Good news, bad news, Poor Man wrapup
Phillip Carter (proprietor of the excellent "Intel Dump") sees "Signs of Learning on the Potomac" in Rumsfeld's dispatch of General Luck to Iraq to "look at all areas of [Operation Iraqi Freedom], identify any weaknesses and report back in a few weeks with a confidential assessment." (New York Times: Rumsfeld Seeks Broad Review of Iraq Policy). Noting improved Army training methods as well, Carter concludes,

Together, these should be seen as good news stories... Assuming Gen. Luck can get the "ground truth" when he's in Iraq, and he's listened to, we may see more signs of improvement in the future. Hope spring eternal.

But according to the "Nelson Report," the "listened to" part may not work out:

There is rising concern amongst senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear "bad news."

Rather, Bush makes clear that all he wants are progress reports, where they exist, and those facts which seem to support his declared mission in Iraq...building democracy. "That's all he wants to hear about," we have been told. So "in" are the latest totals on school openings, and "out" are reports from senior US military commanders (and those intelligence experts still on the job) that they see an insurgency becoming increasingly effective, and their projection that “it will just get worse."

Our sources are firm in that they conclude this "good news only" directive comes from Bush himself; that is, it is not a trap or cocoon thrown around the President by National Security Advisor Rice, Vice President Cheney, and DOD Secretary Rumsfeld. In any event, whether self-imposed, or due to manipulation by irresponsible subordinates, the information/intelligence vacuum at the highest levels of the White House increasingly frightens those officials interested in objective assessment, and not just selling a political message.
(emphases added)

(Via Air America/Al Franken, via digby). Under these circumstances, The Poor Man may have the best handle on the situation:

Reality is that the situation in Iraq is horrible, the outlook for any lasting peace is grim, and that this has nothing to do with a nebulous, malignant, all-powerful “Left”, and everything to do with the people in power who make bad and stupid policies. You can pull your head out of your ass, stop dreaming up stupid conspiracy theories about how everyone around the world you don’t like is working together to destroy Freedom, and tell them that they need to do a better job. And if they won’t do a better job, the solution is not to get upset at people who aren’t waving their pom-poms or denouncing Saddam single-mindedly enough for you, it is to fire the fuck-ups so we can maybe have some chance at salvaging something from this fiasco.

Read it all, it's excellent throughout, and closes memorably. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 AM -- |    

 
Good blogs asking good questions

• Charles Dodgson asks a "stupid" question: is it really just bad, "low skill" jobs that get outsourced overseas? Rephrased, "when things all settle out how much will Americans get paid to do what?
• Mark Schmitt asks, "What does "Winning" on Social Security Mean, for Bush??" He suggests that the Wehner memo is "really arguing with a faction that believes it can win 'the battle of ideas' without winning the legislation." Me, I think it's likelier they'll win the legislation than the battle of ideas, but Schmitt wants Dems to ready some reform proposals of their own.
• Jim Henley, responding to Virginia Postrel (and a similarly odd opinion by Glenn Reynolds), wonders where and when else torture might be opposed than in a Senate confirmation hearing of one of the principals involved in justifying it.
• Digby recommends drawing a line in the sand about torture and not worrying about appearing soft on terrorism, and asks, "We, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, will be defeated by a bunch of third world religious misfits if we don't engage in torturing suspects. Just who sounds weak?"

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:45:00 PM -- |    

 
Person of the Year
I agree -- not with TIME magazine, that's for sure, but with The Globalist. Absolutely. Actual guts as opposed to flight-suit poses.

More on an American hero here (where he's also one of several People of the Year), here (where he's a finalist), here, here, and here*:

He played football, had a temper that got him into a few fights and worked hard to take care of his mother, said several people who watched him grow up. Like most of the other young people in this village of 250 people, he left town after graduation in search of work.

"It surprised everyone that it was him," said Alan Pettitt, a thickly bearded man whose daughter dated [him] in high school. "You wouldn't think he'd do it."

The last story is out of sync with the rest in claiming his hometown is proud; words like "ambivalence," "rat," and "traitor" are used to describe local reactions in other stories. So it's probably not going to be worth much to him, but here's another civilian's salute from me, too, to Spc. Joseph Darby, the Abu Ghraib whistle-blower.


