This is the reason for the separation of church and state in a pluralistic democracy. It’s not that you don’t want politicians to be religious people or that you don’t want religious people to be political. It’s that when you get politics enmeshed in religion you screw up religion and politics to the detriment of both. Hundreds of years of bloody religious wars in Europe taught the founders of this country that religion can be a dangerous political weapon and they decided that the government should remain neutral on the subject in order to prevent both religious persecution and undue influence. It’s worked out pretty well for us up to now, at least better than most.
But that’s not the only reason why government and religion are a bad combination, and nowadays it’s not necessarily even the most important reason:
In the last six months, a handful of Catholic bishops in the United States have already weighed in on the presidential race by threatening to withhold communion from Catholic politicians who disagree with the church’s stance on abortion, a group that includes Senator Kerry.
Other bishops, however, have said that threatening to withhold communion goes too far, and the pope has warned of “the formation of factions within the church” in the United States. The bishops are expected to take up the matter at a closed-door conference this week in Colorado.
I realize that the american catholic church has a number of internal issues that are not related to politics, but surely this is not helping. And catholics aren’t the only churches dividing up into political factions. You can see it happening in the episcopal church with gay priests; the methodists and the baptists both have issues with women’s rights. Jews are fighting over the country’s stand on Iraq. Much of this stuff is purely doctrinal and hasn’t got much to do with government. But, our president and his braintrust’s obsession with the religion vote as a single constituency, is making these issues more and more explicitly political. It’s not only dividing the country, it’s dividing the religions themselves.
If you are a religious person you should be very worried about this development. It is not in the American tradition to treat “religion” as a political constituency and govern explicitly from a religious standpoint. This is new. But as much as that might be uncomfortable to despised atheists like me, it should be doubly uncomfortable to believers who care about their religious institutions. Priests and Pastors are as susceptible to vanity and power as anybody else — perhaps more. These are among the things that caused the schisms in Europe and led to reformations and huge changes. It hardly seems worth it in order to gain temporary influence over some politician whose time in office is short and whose loyalties are necessarily divided.
It’s not only that religion is corrupting the government. It’s that government is corrupting religion. That’s always been the problem.
Mr. Hyde is, of course, the gentleman who took the lead in investigating Clinton’s blowjob, as well as the gentleman who was discovered while that investigation was going on to have committed a “youthful indiscretion” from the ages of 41 to 46 and precipitated the dissolution of the marriage of a woman with three children.
[…]
…I suspect that the bishops are not all that terribly likely to be led by Mr. Hyde’s non-traditional view of Catholic doctrine and the public responsibilities of a moral person in this matter.
Or, for that matter, to lift a finger to help someone who is attempting to blackmail them stay in power.
For the sake of all my Catholic friends, I hope not.
This business of using dogs to torture Iraqi prisoners actually is more depraved than is obvious, if you can believe that.
Islam has a prohibition against keeping dogs in the house or touching them. They are considered impure. I would guess that the braintrust who is putting together this new torture regime thought they were being very clever by doing something that “the ayrabs” would find particularly unpleasant.
We know that big tough American guys like Trent Lott wouldn’t piss all over themselves if they were tied up naked while a 150 lb snarling German Shepard was allowed to back them into a corner and take a piece out of their flesh. They don’t have a problem with dogs like those arabs do.
This is but another example of the crude, stereotypical approach we seem to have taken toward the Iraqis (and undoubtedly the Afghans, as well.) And it is likely because the “intellectuals” who planned and implemented the war don’t have a clue.
Sy Hersh mentioned in his May 24th article in the New Yorker one of the many possible reasons why:
“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was ‘The Arab Mind,’ a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai … The book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression … The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.'”
You might as well read a ZOG comic on mudpeople as read this for any true understanding. The passages on sex could have been written during Queen Victoria’s reign which is, indeed, the period from which many silly, crude stereotypes about arabs and sex really got off the ground. (The funny thing is that Patai’s book portrays arabs as being rigidly sexually repressed when during Victoria’s time they were reviled for being scandalously oversexed. It seems that no matter what, westerners believe that arabs are all fucked up when it comes to sex. Unlike we Americans, of course, who define healthy sexuality.)
So, a bunch of second rate minds read a third rate book about people they know nothing about except what they’ve seen at parties where Ahmad Chalabi is holding court, and they fashion a torture regime based upon a ridiculous thesis that arabs (unlike Western he-men apparently, which is interesting in itself) are particularly uncomfortable with being herded around naked, forced to pretend to masturbate in front of women and piling themselves up in naked pyramids, among other sexually charged, homoerotic acts.
