oops oh my
I recall hearing - actually, I think it may have been Gore Vidal who said it - that the New York Times Book Review is that paper's vehicle for cultural and political hits; the black Sauroman heart to the Gandalf-y face of wisdom and cosmopolitan affectations the paper projects to the rest of the world. Indeed, during the last two years of the 1990s - that is, the 20th century - that section of the paper featured numerous long essays about communism - sorry, Communism - and the Rosenbergs and the Black List and just how really bad Communism was and how the Left then and now always equivocated on that.
This Sunday, the NYTBR features another long essay and review by Andrew Sullivan, a writer of talent with absolutely no vision or perspective at all, and who in turn possesses some mastery of equivocating with a capital 'E'. Like a lot of Sully's writing's - he's a bit like Christopher Hitchens this way - the review makes advances towards the truth of a problem, but makes a hard right (literally) if it fails to mesh with his ideological preferences.
There are other, probably more qualified critics of Sully's stuff, but I clipped some of the grafs out that I found especially egregious - true to form for the Axis of Equivocation (Friedman/Brooks/Sullivan) - that is, they try to have it both ways. Now, this is not an argument against nuance or shades of gray, but Sully and fellow Axis members try to give nuance or color in shades of gray to lunatic gestures - like torture - or psychotic impulses - like imperalism and genocide, in addition to completely ignoring history whenever it's convenient. In essence, they attempt to give the sociopathic structures of the state more credit than it's inherent sickness allows.
Anyway, my comments beneath the grafs. They are in no way shape or form meant to be comprehensive, I'm simply pointing out the shaky foundations and shitty drywall on this stinky little house Andrew Sullivan's attempting to pass off as a charming bungalow. And because blogspot gets hinky sometimes, I'll boldface said comments.
#5) The critical enabling decision was the president's insistence that prisoners in the war on terror be deemed ''unlawful combatants'' rather than prisoners of war. The arguments are theoretically sound ones - members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not party to the Geneva Convention and their own conduct violates many of its basic demands. But even at the beginning, President Bush clearly feared the consequences of so broad an exemption for cruel and inhumane treatment. So he also insisted that although prisoners were not legally eligible for humane treatment, they should be granted it anyway. The message sent was: these prisoners are beneath decent treatment, but we should still provide it. That's a strangely nuanced signal to be giving the military during wartime.
The point is not whether or not "members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban" deserve humane treatment. The point is that this country is a signatory to the Geneva Convention and it will treat prisoners according to such. Either you're party to it or you're not. This is like saying that just because one team's power forward is a no-account brute and is just in a game to foul your best player, you get to travel with the ball or punch out the other team's coach.
Sullivan fails to provide evidence of President Bush's fear of the "consequnces" here, nor does he provide evidence of such in either book he's reviewing. He also legitimizes a central argument that Alberto Gonzales made in his "torture memos," that the President gets to do what he wants because of war and the CIC function of the office blah blah. This is not "nuance," it's making up the rules as he goes along.
#10) [Assistant Attorney General Jay S.] Bybee even suggests that full-fledged torture of inmates might be legal because it could be construed as ''self-defense,'' on the grounds that ''the threat of an impending terrorist attack threatens the lives of hundreds if not thousands of American citizens.'' By that reasoning, torture could be justified almost anywhere on the battlefield of the war on terror. Only the president's discretion forbade it. These guidelines were formally repudiated by the administration the week before Gonzales's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation as attorney general.
This graf and the above sentence directly contradicts the assumptions Sullivan attempts to advance in various places in the rest of the review. First, where exactly is "the battlefield of the war on terror"? Kabul? Tora Bora? Falluja? Colombia? Iran? As I recall, Saddam's Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda until it became Bush's Iraq.
That the Gonzales "guidelines" were "formally repudiated" by the Bush Administration A WEEK before Gonzales went before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as opposed to when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke or when the torture memos dropped, is as obvious as all that fucking snow in the northeast right now.
That, and the fact that "the abuses" were "tailored to humiliate Arabs and Muslims," conflicts with Sullivan's efforts to present the torture at Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere as a case of crossed wires - how does the purposefulness of all that make it all one big misunderstanding?
#12) What's notable about the incidents of torture and abuse is first, their common features, and second, their geographical reach. No one has any reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to one prison near Baghdad....Many of the abuses seem specifically tailored to humiliate Arabs and Muslims, where horror at being exposed in public is a deep cultural artifact.
