The Dish

The adoption of torture as an authorized interrogation technique by the United States was innovated by president Bush, vice-president Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and officials in the Justice Department and Pentagon in the wake of 9/11. It has been documented in hundreds of cases in every theater of war, and authorized by presidential directive, waiving the Geneva Conventions if "military necessity" demands it. Last September, Karl Rove made a strategic decision to use the torture issue as a last, desperate campaign tactic – to see if he could out-Bauer the Democrats. Jane Mayer’s latest contribution to reporting the shift of America from a law-abiding country to a torturing nation is this piece on the hit television show, "24." It’s a very effective drama and pure fantasy for pro-torture conservatives. Conservative pundit Laura Ingraham has even confessed to finding scenes of brutal interrogations therapeutic:

[Joel] Surnow, [the creator of "24"] once appeared as a guest on Ingraham’s show; she told him that, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, "it was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt better." Surnow joked, "We love to torture terrorists — it’s good for you!"

Mayer helps show how Charles Krauthammer’s near-non-existent "ticking clock" scenario has been popularized by "24" in such a way as to normalize torture in the public consciousness. In five seasons of "24", there have been sixty-seven torture scenes, and all of them are portrayed as effective, productive, and justified. Military cadets, weaned on ’24", now tend to see nothing wrong with it. Soldiers in the field have internalized the show’s ethics. One witness to this is Tony Lagouranis, a former army interrogator in Iraq. He tells Mayer that some soldiers in Iraq just replicated the "24" scenes in real life – even though torture is still nominally illegal under American law for the regular military (the Bush administration has created a special CIA torture unit to do the job instead).

Lagouranis is a good witness for what has actually been happening in the war:

"In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence," Lagouranis told me. "I worked with someone who used waterboarding … I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened." Some people, he said, "gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information."

Yep: these are American soldiers he’s talking about, not Serbian thugs. What’s truly disturbing is how enthusiastic the Republican establishment is about this adoption of torture as the American way. The Heritage Foundation had a symposium celebrating the show, organized by Virginia Thomas, wife of Clarence. Michael Chertoff endorsed "24", despite its endorsement of law-breaking by government officials. Then we discover this:

The same day as the Heritage Foundation event, a private luncheon was held in the Wardrobe Room of the White House for Surnow and several others from the show. (The event was not publicized.) Among the attendees were Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff; Tony Snow, the White House spokesman; Mary Cheney, the Vice-President’s daughter; and Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President’s wife, who, Surnow said, is "an extreme ’24’ fan." After the meal, Surnow recalled, he and his colleagues spent more than an hour visiting with Rove in his office.

It all begins to make more sense now, doesn’t it?

(Photo: Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, under U.S. supervision.)

A reader writes:

You may not believe this, but your quote from Lincoln moved me (completely unexpected, sitting at my desk during a normal workday) close to tears. Writing 150 years ago, Lincoln hit upon the primal cause of the whole sorry tragedy of our past four years: we turned our president into a king, and we allowed him to act as kings do, waging useless wars with our children and our treasure for their own self-aggrandizement.

Lincoln, of course, knew his scripture, and when he wrote those words undoubtedly had this verse in mind: (I Samuel 8:10-18 )

Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day."

I’ve always rejected arguments that our ancestors were somehow wiser than us. But reading Lincoln’s words reminds me that, in a few key cases, some of our ancestors were indeed wiser than anyone alive today.

Another reader notes:

Lincoln had it right of course (as usual). But this country did go to war against Mexico anyway, and it was a highly popular war, while Lincoln’s career suffered almost terminally for opposing it.

A new skirmish on the Christianist right.

A conservative reader writes:

Let’s see, in Guliani. we’ve apparently got a guy who on one hand is on the wrong side of some social issues, but on the other hand, is strong on the WOT-related issue. But what about everything else?

What about Tax Reform, fiscal (budgetary and entitlement) reform, education reform (vouchers, etc.), health care reform (and no, not the one-size-fits-all nonsense that Uncle Teddy dreams about)? What about the damn near $3-T federal behemoth that grows seemingly unabated via nonsensical expenditures like agricultural subsidies, etc?

I would hope that at some point we’ll find out where Rudy stands on those issues. I suspect he’s both a forceful proponent of wholesale reform in all necessary areas and relentless and articulate enough to browbeat the establishment into aquiescence. If that pans out, those who have blinders on now as they focus on either end of the existing bipolar discussion will open their eyes all the way.

