Category: The Dish

The L.A. Times continues an investigation into unconscionable and covered-up torture by the Special Forces in Afghanistan. Money quote:

Within days of the Wazi killing, an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit named Jamal Naseer died after being interrogated at the team’s firebase in Gardez, about 25 miles to the north. Multiple witnesses say his body showed signs of severe beating and other abuse. His brother and six others also held at Gardez say they were tortured.

The commander over all Special Forces in Afghanistan at the time, then-Col. James G. "Greg" Champion, said in a brief interview that neither death was reported up the chain of command. Champion, a National Guardsman who has since been promoted to brigadier general, said he did not hear of the deaths until 18 months later, when he learned that The Times was investigating.

Under this president, America has become a nation increasingly known for torturing, murdering and disappearing "terror suspects." Some, of course, can see what is in front of their noses:

"Two unreported deaths in a few days are a clue that something’s wrong" with that team, said a military official familiar with the incidents, who asked not to be identified.

In the future, when history is written, just remember: it’s not that we weren’t told what was going on. It’s that we looked the other way.

George Allen’s past keeps coming back to haunt him:

"Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where ‘blacks knew their place,’" said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. "He used the N-word on a regular basis back then."

Like this is a surprise.

The pro-torture magazine proclaims victory. By "torture," I mean the KGB-perfected hypothermia treatment, and the "long-time-standing" technique used by the North Vietnamese against John McCain himself. These practices are now endorsed by NRO. Notice how NRO doesn’t even concede that "waterboarding" is now out of bounds. It is only an "apparent" exception. How does a law allow for something "apparent." Aren’t laws supposed to be clear? Not in countries where the rule of law is determined by the will of one man, the Caesar.

Can you imagine what conservatives of the Cold Wr era would say if they knew that National Review would one day be supporting the American government’s use of methods developed by Stalin and the North Vietnamese? It is one thing for a conservative magazine to endorse the torture of prisoners detained without due process and unable to challenge their detentin in court, i.e. the torture of many innocents, as has already been documented in abundance. It is another thing for it to pretend it isn’t pro-torture, and that it is merely endorsing "coercive interrogation" for those proven guilty in a court of law. But NRO’s principles remain intact: whatever the Leader says. The vandalism of conservative principles and the rule of law continues.

Hmm. You mean only one alleged terror cell was interested in mixing liquids in lip-balm to blow up "dozens" of airplanes across the Atlantic? Or that the entire London bomb scare is beginning to look less and less like anything close to a realistic danger and was hyped for political purposes? I guess we’ll soon find out from the British courts. But count me as a remaining skeptic on what exactly that August 10 bomb threat really was.

Orwell, torture and Bush’s America. My latest column.

Readers will have to judge for themselves what Senator John McCain said on "Face the Nation" yesterday. I’m afraid it confirms my worst fears: there is no legislative brake on the president’s use of torture, and the only restriction that has any teeth is that the president may – but may choose not to – publish his torture techniques in the Federal Register. Moreover, there seems to be no actual legal requirement for the president to do so, and no legal time frame cited in which he must provide details in the Federal Register. Can you imagine Cheney volunteering such information? Even if the president were to do so, any Congressional attempt to roll back specific torture methods would probably require a veto-proof majority, as Marty Lederman points out. The "transparency" is therefore transparently opaque.

There is no legal provision to prevent water-boarding, hypothermia, long-time-standing, intense sleep deprivation, or many of the abuses documented at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib – and cited in the "Gulag Archipelago". All of that is left up to this president to decide – and we know what his record is: brutality toward terror suspects, and reckless, ad hoc conflation of the innocent with the guilty.

Ask yourself this question: in the days after Abu Ghraib was exposed, did you believe that within a few years, the Congress of the United States would be formally decriminalizing exactly the techniques depicted in many of those photographs – and allowing the president to use his discretion to order them? Now absorb the fact that they are on the verge of doing just that. If this bill is passed, Abu Ghraib will be American policy, and integral across the world to the meaning of America. That’s a devastating self-inflicted wound in this war of ideas.

Here’s the key part of the McCain transcript:

Mr. HARRIS: This whole debate turned on things that I think most citizens couldn’t understand. You said you–severe punishment, pain should not be inflicted, but serious pain can–what can that possibly mean in concrete terms?

Sen. McCAIN: In concrete terms, it could mean that waterboarding and other extreme measures such as extreme deprivation–sleep deprivation, hypothermia and others would be not allowed.

Mr. HARRIS: That’s what you say. What if the administration interprets it differently, as it is allowed to do under the provisions of this law? What if you disagree with the interpretation?

Sen. McCAIN: If we disagree with the interpretation, the fact is that those interpretations have to be published in the Federal Register. That’s a document that’s available to all Americans, including the press. And we in Congress, and the judiciary, if challenged, have the ability then to examine that interpretation and act legislatively. These are regulations the president would issue, we would be passing laws which trump regulations.

Mr. HARRIS: If you have confidence that those were–tactics were disallowed, why didn’t you get it in the–in the actual law?

