Category: Old Dish

Great news that SCOTUS will take on the critical Hamdan case. The president, in my view, should have lee-way to exercize executive power in wartime as he sees fit, in emergencies when the legislature cannot be expected to act with sufficient speed or secrecy. But broad detention policies in a war that is now defined as permanent should not be in the hands of one man outside of legal, judicial or legislative review. I agree with Churchill on this matter, as he expressed himself in a speech on November 21, 1943:

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whther Nazi or Communist.”

Of course, among some of today’s Republicans, Churchill would be considered a whining liberal. Not by me.

Here’s some useful context on the tragedies that accompany all wars. Here’s a chart comparing deaths in all America’s wars. If you take the 2,000 death toll of the current war in Iraq, and average out over the 30 months of combat in that country, you arrive at the grim tally of 68 deaths a month. If you only count deaths caused by hostile forces, the number goes down to 53 deaths per month. That remains the lowest ever military death rate of any war in U.S. history. It’s below even the first Gulf War. Part of this may be attributable to remarkable advances in medicine for the wounded – which leaves many, many more individuals alive but badly injured. And part of it is a consequence of the Rumsfeld decision to let Iraqi civilians be murdered in the thousands, rather than provide basic order and stability in an occupied country. But it’s important to keep some context in mind. Every death is an incalculable tragedy for the families and friends left behind. In no way am I attempting to minimize this appalling toll. At the same time, this has been an historically low-military-casualty conflict. That’s worth knowing.

Marty Lederman reviews the state of play among right-of-center blogs on the torture question, and asks some salient questions. Kieran Healy focuses on the Volokh blog’s increasingly tangled knots. Not all freedom-lovers have looked the other way, of course. But loving freedom and opposing government torture is no longer, sadly, a unifying theme on the right.

The avalanche of embarrassing CIA leaks in the last couple of weeks is a sign that within the Bush administration, the proponents of torture are finally losing the debate. They are losing the debate because torture is morally wrong, deeply damaging to the United States, terribly dangerous for U.S. servicemembers and counter-productive in the war against Islamist terrorism. Today, we get even more info. From Jane Mayer’s must-read New Yorker piece, we find that the White House Office of Legal Counsel had indeed opined that Iraqi insurgents were originally not covered by Geneva, and that that opinion had lasted until October 2003. Now does it make more sense why abuse and torture migrated so easily from Gitmo to Iraq and Abu Ghraib? And why we lost the hearts and minds of many Iraqis so soon? We also find out more about the critical 3/14/02 memo written by John Yoo, still classified but now being leaked. According to Mayer, the memo

“dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated.”

Surely the public has a pressing right to know the contents of that memo. Meanwhile, many others in the administration are trying to reverse the hideous Cheney policy. According to Newsweek, Condi Rice, as I would have expected, now opposes this insane policy, along with humane and smart hawks like national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Gordon England, Donald Rumsfeld’s new deputy. Even Gonzales and Miers refuse to support torture any longer. The Washington Post also highlights a neoconservative hawk who has not gone over to the dark side:

[I]n a reflection of how many within the administration now favor changing the rules, Elliot Abrams, traditionally one of the most hawkish voices in internal debates, is among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy in his role as the deputy national security adviser for democracy, according to officials familiar with his role.

Those of us who recall the Reagan legacy and who believe in America’s vital role in fighting terror while preserving its values of human treatment of detainees and human rights are finally gaining ground. The soul of conservatism is at stake here – and the soul of America as well.

Here’s a fascinating quote:

“There’s an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law. We do not torture,” – president Bush, today.

If that’s the case, why threaten to veto a law that would simply codify what Bush alleges is already the current policy? If “we do not torture,” how to account for the hundreds and hundreds of cases of abuse and torture by U.S. troops, documented by the government itself? If “we do not torture,” why the memos that expanded exponentially the lee-way given to the military to abuse detainees in order to get intelligence? The president’s only defense against being a liar is that he is defining “torture” in such a way that no other reasonable person on the planet, apart from Bush’s own torture apologists (and they are now down to one who will say so publicly), would agree. The press must now ask the president: does he regard the repeated, forcible near-drowning of detainees to be torture? Does he believe that tying naked detainees up and leaving them outside all night to die of hypothermia is “torture”? Does he believe that beating the legs of a detainee until they are pulp and he dies is torture? Does he believe that beating detainees till they die is torture? Does he believe that using someone’s religious faith against them in interrogations is “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment and thereby illegal? What is his definition of torture?

