The Dish

Here’s his response to a softball question yesterday:

Q: Mr. President, I’d like to ask you about the Gonzales nomination, and specifically, about an issue that came up during it, your views on torture. You’ve said repeatedly that you do not sanction it, you would never approve it. But there are some written responses that Judge Gonzales gave to his Senate testimony that have troubled some people, and specifically, his allusion to the fact that cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of some prisoners is not specifically forbidden so long as it’s conducted by the CIA and conducted overseas. Is that a loophole that you approve?

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, Al Gonzales reflects our policy, and that is we don’t sanction torture. He will be a great Attorney General, and I call upon the Senate to confirm him.

Notice how Bush won’t address the issue in front of him. He won’t disavow the loophole. He won’t address the fact that his administration has carved out a remaining exception for the CIA, and stopped the Congress from ending it. Notice that his definition of “torture” is left vague – and subject to the Bybee non-restrictions. If you want clear evidence that this president condones the cruel, inhumane and degraging treatment of detainees, what he doesn’t say is as instructive as what he does. (Hat tip: Marty Lederman). My Q and A with NYT readers on my book review-essay can be read here.

BACK-STORY ON SPELLINGS: She was once out of favor with the religious right for seeming to believe that single moms could be ok at parenting. You know: like, er, Margaret Spellings. So what do you do if you’re in the Bush administration and want to curry favor with the base? Duh.

Here’s an email rebutting the TCS piece I linked to earlier today. Some great points, I think:

Arnold Kling’s “Oil Econ 101” article you linked to in Tech Central Station mocking the neocon goal of oil-independence begs for a response, because he gets exactly wrong the means and ends of the rationale for cutting US oil demand.

(Full Disclosure — I am a pro-McCain Eagle, supported the Iraq War, and I have covered oil and gas industry and commodity markets for six years for industry trade press, so have some familiarity with this).

Kling mocks efforts to cut our oil demand from the Saudis, noting “If we reduce oil consumption by 10 percent, then we will not cut 100 percent of our imports from Saudi Arabia. We cannot arrange to consume only American oil and no Saudi oil … If we reduce demand by 10 percent, we probably will reduce our demand for Saudi oil by 10 percent.” He then goes on to say this “indirect approach of reducing oil demand is meaningless. Only a worldwide boycott of Saudi oil would effectively cut off their oil revenues.” While Kling is correct that an intense conservation program would only marginally cut our reliance on the Saudis (they are the equivalent of the global Federal Reserve in crude production capacity, and nothing will change this unfortunate geological reality), what ultimately matters is the price they receive. It comes down to a question of oil revenues (price * volume) that matters most to their state budgets, and their capacity to buy off restless elements in their society.

The volume of oil that OPEC and the Saudis produce only changes marginally year to year, but the price can very tremendously. Crude prices — and all commodity prices — are set at the margin. The main reason crude is near $50/bbl now is that Chinese oil demand grew 15% last year (plus strong growth from India) and no one, not the Intl. Energy Association, not the Energy Information Administration and not even OPEC, saw it coming. Chinese demand growth is expected to be 8% in 2005, and that should be a very supportive factor going forward for oil prices. Yet the size of the Chinese market is still only about 1/5th to 1/6th our own. (Dealing with rapid Chinese demand growth in the future is another prickly matter…). The US consumes roughly 25 million b/d out of a global crude market of about 76 million b/d. If the US were to cut its oil use by 10% it would cause DRAMATIC downward pressure on the price of oil going forward, starving the budgets of the Middle East oil oligarchies. This is exactly what happened in 1997-1998, when global crude prices crashed to $10-$12/bbl becuase the Asian currency crisis sank Pacific crude demand, while a string of mild winters cut US heating oil needs. The amount of crude that Opec and the Saudis produced at the time declined somewhat, but only marginally, as Kling would have predicted. But their revenues plummeted due to weak crude prices well below forecasts.

I can tell you from our reporting at the time that the oilicrats in countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypyt and Iran were sweating it big time due to mounting budget deficits and a failure to meet state budget commitments. It was a very dire time for the oiligarchs and undermined their domestic hold on power. Thankfully for them US gasoline demand remained strong due to our affair with SUVs, and eventually pulled the oiligarchs through to their current revenue bonanza. What Klingle doesn’t understand is that it is not about just states “sponsoring terrorism”, but forcing these sclerotic Middle East economies to face the same forces of dynamism that the rest of the world deals with it, resulting in more liberal societies. Not all countries in the Middle East have lots of oil. In fact countries like Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE have very little of it, and not coincidentally they represent the most liberal societies in the region. There is a strong argument that the societal unrest building in Iran is due in large part to their exploding population outgrowing the Mullah’s oil revenue, crippling their ability to buy off interests within society. We could help push them over the edge with a concerted effort to cut our oil demand. Young boys in Saudi Arabia might spurn the Jihad if they had something to look forward other than working for Saudi Petroleum or becoming freeloaders living off oil-driven state subsidies. That will never happen as long as the House of Saud remains flush with crude revenues.

