Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I almost wish you wouldn’t write about Kafka when you talk about Guantanamo. It’s pretty easy for me to imagine the worst about that place, and it’s usually pretty unpleasant when I do. I don’t need much help on that score.

I support abortion rights early in a pregnancy. But I’ve listened to enough religious talk radio to know where people who disagree are coming from. They see abortion as the murder of a baby – not just as a murder, but as the most heinous murder imaginable. And because that’s the way they see it, they will never be reconciled to abortion.
That’s the way I feel about torture. It is, in its essence, something so vile that I just can’t be reconciled to it. Even if most of the guys at Guantanamo are guilty, and even if they provide useful intelligence under torture.

I read an article somewhere, a while back about torture, and how odd it was that people who are willing to accept collateral civilian deaths in places like iraq, as a normal and inevitable cost of war, can not be reconciled to torture.  If I remember it properly, the idea was that those of us who are so opposed to torture are a little hypocritical for singling it out for special condemnation.

I keep telling people that it’s not about them, that it’s about us. That it doesn’t matter if the guy at Guantanamo is a monster – that if we torture him, we become monsters too.  People who argue for torture always talk as if we aren’t really there – as if the criminal is there, the monster, and torture is there, a fate that isn’t underserved, and which might bring forth some useful information.

The problem, of course, is that we are there, and the practice of torture changes us. Approving of it changes us, carrying it out changes us, to become the sort of people who approve of torture means, in a sense, that the country we love so much has passed from the scene.

My view is the following: I’m not a pacifist, and I understand that in any war, innocents will be killed. But a just war minimizes such a cost as much as is humanly possible, and that cost must be weighed in the decision to go to war. But torture is something different. It occurs not on the field of battle, where fear and chaos and mistakes abound, but outside of combat. It is deliberate and pre-meditated. The victims are already under your control. They have nowhere to go. And yet you still commit violence against them. The use of cruelty against the defenseless – even for good reasons – is categorically evil. I’m not a utilitarian in this sense. Some things are wrong in themselves. A constitutional democracy that practices torture is an oxymoron. The newly formed National Religious Coalition Against Torture has a new ad that can be found here.

What a great idea: a day set aside in D.C. to commemorate the anniversary of the day the case of Loving vs Virginia was decided. The decision ended three hundred years of marriage defined in many parts of America as a racially separatist institution. Inter-racial couples still face lingering social stigma and it’s worth reminding ourselves how vile it is to discriminate against someone because of a couple’s decision to commit to one other exclusively for life. Money quote from Hannah Arendt, writing in Dissent in the winter of 1959, eight years before Loving:

The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardles of one’s skin or color or race," are minor indeed. Even political rioghts, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionable belongs.

Clear enough. And yet today, it still isn’t to some.

A cautionary tale.

The Onion takes a stand.

Here’s a confession: I trust Patrick Fitzgeral’s integrity to believe him when he finally states that there is insufficient evidence to indict Karl Rove in the Plame affair. (If I had to trust Patrick Fitzgerald or John Podhoretz for fair treatment, let’s just say I’d go with Fitzgerald.) I also think it was a close call. But close calls are still calls, and Rove deserves at this point the benefit of the doubt. Jonah asks:

Where does Karl Rove report to get his reputation back?

He might start in South Carolina.

A friend reminds me that there is an actual Kafka notebook entry that, in a strange way, does indeed seem to bear on the absurdity of Gitmo:

"A first sign of dawning recognition is the wish to die. This life seems unbearable; another existence seems unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of the desire to die; one wishes to be brought from one’s old cell, which one detests, into a new one, which one will shortly come to hate. The remainder of one’s faith colludes in the hope that during the transfer the Lord will coincidentally come down the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: ‘Don’t bother to lock this one up. He is coming to me.’"

Maybe that is always the real remainder of faith before each of our deaths. I know that many will counter that, for all we know, some of these prisoners are indeed Islamist murderers and fanatics. Leaving aside the "for all we know" part, let us concede that they are. They are still human beings. Their search for death, which cannot in this case be conflated with the murder of others (as in suicide bombings), is a human activity. And the response of the U.S. military has been to dehumanize it. We must resist that impulse. If we do not resist it, we will become what we fight.

Money Cole quote from last fall:

"Personally, I’m not sure Zarqawi exists, so I’d be reluctant to send a thousand Marines after him."

IraqPundit runs with it. It also seems weird to have read Mary Ann Weaver’s piece detailing a long and intricate love-hate relationship between Zarqawi and bin Laden and then to read Cole’s dismissal of any connection between Zarqawi and al Qaeda at all.

The British newspaper (with an impressive 6.4 million unique American readers a month) has decided to publish stories online before they appear in the print edition. Jeff Jarvis thinks this is a big deal. He goes further than I would, but, as usual, he’s provocative in an interesting way:

I think this can change what a news story is. Imagine a reporter putting an edited story online in the afternoon and then hearing more questions and facts from online readers. So the reporter updates for print; putting it online improves the story. And after it is in print, more information comes from readers, so the online version is improved again, perhaps even by trusted readers. This needn’t be the never-ending story, the bottomless edition. But neither does it need to be news on a stone tablet.

Yet it changes more than just the story. Another smart editor I know said recently that newspapers have to involve readers in the news but not necessarily the news process. At an Aspen Institute thing a year ago, a former network news executive said that readers should judge us by our product, not our process. No, for many reasons, the process becomes the product. The public can now question our work and contribute to it and by opening that process, we improve the news. So throwing out the newsroom clock with one time on it — deadline time — is a very big change, indeed.

"If you, like many people both gay and straight, think Graham Norton and Will and Grace are dreadful, no-one could possibly blame you for associating ‘gay’ with ‘crap’," – Rob Lyons, at Spiked.

Every time I have tried to write something about the cancer and shame of Guantanamo, and the thought that the United States has strapped dozens of randomly captured individuals in metal restraints in order to force-feed them, I find myself so flummoxed that I give up. It has come to this? Remember: scores of these inmates have almost no evidence against them or have been detained on evidence tainted by torture, and have no way out of an insane system. Remember also: it is perfectly obvious that whatever interrogation techniques we may have used against these people, we have completely failed to get their cooperation to an almost farcical degree. And when some then commit suicide, which is one rational response to the situation, a U.S. general describes their deaths as a form of "asymmetrical warfare"? Again, it is hard to know what to say. These defenseless suicidal inmates are a threat to the U.S. military? Some things are so absurd that they can only be addressed in fiction or satire or silence.

And then you try and use logic that might appeal to a caricature like Rumsfeld and you find yourself thinking: Since whatever intelligence we have procured from these prisoners must now be either moot or exhausted, since they will never be released, and since almost none have had or will have access to anything resembling a fair trial, isn’t allowing them to commit suicide the first rational policy we have entertained yet? These prisoners cannot be a threat dead. They are no use alive any more. They clearly prefer paradise to the eternal Cuban limbo they are now enduring. So why keep them on earth? When they’re all dead, you can shut the place down, whatever the Supreme Court says. Win-win, no? The blogger Jon Swift responds in a manner worthy of his namesake here.