It’s always interesting to see people’s innermost fears and insecurities projected on to another isn’t it? These neocons have some serious issues.
I wonder if everyone is aware of the fact that the man who put the “Git Mo Info” into Camp Delta and then took his sophisticated naked men and rabid dogs interrogation techniques to Iraq has no backround in intelligence, prisons or law enforcement?
That’s right, General Ripper, the Theodore Eicke of America’s gulag is actually an artillery officer. And, he doesn’t know fuck-all about interrogation.
From a January article in Vanity Fair by David Rose:
Reporters are not allowed to speak with interrogators or anyone else who deals with intelligence at Gitmo. The only testimony I hear is from General Geoffrey Miller, the task-force commander. “We are developing information of enormous value to the nation,” says Miller, a slight, pugnacious man said to be a strict disciplinarian. “We have an enormously thorough process that has very high resolution and clarity. We think we’re fighting not only to save and protect our families, but your families also. I think of Gitmo as the counterterrorism-interrogation battle lab.”
But Miller’s background is in artillery, not intelligence, and senior intelligence officials with long experience in counterterrorism, who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, question his assessment.
[…]
General Miller makes it clear that he does not have access to staff of this [high] caliber. Seven out of 10 of the interrogators working in his “joint interrogation group” are reservists, and they come to Camp Delta straight from a 25-day course at Fort Huachuca. “They’re all young people, but they’re really committed to winning the mission,” Miller says. “Intelligence is a young person’s game-you’ve got to be flexible.”
Some seasoned intelligence officials disagree. “Generally, the new hires apprentice in the booths with more experienced guys,” says one. “I certainly know of no one at Gitmo having the opportunity or the luxury to be able to prepare an interview for three months.” Another had met some of Miller’s interrogators. “They were rookies, and none were too keen on the process down there,” he says. They knew that any seemingly insignificant tidbit might later turn out to be important, but in general “they just didn’t feel that the process was going anywhere fast.”
According to General Miller, Gitmo’s importance is growing with amazing rapidity: “Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I’m talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world.”
Gisli Gudjonsson, a professor at London’s Institute of Psychiatry, is arguably the world’s leading authority in this field. “The longer people are detained, the harsher the conditions, and the worse the lack of a support system, the greater the risk that what they say will be unreliable,” he explains. Sometimes one suspect will supply the names of others, who will then in turn confess. Each will appear to corroborate the others’ statements, when in fact all are false. This is what happened in the case of the Guildford Four, the subject of Jim Sheridan’s movie In the Name of the Father. They were wrongly jailed in 1974 for blowing up two pubs in England and spent 15 years in prison before the British authorities admitted their mistake. “The first thing an interrogator should acknowledge is that you may get false information from someone who is vulnerable.”
General Miller, however, sees no cause for concern. “I believe we understand what the truth is. We are very, very good at interrogation… As many of our detainees have realized that what they did was wrong, they have begun to give us information that helps us win the global war on terror.”
Spies and psychiatrists may have their doubts, but Donald Rumsfeld is convinced that even the mere foot soldiers imprisoned at Gitmo are “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” All, he has said, “were involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans.”
Yet since 2002, when these claims were made, 64 of these “vicious killers” have been released, all after many months’ detention. John Sifton, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, has traced and interviewed some of them in Afghanistan. They are all, he says, “the most extreme cases of mistaken identity, simply the wrong guys: a farmer, a taxi driver and all his passengers-people with absolutely no connection with the Taliban or terrorism.” Several were victims of bounty hunters, who were paid in dollars after abducting “terrorists” and denouncing them to the U.S. military.
Well, I suppose if a failed businessman, ex-drunk, fratrat mama’s boy could be considered a strong leader, why not send in an artilleryman to gain “intelligence” from a bunch of small time nobodys. He kept that flow of information up and that’s what Mr. Cambone and Ms Rice — the worst and the dimmest — wanted.
Update:
BRIGADIER GENERAL MARK KIMMITT, DEPUTY DIRECTOR COALITION OPERATIONS, IRAQ: It was apparent that many of the units that had not been defeated in the war were starting to act up. We started seeing some problems out around the town of Falluja and we were getting a number of security internees into the detention facilities. Large numbers. There was not an expectation during the war that we would have this large number of internees and when it became apparent that this was a process that we would have to start up, and there were some challenges at that time, we called in the expert. The expert was Major General Geoff Miller.
