The Dish

It’s fine now – when it’s done by one man with no consultation for a man who hasn’t even served a day of time for perjury. But back in 1982, when Rudy was an assistant attorney general for Reagan, it was a different story:

According to Associate Attorney General Rudolph W. Giuliani, executive clemency involves a great number of people and a complex, yearlong procedure. Every request is subject to a detailed inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which conducts as many as 50 interviews to flesh out each application. That background investigation is as comprehensive as any the bureau conducts on a prospective United States Attorney, Mr. Giuliani said.

The case is next studied by the pardon attorney, who makes a judgment that Mr. Giuliani reviews. His judgment, in turn, goes to Fred Fielding, the White House counsel who re-examines the files and makes his own judgment. Then, according to Mr. Fielding, every request is presented to the President for his concurrence.

There’s much bullshit flying around Republicans on the Libby pardon, you need an army of fans to catch it.

There is none. Part of what makes the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence for perjury so transparently corrupt is Bush’s long and remarkable record as Texas governor of denying clemency to almost anyone, and the contempt he expressed for even the process of reviewing appeals for mercy from death row. These were not white-collar criminals threatened by 30 months of jailtime. These were often individuals with very few resources facing the direst sentence imaginable: the death penalty. The massive discrepancy between the brusqueness with which Bush dismissed their pleas for mercy and the hours of careful study he cites in relieving Libby of inconvenience is proof positive to my mind of this president’s reflexive sense of privilege, and profound moral and ethical corruption. Here’s a devastating article from the Atlantic archives detailing Bush’s clemency "decisions" while Texas governor. To give you a flavor:

On the morning of May 6, 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed his name to a confidential three-page memorandum from his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and placed a bold black check mark next to a single word: DENY. It was the twenty-ninth time a death-row inmate’s plea for clemency had been denied in the twenty-eight months since Bush had been sworn in. In this case Bush’s signature led, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on the very same day, to the execution of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.

Gonzales’s summaries were Bush’s primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant’s personal background, and a condensed legal history. Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant’s claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes…

The record as a whole is one of a human being utterly indifferent to the fate of others, especially those without money, connections or political value. The number of people George W. Bush sent to their deaths without a second’s thought is higher than any living governor in the United States. And yet it took a perjury conviction of a white, wealthy, connected apparatchik to awaken the president’s sensitivity to injustice:

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

Gonzales declined to be interviewed for this story, but during the 2000 presidential campaign I asked him if Bush ever read the clemency petitions of death-row inmates, and he equivocated. "I wouldn’t say that was done in every case," he told me.

Get angrier.

(Photo: WIn McNamee/Getty.)

There’s new evidence that the Iraq war did provide a proximate cause for the attempted terror attacks in Britain:

Shiraz Maher, a former member of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir who knew Dr. Abdulla in Cambridge, painted a different picture. In an interview on BBC television broadcast Tuesday, he said: "He actively cheered the death of British and American troops. One of his best friends had been killed by Shias."

This last part alarms me the most – because it’s the first time I’ve heard of a sectarian motive within Islam being used to justify violence against those outside it. Abdulla is clearly a Sunni, angered at US and UK support of Shia in Iraq. This paradigm reveals the real danger of our further enmeshment in a Muslim civil war: we can turn one or both sides against us. The imperative to get out before this compounds itself as a problem is urgent.

At the same time, it’s far too convenient to regard this threat as somehow caused by the Iraq war. Its roots go far deeper. The Sunni fundamentalism that targets the Shia and insufficiently crazed Muslims is also part of a more general Islamist threat to all secular order:

At its core, Islam is deeply sceptical of the idea of a secular state. There is no rendering unto Caesar because state and religion are believed to be inseparable. This idea then interacts with centuries-old edicts of Islamic jurists about how the land of Islam should interact with the world of unbelievers, known as dar ul-kufr. The modern radicals then take it further, declaring that since, with the exception perhaps of Pakistan and Iran, there are no Islamic states, the whole world is effectively the land of the unbelievers. As a result, some radicals believe waging war on the whole world is justified to re-create it as an Islamic state.

