Category: The Dish

The manner in which free societies lose their moral compass is always incremental. Step by step by step, certain core values are whittled away. There is rarely a moment at which a government stands up, and asks its people if they wish to abandon such "quaint" notions as the Geneva Conventions, the rule of law, humane interrogation or habeas corpus. These things are abandoned incrementally or secretly, slice by slice, euphemism by euphemism, the chronology always clearer in retrospect than at the time. And each incremental step is always portrayed as a small but essential temporary sacrifice for the sake of security in a time of great and imminent peril.

And so defenders of torture have long argued that is is essential to make torture legal – but only in the ticking time bomb scenario. And yet, such a scenario has not yet happened and the United States has still indisputably abused and dehumanized thousands of prisoners in its custody, "disappeared" and tortured hundreds, and seen more than a dozen die in "interrogation". We now know, moreover, the following undisputed facts: the president of the United States and his closest advisers devised, orchestrated and monitored interrogation methods banned by the Geneva Conventions at Guantanamo Bay and subsequently in every theater of combat; these techniques were used not only in the extra-legal no-man’s land of Guantanamo Bay but also at the prison at Abu Ghraib where photographic evidence of many of the actual techniques explicitly authorized by the president – stress positions, hoods, mock-executions, etc. – was incontrovertible. We now know that those techniques that the president expressed "shock" at were already explicitly authorized for use by other agents by him long before Abu Ghraib was exposed.

Moreover, even after attempts by the Court and the Congress to rein in these methods – which were once prosecuted by the US as war-crimes – the president continued to defend, use and advance violations of Common Article Three in violation of the law and the Constitution. In the last week, we have also learned the following: that some Gitmo inmates have testified to being injected with some kind of substance:

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle. "I’d fall asleep" after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

"I was completely gone," he remembered. "I said, ‘Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I’m a member of al-Qaeda, I will.’ "

We have also discovered that the president is still insisting that he has the power to violate Geneva at will on a case-by-case basis, rendering the rule of law moot and the Constitution toothless. Money quote:

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity,” a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.  

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.

And so abuse and torture are entirely dependent, we are told, on the apparent motives of the abusers and torturers. But torture is actually defined in the law as an illegal tool devised not for sadism’s sake but as a means to extract information. And notice the extremely slippery slope. We no longer have torture as an extreme last resort in the face of a ticking time-bomb; we have authorized it simply "to prevent a threatened terrorist attack." That means any time anywhere by anyone authorized by the government after 9/11, no? And if a foreign government were to use such a standard? What do we say then?

We also know that the torture and interrogation camp at Guantanamo Bay has become for many of its inmates the functional equivalent of a lunatic asylum. It is not very hard to see why. If you were not crazy before you got there, it will not take long for the abuse and isolation and total hopelessness of the place to get into your head. The cells are 8 by 12 feet, have no windows and inmates are in solitary confinement and stationary for 22 hours a day. There is no escape and no possibility of a fair trial by any traditional standards of "fair". No one locked up in these conditions has been tried or convicted of anything. And we wonder why some have attempted suicide or gone on hunger-strike? From the New York Times a few days ago on the conditions endured by the most high-profile of the prisoners:

“Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse,” [Hamdan] wrote his lawyers in February. “Why, why, why?” At Guantánamo, there are no family visits, no televisions and no radios. A new policy will for the first time permit one telephone call a year.  

In the cells where Mr. Hamdan and more than 200 of Guantánamo’s 280 detainees are held, communication with other detainees is generally by shouting through the slit in the door used for the delivery of meals. Mail is late and often censored, lawyers say.

Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on American prison conditions.

We have evidence of what abuse and torture does to prisoners, in the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen subjected to torture at the behest of the president:

Dr. Hegarty, one of two mental health professionals who examined him, said Mr. Padilla was "fearful of being thought of as crazy." She described him as "hypervigilant," his eyes darting about, his face twitching into grimaces, his "startle response" on constant high alert.

"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."

