Category: Old Dish

Should we feel sorry for Condi Rice? She wasn’t exactly the architect of the torture policies of the current administration, but she sure hasn’t stopped them. And now, after hurriedly closing secret torture sites in Eastern Europe, she has to greet the fact that America’s natural allies – such as Poland or Britain – have been profoundly alienated. Listen to my old friend Radek Sikorski, now defense minister for Poland, and as pro-American a man you will ever find, squirming his way through a non-denial denial:

Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told ABC Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross today: “My president has said there is no truth in these reports.”

Ross asked: “Do you know otherwise, sir, are you aware of these sites being shut down in the last few weeks, operating on a base under your direct control?”

Sikorski answered, “I think this is as much as I can tell you about this.”

Maybe Radek can tell his wife, the Washington Post columnist, Anne Applebaum, who documented the Soviet gulag. Then listen to Condi herself:

“The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt,” Rice said.

Hmmmm.

THE TORTURED ELEVEN: Do we torture captured terrorists? Nah. Not according to John “Milosevic-was-a-wimp” Yoo’s definition, that limits it to treatment threatening imminent death or major organ failure. We just subject them to “the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA’s secret arsenal, the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.” Those include “waterboarding,” an offence that before Donald Rumsfeld became defense secretary, was subject to court-martial if a soldier were found committing it, and that violates basic Geneva protections even for captured terrorists. Do we send these prisoners to countries where we know they will be tortured? Money quote:

These same sources also tell ABC News that U.S. intelligence also ships some “unlawful combatants” to countries that use interrogation techniques harsher than any authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. They say that Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Egypt were among the nations used in order to extract confessions quickly using techniques harsher than those authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. These prisoners were not necessarily citizens of those nations.

11 out of 12 suspects were, however, “waterboarded” by Americans. The issue of torture is now building to a real fever pitch in Europe. Check out this latest typical report in the London Times, again not a paper hostile to the U.S. The damage this policy is doing to the alliance is incalculable. The whole idea that this country liberated Poland from totalitarianism only to practise secret torture on its territory would be beyond belief, until only recently. The Washington Post gets it right again. The only way to win this war is to abandon the illegal and immmoral detention policies rammed through the system by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. As for Condi, she has rebuilt our alliances rather successfully so far. Surely she must see that until the McCain amendment passes, her good work will have been in vain.

A reader emails:

Thanks for highlighting Kevin Drum’s comments, which I found cogent and illuminating, even though I maintain my opposition to the war in Iraq (as I have since the invasion). I’ve been following your mood swings on the war with both a mixture of admiration and annoyance. On my good days I share your optimism and faith that our fine military can somehow transcend the morass the Pentagon has put them in, but I confess I roll my eyes on the occasions when you swoon over one of Bush’s chest-thumping “stay-the-course” speeches, such as on Chris Matthews’s show yesterday morning.

But I think I speak for millions of my fellow Americans when I say that we are fervently anti-war not because we’re some cartoonish Sheehan-style peaceniks but because the war in Iraq has failed utterly to protect us from terrorism here. Indeed, it may very well lead to another 9/11, as our distracted policy makers have neglected even the most basic and urgent of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission’s recommendations, such as increased inspections of cargo containers, better intelligence gathering on possible sleeper cells and terrorist plots, etc. The confusion over our recent subway scare here in New York should give everyone pause, as Mayor Bloomberg and Ray Kelly implied that the Feds’ dismissal of the intelligence was complacent at best, and incompetent at worst.

On “Meet the Press” yesterday, those sage heads of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, struck a completely different tone to your optimism. As Kean and Hamilton emphasized, almost to the point of shouting at Tim Russert, our government has done virtually nothing to implement the Commission’s meticulous suggestions, making a future catastrophic attack on U.S. soil a near certainty — not if, but when, as both men noted. “Heaven help us,” Kean said and he’s right. Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t commented on Kean and Hamilton today.

After all, aren’t all the young lives lost and billions of taxpayer dollars spent in Iraq supposed to be an insurance policy against another 9/11-style attack? I lived through the horror of that day — the images of fire and smoke and falling bodies are seared forever into my memory. I’d like some war hawk to tell me unequivocally that our involvement in Iraq will spare our country another terrifying day like that one.

Until then, I mourn the losses in Iraq and pray for smarter, more competent ideas on national security to emerge.

It appears that the 9/11 Commission agrees with him.

A dissent.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: A reader nails it:

Now I may be HIV-poz (since ’98) and you may be HIV-poz and it takes nerves of steel to cope with it. And I am bearing up fairly well, thank you. So are you. I resent the condescension inherent in the “Let’s pretend-we-have-AIDS” crowd. These are often the same celebrity clowns who knock the big pharmaceutical companies who have kept me alive and healthy. Knowing what I know now, if I didn’t have HIV, I’d be the first one to exclaim “I don’t have HIV!” But I do. And I take literally no comfort in knowing Will Smith earns free publicity and good will for saying he feels sorry for me.

Can you imagine how much money was spent on that idiotic ad insert in the NYT? If you want evidence for why the AIDS establishment often seems so out of it, this kind of p.r. nonsense is Exhibit A.