Speaking of warcrimes, I just remembered another action premptively absolving Americans of war crimes — the dramatic “unsigning” of the International Criminal Court Treaty and the subsequent signing of the “American Servicemembers’ Protection Act” handily tucked into the “vote for it or you’re a traitor” Supplemental Defense Appropriations Act of 2002.
The first action, a highly unusual unilateral repudiation of a signed treaty, was taken in May of 2002:
“Dear Mr. Secretary-General:
This is to inform you, in connection with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted on July 17, 1998, that the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty. Accordingly, the United States has no legal obligations arising from its signature on December 31, 2000. The United States requests that its intention not to become a party, as expressed in this letter, be reflected in the depositary’s status lists relating to this treaty.
Sincerely,
S/John R. Bolton”
Easy as pie. No muss no fuss. We don’t like it we just unsign it. Now that’s some tort reform.
It must be noted that the Republicans had long opposed the ICC on the grounds that the jack booted, blue helmeted thugs of the UN were coming to kill Americans because we’re so strong and so good. It was not surprising that they would do this when they got the chance, although “unsigning” treaties was a bit of a shock. (How innocent we all were in those days.)
However, in May of 2002, we also now know that the US government was actively looking for ways to legalize war crimes under all international treaties and US Law. That puts a little different spin on the unsigning, doesn’t it?
And it also makes you wonder about the administration’s strong arming for the ASPA, aka the Hague Invasion Act:
The Washington Working Group on the ICC described it this way:
President Bush signed the Supplemental Defense Appropriations Act of 2002 (HR 4775) into law on August 2, 2002. Contained in the measure was a version of the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA) that is heavily modified from the first version introduced over two years ago (for more information on past versions of ASPA, see the WICC Archives). The ASPA limits US cooperation with the International Criminal Court, restricts US participation in UN peacekeeping, prohibits military assistance to most countries that ratify the ICC Statute, and authorizes the President to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free from captivity any US or allied personnel held by or on behalf of the ICC — a provision that has led European leaders to call it “The Hague Invasion Act.” However, the final version includes broad waiver authority for the President, strengthened by a stipulation that no part of the bill may interfere with the President’s constitutional authority to make foreign policy.
This last part is interesting in that the original versions of the bill, originating during Clinton’s term (sponsored by none other than Monsieur Tom DeLay) put huge restrictions on the president’s ability to conduct any kind of foreign policy with signators of the ICC treaty. Since then we have learned that the president answers to no one and can set aside any law he chooses. Tom didn’t seem bothered by this.
I am not suggesting that there was specific coordination between the congress and the administration to loosen the definition of war crimes so that George W. Bush could assert that he has followed the law when he orders torture (or whatever else his puerile little imagination believes is necessary to defeat Satan.) However, it does reveal the underlying mindset that allowed these budding war criminals to seize the day without any obvious conscience.
The Republicans believe that world leadership is defined by the aggressive use of American power against others and holding itself unaccountable for it, apparantly guided by the absurd fantasy of the mythic, invincible American cowboy. Evidently, nobody told them that the cowboy myth was created by a bunch of pansy-assed, effete dime novelists from New York City.
Shallow hubris has always been their downfall and will be again.
Maybe if some of these tough guys had spent more time actually reading the Canon of Great Dead White Guys instead of complaining that liberal mush-headedness was ruining education they might have learned a thing or two. Even the good old Bullfinch’s Mythology would have sufficed to warn them about the fate of nations whose leaders foprget they are not Gods:
The story of Niobe has furnished Byron with a fine illustration of the fallen condition of modern Rome:
“The Niobe of nations! There she stands,
Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;
The Scipios’ tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless
Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow,
Old Tiber! Through a marble wilderness?
Rise with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress.”
In the president’s beautiful mind, he didn’t order torture because he told the lawyers to make a legal finding that torture was ok and so they found that what we call torture is legal now but it isn’t called torture anymore because torture is still illegal. So the president followed the law.
And lots of people pitched in to make it all possible.
Okay, did anyone see how insignificant Dubya seemed at today’s memorial? He’s probably the only man ever to be upstaged by Brian Mulroney.
Lou-seur.
