The Dish

The latest leak from the tragic farce known as Gitmo:

Throughout the process, Abraham discovered that officers attempting to comply with CSRT rules to present exculpatory information were frequently obstructed. When he attempted to gather information on a detainee from an intelligence agency aside from a package prepared from him, he was told that no additional information would be forthcoming. An attorney for one intelligence agency refused to certify that no exculpatory information was being withheld. On other occasions, intelligence agencies would overload the intelligence-illiterate Recorders and Case Writers with files, leaving them with "no context for determining whether the information was relevant or probative."

During one CSRT, Abraham found the evidence suggesting one detainee was an enemy combatant "lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence."

Objectively credible evidence? This is the Bush administration, buddy. They don’t believe in that.

A reader writes:

Your post "Scarred For Life" is just so painful. But when you write,

"[‘My body my choice’] is only for women, apparently,"

I think you’re missing the point. This is not a men’s issue – it’s a children’s issue. The desires, aka the rights and humanity, of children are terribly violated in this culture. (And lots of others, sadly.) Circumcision is just one part of it. What we glibly call "separation anxiety," as parents pry their distraught 2-year-olds off them and leave them at day care, is the western world’s equivalent of forcing women into burqas, gender apartheid, and second-class citizenship. Young children who do not want to be separated from their parents should not be forced to do it on a regular basis. They are not developmentally able to understand why this is happening to them, so their objections to it should be taken seriously. Young children unwillingly separated from their parents show obvious, massive distress. Adults trivialize this distress ("She’ll be fine in half an hour") in the exact same way that men have trivialized the distress of women, slave-owners have trivialized the distress and agony of slaves, and so on.

Women, and feminists in particular, should recognize the unhappiness of children as a feminist issue. But that threatens the gains of women the same way that feminism threatened the status of men.

Women fear that giving their children what they want will lead to their own re-entrapment in the kitchen (which would indeed stink). But the alternative is to look at a defenseless being and say "What you want doesn’t matter. My needs come before yours."

Circumcision is the ultimate expression of this. Nobody who saw infants as *human beings* could possibly countenance the pain they endure for an unnecessary procedure. No one would perform such a painful act on an unwilling or unable-to-consent adult just for reasons of habit or custom or religion.

I think we need another civil rights revolution in this country, predicated on the radical idea that babies and young children are people. (And to the extent that mothers might need to make big changes in their priorities to accommodate that revolution, there should be social support for them so they’re not penalized in employment or social status.)

(Photo: Spencer Flatt/Getty.)

"A wrong attitude towards nature implies somewhere a wrong attitude towards God, and the comnsequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time, we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanised, commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this earth," – T. S. Eliot, "The Idea of a Christian Society," 1939.

A reader writes:

My question is this: If everyone is admitting that a Hillary Clinton’s potential nomination to the Democrat Presidential ticket is only fuel for the religious right, then what do you think Senator Clinton’s view is on that? Why is it that this either doesn’t concern her, or she thinks she can overcome it?

If I were in the same position, I would realize that winning the nomination, only to further create a dichotomy between the American politic, would be disastrous for the country. So, why doesn’t Senator Clinton? I can’t get over that. Does she not know? And if she does, what’s she telling herself to motivate her to continue? Is she really that good?

I think if she were elected, we would be dealing with the same Shakespearean themes we’re dealing with now in the Bush administration. She might be looking to simply one up her husband’s performance. I consider her nomination to be like pouring salt on a wound.

So far as I can tell, there is nothing Senator Clinton wouldn’t sacrifice in the cause of her own ambition: her own self-respect as a wife; what once passed for her principles; and group of Americans (like the gays) who get in her way; and any rival who challenges her. She is now and always has been about one thing only: her own power and ego and how to satiate it. If she has to empower the Christianist right in pursuit of her goal, she will. And if she loses, she will blame everyone but herself. Remember the fathomless narcissism of her husband? She fed it as a way to feed her own.

Two women sit at a picnic table and shelter beneath an umbrella during a rain shower at Royal Ascot on June 23, 2007 in Ascot, England (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

The leaked White House meeting to discuss whether to close it down was canceled, and the status quo continues. I’m sadly skeptical that Condi has any chance to balance out the vice-president on the question of illegal detention, rendition and torture. But I found this an interesting nugget:

Ms. Perino, the White House spokeswoman, noted today that the United States plans to release about 80 of the detainees soon. "America does not have any intention of being the world’s jailer," she said.

Now recall the position of the McCarthy-Levin-Malkin-Crittenden right. It is that everyone in there is the "worst of the worst". They’re all terrorists, according to Limbaugh and Romney. Romney’s position is that he wants to "double Gitmo." (Why, by the way, has the press not followed up by asking Mitt what on earth he means by that literally nonsensical piece of pandering?) So, according to Malkin, the president is about to release 80 murderous, guilty Jihadist terrorists into the world. Let’s see if Malkin even utters a squeak.

Josh Claybourn returns to the question of cell-phones, polls and Ron Paul’s campaign. They do affect pollling data, as Pew has demonstrated here, and certainly by enough to affect a primary election. Cell-phone-only voters are also markedly different than landline voters:

The National Health Interview Survey found them to be much younger, more likely to be African American or Hispanic, less likely to be married, and less likely to be a homeowner than adults with landline telephones…

According to the most recent government estimate, more than 25% of those under age 30 use only a cell phone. An analysis of young people ages 18-25 in one of the Pew polls found that the exclusion of the cell-only respondents resulted in significantly lower estimates of this age group’s approval of alcohol consumption and marijuana use.

That makes intuitive sense to me. And it would mean a slight under-estimation of someone like Ron Paul’s support.

Since my recent posts on infant circumcision (here and here), I’ve learned a lot more about the subject. If you can bear a glimpse at the reality of this gruesome procedure, check out this YouTube. Some things I have learned: the majority of circumcisions do not use anaesthetic. Babies are strapped into a restraint, keeping their legs apart, and their arms and abdomen down, because when they have their penises sliced open, they scream and struggle. And this:

Because a baby’s prepuce is usually naturally adherent to the glans (this is true of both males and females), it must first be torn away in order to perform the circumcision. The doctor applies clamps and inserts the nose of a pliers-like instrument to tear away the foreskin from the glans.

If parents tore the skin off their infants in any other part of the body, they’d be arrested for abuse. The great unmentionable, of course, is that religion, not medicine, is behind this practice – Judaism and Islam, to be precise. Many secular men, in other words, bear the scars of someone else’s religion on their own bodies for life. (I should add, as I have written before, that female genital mutilation is exponentially worse. It removes a girl’s sexual pleasure, rather than simply scarring and numbing it.) One commenter on Jeff Goldstein’s blog put one rationale for it this way:

Further proof that God exists: he mandates a ritual that tones down the male sex drive, if only by a little, to help men become more godly instead of more carnal.

A survivor of a botched circumcision writes:

I am forty years old and never realized that my penis was terribly mutilated during my circumcision until 10 years ago. I hadn’t seen too many other men’s penises up close so I just assumed that the scars and layers of missing skin on my glands was a normal variation. A doctor informed me that the jagged edge of my crown, the gouges in my glands and the missing layers of skin on my glands was the result of a doctor butchering me during my circumcision. He said that my parents should have sued.  I thought “my parents” were the ones that had it done to me. What about my rights?  What about my right to sue? I was the one who was butchered. How many men are out there like me?  How many don’t even know that their penises aren’t normal?  And even if they cut me by the book, I would still consider it mutilation because part of me was cut off, altering me for life, without my consent. What about my body my choice?

That’s only for women, apparently.