Category: The Dish

You want a blasphemous cartoon? They’ll give you a blasphemous cartoon.

A Malaysian triangle.

The debate over treatment of military detainees must now take into account the evidence reported in Jane Mayer’s new New Yorker piece. She relies in large measure on an impeccable source: Alberto J. Mora, former general counsel for the Navy. What she shows, and what the now-available memo proves, is that the Bush administration made a conscious decision early on to abandon American and international law and indemnify in advance military officials tasked to "coercively interrogate" detainees. We knew that already, but we now also know that decent, intelligent, conservative people within the administration told the White House and the Pentagon that the new policy amounted to legalization of torture, and rested on a legal analysis that gave president Bush unfettered power to break any law and violate any ethical standard in the defense of the United States. They fought hard to stop it; when they succeeded at one point, the vice-president, defense secretary and president devised a two-track policy in which they told the Congress and world one thing, while allowing the abuse and torture policies to remain secretly in force. Money quote:

"Without Mora’s knowledge, the Pentagon had pursued a secret detention policy. There was one version, enunciated in Haynes’s letter to Leahy, aimed at critics. And there was another, giving the operations officers legal indemnity to engage in cruel interrogations, and, when the Commander-in-Chief deemed it necessary, in torture. Legal critics within the Administration had been allowed to think that they were engaged in a meaningful process; but their deliberations appeared to have been largely an academic exercise, or, worse, a charade."

In short: we have a lawless executive, consciously and with pre-meditation dedicated to the practice of torturing and abusing detainees. Their motives might be decent: they were doing all they thought they should to protect the country; and they still are. But I repeat: we have a lawless executive, consciously and with pre-meditation dedicated to the practice of torture.

The hero in this particular narrative is not some wild-eyed leftist. He is the son of immigrants, whose family was acquainted with the terrors of Nazism, and the police states of the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba. He knows what freedom is; and he knows what it means when the government decides to deploy cruelty against defenseless human beings as an instrument of policy. Mora, who backed the war on terror, including the war in Iraq, merely knew what tyranny means; and he saw it being drafted in memos for the president of the United States. "My mother would have killed me if I hadn‚Äôt spoken up," he tells Mayer. "No Hungarian after Communism, or Cuban after Castro, is not aware that human rights are incompatible with cruelty." But Bush and Cheney and Addington and Rumsfeld – who scribbled a joke on one memo detailing torture – seemed utterly unaware of this basic truth. Mora saw that this president, in defending America, had actually attacked America. And he had no patience for the attempt to split hairs between "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners and the t-word:

"To my mind, there’s no moral or practical distinction. If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America ‚Äî even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue."

Of course, it’s a transformative issue. And it has transformed America, and its meaning around the world – for ever. No one in future generations will be able to defend America’s honor, without having this thrown back in their faces. We can draw some comfort that we are told that the worst is over. But we know that the people who legalized, defended and endorsed torture are still in power; we know that they do not consider themselves bound by the law; and we know that most of those who have opposed them are now in the private sector. The fact that Bush, Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, Sanchez, Gonzales, and Miller may have committed war crimes with good motives (the defense of the United States) does not mean they haven’t committed them.

A reader writes:

"I am so tired of Muslims of blaming ‘culture’ not the ‘religion’ for any trouble inside Muslim countries. If you need an example of the falsehood of that statement – look at India and Pakistan. The people are ethnically identical, speak the same languages and eat the same foods. (In fact they were the same country until Muslims demanded they get their own country).

Today Pakistan is a military dictatorship and has been for most of its 50 plus year life. Its only claims to fame are killing journalists, operating jihadi camps, beating up women who try to run marathons, possessing nuclear weapons and blowing up the local KFC to prove that Islam is not violent. India on the other hand is a striving (albeit Third World) democracy that is home to Gandhi, yoga, computer programmers, hugging saints, doctors and spelling bee enthusiasts.  Thus once again demonstrating that it isn’t the ‘culture’ but the ‘religion’ that is truly incompatible with the modern world.

In fact, it’s sad to say this but in the eyes of many Hindus, myself included, September 11th is just another horrific example of the 1400 years that Islam has been fighting ‘the other’. We don’t view it as some sort of perversion of Islam but rather the way it has been since its birth. I’m also tired of liberals blaming marginalization in Europe and Britain for everything. That is just rubbish. Hindus in Europe are the same colour as their Muslim counterparts and therefore would face the same discrimination and barriers but choose to direct their energy to better education and assimilating into the culture. Not to building better bombs."

I am not going to second-guess this reader’s experience. But I would say that, from what I know, Islam is not monolithic and has many strains and sub-varieties that will inevitably affect its capacity to adapt to modernity. I can also think of two predominantly Muslim countries that don’t support this argument: Indonesia and Malaysia. But that Islam does indeed have a problem I’m afraid I no longer doubt. "Problem" may even be too euphemistic a word. Pathology in some places is more appropriate.

A low-point for the blogosphere just keeps going lower.

"At stake is not only the fate of the Christian minorities which live in the Muslim world but the freedom of everyone. The current silence of states and international organisms is unacceptable. They should be firm on the principle of reciprocity. What are the Arab League, the European Union, the United Nations doing?" –  Pontifical University rector Rino Risichella, commenting on the appeasement that has gripped much of the West in the face of violent Islamic attacks on free speech.

A reader provides some background:

"A word about the current "Chief Rabbi" of Moscow:  he is a representative of the Chabad-Lubavitch hasidic sect.  They are a curious beast indeed. Many – probably most–of them believe that their late leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (now dead about 10 years) was the messiah, and expect him to "return".  This is not, let us say, a mainstream Jewish belief.

Anyhow, they have insinuated themselves into Russian Jewry through a combination of vigorous outreach and getting into bed with Putin, which is how an American-born rabbi like Berl Lazar ended up as the "chief rabbi" of Moscow.  Not that there aren’t also plenty of conventional Orthodox Jews who share their basic attitudes towards homosexuality and homosexuals. But by and large, the Chabad folks are really way out there on just about every issue. They also are hard core creationists, for instance, which is not the case with mainstream Orthodox Judaism (or at least it didn’t used to be–the "mainstream" seems to move rightward every day). Oh, and at the risk of greatly simplifying some very obscure kabalistic concepts, they also believe that non-Jews have "souls" that are basically Satanic in character. Nice, huh?"

This sounds not unlike what has happened to Christianity in parts of America – hijacked by the most extreme and intolerant.

Gays were included in a church blessing on St Valentine’s Day in Vienna’s Catholic cathedral. Cardinal Schonborn appears to have given tacit consent. (A blogger dissents here. He argues that gay individuals were blessed, not gay couples.)

The devil is everywhere. Even in that dolce cinnamon latte.