The stench of defeat is starting to rise off of him. I watched it happen to Carter and Senior. People keep a little distance. They don’t look him in the eye. The winner’s gloss is replaced by a sheen of desperation. He’s got trouble. You can smell it.
Mike Finley writes a letter to an earnest young conservative and tries to explain what politics are all about. In the process, he explains what life is all about. It’s a wonderful post.
Young people are persuadable. They’re looking for answers not validation. It’s always worth taking the time to talk to them about politics in a thoughtful interested way. By the time you get to be my age, you’re already who you’re going to be and it’s all about finding ways to justify what you’ve become.
Kevin at Catch has more on what he calls the Ronald Reagan Lunacy project:
In a statement on the project’s Web site, www.reaganlegacy.org, Norquist said, “Ronald Reagan was the greatest leader of the free world in the 20th Century. Franklin Delano Roosevelt left Europe half-enslaved. (Winston) Churchill left Britain in economic decline.
“Ronald Reagan both defeated the Soviet Union and began a period of economic growth that has lasted a generation and continues to this very day.”
At first, Norquist backed the idea of replacing Roosevelt’s likeness on the dime with Reagan’s. But that has met resistance from Democrats.
Chris Butler, executive director of the legacy project, said, “The ten dollar bill is a more prestigious location. The dime is so small you can hardly see the face. The name is given on paper currency.”
Chris Butler knows that size does matter.
And it’s so hard to tell those presidents apart if you don’t have the name written there.
But, let’s be serious. The only patriotic thing to do is put Reagan on all the money.
Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED notes in his post called “HOWARD THE GIP” the fact that many in the blogosphere are making comparisons between Howard Dean and Ronald Reagan.
I don’t really want to open up this can of worms, but I just have to say it:
The difference between Ronald Reagan and Howard Dean is that Ronald Reagan won two straight national elections in landslides that featured huge crossover numbers of Democrats. Howard Dean failed to get even 20% of the Democratic vote in the primaries. He may be similar to the Ronald Reagan of 1972, but he’s a long, long way from the Ronald Reagan of 1980.
Ronald Reagan articulated for the base of his party a very distinct ideological form of conservative Republicanism. His entire worldview was shaped by anti-communism and low taxes and laisse faire capitalism, period. It was, rhetorically speaking, a repudiation of the New Deal and it was a big, big idea that animated many Americans after the hangover of the 60’s. (Of course, he didn’t govern as he preached — and people didn’t really want him to — but the fact that he was able to keep his base fanatically loyal despite that is a testament to his political skill.)
Dean on the other hand offered no such big ideas — not that any of the other Democrats did either. He ran on the “Stop The Republicans Before They Kill Us All” platform, one which I think was very powerful in helping break the trance into which we’d all been forced after 9/11 and the patriotic police started their patrols. I don’t underestimate its significance or its importance in jumpstarting the Democratic will to fight back in this particular election.
But, if Dean is to build on the truly amazing loyalty he has engendered among his core group of Democrats, he’s going to have to articulate a bigger vision and animate Democrats on a more ideological level.
I’m personally hoping that he will take the job of DNC chaiman in the short term, even if he decides to run again. I think it would be a huge statement to the ossified party bureaucracy and would give a voice to all those who feel left out of the party apparatus presently. That job requires a fighter and that’s what Dean is all about.
But, if he is going to have the galvanizing effect on the Democrats that Ronald Reagan had on the Republicans he will have to embrace and articulate a fresh, affirmative, long term vision for the party that goes beyond what he’s talked about in the past. He has a base to build upon if he wants to do it.
Billmon has been writing about Joe Ryan, the “private contractor” from Abu Ghraib who abruptly stopped posting his “diary” as the scandal broke. Alert readers found a cache of Ryan’s previous writings which are interesting mostly for the fact that Ryan is revealed to be dumb as dirt about the country and culture he’s dealing with. (And *sigh* he’s supposed to be a trained intelligence guy, not some grunt from podunk.)
However, Billmon unearthed this interesting little entry:
March 30: The other big news at work was a message sent to us from Ms. Rice, the National Security Advisor, thanking us for the intelligence that has come out of our shop and noting that our work is being briefed to President Bush on a regular basis.
Now, this could be nonsensical “rally the troops” crapola. However, this article in today’s Washington Post makes it much more intriguing:
The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by “White House staff,” according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.
Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned “any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues.”
The Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, asked Jordan whether it concerned “sensitive issues,” and Jordan said, “Very sensitive. Yes, sir,” according to the account, which was provided by a government official.
