The Dish

Another must-read from Marty Lederman on the pirouettes Scott McClellan now has to perform to prevent the obvious conclusion that the administration supports the use of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of some detainees. McClellan’s point is that the administration resisted the idea of a Congressional ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading practices for the CIA outside U.S. territory because it was already banned and the legislation was superfluous. Yet Condi Rice’s letter at the time stated that she opposed the new restrictions because they would “provide legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy.” So it would change things but was also redundant? I don’t get it. Poor Mclellan. It’s only going to get worse.

NRO’s Denis Bowles says that the entire substance of the hundreds of cases of abuse and torture can be summarized thus:

Is there any substance to [Human Rights Watch’s] complaints? Well, yes – you should not make terrorists stay up late listening to Ratt and you should not make Iraqi convicts get naked and then laugh at them. If you’re an American soldier doing these kinds of things, you’ll be punished, even as others also try to punish your fellow soldiers and your country.

The only word for this is denial. Please, Denis, read the reports. At least thirty inmates have died after “coercive techniques” in U.S. custody. The government itself has conceded that the U.S. has tortured five inmates to death. Hundreds more have been hospitalized or permanently physically scarred. Even if you radically restrict your analysis to the night shift in Abu Ghraib, the abuses far outstrip forcing people to listen to music or laughing at nakedness. What has happened to American conservatism when it is reduced to ridiculing genuine and important issues of human rights?

Jon Rauch has, as always, a very perceptive piece on the president’s social security reform plans. Money quote:

The 2004 exit polls suggested, to many conservatives, that “moral values” won the election for Bush. It may seem odd, then, that his boldest post-election priority is not abortion or gay marriage or schools, but Social Security. The key to the paradox is that Social Security reform is not, at bottom, an economic issue with moral overtones. It is a moral issue with economic overtones.

It’s about transforming a culture of dependency into one of self-reliance. That’s partly why I support it. But this impending fiscal crisis stuff with regard to social security is not plausible. I wish they’d talk that way about Medicare. But they’ve made that real crisis far worse.

Peter Beinart seconds Schwarzenegger’s idea that redistricting should be taken out of the grimy hands of people like Tom DeLay. Amen.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “It’s time to ask, bluntly, whether self-government can work for people not operating within a Judeo-Christian worldview.” – Joseph Farah, WorldNet Daily, a far right website. One word: India.

QUOTE OF THE DAY I: “Freedom of thought, community and faith, civil equality, and the rights of due process, are meaningless unless they are universally valid. They are also non-negotiable. As Salman Rushdie himself said shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, the things that the jihadists are against — ‘freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex … even the short skirts and dancing … are worth dying for.’ Rushdie’s maxim holds true all the more in light of Theo van Gogh’s murder. The viciousness of our enemies — and they are our enemies — remains undiminished. We liberals had better find the courage not to be intimidated.” – Daniel Koffler, a junior at Yale.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Normally you can’t shut her up but she went very silent and I just heard this little voice say ‘Dad, I think I’ve glued my eyes shut’,” – the husband of a somewhat foolish grandmother.

AN OPEN LETTER: To my mother. What happens when you write a racy, sexy blog … and your mom reads it. Just make sure she’s not on BigMuscle.com that’s all. I liked this entry too.

THE HIGH GROUND: No, we shouldn’t take seriously everything that Human Rights Watch says. But it is simply fact that the revelations of widespread use of torture by the U.S., which extend far beyond Abu Ghraib, have made the defense of the U.S. far harder in the rest of the world. I know that when I get into fights with my European friends about U.S. policy (and I have broken up many a London dinner party with my pro-Americanism), this will get thrown back in my face. And I will have little substantive to rebut it. Yes, I still think we clearly have the moral edge over our enemies. But less now. Much less. Speaking of which …

On the City Journal website, Heather Mac Donald responds to my and Marty Lederman’s dissent from her anti-anti-torture article. She writes:

The Fay and Schlesinger reports provide no evidence for the proposition that the CIA’s very aggressive secret methods allegedly used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammad influenced either the interrogation rules at Iraq or the prisoner abuse.

