Category: Old Dish

How much higher will the abuse scandal go? Surely Rumsfeld was aware of the new relaxed interrogation methods. He approved of using dogs at Guantanamo:

In January 2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners there; although officials have said dogs were never used at Guantanamo, they were used at Abu Ghraib.
Then, in April 2003, Rumsfeld approved the use in Guantanamo of at least five other high-pressure techniques also listed on the Oct. 9 Abu Ghraib memo, none of which was among the Army’s standard interrogation methods. This overlap existed even though detainees in Iraq were covered, according to the administration’s policy, by Geneva Convention protections that did not apply to the detainees in Cuba.

But didn’t Rumsfeld deny under oath that he had any knowledge of such techniques in Iraq?

You’ve got to love this town. While contractors were trying to build a new driveway last week, they came upon some human remains:

Two human femur bones found by sewer excavators in Provincetown last Wednesday ignited rumors that made their way to Shop Therapy owner Ronny Hazel while he was in New York.
The juiciest details placed Hazel at the center of the skeletal discovery, where it was said teen-agers from the 1970s had unearthed a body and delivered a skull to him for drugs or money and then buried the remains nearby.
This week Hazel joked about receiving at least 50 phone calls about the rumor, with as many variations, some involving a Mafia burial ground.
Hazel said he has sold Tibetan monk heads, imported from Nepal, for at least 20 years. He also acknowledged having a shop in the neighborhood where the bones were discovered. After thinking about it a bit on Tuesday, though, Hazel said any connection to last week’s discovery was “highly unlikely.”

But not impossible.

A DOLE CLASSIC: A great come-back to D’Amato at the Reagan funeral:

It was in this vein that Mr. Dole and Mr. D’Amato teased each other, and it was just a matter of time before Mr. D’Amato brought up Viagra, the potency drug for which Mr. Dole is a noted pitchman. Mr. D’Amato told him there was now something even better on the market, called Levitra.
“Does it give you hair?” Mr. Dole asked.

No one does the barbed response better than Dole.

I should have added yesterday that I thought the best performance of the Reagan funeral service was president George Herbert Walker Bush. He wasn’t very coherent at times – he can mangle syntax even when it’s written in front of him. But he was so classy. The early focusing attention on the bereaved family – the man was brought up right. Then the concrete and revealing anecdotes:

And then I learned decency; the whole world did. Days after being shot, weak from wounds, he spilled water from a sink, and entering the hospital room aides saw him on his hands and knees wiping water from the floor. He worried that his nurse would get in trouble.
The good book says humility goes before honor, and our friend had both, and who could not cherish such a man?
And perhaps as important as anything, I learned a lot about humor, a lot about laughter. And, oh, how President Reagan loved a good story. When asked, “How did your visit go with Bishop Tutu?” he replied, “So-so.”

Perfect. And the choking up: that blorting of WASP emotionality. He made me choke up then as well.

The use of unmuzzled dogs to terrify prisoners was approved military practice in Abu Ghraib:

Smith said military intelligence personnel asked him to instill fear in detainees. He said that he would bring his dog, a black Belgian shepherd named Marco, to the tier specifically to scare prisoners after they were pulled out of their cells. At the behest of interrogators, he said, in some cases he would bring the barking dog to within six inches of the prisoners. “Is using the dog in this manner an allowable tool by the MI interrogators?” an investigator asked Smith. “Yes,” he replied. The dog handlers arrived at Abu Ghraib in late November, sometime after the abuse of detainees had been captured in photographs, including the images of the naked human pyramid and forced masturbation.

It seems to me to be getting clearer and clearer that Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few rogue soldiers. The dogs are among the least troubling tactics, of course. But when you also consider that up to 80 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were guilty of nothing, you have to wonder who thought this was a good way to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Some soldiers are saying that Colonel Pppas, the Military Intelligence officer in charge of Abu Ghraib, directly approved the inhumane treatment. How inhumane?