“A year ago, I asked [Irving] Kristol after a lecture whether he believed in God or not. He got a twinkle in his eye and responded, ‘I don’t believe in God, I have faith in God.’ Well, faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:1, ‘is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ But at the recent AEI lecture, journalist Ben Wattenberg asked him the same thing. Kristol responded that ‘that is a stupid question,’ and crisply restated his belief that religion is essential for maintaining social discipline. A much younger (and perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinary people lost their religious faith, ‘it would indeed become the duty of the wise publicly to defend and support religion.'” – Ronald Bailey, Reason. (Hat tip: Derb).

Re-reading the theocons for my book on conservatism, I have been struck by how, in recent years, they have come to a consensus that in order for their political-theological project to be coherent, they may have to undermine Darwin and evolution. This political Pope may help provide cover. You cannot restore Aquinas as the central figure for the West’s understanding of its own politics without dethroning Darwin. For the neocons, this will present a real challenge: to say things they know are untrue in order to promote a political reordering that they approve of. Some will balk, like Krauthammer. But others will find a way to be tactically silent, or worse. Power is at stake.

THE MILITARY VERSUS TORTURE: The internal revolt against the Cheney-Rumsfeld policy gains momentum. Honor is not dead in the American military and CIA. Far from it. It is just dead in the White House.

A TWOFER: Among Republican and conservative blog-readers, I’ve won two prizes. An Honorable Mention for “Most Annoying Left-Of-Center Blogger” (ahead of Juan Cole!); and a clear win for “Most Annoying Right-Of-Center Blogger.” Shucks. I do what I can.

They’re still useless.

What Pope Benedict XVI has wrought. My take in Time.

“I’ve seen a lot of lefty critics who have hammered Packer because he supported the war and, in their eyes, hasn’t been forthcoming enough about admitting he was wrong about that. Michael Hirsh led the charge here in these pages a couple of months ago. I have three words for these critics: get over yourselves. Perhaps someday we’ll ship Packer and his fellow liberal hawks off to reeducation camps and force tearful confessions of doctrinal error out of them, but for now partisans on both sides could do worse than admit that the world comes in shades of gray and neither success nor failure in Iraq was quite as preordained as you might think. A little bit of difficulty figuring out where you stand on the war isn’t quite the moral failing some seem to think it is.” – Kevin Drum, on the Washington Monthly blog. Very nicely put. I’ve been both ridiculed and scorned for my mood swings on how the war is going, but they have been honest attempts to understand in real time what is an immensely complex and opaque situation. The real suspicion should be reserved for those who have seen nothing but failure for the past three years or nothing but brilliant success. The truth is in between; as is the prospect for ultimate success. Even now. Perhaps especially now.

Here are two quotes from theocon-in-chief, Richard John Neuhaus, on the issue of gay priests. The first is from the summer of 2002. Neuhaus has always held that the scandal of sexual abuse of children and minors in the Church was homosexuality, rather than pedophilia and ephebophila, but even arguing that, he conceded the following:

There was quite a ruckus in March when Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman, opined that homosexuals “just cannot be ordained.” He went so far as to suggest, but did not develop the idea, that homosexuals who had been ordained were not validly ordained, homosexuality being an “impediment” to ordination in the same way that there may be impediments to a valid sacramental marriage. This gets into sticky territory, given confused and conflicting notions about sexual orientation. (See above on the distinction between “homosexual” and “gay.”) It seems more than likely that, in centuries past, some priests who have been canonized as saints would meet today’s criteria as having a “homosexual orientation.” The issue was not then, and should not be today, the nature of the temptations resisted but the fidelity of the resistance.

That was his view then. This is his view now:

There are priests and bishops who are afflicted by same-sex attraction, and it is by now no secret that some have acted upon that attraction. Those who are afflicted but have been chastely celibate protest that the instruction cannot possibly mean that, were they candidates for ordination today, they should be refused. But that is precisely what the instruction seems to say.
That does not mean they cannot continue as good and faithful priests. Most certainly it does not in any way throw into question the validity of their priesthood and therefore the validity of the sacraments they administer. But it would seem to mean that they should not have been ordained in the first place, and those with a similar lack of ‘affective maturity’ should not be ordained in the future.

Just to clarify. Neuhaus is now in favor of the proposition that those who he once opined were saints should now be barred from the priesthood? Why the change? What’s the argument? Do we not need saints in the Church?

The disgraceful conduct of the secretary of defense continues. It is perfectly clear that he is a major obstacle to success in Iraq. Just read yet another story that shows that with more troops, we could have done so much better these past few years. Bush should replace Rumsfeld with Lieberman after the December 15 elections. We need a defense secretary who actually wants to win this war, not one whose main skill is in finding increasingly glib excuses for our losing it.

NOW WHAT? James Alison, one of the most lucid and subtle Catholic thinkers out there, reflects on the fall-out from the Vatican ban on gay seminarians and teachers.

Greg Djerejian notes that Saddam’s son engaged in a little Wall-Street-Journal-approved “water-boarding” too.