Sen. McCAIN: What we did, John, was we called–outlawed certain procedures, including some of those that you might think would be natural–murder, rape, etc.–but also cruel and inhuman–we included cruel and inhuman treatments, not as severe as torture but could still be considered a crime.

[Bob] SCHIEFFER: Well, we look at…

Sen. McCAIN: I’m confident that some of the abuses that were reportedly committed in the past will be prohibited in the future.

This "confidence" rests entirely on McCain’s personal trust in this president not to authorize various forms of torture against military prisoners. There is no rule of law in these instances. There is the will of one man – the president – against the confidence of another man – Senator McCain. That’s it. The rule of law – on something as critical as torture – is potentially over.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

I’ve long tried to give McCain the benefit of the doubt on all of this. He has been the sole figure able to resist this president’s permanent seizure of emergency powers – to detain any person at will without charges or recourse to courts and to torture them at will. McCain is, I believe, a good man. But he has obviously decided that he cannot win this one. He has decided that the best he can do is prevent a formal breach of the Geneva Conventions, keep the military itself away from torture, while allowing domestic law to be reinterpreted to allow all the torture techniques previously used by the CIA. It is easy to condemn him. Too easy, perhaps. He may have done as much as he possibly can to prevent torture without playing directly into Karl Rove’s hands. It is clear that if McCain continued his opposition, the Bush machine would have done all it could to kill his nomination prospects. And if he fails to win the nomination, and a Christianist Rove-backed candidate seizes it, then the future for American liberty and a decent conservatism would be even darker than it already is. I’m guessing that’s how he has rationalized it. He’s not dumb enough to trust the good word of George W. Bush. And he’s not dumb enough to fight a battle he cannot win – now.

Then there are more cynical interpretations. It is in McCain’s interests for the Republicans to do very badly this fall, so he can position himself as their savior in 2008. By taking the torture issue off the table, he removes one of Rove’s key weapons in the campaign: to portray the Democrats as too cowardly to torture the perpetrators of 9/11 and therefore too weak to defend the nation. It’s b.s., of course, but that’s beside the point. It works. So this deal may temporarily help the Democrats in November (which may explain their own supine cowardice on the subject).

McCain, in other words, is a shrewd politician and he knows when to fight a battle he can win and when to punt on a fight he will lose. If he becomes president, he could, with the discretion given the president in this bill, rescind the torture that Bush has authorized. Maybe, he could repeal the bill, with a Democratic Congress or even a Republican Congress that returned to its decent conservative principles. At the same time, it’s clear he has also acquiesced to giving complete legal impunity to the civilian architects of the torture policy within the Bush administration. Maybe that’s the real deal here – I’ll give you legal protection for past war-crimes if you give me the nomination in 2008. But surely McCain knows better than to trust the likes of Rove. He may have sold his soul … for a promise from a professional liar. The tragedy of 9/11 keeps deepening, dragging with it men of conscience and principle into the pit of opportunism and Caesarism.

I keep reminding myself of the hideous irony: John McCain has just allowed the U.S. president to use some of the techniques the North Vietnamese once used on McCain when he was a P.O.W. If that doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, then I guess you’ll never understand why so many of us feel so strongly about this.

We had one hope in this fight; and he just, at best, beat a tactical retreat. There is no knowing whether this moral ground can ever be regained. We must simply pray it can; and fight on to ensure that it is. We have no choice right now. But we must not surrender. And we must not despair. That way, Rove truly does win.

The polarization spreads. This photo was taken by a reader near Chicago. Readers are invited to send in slogans or posters designed purely to demonize opponents or polarize discourse.

"Our tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a few men deeply concerns me.  We can be conquered by bombs or subversion; but we can also be conquered by neglect – by ignoring the Constitution and disregarding the principles of limited government.  Our defenses against the accumulation of unlimited power in Washington are in poorer shape, I fear, than our defenses against the aggressive designs of Moscow. Like so many other nations before us, we may succumb through internal weakness rather than fall before a foreign foe," – Barry Goldwater, "The Conscience of a Conservative." There seems to me no question that Fox News would now regard Barry Goldwater as a leftist.

I read Damon Linker’s new book, "Theocons," reviewed today in the NYT by Adrian Wooldridge, a while back in proofs. It’s the most comprehensive analysis and take-down of the theocon set around – from an insider who knows them intimately. Linker worked at First Things until quite recently and saw first-hand the extremism and intolerance at the heart of the theoconservative project – and its remarkably direct reach into the White House. Among the most striking revelations is that then-Cardinal Ratzinger actually urged the American bishops in the 2004 campaign to formally deny communion to Catholic Democratic pro-choice candidates, and was scuppered only by some adroit maneuvring from the American Catholic bishops. From Booklist’s review:

Linker’s literate, reasonable chronicle and assessment of the theocons, that of an erstwhile colleague who shows no personal animus toward his former associates, is one of the most enlightening critiques of the Religious Right to date.

I agree. Of course, my own is better. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?