On Jan. 13, Spec. John Harold Ketzer, a military intelligence interrogator, saw a dog team corner two male prisoners against a wall, one prisoner hiding behind the other and screaming, he later told investigators. “When I asked what was going on in the cell, the handler stated that he was just scaring them, and that he and another of the handlers was having a contest to see how many detainees they could get to urinate on themselves,” Ketzer said.

That’s what some parts of the U.S. military have been reduced to. I have a sense we’re only at the beginning of this story. Check out the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.

AIDS IN CHINA: We can be retrospectively critical of Reagan, but no one in America ever sent AIDS activists to forcible psychiatric treatment. But that’s what just happened in Communist China:

When a fellow activist attempted to deliver some AIDS materials to Hu Jia on the evening of June 1, police refused to allow them to meet, and gave Hu Jia a brutal thrashing that resulted in injuries to his head and left arm. On June 3, four police officers forced their way into Hu Jia’s home and said they would be staying there to monitor his activities. When Hu Jia objected, they struck him in the presence of his father and mother, then took him away and detained him in a cold, damp basement for three days and three nights. Since releasing Hu Jia on June 6, police have continued their surveillance on his home, cutting off all of the family’s telephone access and refusing to allow Hu Jia to leave the house.
The more recent order for psychiatric evaluation is causing considerable distress to Hu Jia and his parents. Hu Jia’s parents see absolutely no sign of mental abnormality in Hu Jia, and are well aware that “psychiatric treatment” has been forced upon a number of dissidents and religious practitioners, sometimes resulting in them actually becoming mentally unstable. A source passed HRIC a message from Hu Jia’s family and friends calling on the international community to take note of Hu Jia’s desperate situation. The message states, “If the police forcibly commit Hu Jia to a mental hospital against the wishes of himself and his family, this constitutes using psychiatric treatment as a form of torture and political persecution.”

Yes, a form of torture. But how can the U.S. now take a stand against this, when the president has memos drawn up explaining why torture is sometimes okay?

In local and European elections, the Labour party has been pushed into a humiliating third place.

Elegantly, simply done, I thought. Thatcher’s eulogy was the finest – and most interesting. The sheer beauty of the honor guard’s ritual took my breath away: this, I thought, really is a civil religion. Bush’s eulogy was good, but not quite as good as I’d hoped for. Maybe it’s because Reagan’s rhetorical skills were so fine that everyone else comes up short. Mulroney was a bit of a bore, but every funeral should have one. And tell me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Bill Clinton asleep while W was speaking? Or at least with his eyes closed?

In honor of president Reagan’s funeral, here’s a useful corrective to the notion that his legacy was always celebrated. Today, almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn’t what was said at the time. Here’s a smattering of commentary from the 1980s.

“A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today.” – Arthur “Always Wrong” Schlesinger, Washington Post, May 1, 1988.

“I wonder how many people, reading about the [Evil Empire’] speech or seeing bits on television, really noticed its outrageous character… Primitive: that is the only word for it. … What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology – one in fact rejected by most theologians?… What must the leaders of Western Europe think of such a speech? They look to the head of the alliance for rhetoric that can persuade them and their constituents. What they get from Ronald Reagan is a mirror image of crude Soviet rhetoric. And it is more than rhetoric: everyone must sense that. The real Ronald Reagan was speaking in Orlando. The exaggeration and the simplicities are there not only in the rhetoric but in the process by which he makes decisions.” – Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 10, 1983

“Something like the speech to the evangelicals is not presidential, it’s not something a president should say. If the Russians are infinitely evil and we are infinitely good, then the logical first step is a nuclear first strike. Words like that frighten the American public and antagonize the Soviets. What good is that?” – Rick Hertzberg, New Yorker macher, quoted in the Washington Post, March 29, 1983.

“President Reagan has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign policy, rattling arms from El Salvador to Saudi Arabia, frightening our friends from Japan to West Germany. He proposes a 50 percent increase in ‘defense expenditures.’ Much of it will be dissipated in the self-defeating spiral of an open-ended nuclear-arms race that poses a greater threat to our own internal and external security than all the Communist propaganda that ever emanated from Moscow. Already, the cost of Reagan policies is devastating to our country in economic strength, in diplomatic influence, in national security, in moral stature.” — John B. Oakes, former senior editor, New York Times, November 1, 1981.

