Category: The Dish

The fact that there are indeed many vicious terrorists in Guantanamo Bay does not mean it is a fair, humane or effective instrument of a fair, humane or effective policy. About one fifth of the inmates were actually captured by US forces. The evidence for the rest is often extremely sketchy. It’s hard to convey this until you hear the specifics. Here are some:

In a hearing on Oct. 26, 2004, a transcript shows, one detainee was told that another had identified him as having attended a terrorism training camp.

The detainee asked that his accuser be brought to testify. “We don’t know his name,” the senior officer on the hearing panel said.

At another hearing, later reviewed by a federal judge, a Turkish detainee, Murat Kurnaz, was said to have been associated with an Islamic missionary group. He had also traveled with a man who had become a suicide bomber.

“It would appear,” Judge Joyce Hens Green wrote in 2005, “that the government is indefinitely holding the detainee — possibly for life — solely because of his contacts with individuals or organizations tied to terrorism and not because of any terrorist activities that the detainee aided, abetted or undertook himself.”

In a third hearing, an Afghan detainee said he had indeed been a jihadist — during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union, when a lot of Afghans were jihadists. Was that what the accusation against him meant, he asked, or was it referring to later, during the American war?

Again, a very traditional, conservative and careful patriot has risen to the occasion to illuminate these abuses and to try to correct them. And that man, reservist Colonel Stephen Abraham, had a role in getting the Supreme Court to review its own previous decision. America does indeed require the virtue of its most loyal citizens to survive as a constitutional republic. Thank God some still exist.

My column on Oprah and Obama is here.

"With the ongoing progress of the surge, and the obvious fact that the vast majority of the troops want to fight and win the war, the "support-the-troops-but-oppose-what-they’re-doing" position has become increasingly untenable. How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies? You can’t. […]

Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support…. [The troops] are our best and bravest, fighting for all of us against a brutal enemy in a difficult and frustrating war. They are the 9/11 generation. The left slanders them. We support them," – Bill Kristol, classy as ever.

A paleocon manifesto.

Please don’t feed or hug the base.

This is something some of us have worried about for a couple of decades now:

Ron Garber knew his former wife was living with another woman — and had taken her last name — when he agreed to pay her $1,250 a month in alimony.

What he didn’t know was that the two women had registered with the state as domestic partners under a law that was supposed to mirror marriage law, Garber said.

State marriage laws say that alimony ends when the former spouse remarries, and Garber reasons he should be off the hook, given that domestic partnership is akin to marriage. But an Orange County judge has decided that registered partnership is cohabitation, not marriage, and that Garber must pay.

"This is not about gay or lesbian," Garber said. "This is about the law being fair."

The case, which Garber intends to appeal, highlights gaps between the legal status of domestic partners and of married couples, an issue the California Supreme Court is considering as it ponders whether to legalize same-sex marriage.

The answer is to grant us all the same rights and responsibilities of civil marriage: good for marriage, good for families, good for gays, good for straights, good for kids.

My new column in the Sunday Times is up. Money quote:

To be sure, Oprah went out of her way not to diss Clinton, whose support among women and African-Americans has kept Obama in a firm, water-treading second place in the polls, if not in fundraising.

“I think I’ve said this before and it’s true: because I am for Barack does not mean I am against Hillary or anybody else,” Oprah explained. “So the fact that I would endorse Barack Obama, I have not one negative thing to say about Hillary Clinton.”

That’s the classic Oprah touch: never divisive, always positive, but somehow not completely vapid. It’s not easy to pull that off and to retain an appearance of authenticity, but that’s why her talk show remains a phenomenon in the popular culture.

She has an ally among black women for the Obama candidacy. The other woman is not well known yet, but she soon will be. In some ways, she is for Obama in retail politics what Oprah is for him on the national stage. Her name is Michelle Obama, and she is the Illinois senator’s wife.

The rest here.

(Photo: Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty.)

"We ain’t found shit." Spaceballs.

Chuck Todd on the Big Factor in the 2008 election. Money quote:

There are a couple of parallel elections that we could be in the midst of right now and depending on the country’s specific mood will determine the outcome. Clearly the mood of the country is down, but is it anger or depression? Is it exhaustion or fear? If it’s like ’68, where the country was angry but a bit fearful of drastic change, Thompson and Clinton could succeed; both are very similar to Humphrey and Nixon in that they are selling cautious change.  If the mood is exhausted and depressed, like ’80, Romney and Obama could prosper.  Then again, if the mood is angry with an electorate demanding of change no matter the unintended consequences, like 92, then perhaps Edwards, Giuliani or even a Bloomberg will fit the bill. In fact, take note that in the three elections cited above (’68, ’80 and ’92), all of them saw significant third party candidacies influence the outcome of the election (Wallace, Anderson and Perot).

New York, New York, dusk.