The Dish

If you haven’t read Ron Suskind’s "The One Percent Doctrine," I recommend it. As the CIA’s brief against the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, it’s hard to beat. The central idea – that Cheney believes that the US should treat a one percent chance of a terrorist getting a WMD as a 100 percent certainty – helps explain the way in which the administration analyzed the Iraq intelligence data (and ignored all the caveats). But it makes a mockery of the response to Kim Jong Il. The doctrine has either been abandoned or modified – as my corporate overlords are now rightly noticing. As usual, however, we know only what our king and his consort deign to tell us. My Sunday Times take on the surreal dissonance between the approaches to Iraq and NoKo can be read here.

(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis for Times.)

My first essay arguing for marriage rights for gay couples was in response to a New York City decision legalizing domestic partnerships. I was concerned that marriage-lite institutions would indeed undermine marriage as a social institution, and suggested that since the gay issue was not going away, the most appropriate conservative response was to back gay marriage. It still is. But the fundamentalist approach is to ban it – and the current GOP is not conservative, but fundamentalist-authoritarian. Anyway, here’s the latest twist in the debate:

Memo to Boston Globe gay and lesbian Guild employees: Get married or lose your domestic partner benefits. Globe staffers have been told that health and dental benefits for gay employees’ domestic partners are being discontinued. Gay couples who want to keep their benefits must marry by Jan. 1. A memo sent to the Globe’s Boston Newspaper Guild members, and obtained by the Herald, states that Massachusetts gay Guild employees can extend their benefits to their partners only if they marry.

And so the socially conservative impulse behind gay marriage is revealed – and proven in practice. This is the real slippery slope: of gay people sliding into integration and responsibility. And that’s what many alleged conservatives want to prevent.

An amazing rendition of a Gospel song, "So Amazing," by a remarkable college high school freshman, Jordan Booker. If you need some spiritual uplift this Sunday morning, you could hardly do better.

We get caught up in abstract debates. But here’s a riveting first-hand narrative of the astonishing risks and dangers so many face in order to become Americans.

A reader writes:

I regularly take part on a discussion group that is dominated by intelligent conservatives in the engineering fields – particularly automotive. Their ability to put on the blinders is incredible. Imagine a guy with an amazing IQ. A guy who can design practically every part on a motorcycle or manufacturing robot while discussing upper division economics and the folly of the allied strategy at Galipoli. Now bring up Bush and/or Iraq, and this guy is reduced to being a mouthpiece for NRO. The biting wit and piercing insight displayed in so many other arenas goes by the wayside.

This is the intellectual disconnect in the conservative movement right now. Dogma and opportunism has supplanted integrity and critical thinking.

It cannot continue indefinitely. When people such as yourself  "have no conservative credibility" rifts are created that will only get larger. Conservatives must ask themselves: "Is it more important to support our leaders although they have gone astray, and thus present a united front against creeping liberalism? Or is it better to oppose those whose actions are insupportable, regardless of party affiliation?"

It’s a difficult question, but one I’m familiar with. As probably the only regular reader of the National Review at Berkeley High School in the late 70s, I am drawn to certain aspects of each ideological camp – as you are. I would hope that there is enough  flexibility and integrity amongst the conservative intelligensia to adopt nuanced views and fight for what’s right, regardless of the source. Unfortunately, I fear that is not the case, that voices such as your own will continue to operate from the fringes, and your "purity" will continue to be questioned by either side.

An update on a story I recently linked to:

Some of you may know that the Iraqi national coach and the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 players were murdered recently – the newspaper reports said it was because they wore shorts in public. This, according to Haider [Abbud, a political/cultural advisor who is with the NATO training mission in Iraq], is false. They were killed because one of the players, who hailed from a town that is a hotbed of the insurgency, was approached and asked to drive a car bomb and detonate it in a neighborhood said to be frequented by Americans.

The player refused, partly because there were no longer foreigners in that neighborhood, just Iraqis. So the insurgents changed their plans and killed the tennis players instead. "It had nothing to do with wearing shorts," Haider told me. "These guys were very traditional and correct about things like that."

We need to be more aware of the hideous blackmail being played against ordinary Iraqis by the Jihadists, and others empowered by the anarchy Rumsfeld unleashed.

Marty Lederman has again provided an essential guide to the complicated legal issues involved in the Hamdan case, and helps set the stage for what will be an important Congressional debate on the United States’ standards for prisoners of war. All of it is worth reading carefully, but this strikes me as among the more pertinent points:

MYTH NO. 8: "[T]he Court, without any grounding in either American law or the Geneva Conventions, has effectively signed a treaty with al Qaeda for the protection of its terrorists." So says the National Review. This meme has been front and center of many reactions to Hamdan – that it is preposterous to construe a treaty to provide protections to persons who are not party to the treaty and refuse to abide by its terms.

FACT: Nonsense.

As Carleton Wu pointedly remarks in the comments section below, saying that we’ve now "effectively signed a treaty with Al Qaeda for protection of terrorists is like saying that because we’ve signed the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, we’ve now entered into a treaty with the whales. There are many modern treaties, promoted by the United States and universally accepted – think of the Convention Against Torture, for example – that require signatory states to refrain from acting in certain ways universally, even with respect to persons, entities and states that have not signed, and do not comply with, such treaties. Simply put, reciprocity is not a necessary prerequisite of many modern human-rights treaties. And that’s largely a U.S. innovation: As noted above, from the Civil War until February 2002 it was the view of the United States that we are legally and morally obligated to treat our enemies according to a baseline of civilized conduct, whether or not our enemies (e.g., the Confederacy; the Germans and Japanese in World War II; the Viet Cong) do likewise. Contrary to Sen. Graham’s assertion that to give Al Qaeda detainees this baseline protection is "breathtaking," there’s nothing at all unusual about it:  The Court’s decision simply returns us to the standards we applied to our enemies — including barbarous and lawless enemies — for many decades prior to February 2002.

Indeed, the whole point of Common Article 3 — its only application — is to provide Geneva protections to parties who have not themselves agreed to be bound by the Conventions.  As OLC explained, "Article 3 is a unique provision that governs the conduct of signatories to the Conventions in a parlicular kind of conflict that is not one between High Contracting Parlies to the Conventions. Thus, common article 3 may require the United States, as a High Contracting Party, to follow certain rules even if other parties to the conflict are not parties to the Convention."

That is to say, the now-oft-heard complaint that those who have not signed the treaty should not be protected by it would mean the rejection of Common Article 3 altogether.

I think that’s what Cheney and Bush want. If so, they should say so, and withdraw the U.S. from the Geneva Conventions formally, with Congressional support. If that day dawns, we have truly crossed a Rubicon.

While you’re at it, check out Marty’s discussion of the legal salience of the phrase "not of an international character" as applied to military conflicts. I’m persuaded by his and the Supreme Court’s interpretation – that this does not refer to a geographical location (i.e., "taking place only in one country"), but instead to a conflict that is not between nations. Geneva’s baseline of civilized warfare, Article 3, applies regardless of the enemy. In fact, it was crafted precisely to make the kind of objections made by NRO moot. These standards are about us, not about them. But maybe NR’s editors understand that as well. They just have lower standards for the West than others do.

You think bilingualism is new? Check out this political ad from 1960 for JFK. Jackie speaks Spanish for Hispanic voters.

Cleveland, Ohio, 1 am.

Another one gets electrodes up his nose. Sexy pic, by the way.