SOME MORE QUESTIONS: What does the president think of Ian Fishback’s testimony that abuse and torture was routine and that no one in the military hierarchy would say they were not permitted during eighteen months of his trying to get an answer? What does the president make of the following quote from another servicemember of his time in Iraq: “I think our policies required abuse. There were freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used dogs.” Since the president signed the finding of September 17, setting up a series of secret CIA detention camps where “waterboarding” is permitted, does he believe and will he state categorically that no torture has ever occurred at those camps?

Watching and listening to this man, it seems to me we have a few possible interpretations in front of us. Either the president simply does not know what is being done in his name in his own military or he is lying through his teeth to the American people and the world. I guess there is also a third possibility: that he is simply unable to acknowledge the enormity of what he has done to the honor of the United States, the success of the war and the safety of American servicemembers. And so he has gone into clinical denial. Or he is so ashamed he cannot bear to face the truth of what he has done. None of these options are, shall we say, encouraging. But there is, of course, an easy way forward for the president if this is truly what he believes: support the Congress in backing the president’s own position. Pass the McCain Amendment. Given what he said today, why on earth would he not?

The movie, “Brokeback Mountain,” looks set to be a fascinating cultural moment. What’s interesting to me is that it takes the question of same-sex love and places it firmly in the center of American folklore, especially the cowboy West. Now, of course gay cowboys existed and exist. But that two very hot Hollywood leading men would be prepared to take on these roles, that a director as accomplished as Ang Lee would direct the movie, and that a studio as mainstream as Universal would produce it strikes me as a significant development. A few years back, it would have been unthinkable for bankable, heterosexual stars like Ledger and Gyllenhaal to have embraced such a venture. But they are of the generation that is mercifully over the bigotries of old Hollywood. Think of the greatest actor of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Three of his most powerful, accomplished, career-making performances – in “Boogie Nights,” “Flawless,” and “Capote,” – are of gay men, each very different, each very human, each poignantly and brilliantly brought to life. In his case, taking on homosexual roles has helped Hoffman reach the career heights he now commands. Ledger and Gyllenhal take this to a new level, because, unlike Hoffman, they are handsome beyond measure, and have played macho heterosexuals for years. Now they get to play macho homosexuals – itself an inversion and abolition of a certain stereotype. I have yet to see the movie, so I cannot judge it on its merits. But so far, its potential cultural impact looks riveting. If it wins a wide audience, it will be one more sign that the old cliches of “gay culture” are indeed dying fast. I think Red State America is less fearful of the truth than its political representatives. But we’ll see, I guess.

The emergence of Christianism in this country – a political movement founded on evangelical doctrine – is arguably the most significant political development of the new millennium. And what’s critical about this new movement is its relationship to government: there’s nothing Christianists like more than active, interventionist government to right wrong, police private lives and uphold their version of morality. Now take a moment to ask yourselves: who do they resemble? This busy-body, moralizing tendency was once the province of what we once called the left. Like the old left, Christianism puts virtue before freedom, even if its idea of virtue is very different than those in the old left. But the usual facets of leftism – massive public spending and borrowing, growth in regulations, tampering with the constitution for political ends, use of churches for political campaigns – are now just as powerfully represented on the Christianist right. Eventually, it was inevitable that they would join forces in a common cause – and the environment is one of them. What’s interesting here is not whether the policy proposals have merit; but the confluence of these two interventionist, big government philosophies. Some parts of the environnmental movement – the loopy parts – are very similar to eschatological religious phenomena in any case. Their fusion is a sign of our new politics – where bigger and bigger government and less and less freedom is now the ruling consensus.

This is important and good news from Iraq. The critical things to watch in the next couple of months are, it seems to me, the potential splintering of the Sunni Arabs, between die-hard dead-enders and pragmatic pols, and the pace of reconstruction. Developments in Syria and Iran matter too. More here.

There is a critical distinction between forbidding abuse of detainees already in captivity and micro-policing all military combat. The British troops in Basra are apparently demoralized because they fear legal consequences for shooting insurgents. That’s nuts. These soldiers have enough stress dealing with Baathists and Jihadists and Sadrites without worrying about being prosecuted by their own courts for casualties in legitimate combat. Money quote:

The combination of knowing that death might come at any time from a roadside bomb and that shooting back at Iraqis who attack them might result in their being court-martialled is putting immense pressure on young soldiers.
The doctors described morale in some units as very low with soldiers cynically suggesting they needed a solicitor with them before they shot back at any Iraqi who attacked them.

Blair needs to back his own troops on this one. So does the British public.

“I don’t understand it, and neither does Bill Kristol. The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War.” – Powerline blogger, John Hinderaker.