Huh? That’s the entire central point of both reports. Reading her piece, it’s not obvious she has read the reports at all. She frames her argument by asserting that the “narrative” of the migration of torture techniques from Gitmo to Iraq is an invention of the press and liberals. In fact, that entire narrative is that of the offical government reports themselves. The very word “migrate” is Schlesinger’s coinage. She writes: “The decision on the Geneva conventions was irrelevant to interrogation practices in Iraq.” Every single report on the abuses says the exact opposite.

THE TRUTH: Here’s Lederman’s useful summary of what the reports actually say:

The reports explain in detail that the interrogators at Guantanamo, and the conflicting and confusing set of directives from the Pentagon for GTMO, ‘circulated’ freely to Afghanistan and then to Iraq (Schlesinger 9). Lieutenant General Sanchez, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force in Iraq, approved techniques going beyond those approved for GTMO, ‘using reasoning’ from the President’s February 7, 2002 directive on unlawful combatants (id. at 10). The ‘existence of confusing and inconsistent interrogation technique policies,’ including a ‘proliferation of guidance and information from other theatres of operation,’ and the fact that personnel involved in interrogation in GTMO and Afghanistan ‘were called upon to establish and conduct interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib,’ all contributed ‘to the belief that additional interrogation techniques were condoned in order to gain intelligence’ (Jones 15-16; Fay 8, 10, 22). ‘The lines of authority and the prior legal opinions blurred’ (Fay 10), and ‘DoD’s development of multiple policies on interrogation operations for use in different theatres or operations confused Army and civilian Interrogators at Abu Ghraib’ (Fay Finding No. 7).

The point is that the category of “unlawful combatant” “migrated” from Guantanamo and the CIA to Iraq and the general military, as did the non-Geneva methods of interrogating them. Was this the intention? We simply don’t know.

HAS SHE READ THE REPORTS? What we do know is that all the reports specifically say that the relaxation of existing CIA rules, ostensibly for very few cases, had a huge impact on the general conflict. The hundreds of incidents of torture that we know about (and we don’t know everything because much of the CIA’s operations were off-limits even to the official investigators) are inexplicable without this. We know that the Pentagon distributed the new rules widely – and that brutality occurred across the theater of war thereafter. The only way Mac Donald can avoid the obvious question as to how all these torture incidents then occurred is simply by pretending that none of them happened at all. Mac Donald further says of Abu Ghraib: “Though [the photos] showed the sadism of a prison out of control, they showed nothing about interrogation.” In the first paragraph of the Schlesinger report, we read: “We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.” Mac Donald also argues that “For the record, I explicitly reject torture in my article.” That’s true. But it’s only true because, for Mac Donald, even “water-boarding,” the technique that Condi Rice has explicitly insisted on retaining for the CIA, is not obviously “torture”:

Later, the CIA is said to have used ‘water-boarding’ – temporarily submerging a detainee in water to induce the sensation of drowning – on Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Water-boarding is the most extreme method the CIA has applied, according to a former Justice Department attorney, and arguably it crosses the line into torture.)

“Arguably crosses the line?” Mac Donald makes Jay Bybee look like the Dalai Lama.

THE BOTTOM LINE: What’s my bottom line, she demands? It is, I repeat, to stick to non-coercive techniques, as laid out in Geneva and U.S. law. Imagine that: obeying the law of the land. (And I know of no solid cases where the use of torture has led to actionable and useful intelligence in any case.) By the way, that’s Bush’s official position as well. More important, my bottom line is to send a very strong signal that anything else will not be tolerated. Bush should have fired Sanchez and Abizaid and Rumsfeld and Miller immediately after getting the first reports from Abu Ghraib. He didn’t. Even when the photos surfaced, he refused to discipline anyone truly responsible. When more and more reports of torture emerged, he had another chance to fire the generals and officials responsible for conflicting messages and winking at abuse. Why didn’t he? Or do we really want to know the answer to that question?

“I attended a continuing legal education seminar for Army Reserve and National Guard lawyers last weekend. I was struck by one thing: The biggest response from a ballroom full of JAG lawyers was when one dynamic Colonel spoke and said the Army needed to do a better job in handling detainees. He quoted a dispatch from WWII when the commander of a US prisoner of war camp reported back that his camp was under air attack by the German air force, that he could not protect his German prisoners of war, and he had opened the gates and set them all free. This is the standard for the US Army and we need to live up to it. The room cheered. My impression is that the people who have been trained in this stuff (at least the citizen solders) may not be terribly pleased and indeed may be somewhat embarrassed with how this is unfolding. This is also consistent with the JAG lawyers being kept out of the loop.” Yep. Good soldiers don’t believe in this poison. Alas, their civilian superiors do.

