Category: Old Dish

Something remarkable has been going on these past few weeks. The president has begun to be a real war-leader. He is conceding mistakes, he is preparing people for bad news, he is leveling with the American people, he is taking questions from audiences who aren’t pre-selected or rehearsed. Some of us have been begging him to do this for, er, years. Now that he is, his ratings are nudging up. The truth is: most Americans want to win in Iraq. They will back a president who is honest with them and dedicated to victory. And those of us who have been deeply critical of the war’s conduct thus far are fully prepared to back the only commander-in-chief we’ve got, if he’s honest with us, corrects mistakes, and has a sane plan for progress. With Casey and Khalilzad and Rice, I think we have the best team we have yet deployed in the war. Let’s pass the McCain Amendment and put the abuse and torture issues behind us, and fight this war the way Americans have always fought: humanely but relentlessly, for a better, freer world.

NO DICE: McCain won’t give in on immunity for those who have broken the law. At this point, the Bush administration is trying to protect itself from prosecution. I have a feeling that Donald Rumsfeld won’t be leaving the United States very often in the future.

This is just embarrassing. But at this point, what choice do I have? Here’s Mark Levin again, who openly admits he hasn’t read a single one of the government reports on abuse and torture. Here’s his latest repetition:

[Sullivan] says he linked to several government reports. He did in an earlier post, which I addressed, i.e., that they deal almost exclusively with Abu Ghraib, which has nothing to do with the debate about allegations of systemic torture involving unlawful enemy combatants. Andrew wishes Abu Ghraib had relevance to this debate, but it does not.

Let’s just look at the titles of the actual reports. The Taguba Report is an “Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade.” That brigade operated at Abu Ghraib, but also, according to the report, “Camp Bucca, Camp Ahraf … and High Value Complex/Camp Cropper.” The Schlesinger Report’s title is “Final Report of the Independent Panel To Review DoD Detention Operations.” It deals with much more than Abu Ghraib. It’s a vast report on policies and “leadership failures” across every theater of combat. It’s ok if Levin doesn’t want to examine any of the evidence. It’s another thing when he accuses those of us who have of lying or misrepresenting what is in the public domain. Levin goes on:

He threw up a flurry of news stories, including one reporting on secret prisons in Europe (which has nothing at all to do with torture). By looney links I meant not that the sources themselves were looney, but the use of them was looney since they are not evidence. Perhaps I should have been more clear.

The Washington Post story Levin refers to specifically pointed to the fact that these secret sites were authorized to use waterboarding. The evidence in the Danner book contains every single government memo relating to detention policies, all the official government reports, and dozens of depositions of detainees. The reports are also the first to use the term “migration” of torture policies from Gitmo to Iraq. I didn’t come up with that idea. The government did. Last time I checked, this kind of thing is considered “evidence.” Levin has no idea what he is talking about and is allowed by National Review to charge those who do with lying.

COLD CELLS: Lowry wants my view on “cold cells:” creating freezing rooms where water is constantly doused on naked prisoners to induce near-death hypothermia. He wants to know if I think it’s torture. No reasonable person would ask such a question. Of course it’s a form of torture. Which is why it’s banned under U.S. law and in the Army Field Manual. The illegal acts authorized by the president are one reason he is trying to negotiate immunity for the crimes that he has instigated. If it weren’t torture, he wouldn’t be seeking immunity. By the way, don’t you think it’s odd that the theocons at NRO have yet to note the Pope’s condemnation of torture? Actually, not odd at all.

The great thing about blogging is that, if it’s done right and honestLy, it can sometimes reveal things about yourself even you didn’t know. Mickey Kaus has always done it right. Which is why his posts about “Brokeback Mountain” are must-reads.

“Democracy is better than nothing. It’s not very good, but it’s better than nothing.” – a Sunni Arab electoral official in Iraq.

