Category: The Dish

"America’s idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations," – British High Court Judge, Justice Collins, yesterday. The British High Court is not al Jazeera. It’s the highest legal authority in America’s closest ally. By endorsing and practising torture, as defined by U.S. law and international treaties, the Bush administration is turning this country into a rogue nation.

A group of Israelis launch a contest: for Jewish cartoonists to produce the most anti-Semitic cartoons imaginable. Nothing could better distinguish the difference between the West and the Arab-Muslim world.

Josh asks a good question. A reader also wonders:

"But wasn’t Byron York talking about classification in his column?  The authority for declassification is not the same as classification under the Executive Order as amended.  As I understand it, Big Dick could only declassify something that he classified in the first place (which is n/a with respect to the NIE or the Plame disclosures). Of course, the unknown is the existence/extent of a classfied Executive Order that further addresses declassification! The mind continues to reel at the unending Orwellianism of it all … "

Maybe we’ll clear some of this up tomorrow. I have a deadline now …

Michelle Malkin asks, not without reason:

"Readers have been e-mailing all day the question the MSM needs to answer: Why the Abu Ghraib photos, but not the Mohammed Cartoons?"

But one might ask Michelle the reverse question about her blog: why the Muhammad cartoons and not the Abu Ghraib photos? Both are legitimate news stories; both are invaluable to people trying to understand the state of our current war. But I have yet to see any depiction of the AG photos on her blog. Did I miss something?

A heartening account of military success in Iraq. Notice one thing: the unit most adept at fighting insurgents has a firm no-abuse-of-detainees rule. "Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy," is how the commander educates his troops. That’s the American way. And it works. Someone may want to tell Rumsfeld.

Dahlia Lithwick pulls some themes together in, as usual, an insightful piece on the growing scandal of Guantanamo Bay. Money quote:

"Guantanamo is a not-place. It’s neither America nor Cuba. It is peopled by people without names who face no charges. Non-people facing non-trials to defend non-charges are not a story. They are a headache. No wonder the prisoners went on hunger strikes. Not-eating, ironically enough, is the only way they could try to become real to us."

It’s raging in Bangladesh.

A reader notices something interesting:

"The Executive Order allowing Cheney to declassify classified information is Executive Order 13292. Bryon York at the National Review actually has a good article on it this morning. I found the date of the Executive Order, March 25, 2003, to be the most astounding part.  According to Wikipedia, the time line of the Plame Affair goes like this.  On March 3, 2003 Joseph Wilson writes an article in the Nation in which he claims that "America has entered one of it [sic] periods of historical madness."  The Executive Order 13292, giving the Vice-President explicit authority to declassify information, is issued on March 25, 2003. On July 6, 2003, Joseph Wilson writes his article in the New York Times disputing the intelligence that Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire nuclear materials in Africa, which is followed by Robert Novak’s article ousting Valerie Plame on July 14, 2003."

The York article is indeed very helpful. York will no doubt soon be called a liberal. More to the point: the circumstantial evidence seems pretty clear to me that the president gave the vice-president constitutional authority to smear Joseph Wilson. It also seems to me that this is a big deal.

UPDATE: Wikipedia appears to be wrong, although my reader read it correctly. The quote from Wilson was actually by John le Carre. The first print mention of Wilson’s dissent from the White House line was in May 2003. So the time-line for a clear connection doesn’t work. All we can say is that Cheney’s new authority to leak classified information came at a time when the administration’s claims about WMDs were beginning to look weak. Not long thereafter, Plame was outed. 

A former military man writes:

"When I saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib (and Gitmo?) my eyes filled up and I began to weep slowly. For my country. Americans don’t do things like this! (Yes, I remember My Lai but when it was revealed, the country was shocked and outraged.) I was born in the presidency of FDR and my uncles and cousins fought in the European and Pacific theaters. Enemy soldiers, when they surrendered, wanted to surrender to the Americans because Americans didn’t mistreat prisoners. The Japanese were particularly hated because of their well-known ill-treatment of prisoners.

I grew to manhood during the height of the Cold War and the doctrine of MAD. I never saw combat (too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam) but I did serve for 3 years as an Intelligence officer in a strategic airborne unit. America was widely respected, with all our faults and stumbling steps, as "a shining city on a hill". When we betray our national ideals for the stated purpose of defending them, we lose the moral high ground.
I remember when Bill Buckley started National Review and when Barry Goldwater, an intelligent, thoughtful man, ran for the Presidency. Ronald Reagan, (whom, I confess, I consider a so-so President) was a decent, honorable man who understood that bullets and bombs are not enough to "win" a war.
Question for you, Andrew: when did intellectual conservatism morph into an apologia for trickery, torture, and theocracy?"

Another liberal, I can almost hear Sean Hannity mutter.

Here’s a thorough piece on how Bruce Bartlett, horrified by an administration that increased this country’s unfunded liabilities by over $20 trillion in four years, was fired from his think-tank job for his conservative principles. Money quote involving John Goodman, a friend of Karl Rove, and head of the National Center for Policy Analysis, who purged Bartlett:

"No one asked me to do this, no one suggested it would be a good thing, nothing like that," Goodman says. When asked precisely whom he spoke with, Goodman smiles and chuckles. "Well, I don’t want to get into that," he says. "But some people in the Bush administration said, ‘We think you just did something good.’"

You can buy Bruce’s new book, "Impostor," here.