=====
* ABC News, Beliefnet, GQ, Washington Post, USA Today posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:10:00 PM -- |    

 
Brass Crescent Awards
Aziz Poonawalla is hosting a "Brass Crescent Awards" contest, with categories for best Muslim blogs, best Iraqi blogs, non-Muslim blogs (criterion: "most respectful of Islam and seeks genuine dialog with muslims"), best posts, and the like. Drop by! I'll nominate "ideofact" for non-Muslim blogger, and look forward to learning who -- besides Aziz -- people think are the cream of the Muslim blogging crop.




nominations thread


=====
UPDATE, 1/10: And the nominees are...
UPDATE, 1/17: And the winners are...avari/nameh (best blog, best writing, and best post: Explaining the Mideast to the Midwest) and many others posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:30:00 AM -- |    

 
Alberto Gonzales: forward-leaning yes man
The picture that I'm getting of Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales -- especially after the Washington Post article by R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen ("Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees") -- is of someone aware he's just supposed to provide window dressing for decisions others have already made:

His former colleagues say that throughout this period [of drafting interrogation guidelines, March-August 2002 --ed.], Gonzales -- a confidant of George W. Bush's from Texas and the president's nominee to be the next attorney general -- often repeated a phrase used by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to spur tougher anti-terrorism policies: "Are we being forward-leaning enough?" [...]

On at least two of the most controversial policies endorsed by Gonzales, officials familiar with the events say the impetus for action came from Addington -- another reflection of Cheney's outsize influence with the president and the rest of the government. Addington, universally described as outspokenly conservative, interviewed candidates for appointment as Gonzales's deputy, spoke at Gonzales's morning meetings and, in at least one instance, drafted an early version of a legal memorandum circulated to other departments in Gonzales's name, several sources said.

Gonzales' half-hearted capital punishment clemency briefings for Governor Bush leave the same impression. A 2003 investigation by Alan Berlow for the Atlantic Monthly reviewed 57 summaries of Texas capital cases drafted by Gonzales for Bush -- the last chance for Texas death row inmates. Berlow found that "...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." Berlow concludes:

Gonzales's execution summaries belie [Bush's] assurances of thorough and judicious review. The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration—one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions.

Likewise, Gonzales' failure to adequately "vet" Bernard Kerik for the fairly important job of Secretary of Homeland Security was at least partly due to his unswerving deference to Bush. In a post-mortem of the Kerik flameout, the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller wrote:

Throughout the process, the Republican close to the administration said, everyone at the White House knew that Mr. Bush liked Mr. Kerik, placing him in the special category of "this guy's our guy."
(via Josh Marshall; see also other Marshall posts)

So it appears that Gonzales is simply a yes-man elevated to the highest level of American government. He's not very good at law, he's not very good at personnel, and he's not very good at politics (recall his advice to stonewall the 9/11 commission). And above all, he's not very good at distinguishing his duties to the people he serves from his loyalty to his bosses -- Bush and Cheney. What he is good at is being obedient -- the highest of all virtues in Bush's Republican Party.

Torture
Of course, the main reason to oppose Gonzales' rise to power is his role in the Bush administration's detainee policies. In years to come, this may be judged the most historic paragraph to come out of the Bush presidency:

The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy prisoners be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip, (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments.
Alberto Gonzales memo to President Bush, January 25, 2002*

Notice that even here the memo is all too easily read to expand loosened guidelines against Al Qaeda members -- at least a debatable position, since they were not signatories to the Geneva Convention -- to any "enemy prisoner." You really need a Lincoln to keep from sliding most of the way down a slippery slope like that; instead we got a Bush, a Cheney and their loyal servants Alberto and Rummie.. When Gonzales threw out the Geneva Conventions for Al Qaeda, he had no principles to help prevent him and others from throwing them out for Iraq war detainees as well, and none ultimately preventing him and/or his allies from advocating greatly weakening rules against torture -- that being the whole point ("quickly obtain information").

(I should say that there's a similar lesson for and about me as well. In the aftermath of 9/11 I shared a "who cares?" attitude about the full panoply of Al Qaeda detainees' Geneva-supported rights: things like hooding, sedation en route, and less than ideal prison conditions all seemed in bounds to me -- although I never advocated torture.)

