Category: The Dish

This statement is about as misleading and as false as Jonah’s distortions of the arguments in The Conservative Soul:

[Sullivan’s] assertions on what is and isn’t torture ultimately boil down to his own subjective judgments.

What to say about this, except that it is either a function of complete ignorance of my work on the subject or deliberate misrepresentation? My view of what torture is is grounded in the plain language of US law, in the plain English of what torture has always meant, and in the clear precedents of American legal and military judgment. It is based on the Geneva Conventions, American law, American history and the consensus of the entire civilized world for a very long time. And it is grounded in what conservatives themselves used to say about the subject – when waterboarding was used by the Khmer Rouge, when hypothermia, sleep deprivation and stress positions were used by the KGB and when the exact techniques used by Bush were deployed by the frigging Gestapo.

In fact, my own objective view of this matter was utterly conventional wisdom among conservatives and neoconservatives for my entire lifetime … until the Bush administration. The idea that this is somehow now a purely subjective judgment – an assertion Goldberg makes without ever addressing the many historical and legal arguments I have made – is simply a smear, not an argument.

He aims to please – and Ambinder thinks he is making real progress:

When doctrinally sensitive Southern Baptist leaders start to support Romney (over former Southern Baptist ministers), Fred Thompson has, at most, a few weeks to prevent his cup from runnething over.

The notion that "torture" has never meant forms of coercive interrogation short of electrocuting someone’s balls or tearing their fingernails out (this seems to be Bush’s and Bret Stephens’ comic book position) is simply disproved by history. I’ve proved beyond any doubt or rebuttal that the United States itself treated Bush’s torture techniques as torture and prosecuted them as war crimes during the Second World War. But the understanding that torture is indeed the precise term for hypothermia, stress positions, confinement, extreme isolation and the like goes back a long, long way. A reader writes:

I’ve been doing some research on Elizabethan torture warrants lately (don’t ask). Elizabeth I was the most prolific user of royal torture warrants in English history, issuing (or having issued) 53 of the 81 warrants that have survived. (There were almost certainly more, though not that many, but the details of that story don’t affect the point. If you want to check it out, Torture and the Law of Proof by John H. Langbein has all you need to know.)

Among the things John Yoo would not have considered torture but the Elizabethan torture commissioners at the tower did include confinement in a dungeon with rats (Thomas Sherwood, 17  Nov. 1577, during an investigation of one of the plots against Elizabeth); manacles — essentially a stress position, as the manacled prisoner is lifted to the point where his feet do not support his weight, all of which pulls on the suspended wrists of the victim (several times through Elizabeth’s reign); whipping (Humfrey "a boy" for burglary in 1580 —  note that Jesus too would have had some knowledge of Humfrey’s suffering) and "Little Ease" — confinement in a cell so small that the inhabitant could not sit, nor stand, nor move.  This was used on several occasions including the case of George Beesley, a priest in violation of the Anglican acts in 1591.

The most common techniques in the warrants are either the rack, or else simply "torture" unspecified — once "such torture as is usual,"  a chilling legal statement if ever there was one.

But the key to all this litany of pain is that the English stopped torturing, at least officially.  The last torture warrant dates from 1642, just before the start of the Civil War.  Several reasons have been advanced for the forgoing of torture as a tool of investigation or the discovery of evidence.  But the two most pertinent were the recognition that information under torture was not reliable, and even more significant, that the English jury system allowed for juries to find fact, thus eliminating the need to have a confession to prove guilt.  In other words:  if you trust the rule of law, you don’t need to act in ways that would make Jesus weep.

The Onion homes in on what the voters really care about. I love this quote about Clinton "not just talking bullshit but living it":

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Swearing in the office can make sense sometimes:

Banning swear words and reprimanding staff might represent strong leadership, but could remove key links between staff and impact on morale and motivation, he said.

"We hope that this study will serve not only to acknowledge the part that swearing plays in our work and our lives, but also to indicate that leaders sometimes need to ‘think differently’ and be open to intriguing ideas.

I haven’t written much about the Walt-Mearesheimer book because it’s long and I haven’t had time to read it. (There’s a concept: a blogger not posting about something he knows nothing about.) But it is interesting, it seems to me, that the debate about the Middle East does indeed feel freer in Israel than in the US, where some American Jews have a defensiveness and anger that makes calm debate very difficult. (I guess I should add that my impression of the Walt-Mearesheimer book – I did read the original article – is that it’s shoddy enough to merit Jewish defensiveness and anger. Sigh.) Here’s an interesting piece on the press debate in Israel and the US. Matt comments here. Megan offers her suggested reasons for the discrepancy between the much better-informed and more diverse debate in Israel. Money quote:

1) No one in Israel is worried about being called anti-semitic.

2) Ethnic groups in safe exile tend to be more committed to territorial possession than the people back home who actually have to get shot at in order to obtain or retain the land. This is certainly true of the Irish.

3) Being correct about Israel/Palestine matters a lot more in Israel than it does in America. People expressing views here (or in Europe) are more often staking out ethnic or political solidarity with a cause. People in Israel have a certain level of solidarity assumed, and are in a high-stakes battle for the lowest cost solution, which permits and even demands a wider breadth of views.

4)  Newspapers in Israel are just better than newspapers here.

I’ll take the first three.

Radley Balko struggles to find much daylight between the Clintons and Bush-Cheney in critical respects:

It’s difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband’s administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious "executive privilege" claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests—claims the left now (correctly, in my view) regularly criticizes the Bush administration for invoking.

Hillary Clinton herself went to court to keep meetings of her Health Care Task Force secret from the public, something conservatives were quick to point out when leftists criticize Vice President Cheney’s similar efforts to keep meetings of his Energy Task Force secret.

"I’m a strong believer in executive authority," Clinton said in a 2003 speech, recently quoted in The New Republic. "I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."

That jibes with a February 2007 New York Times article on Clinton explaining her refusal to back down from her vote for the Iraq war: "Mrs. Clinton’s belief in executive power and authority is another factor weighing against an apology, advisers said… she believes that a president usually deserves the benefit of the doubt from Congress on matters of executive authority."

Such is why President Bush has recently had some nice things to say about Hillary Clinton, leading some to speculate that Bush sees her as the Eisenhower to his Truman—a candidate from the opposing party who criticizes his foreign policy during the campaign, but will likely pursue a very similar policy should she be elected.

You want a change from the Bush era? Only pure partisans think a third term for a Clinton co-presidency would do it. Yes, it would give every partisan Democrat a thrill. But if you care about the damage done by this president to the constitutional order, don’t believe for a minute that the Clintons would reverse it. They love their power. 

       

Even Forbes is getting more enviro-friendly. But the greenest states are still mainly blue:

On top: Vermont, Oregon and Washington. All have low carbon dioxide emissions per capita (or "carbon footprints"), strong policies to promote energy efficiency and high air quality, as indicated by their major metro areas that are low in smog and ozone pollution. They’re also among the states with the most buildings (on a per capita basis) that have received the U.S. Green Building Council’s benchmark certification, known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

A clutch of Eastern states round out the top 10.

Christianist-majority states tend to care less about God’s creation.

Even gayer than the GOP? We may finally be about to find out.