The two great advantages Giuliani has are a) national security and b) management skills. In one, he echoes Bush’s post-9/11 strength; in the other he is an antidote to how Bush lost that strength. It’s win-win for many on the right, I think. He may still implode, but the potential is real.

Neuropathy is a difficult thing to explain. It’s a form of pain and sensitivity in the extremities, and it affects people with long-term HIV. It can become quite severe. In the very late 1980s, I was a volunteer "buddy" to a man with AIDS in D.C. who suffered from this. Even a slight brush of a sheet against his feet would give him spasms of pain. I remember this because moving him from sofa to bed caused him to yell expletives at me. We now find that marijuana may help such neuropathy – a new clinical trial shows clearly how. What is the Bush administration’s response? Here it is:

"People who smoke marijuana are subject to bacterial infections in the lungs," said David Murray, chief scientist at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "Is this really what a physician who is treating someone with a compromised immune system wants to prescribe?"

It seems to me that that is a decision best left to a doctor and a patient. Which means making the treatment available if necessary – and legal.

Plenty vulnerable, it appears. This piece in tomorrow’s NYT is intriguing. Put it up against Ahmadinejad’s failure to win strong popular backing in recent elections, the pro-American stance of many Iranians, and the success of the civilized world in unifying around economic sanctions, and we may have real leverage over the regime. Persia and America are not natural enemies. With respect to the Arab Muslim world, they are natural allies. The great challenge of the next few years is detaching Persia’s poisonous regime from the people it purports to represent.

(Graphic: NYT.)

Her coarse mockery of others’ faith, while perfectly within her right to free speech, is nonetheless a liability for a political campaign. I can see why she quit, and I don’t think she has any reason to complain. To be honest, I find the whole idea of bloggers as an integral part of political campaigns a little creepy. When I started blogging, many saw it primarily as a way to challenge those in power – whether in the media or politics or the church or wherever. It was a way to expand the individual’s ability to speak and be heard, as a means to deepen scrutiny of the powerful. Pace Jonah, I see nothing wrong with a party of one, whoever that might be. The way in which blogging has been coopted by the collective and and used as a tool for political purposes is unsurprising, but a little depressing. I guess that’s why I find the whole netroots movement on the left to be unattractive. Sometimes a pack is not a herd. But sometimes it is.

A friend suggested an obvious interpretation: Williams and Connelly is the home base of lawyer/agent Robert Barnett, who does book deals for the powerful and famous. Maybe Rummy’s going to dish.

A reader writes:

The letter from the Catholic nun was simply stunning. I printed it out – it’s a keeper. She spoke so beautifully, so openly, of the female experience. Your printing it humanized her to a secular type like me who has probably always assumed that Catholic nuns think very differently than I do. I have to laugh at myself –  I can only wish I had her bold eloquence and when speaking of women’s sexuality and her experience of it.

I’m much too shy with that stuff thanks to the internalized shame she writes about. I’m rather ashamed to say the letter was a stereotype killer for me.

Thanks for your emails. Victor Davis Hanson has a negative review in the New York Post today; Mark Steyn trashed the book in Macleans; and Buchanan’s outfit offered a "not-so-much" review of the book. Odd silence from the Weekly Standard and National Review (not counting Andrew Stuttaford’s review in the New York Sun). The right-of-center blogs have been pretty lively in condemnation. But the conservative establishment has held its fire – in part, I think, because they really are something of a politburo. Like the intellectual left of the past, the intellectual right these days is often more concerned about maintaining some semblance of orthodoxy than criticizing favorite sons (like D’Souza) if at all possible. One reader sums up the mood of many:

As a conservative, I find the book personally embarrassing. D’Souza was one of the intellectual young conservatives who spoke very articulately of his love of America – his status of an immigrant gave him a special insight. Prior to this book, we could always claim that those on the right who said 9/11 was America’s fault were either borderline anti-Semites (like Buchanan) or outright nuts (like Pat Robertson). It is harder now to make that argument with D’Souza, who is neither a nut nor an anti-Semite.

Taking D’Souza seriously requires seriously addressing what has happened to American conservatism. This was a book written by a star of the conservative intellectual movement, edited by Adam Bellow, and published to great fanfare and mounds of publicity. I’m not surprised some conservatives don’t want to go there.