The Dish

Biden demands accountability for Haditha. Accountability? In this administration?

And so the Cheney-Rumsfeld combo strikes again. The McCain Amendment, we find out, as if we didn’t already know, was irrelevant. We thought we still lived in a constitutional democracy where the Congress regulates the rules of war, as specified in the Constitution itself. No longer. Bush’s signing statement on the McCain Amendment was the first signal. Now we have the second. The new version of the Army Feld Manual will maintain the removal of any reference to the basic Article 3 in the Geneva Conventions with respect to military detainees. There had been an attempt to reinstate it, on the delusion that we still live in a country where the executive enforces the rule of law. But it was foiled by the usual suspects:

The move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by officials from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, government sources said. David S. Addington, Cheney’s chief of staff, and Stephen A. Cambone, Defense undersecretary for intelligence, said it would restrict the United States’ ability to question detainees.

The Pentagon tried to satisfy some of the military lawyers’ concerns by including some protections of Article 3 in the new policy, most notably a ban on inhumane treatment, but refused to embrace the actual Geneva standard in the directive it planned to issue.

The military lawyers, known as judge advocates general, or JAGs, have concluded that they will have to wait for a new administration before mounting another push to link Pentagon policy to the standards of Geneva.

Can you believe what you’re reading? This is not some tight exclusion for a handful of CIA officials to torture detainees. This is a carte blanche for the military as a whole. The argument is the same that we have always had:

But top administration officials contend that after the Sept. 11 attacks, old customs do not apply, especially to a fight against terrorists or insurgents who never play by the rules. "The overall thinking," said the participant familiar with the defense debate, "is that they need the flexibility to apply cruel techniques if military necessity requires it."

The United States is a rogue nation that practices torture and detainee abuse and does not follow the most basic principles of the Geneva Conventions. It is inviolation of human rights agreements and the U.N. Convention against torture. It is legitimizing torture by every disgusting regime on the planet. This is a policy mandated by the president and his closest advisers. This is the signal being sent from the commander-in-chief to his troops: your enemy can be treated beyond the boundaries of what the U.S. has always abided by. When you next read of an atrocity of war-crime or victim of torture by the U.S., just keep in mind who made this possible. Keep your eyes not just on the troops but on the people giving them the orders. My column on Bush’s responsibility can be read here.

"Stanley Kurtz is the ‘EverReady Bunny’ of the same-sex marriage debate, a character who moves forward unrelentingly on a quest to prove that same-sex marriages are harmful. He is sure that state recognition of lesbian and gay unions in Europe has harmed the institution of marriage. But he never quite settles on a reason why this should be so, and his most recent argument illustrates the wildly unscientific thinking behind a lot of the American opposition to same-sex marriage," – Bill Eskridge and Darren Spedale, over on Marriage Debate.

Their new and meticulously researched book, from Oxford University Press, can be found here. It’s a very thorough and scholarly account of the experience of same-sex legal partnerships in Scandinavia. If you need a respite from hysteria and ideology, it’s a good place to start.

A reader takes issue with the email posted earlier today:

Where do you find such fools? First of all, this person should be ashamed of himself: A cringer and crier and a curser, who today ‘can hardly remember’ any of the 10,000 perfectly valid strategic and humanitarian reasons for removing Saddam from power. His ‘soul is seared’ and it burns him, and yet in his pain and victimhood he can’t be bothered to remember what he supported about the war in the first place. And why can’t he remember them? Why of course, because of the ‘shockingly disgraceful way it has been waged.’ The few bad things that have gone wrong trump any and all the positive things that have been done, although this ass-hat cant be bothered to recall any of them.

Pardon my French, but this person can go screw himself. What is ‘shockingly disgraceful’ is that you find some common ground with this person.

I don’t believe for one second that this person ever a) remotely understood what is at stake in the Middle East and the struggle against medieval Islamic fascism, or b) if he did understand it had the courage to see it through even knowing that war is a dirty business and sometimes bad things happen in war. Sorry for the clich√©, but if the clich√© fits: If this clown – and people like him – were around in WW2 we’d all be speaking German or Japanese.