The all but pathological August 2002 memo (parsing torture definitions to the point where only pain equivalent to that of organ failure or death and causing long-term mental harm counted as torture) was also drawn up at the behest of and likely under the direction of Mr. Gonzales, according to at least one "senior administration official." The New York Times reports:

John Yoo, a senior Justice Department lawyer who wrote much of the memorandum, exchanged draft language with lawyers at the White House, the officials said. Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an article published Sunday in The San Jose Mercury News that Mr. Gonzales did not apply any pressure on him to tailor the memorandum to accommodate the White House.

Yoo said that Mr. Gonzales was merely seeking to "understand all available options" in a perilous time, when the United States faced unprecedented threats.

But a senior administration official disagreed, saying that the memorandum's conclusions appeared to closely align with the prevailing White House view of interrogation practices. The official said the memorandum raised questions about whether the Office of Legal Counsel had maintained its longstanding tradition of dispensing objective legal advice to its clients in executive-branch agencies.

While the recent Justice Department memo restoring pre-Gonzales interrogation guidelines is welcome, it's hard to imagine Gonzales saying "no" if Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld were to again insist on harsher protocols.

Even if you're the hard-nosed sort, the political and military cost of abuse and torture has been high -- if generals are to be trusted over warbloggers. As a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee by former Generals Shalikashvili, McPeak, Hoar and other retired military officers states,

Today, it is clear that [U.S. detention and interrogation operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere] have fostered greater animosity toward the United States, undermined our intelligence gathering efforts and added to the risks facing our troops serving around the world. [...]

As James R. Schlesinger’s panel reviewing Defense Department detention operations concluded earlier this year, these changes in doctrine have led to uncertainty and confusion in the field, contributing to the abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and undermining the mission and morale of our troops.

In a Wednesday op-ed in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum summed up why even many Iraq war supporters and/or conservatives ought to want Gonzales rejected in Does the Right Remember Abu Ghraib?

In fact, anyone who has ever wanted the United States to play a role in promoting and supporting democracy and human rights around the world -- and this includes a wide swath of the conservative movement -- ought to oppose the appointment of Alberto Gonzales, if only on the grounds that he is associated with bad legal advice that has damaged our ability to do so.
(link added)

So I'm asking the Senate, and especially its Republicans: if you won't do it for our values, if you won't do it for the good name of the United States, if you won't do it to put statutory and Constitutional duty before party and personal loyalty -- then do it for our men, our women and our purported mission in Iraq:

Do not confirm Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States.


More on Gonzales

• Avi Cover of Human Rights First will be blogging the Gonzales confirmation hearings; this could be a good way to follow the hearings with a knowledgeable guide.
• Human Rights First also provides a "Take Action" web page with an editable e-mail text urging strong questioning of Mr. Gonzales, and the web machinery to send the e-mail to your Senator.
  
• The ACLU has released a report titled The Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Record of Attorney General Nominee Alberto Gonzales proposing a number of questions for the Senate to pose to (former Texas Supreme Court) Judge Gonzales.
• Phil Carter ("IntelDump"), a lawyer with military experience, has a series of excellent posts on detainee abuse; the current entry, titled "Present at the Creation" is about Gonzales, with links to related prior posts. Carter predicts Gonzales will assert executive privilege.

=====
* On re-reading his January 25, 2002 memo, I was struck by this sentence:

The Attorney General is charged by statute with interpreting the law for the Executive Branch. This interpretive authority extends to both domestic and international law. He has in turn, delegated this role to OLC.

I hadn't realized that; I wonder if Congress had. So I suppose there's always the "hope" that the ascendancy of the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) over the Department of Justice means Gonzales' appointment is effectively a demotion. But it's more likely he'll bring the real power with him and direct thousands instead of dozens of subordinates.

UPDATE, 1/10: OK, I was confused about Gonzales' relationship to the OLC. The OLC is part of the Department of Justice, not of the White House. Gonzales has been White House Legal Counsel, and therefore was not part of the OLC. However, he was able to request and receive detailed memos from OLC; together with the similar titles, this led me to think he was in the same office.

So basically, you should ignore this footnote. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:15:00 AM -- |    

 
Tsunami aftershock: child exploitation
UNICEF warns that addition to simply keeping children alive, caring for separated children, and getting kids back to school,

...relief efforts must ensure that children are protected from exploitation. In tumultuous environments like those in the tsunami zone – where families are broken apart, incomes are lost, and hope is in short supply – children are more vulnerable ... In some of the affected countries, reports have been emerging of opportunistic child traffickers moving in to exploit vulnerable children.

