Category: Old Dish

Maybe these newly declassified affidavits and depositions taken during the official investigation into Abu Ghraib can illuminate the Koran abuse mystery a little more. The following deposition is interesting because it is by a U.S. interrogator, not an inmate, and refers to a technique within the military-approved term “Pride and Ego Down” that was apparently already in use. Here’s the first deposition, dated 5/21/04. It is from someone who was

“part of a five person Mobile Training Team from Fort Huachuca, AZ. The mission of my team was to provide an overall assessment of interrogation operations, training and advice and assistance. My focus was interrogation operations … The Intelligence Rules of Engagement (IROE) was posted and was very similar to that IROE used in Afghanistan. During my observation of interrogation operations, the 519th demonstrated experience and dedication to the mission. Most techniques required a very specific written plan with a schedule and parameters. The MP’s appeared to be in control and professional I did see detainees in various states of undress to include nakedness and detainees wearing towels. The MP’s used segregation and stripping as a way to keep the detainees under control and to keep them from talking. On one occasion, I had a conversation with XXXXX, concerning the IROE and interrogation approaches. I gave him examples of approaches including Pride and Ego Down where an interrogator took a Koran, threw it on the floor and stepped on it and Fear Up Harsh where the interrogator had a dog trained to bark on cue if the interrogator thought the detainee was lying. I also explained sleep deprivation. I told him that in Afghanistan the interrogators could use an adjusted sleep schedule for detainees. The conversation was meant to explain why these activities were prohibited or restricted.

This is a little confusing. The person seems to be conflating approved and unapproved techniques – monitored sleep deprivation (approved) and Koran abuse (barred) respectively – and then saying that she was detailing them to show why they “were prohibited or restricted.” Both? Why? A subsequent deposition, which appears to be by the same person (but might not be) was taken on 06/30/04. Here’s the money quote:

I told him of a story I heard in Afghanistan of a dog used during an interrogation. The dog was trained to bark on cue and would bark any time the interrogator had reason to believe the detainee was lying during the interrogation. I told him this would probably not be allowed but that the presence of barking dogs in the prison might be effective. I told him of a story of an interrogator using and Pride and Ego Down approach. The interrogator took a copy of the Koran and threw it on the ground and stepped on the Koran, which resulted in a detainee riot. .. I never personally witnessed the above incidents, but heard about them from other interrogation facility personnel…

I don’t know what to make of this. The witness seems to be saying that s/he was referring to methods that were not authorized, and then s/he says they had already been used in Afghanistan. We may here be seeing part of the confusion in policy that helped make Bagram, Abu Ghraib and the torture in Basra, Tikrit and elsewhere possible, confusion for which no one has been held accountable.

It’s worrying enough that we find that some Christian fundamentalists have undermined the Air Force Academy. It’s bad enough that some extremists seem to think that this is a good way to win a war of ideas against extremist Islam. But when our own military seems to be advertizing an explicitly Christian identity in Iraq, then it’s time the president took action. Whoever in the marines allowed this tank to be defaced in this way needs to be removed from his post. It’s an outrage – to both the New Testament and to our mission in Iraq.

HIV NOW: Thanks for your emails of concern. I’ll be fine. My point is simply to write more candidly about some of the issues facing gay men two decades after HIV first emerged. A good critique of my points can be found here. A candid elaboration of some of the issues is contained in this email:

First, I’m sorry to hear of your latest numbers. I know all too well what it’s like to pass a week every three months hoping that your labs will confirm that your choices are working and your options are open.
Second, you’re right that HIV care has gotten a helluva lot easier. Since I seroconverted about two years ago, I’ve been on a twice-a-day combo that even comes with the special gift of far-out fabulous dreams, courtesy of Sustiva. I still have worries – any career break that might mean suspending health insurance is a complete non-starter, for example. But on the whole it’s been relatively easy, so much so that my biggest challenge for a while has been convincing myself, and fully internalizing, that I actually have this thing, that I am HIV+.
And that same unreality around HIV drove my sexual choices back when I seroconverted. The scare tactics didn’t do much for me any more; all I had was a vague moral sense that using condoms was the right thing to do. And let’s face it, even the most conservative of us gay men instinctively repels just a little bit at the sense of external moral threats. Unfortunately that instinct was just strong enough to keep me from talking openly with my other gay friends about the disappearance of condoms from my bedside, and I never really had the conversation I needed until after I was diagnosed.
I have a hunch, based purely on anecdotal evidence, that HIV is on the rise among educated, middle-class gay men. The stats don’t reflect that yet, but I’ve seen myself and others similarly situated victimize themselves in the double-bind I just described. In the heat of the moment, the instrumental calculus just isn’t going to inspire you to wrap it up. But the lingering moral tsk-tsk makes any failure to wrap it up all but unsayable. We have to figure out a way to get beyond this impasse. Or we need a working microbicide. Behavior modification has its limits, and I think we’ve met them.