And for the record I am powerfully troubled by the latest headlines as any decent human being would be. And if what is being alleged turns out to be true, then some devil dogs and their enabling superiors need to hang. But I simply can’t take any more of this gleeful triumphalism on the left and among the fair-weather Americans that predicates itself on American failure and barbarity, while the worst sins of our enemies go unremarked upon by people like your humble E-mailer du Jour.

Well, I’m glad to give these opinions a venue; and I can see whence they come. But I don’t think this blog has ever stinted in revealing the evil of the enemy we are up against. And a great deal of my frustration is my recognition of this evil, and the inadequate means we have deployed to counter it; and the pointless immorality of some of the decisions and actions that have brought us closer to their level. In that sense, I find some common ground with both these emails. And I imagine I am not alone.

Here’s a chilling piece of news from the London Times:

In a meeting last month with some families of victims of the July 7 attacks, John Reid, the Home Secretary, stunned his audience by telling them that 20 "major conspiracies" had been uncovered.

This was far more than anyone in Whitehall had previously divulged. Understandably, Mr Reid did not go into details but his claim came shortly after MI5 suggested that there were as many as 1,200 terrorist suspects living in Britain.

A report  by the Joint Intelligence Committee  leaked to a Sunday newspaper last month said that the war in Iraq  had made Britain a target for al-Qaeda sympathisers "for many years to come".

This report showed the remarkable rise in suspects that MI5 was attempting to shadow. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, MI5 knew of about 250 "primary investigative targets" inside Britain. By July 7 last year that had risen to 800. Today it is more than 1,000. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had revealed how three attacks had been foiled since July 7 that were likely to have caused many more deaths than the 52 killed in last summer’s suicide bombings …

Today’s terrorists are suburban men who neighbours invariably describe as "hard-working, respectable and British to the core".

Evil to the core is closer to the mark.

Columbus, Ohio, noon.

A reader writes:

I cringed, cried and cursed you when I saw the picture associated with "Surgical Gun-Ships." It felt like being slapped in the face and stabbed in the heart at the same time (I have a young son – not that my reaction is more valuable because of it, I just know the agony has an exquisite resonance now it wouldn’t have pre-motherhood).

Yet, I know how right you are that we all see the concrete consequences of our decisions as citizens. I supported the Iraq war, but it seems increasingly abstract to me now, my fervor at the time gets fuzzier every day. I’m ashamed to say that I can hardly remember what seemed so important to fight for then. I think my confusion comes partly from trauma. This war, and the shockingly disgraceful way it has been waged, has seared my soul. It seems that so little is left of everything I believed in, everything I am as an American. This hurts and burns as few things ever have for me.

Raw and angry in this video from a street confrontation in NYC, courtesy of Ryan Sager. YouTube is slowly allowing citizen video journalists to thrive and prosper. Don’t miss Ryan’s video of the immigrant playing the national anthem on a trumpet either.

A reader writes:

I remember that interview on Joan Rivers’ short-lived series well. Bob seemed a bit nervous in the beginning but settled down. I was shocked that they were going to even be on a "mainstream" talk show. Kind of like when The Pogues appeared on SNL.

Grant Hart was out of his f*cking mind during that interview. I thought he was going to start licking the floor or barking like a dog. You could tell that they weren’t exactly getting along great at the time. They played "Could You Be the One?" which was their "hit" from Warehouse Songs & Stories and "She’s A Woman" with Grant on lead vocals.

What a great and underrated band they were. I don’t think I listened to anything my senior year in HS BUT Husker Du. People look back at the 80s as a wasteland music-wise but I’d give anything to see some of these classic post-punk bands get together to play some gigs. Husker Du would be at the top of the list (Dead Kennedys too).

You can hear Bob all the time at his DC club, BlowOff. And he just put out a new album, "Body Of Song." He has a blog too.

"I think it was purely political. I don’t think he gives a s–t about it. He never talks about this stuff," – an "old friend" of George W. Bush, describing the president’s cynical use of a doomed amendment to gin up his religious base before an election.