Via "Sify," an Indian Internet service, an Agence France Presse report provides sickening details:

UNICEF's spokesman for Indonesia, John Budd, told AFP there had been at least one confirmed case of a child being smuggled out of Aceh province to the nearby North Sumatran capital of Medan for trafficking purposes.

And he said UNICEF's Malaysian office had received an SMS on Tuesday advertising 300 orphans from Aceh aged between three and 10 who could be bought. "It's chilling," Budd said.

To help UNICEF with its efforts in Asia, click here. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:08:00 PM -- |    

 
55-10 and counting
Holy moly, is USC destroying Oklahoma or what? 55-10 with 9:46 left. And most of their offense returning next year, if I heard right.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:46:00 PM -- |    

 
DeLay and conquer?
Josh Marshall, Charles Kuffner, and others are rightly rejoicing at the GOP's Monday decision to undo the "DeLay Rule" that would have allowed the embattled congressman to stay in a leadership role even if he was indicted. But according to the ABC News item Kuffner cited, DeLay supporter Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) said,

"It's a mark of a leader to take a bullet for the team and not for the team to take a bullet for the leader. I'm very glad we decided to stick with the rules."

I say "but" because the very idea of DeLay "taking a bullet for the team" set off all thirty-eight of my BS detectors. So I started looking around, and I think digby may have recognized DeLay's new strategy at the end of a New York Times article from last week. Referring to a Texas district attorney's investigation that has already led to several indictments of persons close to DeLay, Carl Hulse and Katherine Seelye reported:

...Texas Republicans have made it clear that they want to transfer the authority for prosecuting the case away from Ronnie Earle, the Travis County district attorney, and give it to Greg Abbott, the state attorney general.

And Carl Hulse's New York Times report on the GOP about-face notes:

Representative David Dreier, a California Republican who is chairman of the Rules Committee, said Republicans on Tuesday would present to the full House a proposal that ethics cases be dismissed if the ethics committee, which is divided equally between Democrats and Republicans, is deadlocked.

In the past, tie votes have led to investigations. I wonder if DeLay and Hastert have simply figured out that D.A Earle doesn't have enough evidence or enough time to indict the Hammer as the last "clown to climb out of the Volkswagen," to use Earle's great phrase. If so, giving up on the "DeLay Rule" is a fairly cheap concession, and the real action is the ethics committee rule change.

We can still get some entertainment value out of this, if the folks tallying the DeLay rule votes over at the Daily DeLay can find out which Republicans supported both the "DeLay rule" and the about-face. The ones with the best contrast between rhetoric then and now could compete for the coveted "DeLay Obedience School" award.


=====
UPDATE, 1/4: Rep. Mark Kirk (cited above as a "DeLay supporter") won't be a winner of that award: according to the Daily DeLay tally of the original GOP vote, he was one of the so-called "Shays Handful" against the rule change. I regret implying otherwise. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:03:00 AM -- |    

 
New look
Returning readers may wonder what's happened to the familiar 9/11 Statue of Liberty photo at the top left. It's not gone -- it's one of several photos I'm now rotating at random, so you'll see it again sooner or later.*

I built in the "Statue of Liberty in smoke" photo to my blog quite soon after starting it. But it implies a stricter focus on terrorism -- and on constitutional/civil liberties issues, as implied by linking the photo to the U.S. Constitution -- than I really want. So it's more appropriate to rotate it among several others.

Technical blegs
There are a couple of other things I'd like to do, but can't figure out how:

• I'd like to make the "newsrack blog" at the top of the page hyperlink to the current blog home page. That will make it easier for people browsing an individual post via a search engine or aggregators to find out what I've written lately. I just can't seem to make that work.
• I'd like to make a dark gray margin around the body of the blog page go away; it's visible with Internet Explorer, but not with Firefox.
  

Also, if this site has other problems in your opinion (e.g., the site malfunctions with your browser), please let me know, especially if you think you know how to fix it. For anyone interested in helping, I've stored my blogger.com template online.


