Category: Old Dish

No, I’m not describing my decision last year to endorse Kerry (although the opposite choice looks more and more deranged each day, doesn’t it?). I’m talking about this story of a man’s attempt to find out the story of his own legal lobotomy as a child. Weirdly fascinating.

Andy McCarthy seems to believe that this administration does not practice or condone what any rational person would call “torture”. Here’s his latest credulous statement:

First, the administration does not “reserve the right to torture” anyone. Torture is against the law, and even if it weren’t the administration has said, repeatedly, that it won’t be countenanced – it will be prosecuted. There are many of us – including no less a Bush-basher than Alan Dershowitz – who think a total ban on torture is a bad idea. But the administration has shown no stomach for such a discussion. It says torture is prohibited. Period.
What the administration has reserved the right to do – or, better, what congress reserved the right of the United States to do when it enacted significant reservations in its 1994 ratification of the UN Convention on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (UNCAT) (reservations that — as I mentioned this week — the McCain Amendment preserves) – is coercive interrogation. That is, forms of physical and mental pressure that fall short of torture (which, as a matter of law, is limited to the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering).

Just to clarify matters. Does McCarthy believe that repeated beating to the point of near-unconsciousness is “torture”? Does he believe that “torture” includes breaking a detainee’s ribs, tying his hands behind his back, hooding him, and then hanging him by his hands until, after being released, blood gushes from his mouth and nose? (I ask this question because the CIA officer responsible for this has yet to be even charged and the Bush-Cheney CIA has thrown away critical evidence.) Does he believe that “waterboarding” is torture? Does McCarthy believe that “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment for prisoners should be practised by those who wear the uniform of the United States? Does he believe that the religious faith of detainees should be abused and used against them in interrogation? McCarthy gallantly says he admires me for my “willingness to take on the tough issues.” Will he give me the pleasure of returning the compliment?

Just in case you think that habeas corpus does not matter, please read this detailed and harrowing post over to Obsidian Wings. It details the case of two Uighur detinees who have been cleared of all charges. They are innocent and the government accepts that they are innocent. But they are kept in Gitmo, in chairs, with their hands chained to the floor, in definitely. Money quote:

The government thinks it is perfectly acceptable not to inform counsel or the court when it determines that detainees are not enemy combatants, even though the allegation that they are enemy combatants is central to the justification for holding them. They seem to think, in addition, that it is acceptable to mislead counsel and the Court about the status of those detainees. They also think it is fine to keep those detainees at Guantanamo, to chain detainees who are not enemy combatants to the floor, and to deny them the right to communicate with anyone in the outside world, including relatives who think they are dead, and to confiscate things like photographs of their families as contraband. They claim that they cannot discuss the efforts they are making to place those detainees, and that they cannot release those detainees until those efforts, whatever they are, are completed, which will be “‘soon’ in kind of the hopeful sense of the word.”

Remember that this occurred while these people still had some basic habeas corpus rights:

Had these detainees not had the right to file for habeas corpus, none of us would know that they existed, let alone be able to read details of their incarceration, and what our government had to say in its own defense.
But habeas rights do not solve everything. To the best of my knowledge, the Uighur detainees are still at Guantanamo. The detainee Willett described as “the sleepy-eyed young man with the shy smile and the gentle manner” is still in jail, cleared of all charges but unable to go free.

The Graham/Kyl/Levin amendment that just passed is better than Graham’s first proposal. But it is important to remember that, as of now, these innocent men, handed over by bounty hunters in Pakistan, would have no access to courts. We would never have heard of them. They would be America’s “disappeared”. Anyone who cares about liberty in this country – a category that does not seem to include the bulk of Republicans any more – should be proud that the original Graham amendment did not pass. But chilled about what can now happen. In a free country. Whether you’re innocent or guilty.

“Setting a date would mean that the 221 soldiers I’ve lost this year, that their lives will have been lost in vain,” – Maj. Gen. William Webster, in charge of much of Baghdad.

TIMES DELETE: Every now and again, I check in on how the Times columnists are doing in their padded Internet cells. Yesterday, none of them made the top 25 emailed stories. I hope the padding is thick. Way ahead of the columnists: “Pumpkin Pots de Crème With Amaretti-Ginger Crunch.”

A reader chimes in:

One of the problems I see in the Drum vs Reynolds argument is that Reynolds has completely bought in to a White House conflation, and Drum hasn’t drawn the necessary distinctions.

Here’s the Instapundit version of the current administration position: “Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.”

This defense only works if you agree to conflate all WMDs as equivalent. The Bushies specifically inflated claims about nuclear weapons; in particular, the Niger yellowcake, and the aluminum tubes. It was the “mushroom cloud” issue that they pimped. Without that, Iraq’s WMD threat boiled down to weak stuff like mustard gas and non-weaponized anthrax. Those kinds of WMDs were dealt with perfectly well by an ongoing containment strategy. The only WMD scary enough to justify invasion was a nuke, and the administration hid all the strong doubts about Iraq’s nukes. The Bushies also pimped one other reason for war: a non-existent link between Saddam and al Qaeda.

