Category: Old Dish

I wrote yesterday that “Newsweek bears complete responsibility for any errors it has made; and, depending on what we now find, should not be let off the hook.” Retracting a story whose single anonymous source has now said he can’t be sure is the right thing to do. Continuing to report on the question is the other right thing to do. This is not about a minor issue to do with a president’s long-forgotten National Guard service. It is a huge issue with great ramifications for the war on terror. It gets to a very important question: Are we undermining our cause by unnecessary and inflammatory tactics in detainee treatment? And that is where the responsibility of the Bush administration comes in. No one in the administration has flatly denied that desecration of the Koran has taken place at Guantanamo. There are credible reports that mistreatment of the book led to a hunger strike among inmates; and many other such instances of interrogative abuse of Islam reported in official military and Congressional reports. Now that Newsweek has accepted its responsibility, the White House has to accept theirs’: did such a toilet-flushing occur? And if we had not decreed that the Geneva Conventions need not apply to all our terrorist detainees, would this even be a question in the first place?

The great gift that the New York Times gives the world is free access to its articles, opinion-journalists, and stories. In September, that will no longer be the case. They are putting up a $50 toll-booth to “the work of Op-Ed columnists and some of the best known voices from the news side of The Times and The International Herald Tribune (IHT).” They’ll be charging for the privilege of reading MoDo and Krugman and Brooks. I can understand the economics of this, as newspaper circulation declines. But I wonder if, in the long run, this is a wise move on their part. By sectioning off their op-ed columnists and best writers, they are cutting them off from the life-blood of today’s political debate: the free blogosphere. Inevitably, fewer people will link to them; fewer will read them; their influence will wane faster than it has already. The blog is already becoming a rival to the dated op-ed column format as a means of communicating opinion journalism. My bet is that the NYT’s retrogressive move will only fasten the decline of op-ed columnists’ influence.

Kos blogger Susan Hu has discovered four other media citations of the allegation that Gitmo interrogators desecrated the Koran: one from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and three from Human Rights Watch. Now we cannot know for sure – yet – if these allegations are real, or propaganda. But we do know for certain that other “techniques” designed to use religion as an interrogative tool have been deployed, including the smearing of fake menstrual blood on detainees’ faces. This religious warfare was also deployed at Abu Ghraib. I wrote in my review of the official records of the torture:

One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted in broken English: “They stripped me naked, they asked me, ‘Do you pray to Allah?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Fuck him.'” Later, this inmate recounts: ”Someone else asked me, ‘Do you believe in anything?’ I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he said, ‘But I believe in torture and I will torture you.'”

The man cited, Charles Graner, was found guilty of detainee abuse. So we have evidence of the abuse of Islam by U.S. interrogators; we have four citations of the Koran incident; Newsweek has not retracted the story; and more will no doubt come out. One thing worth reiterating: the notion that this obscenity simply couldn’t have happened in the U.S. military (something I believed two years ago) is no longer an operative assumption. We know that incidents like this have happened. And even now, the administration is not denying it outright.

He’s their Bernie Goldberg and he just wrote his confession.

“NOXIOUS BIGOTRY” IN NEBRASKA? Stanley Kurtz takes on the Washington post here on equal marriage rights. He portrays the Nebraska amendment as simply another one “protecting” the traditional definition of civil marriage. The best discussion of the decision I’ve read is, as so often, by Eugene Volokh. The ruling won’t hold. But Kurtz ignores the obvious point of the Post editorial. It is the following:

The Nebraska provision, particularly as interpreted by the state’s attorney general, is so broad as to invalidate any legal recognition of any same-sex relationship. This has implications, the judge notes, not merely for those who would marry but for “roommates, co-tenants, foster parents, and related people who share living arrangements, expenses, custody of children, or ownership of property.” The state attorney general, in fact, interpreted it to prevent any state law allowing gay couples to make organ donation decisions for one another. The constitutional guarantee of equal protection may not require states to recognize same-sex marriage, but it unquestionably prevents a state from arbitrarily targeting gay couples for differential treatment.

So to summarize: there is a law against same-sex marriage in Nebraska; the amendment’s keeping civil marriage rights entirely heterosexual is not under legal dispute at all; the Defense of Marriage Act and all previous legal precedent ensures that Massachusett’s civil marriages will not be recognized in Nebraska. But even this is not enough. By constitutional amendment, same-sex couples are denied all legal protections, including any “civil union, domestic partnership, or other similar same-sex relationship.” It’s revealing that Kurtz seems to support such an amendment, because it belies his claim that he is not interested in persecuting or disenfranchising gay couples, just “protecting civil marriage.” Given the fact that there is not even the slightest chance of same-sex marriage occurring in Nebraska, what is really motivating this sweeping denial of any basic protections for gay couples? Here’s what I mean: preventing them from visiting one another in hospital; making organ donations impossible and joint custody of children illegal; no possibility of sharing health insurance. When a majority singles out a tiny minority that represents no threat to them, bars them from basic legal protections, and denies them the most basic aspects of human dignity, we are no longer talking about the “protection” of marriage. We are talking about another version of Jim Crow. And Kurtz is applauding.