=====
* CREDITS: I saw how to do the photo rotation by viewing the source code that the Danish band "Nephew" uses at their site. I've stored several of the photos at the excellent flickr service. Finally, I found the Statue of Liberty photo at Kulturspiegel, a magazine of the German newsweekly SPIEGEL; the link no longer leads to a page with the photo. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:05:00 PM -- |    

 
Tsunami satellite images
NASA's Earth Observatory service is publishing a series of satellite images about the background and impact of the Christmas Indian Ocean tsunamis. The image at right shows the all but biblical scope of the disaster in the city of Lhoknga, Indonesia; click through for a photo comparison before the tsunami struck.

Other images:

• Tsunami damage, northwestern Sumatra
• Breaking tsunami waves along India's eastern coast; animation (6MB)
  
• Satellites map tsunami wave height
  
• Tsunami damage in Thailand
  
• Tsunami damage in Aceh, Indonesia
• Tsunami damage in northwest Sumatra
• Phuket, Thailand
  
• Tsunami strikes Sri Lanka
  
• Earthquake spawns tsunamis
  

You can help with donations to Oxfam and the ICRC among others.


=====
UPDATE, 1/17: "Tsunami damage in Thailand" link added.
NOTE, 1/17: If tax-deductibility is important to you, look for American charities or American branches of international charities. Also, Congress has passed legislation that such donations for tsunami relief are deductible from 2004 tax returns through the end of January.
UPDATE, 1/24: "Satellite," "Breaking waves," and 2d "northwest Sumatra" links added. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:50:00 PM -- |    

 
A dialogue with Jeff Jarvis: torture by Iran, torture by us
Looking back on 2004, several stories stood out for me, among them the election and certainly the terrible tsunami at the end of the year. But the story that was uniquely depressing and disappointing for me was the news that Americans were torturing and humiliating their prisoners in Iraq, under the auspices of American government policy.

At the time I wrote that I've rarely been so ashamed of this country, and I still feel that way. As an American -- the more so as an American who had supported the Iraq war -- I felt personally kicked in the stomach by those abuses, and responsible for demanding their punishment at every level of government. This conviction has grown as more background information and more accounts of abuse have emerged from Iraq and elsewhere; I want my country back.

Recently Jeff Jarvis drew attention to the sadly credible news -- forwarded by an Iranian government figure named Abtahi -- that the Iranian regime is torturing bloggers who speak out against it. Jarvis wrote that "If what we read here is true, then it is incumbent of us to bring attention to this abuse who are doing nothing more than we are doing." I agree.* But I commented:

What about the torturing we're doing? Or its outsourcing? It doesn't excuse what's happening in Iran, but let's get the beam out of our own eye before going after the mote (or the beam) in someone else's. (Matthew 7:3)

Jarvis replied as if I was trying to suppress the news:

Oh, come now, Thomas: I cannot stand up and warn about torture of fellow citizens because you say I'm not holy enough... because I am American?.... Well, then, certainly our friends in Germany should not be criticizing us or anyone, should they? And the French and their colonialism and stingy contributions to work aid make them unqualified. And.... Don't be ridculous! What an inane equivalency to make! People are being tortured and you turn it into your own spin! For shame, sir. I will stand up for my Iranian brothers and sisters no matter whether you think I should or not.

My reply:

Jeff, I'm not saying you can't speak out about Iranian torture because you're American, not at all. I'm saying it would behoove you and us to look at our own misdeeds as well -- it makes our protests about misdeeds by others more effective and less hypocritical.

Maybe I used the wrong words to express that -- but I honestly don't see anywhere near the same kind of outrage in your writings about American torture that I do about torture by others. Yet American torture is something we as Americans can do something about far sooner than we can do anything about Iranian torture, and with far greater authority. That isn't "my own spin," that's the simple truth. We are *responsible* for one, we are not for the other. Which ought to come first? How do we have standing to criticize in others what we do ourselves?

I said "it doesn't excuse what's happening in Iran". I'm willing to sign petitions, write e-mails, etc. about Iranian torture victims. But it's with a hollow feeling, given the ongoing stream of revelations about our own misdeeds in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo.

Equivalency? Well, yes, I guess torture by us is pretty much equivalent to torture by them. Lets stand up for our detained and tormented Iraqi, Afghan, and Arab brothers and sisters too, while we're at it: 1) they may well be mostly innocent of terrorism, and 2) even if some of them aren't, no one deserves to be tortured.