#13) Whether random bad apples had picked up these techniques from hearsay or whether these practices represented methods authorized by commanders grappling with ambiguous directions from Washington is hard to pin down from the official reports...
Sully approaches the truth here but lets it sort of roll of his back, but only sorta-kind-of-maybe, and ends up prompting more questions than anything: if we're to believe the methods U.S. soldiers used were more or less the same all over - cultural and sexual humiliation on top of physical torture - how are the bad apples not bad apples if Washington was screwing up and giving "ambiguous directions", free to be misconstrued and exploited by soldiers in the field? If it's not really Washington's fault, it's their's, right? But wait, how truly ambiguous were the ambiguous directions if they were of course only unambiguous when they were rooted in the notion that the U.S. was now exempt from the "quaint" Geneva Convention, and that the President that he could do what he wanted because Al Qaeda was Al Qaeda? I mean, isn't this basically greenlighting torture, saying that "Boy, Al Qaeda's really really nasty, and hey, never mind those international rules on torture?" Doesn't this erase the element of ambiguity altogether? Or were they bad apples after all? But if the bad apples are bad apples, then what is and where is the evidence of the torture/abuse/whatever grapevine Sullivan references, the "hearsay"? And if the instructions from Washington were impractical and mistaken and vague, how come Washington never specified instructions for interrogation when they were asked, and often begged for it?
#28) Was the torture effective? The only evidence in the documents Danner has compiled that it was even the slightest bit helpful comes from the Schlesinger report. It says ''much of the information in the recently released 9/11 Commission's report, on the planning and execution of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came from interrogation of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere.'' But the context makes plain that this was intelligence procured without torture. It also claims that good intelligence was received from the two sanctioned cases of expanded interrogation techniques at Guantánamo. But everything else points to the futility of the kind of brutal techniques used in Iraq and elsewhere.
#29) Worse, there's plenty of evidence that this kind of treatment makes gathering intelligence harder. In Abu Ghraib, according to the official documents, up to 90 percent of the inmates were victims of random and crude nighttime sweeps. If these thousands of Iraqis did not sympathize with the insurgency before they came into American custody, they had good reason to thereafter. Stories of torture, of sexual humiliation, of religious mockery have become widespread in Iraq, and have been amplified by the enemy. If the best intelligence comes from persuading the indigenous population to give up information on insurgents, then the atrocities perpetrated by a tiny minority of American troops actually help the insurgency, rather than curtail it.
This would've been an opportunity to explode the right-wing talk-show pundit's equivalent of the alley-oop, the question of how effective torture actually is (Jesus, is this how bad it's gotten? That we actually debate this shit out loud, in earnest, outside of a bar and three beers in?). Sy Hersh made it clear in interviews on the topic that the FBI - the FBI, for Chrissakes - was revolted by the torture it's agents observed at Guantanamo, because THEY KNEW IT DIDN'T WORK. And I will buy and mail the new Jello Biafra CD to anyone who can prove to me that a terrorist attack was stopped in the nick of time by ass-fucking someone with a light stick. This is a bit of pop culture stupidity the media continues to allow to percolate because the pundits have too much time on their hands and not enough facts in their heads.
I also have a feeling that the torture at Abu Ghraib is just icing on the cake, babe. This may have a little bit to do with alienating the "indigenous population."
#33) But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ''evil'' might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.
#34) American political polarization also contributed. Most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents - like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh - were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas. Advocates of the war, especially those allied with the administration, kept relatively quiet, or attempted to belittle what had gone on, or made facile arguments that such things always occur in wartime. But it seems to me that those of us who are most committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential to winning this war.
So - because Sullivan still can't logically, with appropriate context, explain the invasion of Iraq and it's links to the war on terror (whatever and wherever that is) - graf #33 is a series of mental and moral contortions and utter bullshit straight out of Friedman's playbook, but without his smug brevity - and because the Bush Administration - the poor Bush Adminstration...they try to do good! Just like the gay marriage thing, right Sully? They really didn't mean that! It was just all "politics" and "the election" and "ambiguity" - CRITICS of the invasion of a sovereign country for WMDs/democracy/whatever are somehow, in some way - because they did their jobs too well? what? - are ALSO RESPONSIBLE FOR THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ENGAGING IN ILLEGAL TORTURE OF PRISONERS OF A WAR IT STARTED ILLEGALLY.
And what's this shit about their "agendas"? You mean, that they were doing the thing reporters and informed citizens and all that rabble does, holding power to account?
So, was all this a hit? No. I'd say it was closer to a classic example of state propaganda.
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