“All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Sovietphobia… a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.” – Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, 1983.

“‘We’ve really got to start talking,’ says George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. ‘The fact is we’ve let these fellows get away with murder, and the situation now is much too serious for that.’ To ideological men like Ronald Reagan, new information is only useful if it confirms old prejudices. Though he is shrewd enough to bend and budge under pressure (hence, for example, his abandonment of old positions on Taiwan), in his heart Reagan knows he has always been right about the nature of the world, of communism, of America’s proper role.” – Robert Kaiser, Washington Post, October 30, 1983.

“Are we rushing headlong into the next step of those 40 years of progressions by which we do something then they do something, by which we pretend that we’re going to build this and it will somehow strengthen our deterrent then they do it, and low and behold, the next thing we know is, the President of the United States is addressing the nation saying, ‘My fellow Americans, I hate to tell you this, but the Soviet Union is deploying more of these, and we have to respond, and I’m asking the Congress for more money in order to respond.’ Star Wars is guaranteed to do that, and it’s guaranteed to threaten the heavens — the one line we haven’t yet crossed with weaponry: the heavens.” – Senator John Kerry, on SDI, the program that brought the evil empire to its knees, August 5, 1986.

“In his distaste for bilateral efforts to manage the superpower rivalry and his instinctive predilection for unilateral ones, Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end. The most striking, and questionable, theme in his star wars speech was his apparent belief that the U.S. could mobilize its scientific community and its economic resources in quest of an impenetrable antiballistic-missile shield over the entire nation without triggering perilously destabilizing countermeasures, both offensive and defensive, on the part of the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s views notwithstanding, there is little reason to hope that the many handicaps of the Soviet economy will be decisively advantageous to the U.S. in the long run, allowing the U.S. to ‘beat’ the U.S.S.R. in an arms race.” — Strobe Talbott, Time, April 18, 1983.

“Ronald Reagan came to Europe to persuade people that he is not the shallow, nuclear cowboy of certain unkind assessments. Said White House spokesman David Gergen, on the eve of departure, ‘Some in Europe do not know or understand him.’ But now that the president has been among them for over a week, Europeans may think they got him right the first time. In Rome, he made a stab at identifying himself as a ‘pilgrim for peace.’ But by the time he got to London he had reverted to type as a cold warrior. And yesterday in Bonn, he reiterated his commitment to ‘peace through strength’ – which is fancy talk for continuing the nuclear arms race.” – Mary McGrory, Washington Post, June 10, 1982.

Rest in peace, Mr President. And know that after all these years, you were right – and all these people were clearly, emphatically, embarrassingly, wrong.

“Perhaps I’m something of an anomaly, but I’m a progressive liberal–no lover of Bush–who wholeheartedly supports our efforts in Iraq. Indeed, one of the reasons I’m so opposed to a second Bush term is that I believe his administration can’t be trusted to continue to manage the Iraq mission.
I have been awfully upset by the Abu Ghraib revelations, the White House’s response to them, and now the memo scandal. (I heard Ashcroft on NPR yesterday–it was shameful.) And I didn’t even know about Sean Baker until I read your blog this morning.” Richard Cohen also makes some good points this morning.

FRED ON REAGAN: I’ve long admired Fred Barnes for his honesty as a reporter (and his general menschness as a human being). He loved Reagan, as I did, but he wasn’t above criticizing him (which for some reason now seems to be regarded as the equivalent of disrespecting him). Here’s a useful passage from a piece Fred wrote at the end of Reagan’s presidency:

[H]is presidency would have been a lot more successful had Reagan not been so lazy–he said he’d been assured hard work wasn’t fatal, but why take a chance?–and risk-averse. What if Reagan had concerned himself with personnel? I don’t mean he should have fussed over every political job in the administration, all 6,000 or so. But what about treasury secretary and White House chief of staff? Reagan swallowed without a moment’s reflection the job swap that sent James Baker to Treasury and Regan to the White House. Regan lacked the political skills to be an effective chief of staff, which might have occurred to Reagan if he’d taken the time to think about it. Regan also let the president take the one big risk of his second term, the arms sale to Iran, and it was a dumb one. Baker wouldn’t have allowed it. Reagan didn’t pay much attention to his national security advisers either. Had he, he’d have noticed that Bud McFarlane was cracking under the pressure and that John Poindexter, a fellow who blithely lied to the press about the Grenada invasion, was singularly unsuited for the post. Reagan couldn’t be bothered.