I'm frankly surprised and disappointed you consider any of this "inane," and that you employ "for shame" against someone who doesn't.
(link added)

Mr. Jarvis replied again, but continued to claim I was trying to "diminish" his news and make "rhetorical" points:

Thomas: You created the equivalency by bringing it up in this context. You can't find me being outraged enough -- by your standards -- about torture of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody (sorry, but I figured there was plenty of outrage already and I didn't see that I added much to the discussion; like any blogger, I don't cover all issues with the same attention because I'm an individual, not a news organizatin and, to quote Jon Stewart, I'm not your monkey). By making that comparison, you are trying to diminish what I am saying about the torture of bloggers. Well, by that standard, have you been outraged enough about the torture of victims in Saddam's custody? What does that say about your outrage vs. my outrage? I'd call that inane. It's a rhetorical non sequitor. As Hubris says, above, it's tu quoque. It's also slightly exploitive: dangling one class of victims to try to win points against someone advocating for another class of victims. One has no impact on the other -- other than an attempt at distraction. The point of this post is very simple: I am trying to draw attention to what appears to be new disclosures of torture of our fellow bloggers. As far as I can tell, this is news. Pay attention or don't -- your choice. But don't diminish what is being said about these people just to make your rhetorical point.
(link added)

Continuing this dialogue here: At no point do I say anything resembling "don't pay attention to the plight of these Iranian bloggers." Thus I think the charge of a so-called "tu quoque" fallacy is itself fallacious, strictly speaking.

I'm not "trying to diminish what [Jeff is] saying about the torture of [Iranian] bloggers" or distract from that. I'm challenging him to expand his outrage and activism to victims of American and American-sponsored torture as well, and I'm suggesting that may be the first step towards being taken seriously around the world and especially in Iran with regard to the plight of the Iranian bloggers.

Say we get a little traction about the Iranian situation among Americans, without frankly acknowledging and fighting torture by and on behalf of our own government. An Iranian spokesman could simply say, these are people who can't be bothered to care about their own government's transgressions -- why should any of us care what they think? They're just hypocrites who would do it themselves to us if they got the chance. I count the aptness of this answer -- however "tu quoque" it may be -- as one of the huge costs of our own crimes and our own failures to address them.

As for Jarvis, I've actually understated at least his initial lack of outrage when it came to American wrongs. At the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations, Jarvis wrote:

And let me say something quite unpopular and throw just a little perspective into the Iraqi prison scandal. I'll repeat: What happened there was wrong and strategically idiotic and does not reflect either American ideals or American aims for the region. However, let's remember that this is a war; the people being interrogated were likely suspected in movements to bring more violence upon not only American soldiers but also the Iraqi people. The means were wrong but the end was right: Bringing peace to Iraq and protecting its people. And was the "torture" all that shocking? Hell, watch an episode of Oz and compare.
(emphasis added)

This wasn't even "the ends justify the means" -- it was the ends excusing the means, even if the means were reprehensible, stupid, and patently at odds with those ends. The torturers of Iran can just throw such attitudes right back in our face -- and sadly, they'll have a point: we all have ends, we all have means, and we all have people who think means don't matter when it comes to their particular ends. As long as we put up with that, or agree with that, we have little standing to object to it elsewhere.

What matters is whether we keep torturers under control and torture beyond the pale -- and it looks like both Iran and the U.S. are generally busy failing that test, both inside government and outside it. This isn't just a matter of fixing government policies any more. It's about us as individuals deciding what we want our democracy and society to stand for. As Matt Welch wrote in his Reason piece, "Who's Tortured?":

But we now know that many of the shocking images from Abu Ghraib that we've been allowed to see —the hoods, the dogs, the sexual humiliation, the photography, the beating —have occurred elsewhere in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan; and in many instances they reflect nothing more than official United States policy. How we respond, whether conservative, libertarian, liberal or other, will tell us a lot about what we've become.

=====
* You can comment about the charges of Iranian torture by e-mail to members and institutions of the Iranian government, e.g., Iranian President Khatami, Ambassador to the United Nations M. Javad Zarif, the Iranian mission to the UN at iran@un.int, and the Iranian Interests Section at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, D.C. at requests@daftar.org. You can help investigate and oppose torture by the US by supporting organizations such as the ACLU , Human Rights Watch, or Amnesty International. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:45:00 AM -- |