So let’s conserve, shall we? And let’s increase taxes on gas while we’re at it. Far more effective than another botched war.

Heather Mac Donald is now arguing that some of the victims of torture documented in the official government and Red Cross reports are liars. Meanwhile, Little Green Footballs, the enthusiastically pro-torture site, has a thread … well, given the sexually graphic insults hurled my way, let’s just say that Margaret Spellings wouldn’t want to read it. Money quotes from LGF posters:

“Burning cigarettes in their ears.” Don’t they know cigarettes cause cancer? … I’m getting sick hearing about the so-called torture at Abu Ghraib. Do you realize how much money some guys in Hollywood would pay to be led around by a chick in fatigues while wearing a collar? … Plain and simple: Andrew Sullivan is an “enemy of the state.” He has no concern for this nation, and like so many of the “liberal elite,” would simply “give” our country away to those who would destroy it, if he had his choice. Three cheers for Heather Mac Donald for writing an article which demonstrates the true depth of Sullivan’s anal-cranial inversion … Many of Sullivan’s factual claims are tenuous at best. He asserts, for example, that ‘we now know that in Guantanamo, burning cigarettes were placed in the ears of detainees.’ Uh … which END of the burning cigarettes were placed in the ears of the detainees? Filter Tip? Menthol? Low Nicotine? I can think of another place in a detainee I’d insert a burning cigarette … wait, scratch that … make it a Macanudo … Is it still beyond the pale to suggest that Sully is in the throes of AIDS-related dementia? I mean, the evidence does keep piling up. Acknowledging that a person’s apparent behavior may be the result of disease, when the person is known to have that disease, and when the disease (or its treatment) is known to produce a specific response, is not necessarily a smear.

Not necessarily a smear.

“As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break.” – University of Colorado professor, Ward Churchill. He also described the victims of 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.”

FISKING EAGLETON: If anyone deserves it …

SPELLINGS: I didn’t really take Margaret Spellings’ attack on PBS’ Buster very seriously at first. But the more you read about it, the more egregious it is. The series in question takes the bunny Buster across many states and introduces him to many different types of families and backgrounds. From the NYT today:

One episode featured a family with five children, living in a trailer in Virginia, all sharing one room. In another, Buster visits a Mormon family in Utah. He has dropped in on fundamentalist Christians and Muslims as well as American Indians and Hmong. He has shown the lives of children who have only one parent, and those who live with grandparents.

This strikes me as pretty diverse – and certainly exposes kids to situations that are not the nuclear family. So why is it okay to present a single parent or no parents but not two gay parents? If Mormons are portrayed, why not gays? Why should young children be exposed to the tenets of Christian fundamentalism but not even learn a simple fact about life in Vermont? The lesbian couple are not front and center in the piece; they are background. They are Americans. And, according to the Bush administration, they must be airbrushed out of the country. Not a good sign.

There are more than you might imagine. I’m told by the Sunday Times’ Sarah Baxter that at a Hudson Institute confab last September, several pro-war neocons and others came out in favor of energy conservation. Bernard Lewis argued: “There is only one solution and that is to find another source of energy besides oil. It seems to me to be the only way we can put an end to this poison which fouls the sea and the roads and pollutes minds.” David Pryce-Jones cited V.S. Naipaul on the strategic importance of a more enviro-friendly energy policy. “You must make it plain to people,” Naipaul had urged Pryce-Jones that morning, “that they face a choice between saying it’s more convenient for the sake of oil to keep the Saudis going and taking a stand against them. If they hesitate to make that choice, they are gambling with civilisation.” You can read an alternative view here.

“Starkly put, Baghdad is not under control, either by the Iraqi interim government or the American military.” – John F. Burns, New York Times, today.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “Our grunts have been letting me know since the early days of the invasion that there has never been enough people power on deck to do the job. ‘We’re stretched too thin’ has been a constant complaint. ‘Battalions are doing the work of brigades and brigades divisions,’ snorts an infantry skipper now in the Mosul area of operations.” – David Hackworth, yesterday.

RELEASED WITHOUT CHARGE: The final four Brits in Guantanamo were immediately released by the British government upon returning to the UK. They are charging torture. No formal charges of terrorism have been brought against them. Either we should be deeply concerned that potential terrorists are now at large or that innocent men have been held without any due process for three years and, if they were not British, would still be in jail. Which is it?

FEITH QUITS: For personal reasons, the official press release says.

BUSTER’S BLOG: The material that offended Margaret Spellings. Located by Josh Marshall.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: A blogger reports on a not-very encouraging listserv for the Muslim Student Union at the University of Southern California.