I actually side with Glenn on this. I never believed that nukes were the main threat. I was much more concerned with anthrax or smallpox. And I didn’t get the impression before the war that nukes were at the heart of the Bush argument. I can see now how people who weren’t as keen on taking the battle to the enemy as I was could have seized on the nuke issue as the peg on which to hang the war. But that’s their perspective, not mine, and, I suspect, not Bush’s. This debate is a draw. The bottom line is that the president was wrong and waged a war on the basis of intelligence that was soon disproven. Leave all the mind-reading out of it. The public is responding to those facts. And the facts are not really in dispute. We screwed up in a massive way in front of the whole world. If the invasion had gone well, we would have put it behind us by now. But it hasn’t. The key thing now is to do all we can to get a free Iraq in place. We do owe it to the troops not to pull the rug from under them, which is why, despite all my anger at Bush, I still support him as commander-in-chief, and find the Senate vote yesterday repellent. We have no other commander-in-chief for three years. And we must still win.

Maybe I’m under-estimating red state tolerance:

I’m 26, and an out gay male living in Grand Junction, Colorado. It’s my hometown, and a very conservative place to live. Western Colorado is not known for its tolerance. The airport is named for the founder of the local KKK branch.
I came out 6 years ago in the big city of Dallas, TX and had the comfort of a huge “gay community” that included our own “gayborhood,” two city-council members and a supportive public. I moved back home to Western Colorado for various reasons about a year ago. I was dreading the idea of being “out” in the place I was born and raised…but I decided to be completely honest with anyone who asked.
Within a few weeks of course people asked about me. “Do you have a girlfriend? Why not? ” or simply, “Are you gay?” I was honest with everyone and expected a backlash. Nothing. Well, I say nothing…but what really happened was a lot of cool straight people smiled and said “Thats awesome” or “Oh yeah? Got a boyfriend? I know someone you should meet!”
I would say that no one cared, but in a sense, they all cared. They cared about me and wanted me to be honest and happy. I’ve even had a few of my straight guy friends say “You’re the coolest dude we know…gay or straight.” A few offered to kick any homophobic ass that says or does anything to harm me. Luckily that hasn’t happened…but the sentiment was nice.
I have had only one negative experience. I was at a club recently. Some random guy yelled “Faggot” in my direction. I’m not sure who it was, but they didn’t do anything else to cause trouble. Once I told my straight friends who were with me, they nearly started a riot. I had to hold them back from attacking anyone in that vicinity for calling me that name.
There I was, a gay man in the heart of straight country. And every person around me was willing to fight for my sake. I never thought that would have ever happened in my hometown. But it did. And I’m glad.

I’m glad too. The religious right is fighting a losing battle on this one. And they’re also fighting the compassion and love of the Jesus they claim to represent.

Of course, one critical reason that Dick Cheney will not relent in maintaining his right to order torture, even though he is increasingly isolated within the administration and has isolated the United States even further from its allies and friends around the world is … his concern for immunity from prosecution for past actions and decisions. The truth is that crimes have been committed against detainees – and those crimes were sanctioned all the way up the chain of command. If we agree to end the torture and abuse, the question then emerges of actually holding the really guilty men accountable. Pathetic show-trials of grunts, like the Abu Ghraib disciplining, won’t wash. Those thugs were obeying orders. Those orders came from their commanders and those commanders were given the green light from the very top – or at the very least were acting in a meltdown of confusion that their superiors created. There will undoubtedly be pressure from the White House to trade their own immunity – and immunity for the top brass – in return for new legal bars on torture and abuse. In my view, such a trade would be deeply wrong. After we stop the torture and abuse, there will come a time to hold officials in the executive branch responsible for what they have done and enabled. No deal, Mr Vice-president. You sanctioned these actions; and you need to take responsibility for them. If not now, then later.

Just when you think you have heard the worst about this administration’s chaotic, ad hoc, incompetent and intermittently criminal detention policies in the war on terror, a trap-door opens and you fall down another story. It is important to recognize that this administration reserves the right to detain anyone, include American citizens, anywhere, for any amount of time, without charge, sometimes without even documentation, and reserves the right to torture them as well. There are now close to 4,000 held without charge for a year. It is past time for the legislature and the courts to fight back and restrain – or at least bring some kind of order and legality – to this astonishing record. If the administration will not grant these prisoners POW status, it must agree to new rules that allow the innocent to be distinguished from the guilty, and to bar torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for ever. Pass the McCain Amendment now.

Eduwonk tries to get ahead of a looming debate.

SERMON WATCH: The Onion notices a very detailed homily. Meanwhile, a bishop faces reality in a humane and orthodox fashion.

I’m second to no-one in revering Matthew McConaughey, especially the image of him stoned, naked and on bongo drums. I can dream, can’t I? But I would like to dissent nonetheless.