Geneva Conventions are supposed to be applied)

“alleged that he had been hooded and cuffed with flexicuffs, threatened to be tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days. Interrogators would allegedly take turns ill-treating him. When he said he would complain to the I.C.R.C. he was allegedly beaten more. An I.C.R.C. medical examination revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexicuffs, and a broken rib.”

Club Gitmo? Give me a break.

HIV’S DECLINE

Some fascinating stats on declining infection rates among military personnel. The military stats are often among the best, because they have a very large population and can test those in uniform in ways civilians can avoid. Bottom line from the November 2004 report: “Incidence declined between 1985 and 2003 from 0.46 cases/1,000 person-years [py] to 0.07 cases/1,000 py.” African-Americans are still most at risk. But this is good news in general, which is why you won’t read about it in the New York Times. They prefer to hyper-ventilate over one case, rather than a study based on 1,732,419 servicemembers.

MISCEGENATION LAWS AND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

The picture is more complex than I anticipated. Big shout-out to all my poli sci readers who sent me data. At the height of the miscegenation bans, 41 states had them. Something close to that number will probably eventually have bans on marriage of varying degrees of severity for gay couples. The last hold-outs on inter-racial marriages were: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The first states to pass constitutional amendments preventing gay couples from marrying were: Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Utah. Obviously, there are considerable over-laps, but not the identical pattern I suggested. Part of this is accident: Hawaii and Alaska, for example, had early court decisions that prompted amendments that would not otherwise have passed. Part is because I’m taking constitutional amendments as the boundary (most of the anti-miscegenation states have mere laws banning marriage for gay couples). And part, of course, is simply the history of slavery and the South: a unique pattern that does not simply extend to other social issues, like homosexuality. The rhetorical parallels are striking, however. The most common arguments for banning inter-racial marriage were: they violated God’s design; black-white intercourse was mere sex, not marriage; if you allowed inter-racial marriage, polygamy and bestiality would inevitably follow. The most common arguments against same-sex marriage are: they violate God’s design; gay relationships are merely about sex, not love or commitment; if you allow same-sex marriage, polygamy and bestiality inevitably follow. The big difference is that back then, inter-racial marriage opponents backed states’ rights; today, same-sex marriage opponents want to overturn states’ rights. Here are two quotes worth citing:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races show that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

That was from the Loving vs Virginia debate. Here’s another from the New York Times last Sunday:

“The gay activists are trying to redefine what marriage has been basically since the beginning of time and on every continent. The Hebrew words for male and female are actually the words for the male and female genital parts. The male is the piercer; the female is the pierced. That is the way God designed it.”

There’s much more on the parallels – and differences – between these two debates in my anthology, “Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader.”

DURBIN, AGAIN

I’m a little bemused by some of the emails saying that I’ve gone crazy about Dick Durbin. They’re missing an important nuance. If Durbin had said, as Amnesty unfortunately did, that Gitmo was another Gulag, I’d be dismayed and critical, as I was with Amnesty. There’s no comparison in any way between the scale, intent and context of the Soviet gulags and Gitmo. If Durbin had said that what was being done there in the aggregate was comparable to Auschwitz or Siberian death camps, the same would be true. But Durbin said something subtler. Now I know subtlety is not something that plays well on talk radio. But in this case, it matters. Durbin focused on one very credible account of inhumane treatment and abuse of detainees (see below) and asked an important question:

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that prisoners had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s jails, would you have believed it? Of course, you would. In fact, I spent much time and effort before the war documenting the cruel and inhumane conduct of the regime we were trying to destroy – a regime whose cruelty encompassed low-level inhumanity like Gitmos – and, of course, unimaginably worse.

