The Dish

National Review’s Mark Levin wakes up, stretches, rubs his eyes and asks:

And where is all the evidence that U.S. armed forces and intelligence serves are engaged in torture? Is it widespread? Where is this occurring? McCain hasn’t made the case. We get mostly the same kind of platitudes he was famous for during the campaign-finance reform debate, e.g., the system is “corrupt,” money equals corruption, and so forth. Shouldn’t we stop beating up ourselves over this until such evidence is presented? We seem to be making law here based on hypothetical arguments, or worse — left-wing and enemy propaganda.

I refer Levin to the Schmidt Report, the Taguba Report, the Jones-Fay Report, the Schlesinger Report, the mounds of evidence collected by the International Red Cross, the hundreds of carefully checked newspaper reports documenting torture, abuse, murder, rape, and beatings in every single theater of this war by every branch of the armed services against defenseless military detainees. I refer him to the testimony of West Point graduate Ian Fishback and countless others. I refer him to the many memos constructed by the Bush administration defining and redefining “torture” to the point of meaninglessness. May I offer him a cup of coffee and a warm welcome to reality as well?

(By the way, the Lowry notion that the McCain Amendment offers no guidelines as to what is permitted is untrue. The McCain Amendment specifically endorses the Army Field Manual, which specifies 17 specific interrogation techniques, and has been the gold standard for decades, until the Bush administration endorsed torture. One question for Lowry: does he define “waterboarding” as torture? It’s funny but I have yet to get a single Bush apologist on record saying so. I’d think waterboarding is indisputably torture. Condi Rice won’t say if it is. Rumsfeld won’t say if it is. Bush won’t say if it is. Ever wonder why? Memo to Lowry: because we’ve done it.)

Anti-Semitism is as integral to Islamo-fascism as it was to Nazism. Iran’s president helpfully reminds us of this fact.

Remember when the two were connected? Maybe David Cameron’s Tories will lead the way back to a conservatism that actually defends liberty, rather than attacking it whenever it can. Money quote:

We may yet see a party emerge in the true tradition of Tory liberalism, nurturing both civil society and civil liberties. If that is what David Cameron is trying to reinvent, all power to him.

Amen.

LENNON REMEMBERED: Why we still listen to his music.

More evidence here.

Good news from Iraq. Next week will be the most critical election of them all: one which actually leads to the first, real constitutional, democratically elected government in decades. We still have so much to do; and our guide should be the millions of ordinary Iraqis who do not kill, who are not mass-murderers or religious fanatics, but who want to lead a normal life. After all this, we owe it to them to stand by them. However long it takes. For all the blunders of this blighted administration, it is absurd to expect perfection a mere three years after being liberated from totalitarian dictatorship. Thirty years is a more reasonable time-line. My hope is that U.S. troops, albeit in a minuscule presence compared to today, will still be there in thirty years’ time. Just as they are today in Japan, Germany and South Korea.

My response is now posted here.

A GOOD THING: Afghans are grateful for being liberated from the Taliban. More work to do, though.

Islamo-fascist murderers get a massive propaganda victory against the West – and, in civilized countries like the UK – the evidence against them procured by torture is inadmissable in court. The ruling today was unanimous. Terrorists may go free because of it. Congrats, Mr Cheney. You really are helping keep us safe, aren’t you?

The Wall Street Journal would have no problem with Torquemada, one of the most vehement of enforcers of the Inquisition, condoned by the Vatican and enforced by the Spanish monarchy. The WSJ has argued that the practice of “waterboarding” isn’t “anything close” to torture. Torquemada apparently disagreed. Here’s an extract from James Reston Jr’s, book, “Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors.” It describes various methods deployed by Torquemada:

When the rack did not produce the desired result, the churchmen turned to the water torture. In this hideous remedy, the prisoner was tied to a ladder that was sloped downward, so that the head was lower than the feet. The head was held fast in position by a metal band, twigs were placed in the nostrils, and ropes winched tightly around his appendages. The mouth was forced open with a metal piece and a cloth placed over the mouth. Then a pitcher of water was brought, and water poured over the cloth. With each swallow, the cloth was drawn deeper into the throat, until in gagging and choking the victim nearly asphyxiated. The terror of suffocation was extreme, and the process was repeatedly endlessly, bloating the body grotesquely until the victim was ready to confess … From the inquisitor’s standpoint – for he was there to record every detail – the treatment was easy to administer and left no telltale signs.

The distinction, I think, is that the technique used today, as endorsed by our Christian president, does not result in water actually being drawn into the stomach and so bloating it. But the experience of suffocation is identical. (And notice that Torquemada regarded waterboarding as worse than pulling people’s limbs apart on a rack.) From the CIA’s guidance:

“The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”

So, according to Heather Mac Donald, John Yoo, and the WSJ editorial board, Torquemada was just using a legitimate interrogation technique, against recalcitrant Muslims. He wasn’t a torturer. He was fully in accord with American and conservative values.

Tell me something: aren’t evangelicals in the forefront of demanding that the Ten Commandments be observed? So why are they not honoring the Sabbath – on Christmas day?

BILL O’REILLY, CALL YOUR OFFICE II: The war against Christmas continues … thanks to News Corporation, the owners of Fox News (and of the Sunday Times of London, where I’m a columnist). Here’s the invite to their “Holiday” party. Now, how long do you think it will take Bill O’Reilly to attack his own boss as a liberal heathen? Or the president? Or evangelical churches?

“I think it is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we’re engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers.” – John Bolton, our U.N. ambassador.

Bolton is surely aware that the evidence that the U.S. has engaged in torture, and “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees may be found in more than just the newspapers. Has he read his own briefs? He could also read the Schmidt Report, the Jones-Fay Report, the Taguba Report, the Schlesinger Report, the Bybee memo, the Yoo argument, the reports from the International Red Cross, and on and on. His own government has provided ample evidence of its own violation of American law and basic human rights. What you find in Bolton is something democratically repulsive, but one that is very close to the view of Dick Cheney. That view is that the public should never second-guess its own government in the conduct of a war. I wish we didn’t have to. But when you have bungled a war this badly, and committed war-crimes in the process, what would Bolton have us do? Trust, sadly, is no longer an option. It no longer became an option the minute looting broke out in Iraq and the secretary of defense, responsible for maintaining order in a country he had just invaded, shrugged his shoulders. From that moment of complete and proud dereliction of duty, we were on notice that these people couldn’t be trusted.