CORRECTION: The newly minted word “santorum” – meaning “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex” – didn’t win the word of the year according to the American Dialect Society; it won the most outrageous word of the year. My apologies.

Marty Lederman’s blog is again a must-read on the Bush administration’s support of torture. One interesting fact: a recent USA Today poll, cited by Lederman, shows very strong public opposition to torture of even known terrorists even if they might have information to prevent future terror attacks. That’s extremely reassuring – and much higher majorities oppose the use of torture in the hundreds of cases where the exact culpability or even identity of the detainees is unknown. 82 percent oppose the use of the Bush-Rice-Rumsfeld backed policy of water-boarding. Glenn Reynolds’ belief that we shouldn’t make a fuss about torture because the backlash will lead to even worse methods doesn’t seem to hold up. Thank God.

It’s hard to find clearer evidence that Condi Rice wants to keep torturing detainees than the fact that the administration refused to acquiecse in a legislative ban on CIA torture last December. The techniques include Algerian-style water-boarding. Does Alberto Gonzales find that “abhorrent”? Will some reporter now do his job and ask Rumsfeld whether he endorses this CIA technique? The trouble with this president is – how do I put it? – he’s lying. He publicly says he finds torture abhorrent, and yet he ensures that the CIA’s expansion of torture techniques is retained. Remember that these relaxed CIA rules were widely disseminated throughout the military, where they are clearly illegal; and helped form the atmosphere and misunderstandings (or were they actually correct understandings?) of what was permitted and what was not. Again what’s remarkable is not just the brazenness of the Bushies’ endorsement of torture but the absolute cravenness of the Democrats, the pathetic excuse we have for a political opposition. If you’re still unclear about the relationship between the new Bush-backed CIA rules and what has happened throughout the war on terror, revisit this post from Marty Lederman. And remember that the incidents we have are not from black box CIA interrogations. If the abuses were this bad in the regular military, can you imagine what is actually going on – where none of us can find out?

QUEER PATRIOTS FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY: The first “Queer Eye” episode in the new series was a moving fusion of red and blue. Or so says Young Curmudgeon.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Doesn’t Bush (or any other religious person, even one who happens to BE president) have a right to suggest that he sees faith as so integral to proper perspective that he would most likely not support the presidential candidacy of an atheist? I am no bigot or religious fanatic, but I happen to agree. I might be willing to make an exception for the right person, but as a rule I will not vote for a president who has no faith convictions. I think it is human nature to suspect that people who differ from us in so fundamental a way cannot be trusted to make “presidential” decisions. I am fond of any number of faithless people, but I am quite convinced they have made a serious miscalculation in a fundamental matter. I certainly know many atheists or convicted agnostics who don’t trust Bush primarily because they cannot relate to his faith life, and they do not trust him as a result. They have every right to feel that way, and vote accordingly. Votes in a democracy pivot on these kinds of concerns all the time, and they are perfectly legitimate, whether they come out of ideological, religious, or philosophical convictions of citizens.” I disagree. One of the tasks of liberal citizenship is to eschew our religious convictions as guides to the equality of other citizens. It is, in my view, a failure of the liberal temperament to regard some who have a different faith or no faith as somehow less qualified for public office, let alone the highest public office. When the president himself says this, it’s even more troubling. But Bush has never understood classical liberalism. He is a conservative, religious statist, who sees himself as the personal guardian of the country. He’s Bismarck with a penchant for massive government debt. Hence the secrecy, condescension and occasional lapses like his subjective statement ruling atheists out of the presidency. But we knew this already. More feedback on the Letters Page.

LINCOLN, KUHN AND PARADIGMS: An interesting angle on the gay Abe debate over at Upword.