Criticism of people with HIV can only go so far. In consensual private adult sex, after all, no gay man can claim innocence of danger any more. My own modest suggestion is an ad campaign focusing on the possible physical effects of HIV and HIV meds. Appealing to some men’s vanity by portraying people with AIDS as emaciated or suffering from lipodystrophy might help: it’s a more tangible threat than a very distant and vague health menace in a decade or so. I should also add that I don’t want to minimize the negative impact of HIV on my life. I went through hell for a while, and a terror that required all my psychological and spiritual resources to face down. (My memoir of this is contained in “Love Undetectable,” the book I’m proudest of.) The paradox is that if you have marshalled the capacity to face down a life-threatening condition, you have to some extent conquered fear. And conquering fear is contagious. In fact, my very existence as a happy, healthy, productive man with HIV is in itself undermining the safer sex message. Success means failure. But what am I to do? Wear a burka? Pretend I’m close to death?

Here’s a persuasive conservative case in its defense. The fact that so many Republicans and conservative activists are so appalled is a sign, again, of how unconservative they are.

I’ve just refreshed the pieces posted at left. My conservatism essay is now up in full; along with reflections on a year of civil marriage for all in Massachusetts; and a take on the “Toilet Wars” between Bush and the press. Check ’em out.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “Re: The Deal. You confirmed for me what I already knew – it’s a raw one for the GOP. The very fact that a bigot like yourself likes it proves to me that Republicans got screwed. AND you got what you really wanted – pIss off the right-wing base in hopes of depressing 2006 turnout so you can gain seats and secularize American culture.
This is far from over. Bush is not going to nominate O’Connor for Chief Justice – get a clue! She will probably retire soon anyway. Scalia for Chief Justice and someone of like mind to succeed him on the Court. You know it, I know it and the left knows it. At that point, the GOP will have to pull the trigger and morons like Lindsey Graham will vote their constituents’ interest or be bludgeoned to political death in the next primary. Conservatives still hold the cards Andrew. Don’t go wetting your “sane” self just yet.” Charming. And accurate.

“We have now had one year of legal same-sex marriage in our state. Despite predictions, we have not witnessed any threat to so-called ‘traditional marriage.’ There has not been an attack on family, and almost all would admit that very little has changed. In fact, however, something has changed. Many of our citizens have experienced the joy of marriage for the first time where the laws of our state have said, ‘You are equal.’ We have seen that joy in our son. To take that away would be an injustice. It would be devastating for our family and the real values we believe family should represent.
After seven years in a committed relationship, our son and his partner exchanged vows in front of 125 friends and family members. It brought home the reality that marriage is about two people who love each other and who desire to commit to a life together. We now realize how far our entire family has come in 12 years. Those hopes and dreams we had for our son prior to June 1993 have, in fact, now been realized. What more could we have wished for than to have our son find happiness and share his life with someone he loves?” – the parents of a gay son, in the Boston Globe.

I haven’t tackled the fundamental question in Iraq for a while. No, Mickey hasn’t scared me into silence. Since the elections, it’s simply been hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. You can read the good news here. The demise of a complete Sunni boycott of the next political phase also has to be encouraging. Buit it would surely be dumb not to notice how resilient the insurgency still is, how it has capitalized on the political drift of the past few months, and how it is as lethal as ever. My old friend, Niall Ferguson, provides a longer view. Like me, he has long believed that the war was absurdly under-manned from the beginning. Like me, he wants it to work. But some things cannot change. This is the key point:

How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out. The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements. Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed.

We are fighting a global war with the manpower for a minor spat. Technology can only do so much. And when you further consider that, in order to win, we need to deal with Syria and Iran at the very least, you can see the scale of our problem. Solution? At this point, I can’t see any except a major dose of luck.

Thank God there are some sane grown-ups in the Senate. I don’t think, as I’ve said, that either side has behaved very admirably in all this. The Dems have to get used to the fact that this administration won the election, that today’s GOP is an essentially religious group and that hard right fundamentalists are going to become judges. I worry about people like Bill Pryor making rulings – but the president picked him, his party supports him, and he’s not incompetent or unqualified. If the Dems want to stop such people becoming judges, they can always try winning a presidential election. Equally, the Republicans have become a sour, ideological bunch, and the complete lack of consultation with the Democrats or indeed even the few sane Republicans left doesn’t help matters. I hope (but don’t expect) that this compromise helps both sides back down. But it is the president who should take most stock. He should nominate to the Supreme Court someone as moderate on his side as Bader Ginsburg and Breyer were for Clinton. Clinton could have picked hard-left nominees. By and large, he didn’t. Bush should not pick an extremist nominee for the Supreme Court; and he shouldn’t nominate Scalia or Thomas to Chief Justice. Give that to O’Connor, who is, in any case, the real compromise-manager on today’s court. In the end, the Republicans would thank him. If the GOP leadership continues to look as extremist as it has done lately, the Republicans are going to lose badly in the near future.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Regarding ‘Me and my virus’ and ‘The changing climate’: The disincentive to getting HIV is that it is still killing people, even people on the medications. My brother tested positive in 1993 and has developed resistance to every HIV medicine, one by one. He now somehow lives a halfway decent life with only a handful of T-cells and each day is a gift. If you can improve your viral loads with two pills a day, that is wonderful. But it doesn’t work that way for every HIV positive person. Each case is different.”

