The Dish

A reader writes:

The language you quoted isn’t the worst of it. It does require "material support," and that would presumably be defined as in 18 USC 2339a:

(1) the term "material support or resources" means any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (1 or more individuals who may be or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials;

(2) the term "training" means instruction or teaching designed to impart a specific skill, as opposed to general knowledge; and

(3) the term "expert advice or assistance" means advice or assistance derived from scientific, technical or other specialized knowledge.

This is harsh, but not out-of-bounds for law of armed conflict. No, the choking point is the second part of the definition in which the Executive simply gets to say who such an illegal enemy combatant is. That is, in its essence, tyrannical. They say "trust us," but why should we? We now see a long track record of people being so classified and held with little or no basis. The exercise of the discretion has, in other words, been corrupt.

The deeper point is that, in this law, the "battlefield" has been extended into every living room in the country, and that without judicial oversight, the entire discretion to name someone an "illegal enemy combatant" is entirely up to one man, the president. And he also has the discretion to torture such a person at will, using techniques once deployed by the North Vietnamese and the KGB. This is the bill now being considered. It is a grave threat to basic liberties.

"Remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands – all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.

The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live forever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon – and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again, generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken-up, contemptible – and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord.

That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it," – O’Brien, the party operator, from George Orwell’s "Nineteen-Eighty-Four."

Does any of this begin to ring a bell? 

"Do I understand Jerry [Falwell] correctly? Is he saying he supports the misnamed Patriot Act, a law that all but eviscerates the Fourth Amendment and does serious injury to several others, a law that was first proposed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore? Is he saying he supports domestic surveillance, which many fear does more to create an American police state than fight terrorists? Does he mean he supports warrantless searches and seizures and warrantless eavesdropping?

I had always believed that Christian conservatives were among our country’s most ardent defenders of liberty and constitutional government. All that I knew and understood from my schooling at Thomas Road Baptist Church and the Thomas Road Bible Institute, plus all of my involvement and effort in Jerry’s Moral Majority, convinced me that if we Christian conservatives believed anything, we believed in freedom and constitutional government. Am I now to understand that we are supposed to support a Big Brother philosophy to government and must willingly surrender constitutionally protected liberties?

As to the war in Iraq, do we Christians really desire that our young men and women continue to die in another non-declared, no-win war? Is it wrong to wonder whether this never-ending "war on terror" really serves the cause of national security or rather the commercial interests of globalists? Do Evangelicals really have a litmus test whereby any future president must be determined to continue and perhaps expand constant interventionist policies, nation-building, and preemptive invasions of foreign countries? Must we be equally determined to turn the United States into an Orwellian nightmare until life in America looks like one giant airport terminal? None of this reflects historic Christian conservatism as I ever understood it!" – Chuck Baldwin, friend of Falwell and longtime stalwart of the religious right.

This is from General Batiste. It says all we need to know:

My name is John Batiste. I left the military on principle on November 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I am a West Point graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career soldiers, a two-time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and a life-long Republican.

Bottom line, our nation is in peril, our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities. This is all about accountability and setting our nation on the path to victory. There is no substitute for victory and I believe we must complete what we started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader. He knows everything, except "how to win." He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq, or the human dimension of warfare. Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build “his plan,” which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace, and set Iraq up for self-reliance. He refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency, which was an absolute certainty. Bottom line, his plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today. Our great military lost a critical window of opportunity to secure Iraq because of inadequate troop levels and capability required to impose security, crush a budding insurgency, and set the conditions for the rule of law in Iraq. We were undermanned from the beginning, lost an early opportunity to secure the country, and have yet to regain the initiative. To compensate for the shortage of troops, commanders are routinely forced to manage shortages and shift coalition and Iraqi security forces from one contentious area to another in places like Baghdad, An Najaf, Tal Afar, Samarra, Ramadi, Fallujah, and many others. This shifting of forces is generally successful in the short term, but the minute a mission is complete and troops are redeployed back to the region where they came from, insurgents reoccupy the vacuum and the cycle repeats itself. Troops returning to familiar territory find themselves fighting to reoccupy ground which was once secure. We are all witnessing this in Baghdad and the Al Anbar Province today. I am reminded of the myth of Sisyphus. This is no way to fight a counter-insurgency. Secretary Rumsfeld’s plan did not set our military up for success.

Even foaming-at-the-mouth Caesarists understand this now. And yet this architecht of one of a military failure far graver than Vietnam is still calling the shots.

From the USS Enterprise, time and date classified, sent via a proud dad.

Those of us trying to resist the Bush administration’s seizure of permanent emergency powers have so far failed to alert the American public of the immense danger to their basic liberties that this administration represents. Maybe this story in the Washington Post today will help wake America up.

How do I put this in words as clearly as possible. If the U.S. government decides, for reasons of its own, that you are an "illegal enemy combatant," i.e. that you are someone who

"has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States,"

they can detain you without charges indefinitely, granting you no legal recourse except to a military tribunal, and, under the proposed bill, "disappear" and torture you. This is not just restricted to aliens or foreigners, but applies to U.S. citizens as well. It can happen anywhere in the U.S. at any time. We are all at potential risk.