These things are continuing for all we know. This is what the United States has become. To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

Ryan Lizza on Bill Clinton:

When Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign was launched, in January, 2007, her supporters feared that Bill would overshadow her, as he had when they both spoke at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, a year earlier. Now the constant fear is that he will embarrass her. When he makes news, it is rarely a good day for his spouse. Whether he was publicly comparing Barack Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the eighties or privately, and apoplectically, complaining that Bill Richardson broke his word by endorsing Obama, every story has seemed to reinforce an image of Clinton as a sort of ill-tempered coot driven a little mad by Obama’s success. “I think this campaign has enraged him,” the adviser told me. “He doesn’t like Obama.” In private conversations, he has been dismissive of his wife’s rival. James Clyburn, an African-American congressman from South Carolina, told me that Clinton called him in the middle of the night after Obama won that state’s primary and raged at him for fifty minutes.

He just cannot believe that his time has come and gone. But it has.

Banksy does it again. It’s one of the few instances where graffiti really does resonate as art.

A passage from Terry McAuliffe’s book about a discussion four years ago of Michigan moving up its primary date:

"I’m going outside the primary window," [Michigan Sen. Carl Levin] told me definitively.

"If I allow you to do that, the whole system collapses," I said. "We will have chaos. I let you make your case to the DNC, and we voted unanimously and you lost."

He kept insisting that they were going to move up Michigan on their own, even though if they did that, they would lose half their delegates. By that point Carl and I were leaning toward each other over a table in the middle of the room, shouting and dropping the occasional expletive.

"You won’t deny us seats at the convention," he said.

"Carl, take it to the bank," I said. "They will not get a credential. The closest they’ll get to Boston will be watching it on television. I will not let you break this entire nominating process for one state. The rules are the rules. If you want to call my bluff, Carl, you go ahead and do it."

Times change, I guess. But Clintonites never do. Whatever works, regardless of principle, regardless of party. Hat tip: Mark Nicholas.

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

– "To The Harbormaster" by Frank O’Hara.

Thom Gunn wrote of this poem:

Waves are the medium for a ship as the air is the medium for a human being. They exist in an eternity different from God’s, and different again from the life-span of the ship or the man, and opposed to both, in a sense. That is the way things are, and O’Hara had better trust in the sanity of his body. "Sanity"—what a great word!

Either you love this or you are completely mystified and appalled. After watching most of the season obsessively in a couple of sittings, I think I love it. But I’m still not entirely sure. Its post-everything mash-up, brilliant computer animation, motion-capture and Gen-Y wit make it unlike anything else I’ve seen on TV. If you’re intrigued by a six-teated minotaur with a beak and legs that are attached backwards, it may be worth a gander. Think of it as a "’tude colonic":

"We must speak and yet we must maintain our silence, we must maintain distance amidst the proximity of God, and we must worship while being careful not to make God into the object of our worship; for God is the subject before whom we worship. This site of uncertainty and unknowing is often a frightening place to dwell, but while the comfort provided by religion is placed into a certain distress by the idea of doubt, this distress, too, is not without a certain comfort. For while we do not grasp God, faith is born amidst the feeling that God grasps us," – Peter Rollins, whose book, "How (Not) To Speak Of God," has been an exhilarating read this past week.

The transcript is here. I found it moving in parts, and certainly a helpful counter to the notion that Wright is some insane anti-American demagogue. He has some views I don’t hold, but he seems a genuine Christian witness to me. Money quote:

"Those sound bites, those snippets were taken for nefarious purposes. That God can take that and do something very positive for it- with it. That, in Philadelphia, in response to the sound bytes, in response to the snippets, in Philadelphia Senator Obama made a very powerful speech in terms of our need as a nation to address the whole issue of race. That’s something good that’s already starting."

To be able to see how some of the more toxic events in this campaign can be turned into opportunities for dialogue and mutual understanding is an authentically Christian achievement. And not easy. Bitter is easy.

A photographic tour through some restaurants in China. Some classic captions. My favorite:

"Henry’s whip" is the house speciality at Beijing’s Guolizhuang restaurant. It’s a sheep’s penis on a stick covered in mayonnaise, sweet cheese, served on a bed of lettuce.

Mmmm.