Fascinating and encouraging piece by Lawrence Kaplan in TNR on the emergence of a real, actual strategy to defeat the insurgency in Iraq. Change is finally happening:

Battalion commanders who prepared against a conventional enemy at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, prior to their first deployment to Iraq say that, when they returned to prepare for their second deployment, nearly all of the exercises involved guerrilla warfare. From West Point to the War College, the service schools have all added courses on the subject. As well as releasing a counterinsurgency field manual last year, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command has a draft counterinsurgency doctrine waiting to be approved, and, last month, a counterinsurgency school even opened in Iraq, which incoming company and battalion commanders will attend as soon as they arrive in theater. Meanwhile, at the top, despite Casey’s insistence that “we’re applying counterinsurgency doctrine to the situation in Iraq, and doing it fairly well,” his approach is, even now, undergoing a profound revision. Tellingly, the shift comes as much at the behest of retired officers, think tanks, and civilian policymakers as it does from the accumulation of the Army’s own experience. The impetus also comes from two reviews of military strategy in Iraq, one commissioned by Casey himself and one by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. Casey’s review, launched this summer, concluded that U.S. forces “generally have it about it right,” in the general’s own telling. Khalilzad’s review, also launched during the summer, concluded they don’t.

I have a feeling that Zalmay Khalilzad may one day be seen as the critical figure who turned the tide in Iraq.

He salami-slices Krauthammer’s case, while Rumsfeld tries one last gambit. Money quote:

There is no reason to suppose that if Krauthammer’s reasoning was accepted, the result would be Krauthammer’s rules. Once we are rid of the childish notion of an absolute ban on torture, there is no telling where adult minds may take us.

The trouble with salami-slicing is that it doesn’t stop just because you do. A judicious trade-off of competing considerations is vulnerable to salami-slicing from both directions. You can calibrate the viciousness of the torture as finely as you like to make sure that it matches the urgency of the situation. But you can’t calibrate the torture candidate strapped down before you. Once you’re in the torture business, what justification is there for banning (as Krauthammer would) the torture of official prisoners of war, no matter how many innocent lives this might cost? If you are willing to torture a “high level” terrorist in order to save innocent lives, why should you spare a low-level terrorist at the same awful cost? What about a minor accomplice?

What about the child of a terrorist? If you need to save lives, why not? You may think no one in America would go there, right? Not so fast. Here’s AEI’s John Yoo, as recorded in a recent debate with Douglass Cassel at Notre Dame:

Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Just keep slicing the salami until you’re torturing innocent children. And we deposed Saddam for what again?

When all else fails, check the legal definition. The U.N. Convention on Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory, defines it thus:

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession … when such pain or suffering is inflicted at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

The dictionary definition is the following:

1. a) Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
b) An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.
2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.

The Vatican seems to know what it means. Here’s the CIA definition of waterboarding:

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

Rich Lowry argues that this is not the infliction of severe physical or mental anguish or pain. The Wall Street Journal believes this isn’t “anything close” to torture and today argues that “if practiced properly, it does no lasting physical harm.” That’s the WSJ’s standard for America. Let’s just say it isn’t mine.

An apologia. I second every word of it. And this week, we can only pray that the Iraqi people get a chance to move their country forward in ways unthinkable five years ago.

From bugged phone records of an Italian Islamo-fascist, who rejoiced at the beheading of Nick Berg:

In the May 28, 2004, conversation about the Berg tape, Ahmed’s co-defendant, 22-year-old Egyptian Yahia Ragheh _ described by authorities as a would-be suicide bomber _ questions Ahmed’s assertions.

“It’s not a sin?” he asks.

“Who said this?” Ahmed replied. “It’s never a sin … because the cause is never a sin … Are you scared? Are you shocked?”

“No no, I think it is a sin, I only think it’s a sin,” Ragheh said.

“When you enter a movement it’s never a sin because there’s a cause, the Islamic cause, all in hell … everyone finishes in hell, everyone. For those who wound Islam the end is this.”

This is about as brilliant an exposition of what evil can come from people who believe they are sanctioned by God and a “cause” that renders any means permissible. That evil is not restricted to Muslims. It is a universal human temptation. And, in the torture debate, it has infected us as well.

“In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it before the torture started again.” – George Orwell, “Nineteen-Eight-Four.” As so often, Orwell describes the dehumanization and deception that is integral to torture – and to all who suffer and practise it.