Category: The Dish

Torture and the Casus Belli

The cancer apparently helped begin this disaster as well:

Iban al Shakh al Libby was apparently taken to Cairo, [former FBI agent Jack] Clonan told the BBC, after being captured in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

"He (Libby) claims he was tortured in jail and that would be routine in Egyptian prisons," Grey said. "What he claimed most significantly was a connection between … Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. This intelligence report made it all the way to the top, and was used by (former US secretary of state) Colin Powell as a key piece of justification … for invading Iraq," he told the broadcaster.

Powell claimed in a UN Security Council meeting in February 2003, weeks before a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, that the country under Saddam Hussein had provided weapons training to Al-Qaeda, saying he could "trace the story of a senior terrorist operative", whom Grey alleges is Libby.

"At the time, the caveats to say this intelligence was extracted under torture were not provided," Grey said.

This cancer, so beloved of this torture-friendly administration, helped generate the untruths that so many of us then believed as a reason to go to war. And in turn, it led to more torture, which the vice-president regards as a "no-brainer". In fact, it merely proves that the vice-president has no brain, when it comes to matters of intelligence-gathering.   

Quote of the Day

Coulter_3

 "Try sipping this single sentence and then rolling it around your tongue and palate for a while:

"If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too."

Well, I am being paid to parse and ponder that statement and I don’t understand it, either. Does it intend to say that liberals loved Hitler but drew the line at his invasion of the Soviet Union? Should it, rather, be interpreted as meaning that liberals were in love with Stalin but jumped ship when he was attacked by Hitler? It is remarkable to find so much intellectual and syntactical chaos in an assertion that contains no more than fifteen words…

Shall I be fair? Coulter was trained as a lawyer, and she does have an understanding of the rules of evidence… If it matters, I am with her on the tepid climate of moral and political relativism which, while it wants all children to do equally well at exam time, also regards the United States as no worse than the Taliban and thus, by an unspoken logic, as no better. But a polemic against this mentality cannot really be written by a McCarthyite," – Chistopher Hitchens, on Ann Coulter.

Hewitt vs a Heretic

Hugh Hewitt has published a transcript of his "interview" with me yesterday. Here are some of his questions:

"Are you a Christian?"

"Do you believe Jesus Christ rose from the dead?"

"Do you consider yourself under the authority of Benedict, or before him, John Paul II?"

You can read my answers in the transcript. This was not an interview. It was an inquisition. I was having none of it, and refused to acquiesce in his attempt to hijack an interview. But when I tried to challenge him back, he wouldn’t answer. Money quote:

AS: How are you, as a Christian, able to support torture, Hugh?

HH: Now I want to go back … again …

AS: Again, you’re not answering.

HH: We’ll have … I’m not going to be interviewed … I’m interviewing you, because I did a lot of work to get ready for this interview, not to debate you. I want to know about your book.

AS: You can’t answer. You refuse to answer these questions.

HH: Has any…you are a proponent.

AS: How do you support the abrogation of habeas corpus, and the imposition of torture in America? That’s a very profound question. And why are you ducking it?

HH: Well, actually, as Justice Marshall said, it‚Äôs a very important question, and it’s also not a very difficult one. I don’t do either of those things. So that’s the end of it.

Really? This is what he wrote today:

The left hates Bush for a variety of reasons, chief among them that it is easy in this age when nothing is easy. It is safe to scream "torture" in an era when threats that boggle the mind are in fact pressing.

So it would appear that Hewitt does believe the use of torture is justified because of the stakes, but he refuses to say it outright because he knows that a true Christian could never say such a thing, without being exposed as someone who is actually the enemy of the teachings of Jesus. Or he has the exquisite moral position of a Glenn Reynolds who is simply anti-anti-torture – but, boy, is he opposed to one crank blogger’s "outing" of Republicans. Torture is a minor issue compared with that.

Then there are Hewitt’s readers and listeners. On Townhall.com, where he blogs, I have now been called a "Commiequeerbigocrap" and "homosexual sexual pervert". I just got an email from one of his listeners that wrote the following:

Your refusal to accept the Bible as the inspired Word of God, and your suggestion (from ignorance?) that our Lord’s death was not part of His plan have convinced my wife and I – who sat through the whole wetched hour – to vote a straight Republican ticket.

To clarify, I simply stated that the Gospels tell us that on the cross itself, as Jesus’ last words, he cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" His last words were of doubt, doubt that God was not there – the doubt these fanatics want to expunge from true faith. But notice that they are voting Republican entirely on religious fundamentalist grounds. They prove the whole point of my book of how true conservatism has been subverted and destroyed by religious fanaticism, enabled by apparatchiks like Hewitt. And then, of course, what they really think. From an email from a Hewitt fan today:

Why were you so obnoxious on Hugh Hewitt?
Is it because you’re gay and dying of AIDS?

Read the transcript. It speaks volumes.