ONE ACT AT A TIME: When you read the account Durbin was citing you notice an important thing: the detainees were thoroughly dehumanized, robbed of any personal dignity, left in extremes of heat and cold, shackled, covered in their own urine and excrement, with one having apparently torn parts of his hair out, and left without food or water for up to 24 sleepless hours. Durbin could have quoted worse incidents – and there are many, far worse cases – but he wanted to ensure that his incident was testified by an FBI official. The moral question that Durbin is absolutely right to raise is a simple one: two years ago, would you have ever believed that the United States would be guilty of such a dehumanized treatment of a prisoner in its care? If the particulars had been changed, would you have believed that such a thing could have happened in a totalitarian regime’s prison? Does the way in which human beings have been completely robbed of dignity, treated cruelly and turned figuratively into “barking dogs” shock your conscience? The moral question is not simply of degree – how widespread and systematic is this kind of inhumanity? It is of kind: is this the kind of behavior more associated with despots than with democracies? Of course it is. When a country starts treating its prisoners like animals, it has lost its moral bearings; and, in the case of the United States, is also breaking its own laws (and, in this case, the president has declared himself above the law). I don’t know about Hugh Hewitt, Bill Kristol or NR, but I supported this war in large part because I wanted to end torture, abuse and cruelty in Iraq. I did not support it in order, two and a half years later, to be finding specious rhetorical justifications for torture, abuse and cruelty by Americans. I’m sick of hearing justifications that the enemy is worse. This is news? This is what now passes for analysis? They are far, far worse, among the most despicable and evil enemies we have ever faced. Our treatment of their prisoners is indeed Club Med compared to their fathomless barbarism. But since when is our moral compass set by them? The West is a civilization built on a very fragile web of law and humanity. We do not treat people in our custody as animals. We do not justify it. We do not change the subject. We do not accuse those highlighting it of aiding the enemy. We do not joke about it. We simply don’t do it. This administration – by design, improvisation, desperation, arrogance, incompetence, and wilfull blindness – has enabled this to occur. They must be held accountable until this cancer is rooted out for good. It has metastasized enough already.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“Re: Frum. It seems to me that the apt comparison is: interracial marriage after anti-miscegenation laws were discarded. It has been several decades now, but the number of interracial couples, while growing, is still very, very small. Perhaps Frum and his partisans might therefore argue that it wasn’t necessary to repeal those laws. The argument would make no sense to me, and I’m sure to you, but they might make the argument.” No, they wouldn’t make that argument. But their predecessors did – especially in the states that are now banning gay marriage with almost as much enthusiasm as they once banned inter-racial marriage. And they also demeaned those in inter-racial marriages with the usual sexual stereotypes they now deploy against gays. Plus ca change … In fact, it would be very interesting to do a comparison between those states that were the first to ban gay marriage and those that were the last to hold onto miscegenation bans. I bet there’s a correlation. Virginia, of course, springs to mind. Anyone got the data?

DURBIN SAID NOTHING WRONG

I’ve now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin’s comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable. The rank hysteria being perpetrated by some on the right is what is shameful. Hugh Hewitt should answer one single question: does he doubt the FBI interrogator who witnessed the appalling treatment of some detainees at Guantanamo? Here’s the report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold… On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”

Is Hewitt arguing that the interrogator was lying? Does he believe that the kind of tactics used against this prisoner are worthy of the United States? Does he believe that this happened without authorization? If he were told this story and informed that it occurred in, say, Serbia under Milosevic, would he be surprised? Hewitt should then answer the same question about the 5 detainees which the U.S. government itself has acknowledged were tortured to death by U.S. interrogators, and the scores of others who died in detention during or after “interrogation”. Does he deny that this happened? Does he honestly believe that removing the legal restrictions on cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees by our current president had nothing to do with this? Maybe he needs a little refresher on the extraordinary range and scale of the record of abuse that is still accumulating. I’m just amazed that some can view what has happened and their first instinct is to attack those who have criticized it, rather than those who have perpetrated it. It is this administration that has brought indelible shame on America, and it’s people like Dick Durbin who prove that some can actually stand up against this stain on American honor and call it what it is. Good for him. Thank God for him.