The Dish

Retired Major General John Batiste Lets Rumsfeld have it on the Geneva Convention. It’s powerful, moving and essential.

Who wrote the following words:

President Bush exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the utmost in the area in which those powers are already at their height — in our dealings with foreign nations. Unfortunately, the record of the administration has not been a happy one, in light of its costs to the Constitution and the American legal system. On a series of different international relations matters, such as war, international institutions, and treaties, President Bush has accelerated the disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine notions of democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law.

That would be John Yoo, legal architect of president Bush’s assumption of monarchical powers in wartime, wiretapping without court warrants, breaking international law, authorizing torture and breaching the Geneva Convention. Except, of course, I’ve amended the quote. Where you read ‘Bush", substitute "Clinton." How quickly they change when they have access to power.

He was directly involved in increasing the intensity of one technique chronicled in Solzhenytsen’s "Gulag Archipalago." To recap the Soviet method:

"There is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated – because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down. It can be set up in another way – so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all."

Here’s what Rumsfeld wrote in response to news that inmates had been forced to stand for only four hours:

"I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

Remember that after Abu Ghraib came out, the Rumsfeld line was that he was shocked by what he had seen. In fact, he had not only authorized but monitored some of the torture techniques perfected at Gitmo, including "long time standing," and transferred, by his order, via General Miller, to Abu Ghraib. In other words, he lied before the Congress. In his defense, he offered to resign in shame. Bush refused to accept the resignation.

A fascinating reconstruction of a moment in the history of Greensboro, North Carolina, when one of the bigger "gay scares" of the 1950s resulted in 32 men being indicted and jailed. Money quote:

Unlike sweeps of subsequent decades, involving raids on public parks and gay bars, Greensboro’s 1957 trials focused on private acts behind closed doors.

The purpose, in the words of the police chief, was to "remove these individuals from society who would prey upon our youth," and to protect the town from what a presiding judge called "a menace."

Some 32 trials in the winter and spring of 1957 would end in guilty verdicts, 24 of them resulting in prison terms of five to 20 years, with some defendants assigned to highway chain gangs.

It’s a brutal story.

Not so much.

Bill Kristol urges the Republicans to campaign on torturing military detainees. It could indeed shore up parts of the base. The capitulation of neoconservatism to the evil it once fought against is now complete.

"You taught us no government worth its salt can subvert the rule of law. We believed you. That’s part of what you have as a gift for the world. Then how can you commit Guantanamo Bay? Take back your country," – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on what the Bush administration has done to America’s reputation.

A clip from the prophetic Ed Zwick movie, "The Siege," where Denzel Washington makes the case I’ve been trying to make for the past four years. He does it in less than a minute. The movie was written by Lawrence Wright. I don’t know if it’s the same genius who works for the New Yorker. [Update: yes he is the same man. His new book, "The Looming Tower," is on my reading list. No doubt it’s on many of yours’.]

This is the term used by the CIA to describe one of the "alternative methods" that this president has authorized with respect to military detainees. The CIA’s description is this:

Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

Here’s another description of the technique:

Then there is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated – because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down. It can be set up in another way – so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.

Here’s another:

"They would not let you rest, day or night. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. Don’t sleep. Don’t lie on the floor," one prisoner said through a translator.

The second description is from "The Gulag Archipelago." The third is from Guantanamo Bay. One detainee at Gitmo, closely monitored by the administration, was chained to a chair and not allowed to move even while medics had to pump three bags of saline into him to prevent him from passing out. Others have been forced into "stress positions" as illustrated above, or forced to stand with their wrists manacled to bars or a ceiling so they can never rest; or with their feet or hands manacled to a bolt on the floor so they cannot move at all for long periods of time. You can read several side-by-side comparisons of Bush’s methods and the Soviet techniques documented by Solzhenytsen here.

"My correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith. On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are. A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise," РSam Harris, author of the compelling book, "The End of Faith."

I didn’t agree with all of that book, but am very grateful for it. The position Harris holds in this war is roughly mine: as defenders of the West, we can neither let our guard down against the evil we confront nor the abuse of power in our own governments. The test of this long war will be to fight on both fronts simultaneously. Not easy. But it is the calling of our generation.