The Committee Democrats who took a stand against Gonzales and torture: Leahy (VT), Kennedy (MA), Biden (DE), Kohl (WI), Durbin (IL), Feinstein (CA), Feingold (WI), and Schumer (NY). Feingold is particularly interesting. Like me, he believes that, in general, presidents should get the cabinet secretaries they want. Like me, he draws the line at Gonzales. It’s called “moral values.” Am I wrong to notice a touch of condescension in even Hatch’s remarks: “He is a man of decency, integrity and honor who answered the questions before the committee as well as he could.” Translation: if the president wants this mediocre yes-man, then okay.

He distances himself:

President Bush, asked about the practice at a news conference this morning, acknowledged that his administration had made a mistake by awarding contracts to commentators who support his policies. Bush said he expects his Cabinet secretaries to end the practice. “Mr. Armstrong Williams admitted he made a mistake,” Bush said. “We didn’t know about this in the White House. There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press.” Bush said in response to a follow-up question that the Education Department had made a mistake as well. “All our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda,” he said. “Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.”

One way to insure this would be for Bush to order all his cabinet secretaries to release all the information they have on payments to individuals who also write as allegedly independent journalists. Meanwhile, Ryan Sager defends Gallagher.

More details from Alberto Gonzales’ written responses to the Senate. Marty Lederman is on the case. Here’s my favorite part:

I’ve wondered how Secretary Rumsfeld, General Counsel Haynes, and other high-ranking DoD officials could have determined — as they did — that techniques such as waterboarding, forced nudity, threatening the death of family members, use of dogs to induce stress, etc., could possibly be lawful in light of (i) the Uniform Code of Military Justice; (ii) the prohibition in Article 16 of the Convention on Torture against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; and (iii) the President’s February 2002 directive that the Armed Forces treat all detainees “humanely.”
Well, we still don’t know why the UCMJ doesn’t apply. But we learned from Judge Gonzales’s earlier responses that the Administration does not think Article 16 applies in U.S. facilities overseas (such as Guantanamo). And now we learn why the President’s “humaneness” directive is no obstacle to the use of such grotesque techniques. Judge Gonzales writes that “the term ‘humanely’ has no precise legal definition,” but that, “[a]s a policy matter, I would define humane treatment as a basic level of decent treatment that includes such things as food, shelter, clothing and medical care. I understand that the United States is providing this level of treatment for all detainees.”

So “humane” care can also mean near-drowning, use of electric shocks, beating to a pulp, hooding and rape – as long as the victim has shelter, food, clothing and medical care. Well, scratch the clothing. We keep our prisoners naked these days. And the medical care is often needed just to keep the prisoners from dying at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Alas, that didn’t stop over thirty inmates across the war-theater from expiring in suspicious circumstances. Anyway, it’s just a useful defnition of “compassionate conservatism.” Pummel someone’s head in and then hang him from the ceiling. Just give him a sandwich later.

VOLKSWAGEN SUES: They should be pleased. Whatever. The guy who made the TV spoof ad says it was merely for his professional portfolio. But once it got on the web … Hey, nothing’s private any more. Especially something as inspired as that ad.

ABE AND SPONGEBOB: Together at last – in a cartoon. meanwhile, W-crony Margaret Spellings is appalled that a publicly-financed cartoon might actually show a living, breathing lesbian couple. Children are supposed to be protected from such images. Why didn’t Spellings forbid Mary Cheney and Heather Poe from attending the Inauguration? Again, you see the real agenda of some on the right: not a principled campaign against all non-marital heterosexual sex, but an animus against even the visibility of openly gay couples and people.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I had to laugh reading your comment on the Slate article on green conservatives. It hits home. I am a Republican, more of a libertarian than a conservative these days, married to a Eurowannabe liberal.
When we went looking for a new car (we are about to have our second child) I wanted a Prius, she wanted a big wagon (we compromised on a small station wagon with good mileage). As it was obvious I was the one who wanted the Prius, the salesperson asked if I was a “Green.” My wife started to laugh. I told the salesperson that I was enamored with the technology, but my wife knows the real reason. It angers me that the political, economic and military security of my country depends in large part on the continued goodwill of a bunch of fanatical men wearing dresses who dream about the 7th Century.
Besides my support for gay marriage (in part due to your writing, I have come around to using the “M” word these days), I shock most of my friends and family with my hope that gas prices stay high. Why? Because that will provide economic incentives to in the short term improve hybrid technology and in the long term, develop alternative fuels (like hydrogen fuel cells).
A few years back, when people were trying to come up with name for the various flavors of conservatism (“neocon,” “Paleocon,” “theocon,” etc.), a friend started to call me a “crunchy con.” I sort of like it. In any event, part of being a conservatie is preserving those things in your culture you like. I do not believe in slavishly holding onto the past, as much of the past was nasty. But being a conservative should mean balancing environment and progress. As I look out my window onto Lake Michigan, I realize that an America without open spaces and barren landscapes and dense forests would not be America.” More feedback on the Letters Page.