The Dish

The Onion has the latest.

A reader (among many) writes:

Oh will you shut up already?  Khalid Sheik Mohammed is not a veteran of the second world war, and nobody but you gives a crap whether or not this fanatical, mass-murdering thug is brought to the verge of suffocation in an effort to obtain information on the whereabouts and initiatives of other fanatical, mass murdering thugs.  That’s the only issue. 

You will not address it … not seriously, anyway. Instead, we get a never-ending series of eye-rolling rants (and accompanying photographs) about how everything from waterboarding to sexual humilitation is "torture" – and about how our civilization depends upon whether or not we put panties on the heads of of fundamentalist troglodytes who are suicidally intent on destroying humanity. What a shocker: You lost that debate. Do yourself a favor and move along.

"I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate. Because nothing will energize my (constituency) like Hillary Clinton. If Lucifer ran, he wouldn’t," – Christianist Jerry Falwell. Notice that these remarks were made at a "prayer breakfast."

How America became a torturing nation – and how the English language was the second victim. My Sunday Times column can be read here.

"The national representatives of the social conservative movement used to be sophisticated and tolerant. Today, they are sophomoric and angry. It’s an embarrassing spectacle seeing leaders bullied around by the likes of James Dobson, or watching the Christian Coalition team up with MoveOn.org in support of bigger government.

Even more embarrassing is Tom Tancredo and his hot, hateful rhetoric against immigrants. Such demagoguery feeds the worst instincts of nativists and blocks a serious solution to our nation’s border security problems. Reagan, conversely, understood that America is a country of immigrants, and he famously demanded that big government’s walls be torn down," – Dick Armey, defending real conservatism in the Wall Street Journal (sub req.).

I’d say it’s a long shot. But it tells you a lot about America that an openly gay presidential candidate for either party is still all but unthinkable.

Back in the early days of the invasion of Iraq, the sudden news that 170,000 priceless items might have been looted from the National Museum in Baghdad was terrible. Today, Frank Rich (TimesDelete) says I was one of the administration’s "enforcers" back then and dismissed the rumors. In fact, on my blog, I wrote that if such things were true, they were damned near unforgivable. I was appalled from the get-go by the chaotic occupation. But I knew details were sketchy and 170,000 items seemed somewhat excessive. So I waited for the facts to come in. Rich didn’t.

Today, he bloviates:

Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld’s critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled ‘Idiocy of the Week’ (that idiot would be me), Mr. Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about ‘the alleged ransacking’ of the museum, Mr. Rumsfeld or his critics? ‘Rummy, of course. He almost always is.’

Actually, I was only trying to get the facts right. And they were extremely murky at the time Rich wrote. That didn’t stop him from the following hyperventilation:

"There is much we don’t know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country’s gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, ‘You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale’?"

Almost two months later, the New York Times itself corrected its first reports. The new reality was the following:

Officials at the National Museum of Iraq have blamed shoddy reporting amid the "fog of war" for creating the impression that the majority of the institution’s 170,000 items were looted in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad.

A carefully prepared storage plan, used in the Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf war, ensured that tens of thousands of pieces were saved, they said. They now believe that the number of items taken was in the low thousands, and possibly hundreds… Donny George, research director, said: "There was a mistake. Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost."

"Shoddy reporting." I thought Frank Rich was about correcting that, not practising it. So between Rummy’s callous dismissal and Rich’s pre-packaged hysteria, who was more accurate? Rummy. In my column, I cited a Washington Post story and a Channel Four report that noted in fact that:

"’There are only 33 pieces from the main collections that are unaccounted for,’ [Donny] George [the director general of research and study of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities] said. "Not 47. Some more pieces have been returned.’ Museum staff members had taken some of the more valuable items home and are now returning them … "They won’t talk about it, but almost everything was saved," John Russell, an Iraq expert at Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art, told the Washington Post.

So on the matter at the time, Rich was wrong, basing his column on facts subsequently debunked by his own paper. Has he been proven right since? The original figure of 170,000 is no longer believed by anyone. Wikipedia puts the final loss as follows:

Officials said that of the 170,000 items initially believed missing, just 3,000 remained unaccounted for. And, of those, 47 were main exhibition artifacts.
In November, 2003 Coalition officials reported a few dozen of the most important items remained missing from the museum’s public galleries, along with another 10,000 other items – most of them tiny and some of them fragments.

So that’s where Rich got his final figure from – and, as often with him, it’s misleading. The bottom line is that around 47 major items were looted, along with several thousand minor fragments. The truth is: I deplored the looting; but waited to get my facts right. Rich knew the truth already.

(For some weird reason, his original column won’t appear in the NYT search engine, and isn’t linked in his online column. If anyone digs it up in full, please send it to me. My original blog post is also unfindable, since my old archives are still being transferred to Time’s server. If anyone can trace either piece, I’d appreciate it.)

From "Through The Looking Glass":

"There’s glory for you!"

"I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.  "Of course you don’t – till I tell you.  I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’"

"But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’" Alice objected.

"When I use a word, " Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master – that’s all."

Read his lips: We Do Not Torture.

Just a reminder of how previous governments have used "waterboarding" as an "alternative method" for interrogation in the past. Take the horrifying events in Singapore, under the Japanese in World War II. Blogger Robin Rowland has uncovered a gripping story:

Within days of liberation, on Monday September 3, 1945, the surviving civilian internees in Singapore, appointed a "commission of inquiry: into what happened to the former inmates at the hands of the kempeitai. This is how the commission described "the water treatment"

There are two forms of water torture.

In the first, the victim was tied or held down on his back and a cloth placed over his nose and mouth. Waters was then poured on the cloth. Interrogation proceeded and the victim was beaten if he did not reply. As he opened his mouth to breathe or answer questions, water went down his throat until he could hold no more. Sometimes he was then beaten over his distended stomach, sometimes a Japanese jumped or sometimes pressed it with his foot.

In the second, the victim was tied lengthways on a ladder, face upwards with a rung of the ladder across his throat and his head below the ladder. In this position he was slid head first into to a tub of water and kept there until almost drowned. After being revived, interrogation continued and he would be re-immersed.

Cyril Wild’s investigation of torture in Singapore showed that similar water torture was a favourite tactic of the kempeitai:

Wild questioned one of the those accused in the case, Sgt. Major Masuo Makizono. To Makizono, the most important aim was to discover how and what information was being passed from the civilian internees to the British guerrilla forces. Turning to the beating and torture, Wild asked: "Why were these cruelties practiced?"

"None of them would say where the transmitter was," Makizono said. "No information could be gotten from them about the location of British forces."

He told Wild beating was the most common form of abuse. If the kempeitai was dissatisfied with the answers or if they thought the prisoner was lying, they would use torture…

"Did you ever use the water treatment?" Wild asked.

Makizono described how suspects were tied up and laid on the ground. A kempeitai would force open then the prisoners’ mouth, while another poured a bucket of water down the throat. "Did you block up the nose?" was Wild’s last question.

No, Makizono replied he preferred to leave the nostrils open so he could pour water into them as well. Wild noted: "He appeared to take personal pride in describing such methods."

This president has authorized torture once used by the Japanes in World War II. But it isn’t, according to the president, "torture." It is not a "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions any more. Tell that to the vets of the Second World War. To their faces.

Maybe gay culture hasn’t ended. If you take a tape of Kylie Minogue and slow her voice down, who does it sound like?