The website that devotes itself to seeking justice for those who claim they were molested by the Legion of Christ’s leader says that the investigation has not ended. I don’t know how to judge their claims. The website is a good resource, though, for learning more about this troubling matter.

HIV and I have had a relatively civil union these past twelve years. For eight of those years, I was on heavy-duty anti-HIV medication; three years ago, I decided to take a break from the meds, as their side-effects were taking a toll and I had unconsciously begun to miss some dosages. Amazingly, the virus never really bounded back, and my immune system maintained a very stable balance. (For the initiated, my viral load bobbed between 15,000 and 40,000 viral particles per milliliter of blood; and my CD4 cell count stayed in the 500 – 600 range. People without HIV have a count between 500 and 1500, with the majority around 1000. But you only get AIDS if you dip below 200). Until now, that is. My latest numbers show an all-time low for my immune system, 380 CD4 count, and an all-time high for the virus, clocking in at 140,000. It’s one data point, and I’ll get another before I go back on meds. But it seems to me that after three years, the virus has broken back out of its no-fly zone. Not too surprising.

THE CHANGING CLIMATE: But a couple of things struck me talking this through with my doc. First off, my new med regimen may well amount to a mere two pills once a day. Just two pills. By this fall, the drug companies will have simplified the regimen to one pill once a day. The side-effects are predicted to be minimal (I’ll keep you posted). Compared with what we pozzies were taking in the mid-1990s, this is an astonishing improvement. I was once taking up to 40 pills a day with crippling side effects. The broader point: Yet another disincentive to getting HIV has evaporated. How are you supposed to scare people when the treatment is this simple, this effective and this easy? Compare the kind of medical ramifications of testing positive for Type 2 diabetes with testing positive for HIV. Your life is not as definitively shortened with HIV as it is with diabetes; the treatment is far less onerous; the lifestyle changes are fewer, compared with daily injections, monitoring your diet, and so on. All of this poses a big challenge to those trying to craft safer sex messages. When the costs of infection are this low and the sexual benefits as immediate and attractive as they always are, the current strategy of scaring people to death won’t work. We have to find a better, more positive way to encourage safer sex.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The ends never justify the means, because even if we do win in a fit of religious righteousness, ‘it will be a Pyrhhic victory.’ It will fundamentally tear away the wonderful secular and democratic protections the founders designed. As observers like Gary Hart have noted, the moral superiority of our ideals and values – the ‘fourth power’ as he calls it – is what will be the decisive factor in this war against Islamic fundamentalism. That power is the belief that all humanity, regardless of their allegiance to a particular God or any god, deserves basic and elemental protections because one’s own freedom and ability to believe in anything is not derived from the divine, but from the natural.
One of the reasons why I believe fascism fell without much of an attempt to rise again is that at Nuremberg the ethos was clear: even though your crimes are among the most vile ever recorded, you will be afforded a transparent process through which we will try your actions. This offered no legitimacy to the ideology of the Third Reich, but instead made a powerful statement to the rest of the world that even a systematic campaign to exterminate a group of people could not undermine the idea of justice.
And yet, what I am struck by the conception of justice borne out by Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and the logic of Yoo, Gonzales, and all the rest, is that our idea of justice ipso facto has been undermined. We are so fearful of legitimizing the ideology of al Qaeda, and in some way feel they have escaped the throws of humanity itself, that all of this is justified in so far as it all contributes to the “big war” against terror.
For my part, I’m not so sure. I think you have it exactly right. Osama and al-Zawahiri want this, precisely, because they cannot have a morally superior enemy, just as Hamas cannot accept the idea of a decent Israeli citizen. We, and they, are all pigs. It isn’t true of course, but exactly how do we make that case in the Middle East when this idea of justice has been taken to mean that the US can apprehend anyone, anywhere and then do anything with them without any due process or judicial oversight? How do we even make that case at home?
It all plays out like some Faustian tragedy.”

Bill Kristol and Stephen Schwartz get it right, I think. I should say that Bill Kristol has been pretty exemplary in the war on terror, with a few lapses. He hasn’t dismissed the abuse and torture allegations; he hasn’t turned a blind eye to Rumsfeld’s mismanagement of the post-war; he has kept an eye on the broader battle of ideas; he has backed a bigger military; and he has demanded more accountability from the Bush administration for its mistakes. No doubt he will soon be tagged as an anti-American lefty for these laudable criticisms. He wins kudos in my book.