All true. Jon Rauch also made the point that Reagan got the big things right – the economy and the Soviet Union – but was uninterested in much else. Hence the S&L debacle, the Iran-Contra fiasco, and so on. I think that gets it right. He was a great man, a generous spirit, and a brave leader. But he was also human and made mistakes. It isn’t disloyal to remember that.

NOT JUST 1982: Some of you have made the fair point that in October 1982, not many people knew what AIDS was, and so some of Larry Speakes’ cruel jokes at the expense of the sick might be understandable. It’s also true that his interlocutor was Lester Kinsolving, a crack-pot of the far right. But here we are in another transcript two years later on December 11, 1984, with the same questioner:

Q: An estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which can be transmitted through saliva. Will the President, as Commander-in-Chief, take steps to protect Armed Forces food and medical services from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS in the same manner that they forbid typhoid fever people from being involved in the health or food services?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t know.
Q: Could you — Is the President concerned about this subject, Larry —
MR. SPEAKES: I haven’t heard him express–
Q: –that seems to have evoked so much jocular–
MR. SPEAKES: –concern.
Q: –reaction here? I — you know —
Q: It isn’t only the jocks, Lester.
Q: Has he sworn off water faucets–
Q: No, but, I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Lester, I have not heard him express anything on it. Sorry.
Q: You mean he has no — expressed no opinion about this epidemic?
MR. SPEAKES: No, but I must confess I haven’t asked him about it. (Laughter.)
Q: Would you ask him Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Have you been checked? (Laughter.)

Someone should ask Speakes about this. He’s been on some TV shows.

“Terrorists are not POWs by ANY international legal precedent. ALL of the prisoners at Gitmo AND Abu Ghraib fail the test. They are not uniformed members of organized State-sponsored regular military units with an established recognizable chain of command. In World War II and Korea such free lancers were routinely treated to summary execution as saboteurs, spies and provocateurs. And what you think you see in those photos from Abu Ghraib are MOSTLY humiliation techniques — albeit done gleefully by oafish ghouls who are being punished. You seem to mistake this for a law enforcement endeavor like most Democrats. Containment did not end the Cold War and has not served us well in the War on Terror. Preemption is the only viable strategy for success. Humiliating a few cutthroats in order to preempt the death of another Westerner does not bother me in the least. The enemy repeatedly refers to this as a jihad. You need to understand what that means for your kith and kin. You can’t be a hawk on the war and then selectively shrink from the bloodshed inflicted by our side, and from the non-violent coercive means of extracting useful information from TERRORISTS. You are not in a position to critique the proceedings from any base of personal experience; and your knowledge of military history is apparently nil. But there you go trying to hamstring the experts. Makes you a chicken hawk from where I sit.” My favorite phrase from this email is “non-violent coercive means.” Like what happened to Sean Baker in an exercise? And even “unlawful combatants” are supposed to be treated humanely. Murdering them doesn’t fall into that category, in my book. But what do I know? And yes, I can support a war but criticize illegal torture – which ultimately undermines that war. And no, it’s difficult to be a “chicken-hawk” when the military bars any gay patriots from serving in the first place.

You can’t sum up Gallic indifference to reform in the Arab world better than this:

“There is no ready-made formula for democracy readily transposable from one country to another. Democracy is not a method, it is a culture. For democracy to take root solidly and durably in the Arab world, it must be an Arab democracy before all else.”

And where would the model for that be? Of course, the model for Arab democracy has to be imported to some extent. I think Chirac is getting worried that Iraq might blaze a trail. And what would that say about France’s historic support for tyranny and colonialism in the region?