The Dish

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion from the fast-changing events in the Middle East that we are approaching a wider conflagration. The Maliki government is hanging by a thread as Casey begs for more troops for Baghdad. Only three years too late. Iran’s success in infiltrating and controlling a large chunk of Iraq has now emboldened the mullahs not merely to press ahead with nuclear weapons but also to attack Israel via Hezbollah. This has always been a regional conflict, with Iran and Syria as dangerous than Saddam ever was. The Middle East has exploded before, of course. But not with 130,000 American troops stationed in the heart of it.

(Photo of Beirut Airport by AP.)

The senator’s sister souljah moment?

"Humane treatment of insurgent captives should extend far beyond compliance with Article 3, if for no other reason than to render them more susceptible to interrogation. The insurgent is trained to expect brutal treatment upon capture. If, contrary to what he has been led to believe, this mistreatment is not forthcoming, he is apt to become psychologically softened for interrogation. Furthermore, brutality by either capturing troops or friendly interrogators will reduce defections and serve as grist for the insurgent’s propaganda mill," – from the Army Field Manual 34-52. (My italics.)

This may help belie the notion fostered by some that the U.S. has never abided by Article 3 with respect to combatants out of uniform. As Marty Lederman shows, it did for 53 years before the Bush years. Notice how good intelligence, according to the U.S. military, is not procured by brutality but by legal and humane psychological pressure. Notice that the Army doesn’t see anything "vague" about these standards, as some of the new authoritarians argue. Notice that the U.S. Army has historically believed Article 3 to be a minimum of decency – and requires beefing up by Americans, not watering down. Notice also that this has always applied to enemies out of uniform, insurgents, guerrillas, including, for example, the Viet Cong. What this administration and its extremist allies are urging would be an assault on decades of humane warfare by the United States and a terrible self-inflicted wound in a war where the moral highground is essential to long-term success. This is among the most vital issues any nation faces: it’s about the soul of the West, and the short-sighted expediency of those who think part of it can be sold.

And so we discover that, as Marty Lederman feared, the real policy of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld is not to acquiesce to the Geneva Conventions (they got their one-day headline to confuse critics) – but to legislatively revoke them. This can be done. It would remove the United States from the company of decent nations in warfare, it would rewrite a formerly binding treaty unilaterally, and it would specifically authorize, among other techniques, the kind of hypothermia testified to below. We may well have to get into specifics about what can and cannot be legally done. Bush and Cheney want to retain the following, for example:

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.

The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

There is no legal question that this would mean withdrawal from Geneva. And that, make no mistake, is what the new authoritarians want.

This National Review editorial, to its credit, openly supports that move. They want to revoke Article 3, and argue – preposterously – that the U.S. has abided by it all along. Money quote:

Congress should make it clear that its new military-commission statute overrides Common Article 3. This would serve to repudiate the Court’s attempt to effectively sign a treaty with al Qaeda that no one in the U.S. would have ever favored and would also delineate precisely what the standards and requirements for handling unlawful enemy combatants are. If Common Article 3 had been meant to apply to terrorists in the first place, there never would have been a need for the 1977 Protocol I Additional, which the U.S. has never accepted ‚Äî exactly because it afford terrorists Geneva rights.

For an analysis of this fallacious notion that Article 3 would "effectively sign a treaty with al Qaeda," see Marty Lederman’s argument here. But NRO deserves some credit for their candor. They want America to become a country widely known through the world as a country that does not abide by the most basic Geneva protections for military prisoners. And they think this will help us win this long, tough war. They could not be more morally and strategically misguided.

(Photo of Gitmo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

In the funeral for corporate thief and crook, Ken Lay, we have a spectacular display of what is wrong with contemporary Republicanism. We have the famiglia paying their respects to a loyal money-man – Bush senior, Baker, Mosbacher. And we have the exoneration of malfeasance by the Christianist doctrine that if you’re on our side, you can do no wrong. Ken Lay up there with Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr? And the amazing thing is that this is sincere. Christianist spiritual hubris – fused with political and financial power – is phariseeism remade.

I’m late to the blog contretemps between Glenn Reynolds and Glenn Greenwald. But I am as disappointed in Instapundit’s abandonment of libertarianism and limited government as Greenwald is. Reynolds is an immensely talented, smart innovator of this medium, and I admire his work greatly. But his appeasement of the Malkin right is truly dispiriting. He’s not alone in this respect, unable to break with the illegal, arguably un-conservative and certainly anti-libertarian aspects of the current administration. Greenwald gets this right, I’m afraid:

Reynolds long ago used to emphasize the libertarian aspects of his belief system, by, for instance, writing for Reason Magazine. But this weekend, he attacked Reason’s Dave Weigel for criticizing publication of the home address of the NYT photographer so that Reynolds could justify and defend the actions of Michelle Malkin, David Horowitz and Rocco DiPippo with regard to the Travel Section murder plot. That is a clear reflection of what Reynolds is – he has long ago dispensed with his libertarianism beyond the most cursory and decorative uses, and he has no meaningful differences with the most extreme elements of the Republican Malkin/Coulter right wing.

Reynolds’ transformation is illustrative of a broader and much more significant dynamic. There are no more vibrant libertarian components left of the Bush movement. Libertarians (in the small "l" sense of that word) have either abandoned the Bush-led Republicans based on the recognition – catalyzed by the Schiavo travesty – that there are no movements more antithetical to a restrained government than an unchecked Republican Party in its current composition. Or, like Reynolds, they have relinquished their libertarian impulses and beliefs completely as the price for being embraced as a full-fledged, unfailingly loyal member of the Bush-led Republican Party.

I don’t think of Reynolds as a political animal. He has independent integrity. But when push came to shove, Reynolds never challenged in any serious way the abuses of power in this administration nor the extremism of the Malkinesque blogosphere. When a libertarian finds any excuses to ignore or minimize government-sponsored illegality and torture, then he has truly ceased to be a libertarian in any profound sense. If my opinion weren’t so high of his abilities, my disappointment wouldn’t be so deep.

Money talks in the Bush family.

Car-pe Diem. These ten seconds of a near car-crash might do for you what even shrooms cannot.

Now that some version of Geneva has been reinstated, you will soon find, I’d wager, a slew of revelations about what really went on in Iraq, a place where even Rumsfeld said Geneva applied (while secretly monitoring and condoning Geneva violations against military prisoners). Here’s a new piece in the latest Esquire that adds some detail to the story of Captain Ian Fishback, pioneered in part by this blog and its readers a while back now. What the Esquire story shows, I think, is how cloesly the Pentagon and White House were interested in torture, and how people very high up in the Pentagon not only condoned but gave elaborate, professional legal guidance for brutality. Camp Nama, for example, was clearly authorized by high authorities, was a mini-concentration camp for detainees, with U.S. soldiers in no uniform, with no names, licensed by their commander-in-chief to beat and terrorize and torture at will. Money quote from a soldier who witnessed the systematic, approved abuse:

"Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in ‚Äî they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators." …

During his first six or seven weeks at the camp, Jeff conducted or participated in about fifteen harsh interrogations, most involving the use of ice water to induce hypothermia …

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report "is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning" or that it was "read by SecDef." "That’s a big morale booster after a fourteen-hour day," Jeff says with a tinge of irony. "Hey, we got to the White House."

It’s past time for the press to connect this to the White House.