The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military’s scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.
[…]
The precise role and mission of Jordan, who is still stationed in Iraq and through his attorneys has declined requests to speak with the news media, remains one of the least well understood facets of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
[…]
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the chief military intelligence officer at the prison, said in his statement to Taguba that Jordan was working on a special project for the office of Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top U.S. intelligence official in Iraq. He also described Jordan as “a loner who freelances between military intelligence and military police” officers at the prison.
[…]
But Jordan, in the statement to Taguba, described himself as more of a functionary than a rogue operator. He said that Pappas was really in charge, as evidenced by the fact that he was not responsible for rating other military intelligence officers in reports to superiors and “had no input . . . no responsibility . . . no resources” under his control. He said he was just a “liaison” between Fast and those collecting intelligence at the prison.
What do you suppose the White House staff would have been so impressed with? There have been numerous reports that the only good intel anybody was getting in Iraq during this time came from the field. Abu Ghraib seems to have been almost worthless, which is not surprising since most of the people in there were poor schmucks who got caught up in raids and personal vendettas and wouldn’t know an “insurgent” from a ballet dancer.
Specialist Monath and others say they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors – Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast – to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. “It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up,” he said. Pappas was seen as demanding – waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information – but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes. “We were scandalized,” Monath said. “We all fought very hard to counter that pressure” including holding up reports in editing until the information could be vetted.
Ahhh. So, perhaps it was the “flow of intelligence” that was coming out of Abu Ghraib that impressed the White House so much rather than the intelligence itself. Condi Rice is, after all, notorious for not even reading reports as important ans the NIE. I’m sure a “document count” — the GWOT version of the “body count” was more than sufficient to show “progress”:
Miller’s mission came shortly after the horrific suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. He was encouraged by Rumsfeld’s senior intelligence aide, Stephen Cambone, to ensure there was “a flow of intelligence” from detainees picked up in Iraq.
Everyone’s been speculating that the reason General Fay has requested to be replaced by a higher ranking General is because of a need to interview General Sanchez and army protocol precludes him interviewing someone of a higher rank than he. I’m sure that’s at least partly true, although it is more likely that this shuffle is designed to kill more time before the election. But there is also the problem that Fay cannot complete his investigation without being able to talk to his equal in rank, Maj. General Barbara Fast, something which is also prohibited.
And, she may just be the key to the whole story:
Back on May 12, David Hackworth is quotedin the Sydney Morning Herald as saying:
“This is unravelling like a cheap Chinese sweater,” said David Hackworth, a retired colonel whose organisation, Soldiers for the Truth, helped bring the abuse story to the US media.
[…]
But Mr Hackworth said he believed that more junior soldiers would soon come forward to “blow the whistle”.
He said the general who was in charge of military intelligence in Iraq, Barbara Fast, who has escaped media scrutiny, was likely to become the focus of questions in the next few weeks.
So, what’s the story with Fast? Surely she is under increased scrutiny since the Abu Ghraib scandal happened under her command, right?
In September, Fast set up the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. There, detainees were questioned for whatever light they could shed on the insurgency.
Fast’s involvement, if any, in the abuse remains unclear. She was in charge of military intelligence officers at the prison, including Col. Thomas Pappas, who is accused in an Army report of being “directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuse. According to the New York Times, Pappas emerged from meetings with Fast and Sanchez “clutching his face as if in pain.”
Fast also had oversight of civilian interrogators at the prison, two of whom are implicated. And another female general says Fast was largely to blame for the overcrowding at Abu Ghraib.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq’s prison system until February, said Fast refused to release prisoners who were no longer security threats and ordered them “back in the box” for more questioning
Quite a few of the prisoners who were tortured and abused wouldn’t have even been there if it weren’t for Fast. I wonder if “quantity” over “quality” may have been her watchword with prisoners as well as bureaucratic reports to the White House staff and pentagon command?
Whatever it was, it was enough to get her promoted:
In February, as investigators were deep into their still-secret probe of prisoner abuse, the Senate confirmed Fast’s promotion to major general. On March 1, Sanchez pinned the second star on Fast’s collar in a ceremony seen via videoconferencing at Fort Huachuca, where her husband watched, and at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, near where her parents now live.
At the same time, it was announced that Fast would return to Fort Huachuca this summer in the plum post of commanding general.
“She’s done outstanding things,” said Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, “and I expect more in the future.”