My review of the various government reports on torture by the U.S. in the war on terror is now up on the NYT site. Maybe it helps explain why I am still exercised about this. I remain a strong believer in the cause of liberating Afghanistan and Iraq from tyranny; and in trying to move the Arab Muslim world toward democracy. President Bush and prime minister Blair deserve huge praise for seeing this through. I just cannot believe what the Bush administration has managed to do in the execution – to America’s reputation, to the West’s integrity and to the cause itself. It is not irreparable – and I’m very cautiously optimistic about the long-term prospects for Iraq. But we owe it to the cause to investigate where we have gone wrong, and to do everything we can to put it right. The Bush administration’s failure to come to terms with this simply isn’t good enough, in my view. The fact that the United States has been routinely and illegally practising torture in its interrogation procedures is abhorrent to everything we are supposed to stand for. Some things simply cannot be wished away or moved on from. Especially when, in all likelihood, they are still occurring.

Did I over-react? It’s worth looking at the full quote as produced by the Washington Times:

“I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit. That’s what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have or one of the greatest freedoms is the right to worship the way you see fit. On the other hand, I don’t see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord.” (My italics)

Now notice that Bush is explicitly qualifying his defense of religious freedom (or the freedom to have no religion at all) by saying that the presidency, in his view, should nevertheless be reserved for people with a relationship of a personal nature with “the Lord.” He isn’t simply saying that he doesn’t see how he could have endured the presidency without faith; he is asserting that he cannot see how anyone could be president without a “relationship with the Lord.” Now I can see how this might be simply a slip of the tongue: just a projection of his own experience with nothing more to be inferred from it. But given how this administration has consciously eroded the distinction between church and state – fusing the two with federal funds, using religious groups as its political base, incorporating religious leaders into policy-making, and defending public policy decisions on purely religious grounds (calling civil marriage licenses “sacred,” for example) – this is worrying. To put it bluntly, on the separation of church and state, I don’t trust these guys.

FAITH AND ITS LIMITS: Look, I share Bush’s faith, admire it, respect it, and am quite sure it has helped him greatly in a terribly difficult time in the White House. More: I’m glad he has a relationship with Jesus to guide him. If he had said just that, it would be an inspiring and innocuous statement. Likewise, I have no problems with presidents’ invoking God in speeches and the like. But Bush went further. He linked the office of the presidency to religious faith. And as president, his words carry weight. No, he cannot legally prevent atheists from running for president (although his party would never nominate a non-Christian for president and would be hard-pressed to nominate someone who isn’t an evangelical). But if an atheist were to run, Bush’s position would logically be that, in his view, the man or woman would be unable to be an effective president, because they would not have the spiritual resources to withstand the pressure of the job. I do think that’s over the line. The deists who founded the republic would also be excluded on Bush’s reasoning. They had no “relationship with the Lord.” (And “the Lord” in this instance is quite obviously Jesus, not the Jewish God. So Jews and Muslims are excludable as well.) The deeper point is: the president represents all the people, including atheists. As president, he should not be opining that people who have no faith in “the Lord” are somehow handicapped for the highest public office. Imagine if an atheist president said that “I don’t see how you can be president, at least from my perspective, if you believe in something that cannot be rationally proved.” The religious right would immediately proclaim the man a bigot (and they’d be right). Bush is not a bigot. He just sees the world through the prism of his own life. As a man, that is his right. As president, he shouldn’t be sending signals that some people, because of their irreligion, are incapable of representing all the people. And that applies especially because an overwhelming majority of Americans agree with him.

THE GOOD NEWS: In the Washington Times interview, Bush seems really committed to ratcheting down government spending. Money quote:

Look, I fully understand there are people saying, “Can’t America deal with these twin deficits?” It’s an issue which we’re concerned about as we go into the second term. And you’ll see us submit a tough budget and call upon Congress to enact it. I’ve had a good record, by the way, of getting Congress to pass the budgets we’ve submitted. And we’re going to fund the war. I mean, we get soldiers in harm’s way, they’re going to have what they need. And we’ll protect this homeland. But the nondefense discretionary spending and nonhomeland discretionary spending is tough; it’s going to be tough again. It was less than 1 percent last time. I’m not going to give you a number yet; we need to get the process right. But it will be – it will be tough.

He’s right, in my view, to tackle social security; right to insist on benefit cuts as well as part-privatization. I just wish he hadn’t mortgaged our future with that new Medicare entitlement (Apparently he thinks it will save money in the long run. Try not to laugh too hard.) Still, there are real signs that the Bushies are talking the talk on spending control. We’ll see, I guess. Walking is another matter.