Whatever else this is, it is not a constitutional democracy. It is a thinly-veiled military dictatorship, subject to only one control: the will of the Great Decider. And the war that justifies this astonishing attack on American liberty is permanent, without end. And check the vagueness of the language: "purposefully supported" hostilities. Could that mean mere expression of support for terror? Remember that many completely innocent people have already been incarcerated for years without trial or any chance for a fair hearing on the basis of false rumors or smears or even bounty hunters. Or could it be construed, in the rhetoric of Hannity and O’Reilly, as merely criticizing the Great Decider and thereby being on the side of the terrorists?

All I know is that al Qaeda is winning battles every week now. And they are winning them because their aim of gutting Western liberty is shared by the president of the United States. The fact that we are finding this latest, chilling stuff out now – while this horrifying bill is being rushed into law to help rescue some midterms – is beyond belief. It must be stopped, filibustered, prevented. And anyone who cares about basic constitutional freedom – conservatives above all – should be in the forefront of stopping it.

"It did seem that in Saturday’s radio show we were able to tee off on some pretty disreputable characters. Osama bin Laden, first of all: dead or alive? Next, Bill Clinton, whose Fox News appearance hadn’t yet aired, with the exception of a few clips on YouTube, by the time we were on the radio. So we had some lively conversation about Clinton’s legacy as it relates to the terrorist threat. And finally, it was on to the U.N., where Hugo Chavez had just set liberal hearts a-flutter with his attack on President Bush as "the Devil."

Liberals don’t actually believe in the Devil, of course – but still, it did their hearts good to hear the antiChrist – President Bush, that is – described as such," – John Hinderaker, Power Line.

Linking Clinton with Osama? Saying liberals loved Chavez’s comments when some of the most blistering subsequent attacks came from leftist Charlie Rangel and liberal Nancy Pelosi? Just another day of distortion and propaganda at Power Line.

The NYT fleshes out the story today. Larry Sabato adds his credible voice to the chorus. One source is a reminiscence by a highly credible first-hand witness:

I met him twice actaully [sic]. I did two modelling [sic] jobs with his then wife and she told me about some puppies they were trying to give away. I told her I’d like to take one. So one evening I went out to their place in the country near [Charlottesville] somewhere. There was a pond quite close by. I asked if they had any waterfowl landing there. George told me about the ducks and geese that sometimes landed there and about the ducks who tried to raise their young but who would have them all devoured by the big turtles in the pond. Well, why doesn’t someone kill the turtles and eat them? I asked. George said ‘only the niggers around here eat em.’

You tend to remember moments like this. I’m used to anti-white and homophobic slurs around my neighborhood. But the bigotry of some inner-city African-Americans is something I’m so accustomed to it’s just background noise. It doesn’t excuse it: I’m just saying I’m used to dealing with it. As long as they don’t touch me, they’re welcome to their hate.

But when I hear an educated white person use the "n-word" without irony, it’s hard to forget it. The last time was a few years ago when someone I barely knew complained about the poor service from a cable guy. "Worthless n***ers," he said. I was dumbfounded, told him so, found a way to excuse myself, and left. I never spoke to that guy again. I have met Allen a few times and he seems like a jovial fellow. But he has never seen a piece of anti-gay legislation he doesn’t like. His support for the anti-gay constitutional amendment in Virginia – an amendment so extreme and so unnecessary it is indistinguishable from bigotry – is itself proof to me of a bigoted mind. The amendment doesn’t just ban civil marriage for gays – that’s been done in Virginia law and underlined with a few thousand sharpies. It’s to amend the state constitution to bar any rights for gay couples at all:

"This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage."

That goes for gays and straights. It guts any domestic partnership, civil union, or even potentially private contracts trying to keep couples together. We don’t need the n-word to know that Allen is a bigot. We don’t need to know what "macaca" means. We don’t need to know that he is embarrassed to be discovered as partly Jewish. Judge him by his policy positions. The bigotry is in plain sight.

(Photo: from Washington’s National Zoo, the word that popped out of Allen’s mouth when he saw a person of color at a campaign rally.)

It’s a new term, coined in Denmark, about an inability to confront the threat that radical Islam presents to the West. It’s now being used by liberals and centrists finally waking up to the danger that Islamism poses. I’m glad the left is waking up from its own delusions. Now how about the right?

The editor of National Review is thrilled that torture will now continue with Congressional backing. What can I add? Notice how he uses C. S. Lewis’ brilliant euphemism for what he favors: "coercive interrogation." By the way, I’ve been very clear from the beginning what I’m against: "no severe mental or physical pain or suffering," the clear legal definition of torture as proscribed by the Geneva Conventions, and followed by the U.S. for generations. Therefore: no "waterboarding", no "hypothermia", no "stress positions", no "long-time-standing." Nothing but actually good interrogation; and an intelligence effort that is the real thing: careful, long-term infiltration of terror networks, human intelligence, the NSA program (with court oversight). Torture is the lazy, brutal man’s way of getting intelligence. And we have had few presidents as lazy or as callous as this one.

Lowry, of course, doesn’t believe that what Stalin’s thugs did to Solzhenitsyn in the Gulags was "torture". It was just one of many ‘alternative methods". He doesn’t believe that what the Japanese did to Americans in Singapore was "torture". It was all just "coercive interrogation." And fine by him. Isn’t it amazing that that the most prominent moral relativists of our time are on what’s left of the right?