They go as far as reclassifying the globe as dar ul-harb, "land of war", apparently allowing Muslims to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In dar ul-harb, anything goes, including the killing of civilians. While it may appear absurd to most, this nihilistic but exclusivist world view is clearly attracting significant numbers of young Muslims.

And many live in Europe.

He backs the president’s special treatment for his friend. He thinks it was "reasonable." His own record on pardons and commutations is relevant context:

As governor, Romney twice rejected a pardon for Anthony Circosta, who at age 13 was convicted of assault for shooting another boy in the arm with a BB gun – a shot that didn’t break the skin. Circosta worked his way through college, joined the Army National Guard and led a platoon of 20 soldiers in Iraq’s deadly Sunni triangle.

In 2005, as he was serving in Iraq, he sought a pardon to fulfill his dream of becoming a police officer.

In his presidential bid, Romney often proudly points out that he was the first governor in modern Massachusetts history to deny every request for a pardon or commutation during his four years in office. He says he refused pardons because he didn’t want to overturn a jury.

During the four years Romney was in office, 100 requests for commutations and 172 requests for pardons were filed in the state. All were denied.

But none were friends, were they? This basic violation of equal justice is at least transparent. It reveals the hypocrisy like an x-ray. Not that in Romney’s case, the rank opportunism was ever in any doubt.

And I mean semper. This Marine is 72 years old and a young punk makes the mistake of trying to rob him in a convenience store:

"Habeas corpus is coming back, and we’re going to solve that one," – Senator Arlen Specter, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, July 4, 2007.

Leading Christianist, Albert Mohler, lays down the gauntlet. Mormons aren’t any sort of Christian that Mohler recognizes, and he’s being generous for a fundamentalist:

We are not talking here about the postmodern conception of Christianity that minimizes truth.  We are not talking about Christianity as a mood or as a sociological movement. We are not talking about liberal Christianity that minimizes doctrine nor about sectarian Christianity which defines the faith in terms of eccentric doctrines. We are talking about historic, traditional, Christian orthodoxy.

Orson Scott Card responds by offering what seems to be the new Mormon defense. Not that Mormonism is true or even, necessarily, Christianity; but that any faith is better than no faith in an increasingly atheist world:

We Mormons don’t agree with you on many vital points of doctrine. But I hope we all agree with each other about this: In a time when a vigorous atheist movement is trying to exclude religious people from participating in American public life unless they promise never to mention or think about their religion while in office, why are we arguing with each other?

You don’t want your kids to join the Mormon Church; well, I don’t want mine to join the Baptist Church, either. That’s because you think you’re right about your religion, and I think I’m right about mine.

But I would rather vote for a believing Baptist who lives up to his faith than for a Mormon who doesn’t take his religion seriously or keep the commandments he’s been taught.

Would he vote for an Islamist over a liberal Christian as well, I wonder? I mean: they sure do take their religion seriously.

This is Charles Franklin’s visual representation of SurveyUSA’s instant poll of informed Americans’ view of the commutation of Scooter Libby’s jail term for perjury. Charles comments here. I note that fully one-third of self-described conservatives believe Libby should get the same jail time as perjurers not friends with the president. Jim Fallows gets it right, as usual:

Of course this is outrageous. … The problem is: “of course.” We know that this is how the Administration behaves. We know it from the President’s declaration that Alberto Gonzales had performed magnificently in Congressional testimony the rest of the world saw as catastrophic. We know it from the infamous “three stooges” moment when the Presidential Medal of Freedom was conferred on Paul Bremer, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks. We know it from the failure to hold anyone above the foot-soldier level responsible for disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know it in a thousand other ways.

And thanks to “of course,” people can be upset by this decision but not really shocked. (The main surprise, of course, is that Bush didn’t wait until his last days in office and then pardon Libby; on the other hand, Libby would have spent some time behind bars by then.) That is why I agree with only one part of David Brooks’ column today about Libby: his assertion that outrage over the issue will soon simmer down. The outrageousness will remain.

I have no intention of simmering down. But I take Jim’s point.

Six boys lose their penises altogether in the latest botched circumcision scandal in Africa. Several others have died undergoing the ritual.