Category: The Dish

From the Army Times:

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

"Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media," one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

A reader comments:

As a vet, who has experienced the mind games that are part of army life, it certainly does sound like these heroes are being punished for seeking the fundamentals of quality care! The question here is: did any of these soldiers express their concerns to the chain of command first? And if the chain of command failed, did they write to the Inspector General’s office before talking to the media? Every soldier is instructed (as early as Basic Training) to use these two avenues first. And the option to do so is open to every solider regardless of rank. So long as their complaint is genuine, they will not get in trouble and are protected as a witness would be in a civilian court case (in theory anyway).

"I’m not sure that any of us know what happened at the brig, but I know that something there put the fear into Mr. Padilla. Mr. Padilla is an anxiety-ridden, broken individual who is incapacitated by that anxiety," – Patricia Zapf, a forensic psychologist who examined U.S. citizen, Jose Padilla, detained for years in solitary confinement with no charges brought against him.

We still don’t know for sure what was done to Padilla. And there is debate in the court about whether he is mentally fit to stand trial. We found out one solid fact:

A senior official from the naval brig in Charleston, S.C., testified on Tuesday in federal court here that he had twice observed Mr. Padilla weeping in the electronically monitored cell where the military detained him for three years and eight months. The brig’s technical director, Sanford E. Seymour, also said that Mr. Padilla, an American citizen who was designated an enemy combatant in 2002, sometimes slept on a steel bunk without a mattress, that the windows in his 80-square-foot cell were blackened and that brig employees covered up their nametags around him.

Prosecutors wanted to bring into evidence an al Qaeda manual, coaching prisoners to resist interrogation, although they had no evidence that Padilla had read or knew of the manual. The Judge refused. Then this sentence:

In declining to admit the manual into evidence, she added that the manual would have converted the competency hearing into a debate over whether the defendant had been tortured in the brig.

By the government, that is. This, we should remember, is an open question in today’s America.

Two things worth noting: the national oil law, critical to any stable future, has indeed been passed, with the Kurds key winners; the U.S. is now talking to Iran and Syria about Iraq’s future. If you’re an optimist, and we all want to be, that makes the chances of a soft partition in the future more likely. Civil war on a large scale is still more likely, but we shouldn’t miss the slivers of hope as they pass us by.

A reader writes:

Your favorite ranting Republican falls into a trap that most Republicans do – they assume that since the Republican Party really does have reporters and newspapers in their pocket, that the Democrats must, too.

This is laughably, lamentably false.

What’s even funnier is the idea of Maureen Dowd carrying water for the Democrats. She wrote a column attacking Hillary because she doesn’t like the Clintons. She won a Pulitzer making nasty, catty cracks about their marriage. She wrote a lazy, superficial, rather mean column on Barack Obama recently that was merely a clutchful of unsupportable observations about what she assumed he had to be feeling. She wrote a series of columns pretending to be Al Gore’s bald spot. She so totally emasculated poor Al that she (and that other liberal water-carrier Frank Rich) made him a joke by the time Election Day came around in 2000.

This is the woman who’s doing the Democratic Party’s dirty work?

Point well taken. I’ve had my ups and downs with MoDo, but this must be said, I think. She was dead right about the Clintons, and was dead right about Bush and Cheney – long before I was. In the heat of the post-9/11 crisis, I couldn’t forgive her for ridiculing the president in wartime. But she was much more perceptive than me. She is no shill for either side. She can grate, and she barely manages any coherent political philosophy. But as an observer of human nature and its centrality in politics, she’s remarkably acute.

(Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty.)

Blogger Matthew Thompson reports on the latest maneuvring on a draconian anti-gay bill that could pass imminently in the Nigerian Senate. One of the provisions:

(1) Registration of Gay Clubs, Societies and organizations by whatever name they are called in institutions from secondary to the tertiary level or other institutions in particular and, in Nigeria generally, by government agencies is hereby prohibited.

(2) Publicity, procession and public show of same-sex amorous relationship through the electronic or print media physically, directly, indirectly or otherwise are prohibited in Nigeria.

(3) Any person who is involved in the registration of gay clubs, societies and organizations, sustenance, procession or meetings, publicity and public show of same sex amorous relationship directly or indirectly in public and in private is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a term of 5 years imprisonment.

A leading Muslim opposes the bill as gratuitously homophobic, but Archbishop Akinola, a favorite among American theocons, is all for it. Here’s a helpful summary of this alarming development, as American Episcopalians ally with brutal opponents of human rights.

"I believe [homosexuality] is a vital issue in the life of the church. The hope of wholeness and holiness of life is integral to the Gospel message. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to save us from throwing gum wrappers on the sidewalk or using the wrong fork to eat our tofu, he died to save our deepest selves from our darkest sins. And, because we are created with human bodies full of hormones and fallen psyches full of what my friend Bill Stafford calls "disordered affections," many of those deepest sins will involve our sexuality. We are not given new life and new power in Christ so we can do what we darn well please. We are not our own, we are bought with a price, says St. Paul. Therefore, he says, we are to glorify God with our bodies," – Episcopalian priest, Sam Pascoe, who quit the Episcopal Church over homosexuality and joined the Anglican Mission in America.

Pascoe was stripped of his clerical credentials on Monday, after an "inappropriate relationship" with an adult female parishioner. And the beat goes on.

Matt Yglesias diagnoses what may be behind some support for Giuliani. My own view is that political movements that are primarily motivated by what they are against rather than what they are for … tend to fail in the end. But they can succeed in the short term. Ask Karl Rove. Then think about the netroots left. Kinda similar, aren’t they?

Some analysis from Romney-watcher Liz Mair. The Boston Globe story is here. Money quote from Liz:

This document is going to irk those members of the Base who love George W Bush and revile anyone who calls him stupid.  According to the Globe, "the plan lists two ways Romney can set himself apart from Bush. The first says, simply, ‘Intelligence.’"

The fact that Romney’s campaign staff lend credence to the notion that the President is a blithering idiot is bound to irritate a lot of people.  Which I suppose in sum brings us back to the big, overarching point made in the document: as it stands, Team Romney does not think success is on the cards.  I’m not sure I’d be as dismissive of their candidate’s chances as Romney staffers seem to be, but then again, I’m not in the trenches, so to speak – so maybe things are just that bad.

"Who is losing Afghanistan? George W. Bush, that’s who. His watch. His administration. His incompetence. His arrogance. His failure to learn from failure," – Andrew Stuttaford, NRO. I’m with Andrew on the drug war insanity. You cannot fight drugs and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Pick one or the other. 

The former veep defends himself.