Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I can’t believe you would put the interrogation policies of the Bush administration and the barbaric beheading of another human being on the same moral plane. You wrote today:

"My point is that we can no longer unequivocally condemn the torture of these two soldiers because we have endorsed and practised torture ourselves."

Until you can show me evidence that a U.S. Government interrogator has taken a dull knife, cut into the throat of another man or woman, and sawn through skin, muscle, tendon, and bone until the head of that persons detaches from their neck, please don’t make such an intellectually dishonest comparison between these barbarians and our own government.
Our enemies are fundamentalist nihilists. We may have to fight a harder, dirtier war against such a disgraceful enemy. But we still must do what is necessary to win.

This is an honest argument: to fight barbarians, we must become more like them. I disagree; I believe torture is always wrong, and profoundly corrupts the torturing nation that endorses it. I also think that in the short and, even more, in the long run, it will prove our undoing in this war. This is a battle between barbarism and civilization. We cannot destroy our moral compass in order to save it.

Professor Bainbridge writes:

Andrew Sullivan seems to think that the Bush Administration’s position on torture is at least a – if not the – root cause of the death by torture apparently suffered by two US service personnel.

No I don’t. In fact, I explicitly argued against such an idea here. My point is that we can no longer unequivocally condemn the torture of these two soldiers because we have endorsed and practised torture ourselves. What was once a difference in kind between us and our enemy is now a difference in degree. That fact profoundly weakens our moral standing in the world, the power of our cause, and impedes the long-run success in the war of ideas that the war on terror involves. That this change was made secretly by an executive violating the express laws he is constitutionally bound to enforce makes the betrayal all the more enraging.

A reader writes:

I’m sure you’re getting a lot of e-mail along these lines, but have you really only just discovered that video? They have some other terrific ones, as I’m sure you’ve seen on YouTube. I think my favorite is the video for Glosoli, which came off their most recent album. It’s one of the best visualizations of ‘growing up’ that I’ve ever seen.

Another great Sigur Ros visual – although not created by them – happens during the last few minutes of the movie Vanilla Sky. I know how you feel about Tom Cruise and the quality of the movie is debatable, but the last few minutes are astonishingly beautiful mainly due to their amazing music.

As a side note, the band’s lead singer Jonsi Birgisson is gay, which I’m sure had an impact on the Vidrar video.
Anyway, I’m sure you’re hearing from Sigur Ros fans all over the place about how great they are. Hope you join our ranks.

Actually, an old friend of mine introduced me to them a while back. But I’d missed their videos and am only beginning to listen to more. Transcendent, beautiful stuff.

Father Jake reports on the afternoon’s twists and turns at the Episcopal Convention. Money quote:

So, the bottom line is that regarding the election of bishops and same sex blessings, the Episcopal Church stood firm and did not back down from our earlier decisions. The Communion will not be pleased. So it goes. We have expressed our desire to continue the relationship, but have also clearly said that we will not do so at the expense of some of our members. Now the Communion will do whatever it feels it must do.

Next up: Schism?

Texas, 6 am, from 30,000 feet.

The Christianists  will have a lot of work to do in the next few decades to demonize young men like Ryan Fournier, who’s recently been elected student body president of Ohio State University. Ohio just stripped gay couples of any enforceable legal rights. Congrats, Mr Rove! But you cannot stop this evolution in gay dignity and self-respect.

A stunning video from Sigur Ros.

I trusted this president after 9/11. How can anyone trust him if Ron Suskind’s account is true? From Bart Gellman’s review today:

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

And so the president lied to the people of this country, and then tortured a mentally ill man for information he didn’t have; and covered his tracks. Money quote:

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety – against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

This shallow, monstrous, weak, and petty man is still the president. God help us.

I doubt whether even Donald Rumsfeld will describe what has been done to two young American soldiers as a "coercive interrogation technique." But you never know. Some people wonder why I remain so concerned about torture, and the surrender of our moral standing with respect to this unmitigated evil. Maybe the news of captured, tortured and murdered Americans will jog their conscience. Or maybe it will simply reinforce the logic of torture-reciprocity endorsed by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gonzales. As usual, complete silence from Instapundit. Almost radio silence from the Corner, except for the torture-advocate, Mark Levin, who is urging reciprocal atrocities. Give him points for consistency. And so the cycle of depravity and defeat deepens …

Gunagzhou, China, 2 pm.