We have yet to see what’s at the root, if anything, of the Newsweek story. But I think it’s telling that some bloggers have devoted much, much more energy to covering the Newsweek error than they ever have to covering any sliver of the widespread evidence of detainee abuse that made the Newsweek piece credible in the first place. A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to “Fuck Allah,” after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran? Yes, Newsweek bears complete responsibility for any errors it has made; and, depending on what we now find, should not be let off the hook. But the outrage from the White House is beyond belief. It seems to me particularly worrying if this incident further intimidates the press from seeking the truth about what the government is doing in the war on terror. It is not being “basically, on the side of the enemy,” as Glenn Reynolds calls it, to resist the notion of government-sanctioned torture and to report on it. It is patriotism and serving the cause that this war is about: religious pluralism and tolerance. The media’s Abu Ghraib?? When Mike Isikoff is found guilty of committing murder, give me a call. Austin Bay still insists that Abu Ghraib did not constitute “deadly torture.” The corpses found there (photographed by grinning U.S. soldiers) would probably disagree. (Will Bay correct?) Three factors interacted here: media error/bias, Islamist paranoia, and a past and possibly current policy of religiously-intolerant torture. No one comes out looking good. But it seems to me unquestionable that the documented abuse of religion in interrogation practices is by far the biggest scandal. Too bad the blogosphere is too media-obsessed and self-congratulatory to notice.

My thoughts about the risks – and upsides – of the looming clash.

CHILL, GUYS: Pejman and Althouse need to get a grip. Have bloggers become that touchy? I thought David Greenberg (disclosure: an old friend) got a lot about blogging dead-on. It’s harder to do well than it looks; and you need a skin as thick as a dinosaur’s. Or mine.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Now we are forced to do something that societies often do when people can’t control their desires. We have to pass laws to stop their desires.” – Rick Santorum, in a quote that basically sums up his position on most topics. (This time it was about the filibuster.)

CPAP UPDATE: In the last installment in my apnea-drama, I complained about facial imprints and bruises from the attachment to the mask. Well, it turns out I had the straps on inside out. I’m not that big a dope. The guy who trained me in its use – he was sent by the CPAP company – put the straps on the wrong way round; and it wasn’t till I was washing the mask Saturday night that it occurred to me to reverse them. Now there’s barely a mark. I should withdraw my gripe.

Newsweek doesn’t quite retract its story on alleged desceration of the Koran at Gitmo. But it adds:

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur’an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them “not credible.” Our original source later said he couldn’t be certain about reading of the alleged Qur’an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we.

Maybe we will have some sort of resolution of this soon, but I doubt it. I reiterate what I wrote Saturday: “Even if this incident turns out to be false, our previous policies have made it perfectly plausible.” That’s the deeper issue here.

“With all due respect to Prof. Lilla, I wonder if he read the same Himmelfarb book that I read. Himmelfarb’s argument that some British members of the Enlightenment were more sympathetic to religion than French members of the Enlightenment is questionable. How do David Hume, the author of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Edward Gibbon, the author of the vehemently anti-Christian Decline and Fall, become sympathetic to religion? Himmelfarb’s treatment of attitudes towards religion among English members of the Enlightenment is contradictory. She actually spends part of her book attacking sincerely religious English Radical members of the Enlightenment like Richard Price and Joseph Priestly, both of whom were Protestant clergymen. As for the French, while the popular image, shared by Himmelfarb and many intellectuals, of the French Revolution is the de-christianization campaign, people tend to forget that the initial and ultimately most damaging response of the Constituent Assembly was an effort to markedly reform the French Catholic Church on liberal, rationalistic, and democratic (elected priests and bishops) lines. The initial revolutionaries couldn’t imagine the state without the support of the Church and a liberal and republican society required a liberal and republican church. Their mistake was to try to impose this from above, in keeping with the long history of French monarchial control of the Church.

Lilla is also likely incorrect about the influence of German theologians on the second Great Awakening in the USA. This movement, with its Arminianism and emphasis on human perfectability, was well underway prior to the work of Schleiermacher. The latter’s work may have found a sympathetic reading in the USA but to regard it as a driving force is a mistake.

Finally, its an error to see us in the middle of another Great Awakening. While the USA is the most religious of all industrialized nations, religious participation by some important measures is actually falling in the USA and the number of atheists and agnostics has grown significantly in the past 2 generations. Open religious indifference has gone from a tiny to a significant minority. The anti-intellectual elements cited by Lilla have always been present and are nothing new. What is different is the commitment of the so-called religous right, with its spine of evangelical Protestants, to political action. This commitment, like the radical Islamic movements, is not the action of a confident and secure group. It reflects rather a response to an insecure position. The USA is no longer a Protestant country in its historic sense. Catholicism is now the largest Christian denomination in the USA. While Jews were once the only significant religious minority in this country, we now have significant numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and other religious traditions. The number of people indifferent to religion in the USA is only going to grow and our liberal immigration policies guarantee increased religious diversity. The days of Protestant cultural dominance are over and what we are seeing is in large measure a reaction to this irrevocable change in American life.”

I sure hope this piece about comic genius, Dave Chappelle, is on the mark. It certainly seems so to me. The whole idea of a man who is on a direct flight to vast money and fame stopping to ask himself who he is and what he’s doing strikes me as a phenomenally fresh moment in the culture. No, I’m not going to defend his apparent failure to live out certain contractual responsibilities (although I’d see it as eminently within the usual rights of an artist of any kind). What I am going to praise is what appears to be his conscience – even, and perhaps especially, in comedy. His integrity means more to him than going ahead because the money is in control. If that means slowing down, escaping the headlights of fame, taking time, so be it. Here’s a beautiful quote:

I don’t normally talk about my religion publicly because I don’t want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing. And I believe it is a beautiful religion if you learn it the right way. It’s a lifelong effort. Your religion is your standard. Coming here I don’t have the distractions of fame. It quiets the ego down. I’m interested in the kind of person I’ve got to become. I want to be well rounded and the industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well balanced. I’ve got to check my intentions, man.

That first sentence – which combines great faith with great humility – is what we need so much more of. In Islam, it is currently close to priceless. Thank God, then, for Chappelle. Literally.

The debate in the blogosphere just went up a notch.