Yglesias vs. Thiessen on waterboarding
A rather nasty debate about waterboarding is occurring between Matthew Yglesias and Mark Thiessen. It began, if we can date these things, yesterday, when Yglesias came down hard on Thiessen for offering up the following statement, which appeared in a NYT article on President Obama and the national security debate,
“For six years,” Mr. Thiessen added, “the left has had a field day with this, running around saying we tortured people and comparing us to the Spanish Inquisition.” Now, he said, the politics have turned.
Yglesias appears to have turned this line into bulletin board material, lashing out that
at the end of the day, the reason the Bush administration’s preferred torture methods get compared to the Spanish Inquisition is that they used techniques cribbed from the Spanish Inquisition.
Yglesias is referring specifically to waterboarding. He cites the analysis of UPenn historian Edward Peters, author of the book on torture, who, in 2007, described the practice’s history to NPR.
Its use was first documented in the 14th century, according to Ed Peters, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. It was known variously as “water torture,” the “water cure” or tormenta de toca — a phrase that refers to the thin piece of cloth placed over the victim’s mouth.
Thiessen initially responded with a rather detailed description of water torture as practiced during the Spanish Inquisition and concludes by sharply criticizing Yglesias,
Stewart, O’Reilly, and the Rhetoric of Guantanamo
Jon Stewart recently appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” I haven’t seen the edited version of the interview, but the full version is a baffling, soulless thing. Neither man appears interested in the exchange. Both seem terrified of ending up on the other’s terrain and much of the interview is spent not engaging with the other’s weak jokes and criticisms. But at about thirty-six minutes into the interview, O’Reilly and Stewart take on Guantanamo. Stewart defends closing the detention facility, calling it “limbo” and claiming that it “does not fit with the American system of justice” and prompts the following exchange,
O’Reilly: “It’s better to be there, than some penitentiary here.”
Stewart: “No, it’s not.”
O’Reilly: “I’ve been there. It is. Trust me.”
Strange to hear Bill O’Reilly imploring Jon Stewart to trust O’Reilly’s first-person account of Guantanamo Bay. (Hadn’t O’Reilly been paying attention to the previous thirty-six minutes of interview? Stewart doesn’t trust him! That’s the point. Of course, the “Trust me” isn’t aimed so much at Stewart as it is at an audience member who might, in fact, trust O’Reilly…)
But these are not new claims. American politicians made them as early as 2004…
Three dead at Guantanamo, ctd.
Since I last wrote on the collective effort of Scott Horton + Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy & Research + Andrew Sullivan to draw attention to the official account of the deaths of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2006, quite a bit has happened. The Department of Defense (apparently) issued a statement on the deaths and the military’s investigation. (I say apparently, because I’m having difficulty locating the original press release or statement; a little help on this?) The statement, as near as I can tell, claims,
An article in Harper’s Magazine on-line claiming that the suicides were actually homicides, and the NCIS knowingly participated in a coverup of those killings, is nonsense. NCIS categorically and unequivocally rejects these accusations. The Harper’s article incorporates a great deal of supposition, intended to fill in where details are unknown to the author. It contains numerous factual errors. [...]
According to the Harper’s article, Sergeant Hickman was stationed on the exterior perimeter of the Camp, including Tower 1, the night of the detainees’ deaths. From this location, he had no visibility into the cellblock and cells where the deaths occurred, a fact confirmed by FBI and DOJ investigators who were specifically tasked to look into Sergeant Hickman’s allegations. NCIS conducted over 100 interviews during the first three days of the investigation, including interviews with all the guards who worked in the cellblock that day and all the detainees who were housed there. None of those interviewed told of any detainees being taken away or alleged homicide.
The Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University’s Law School promptly responded, challenging the veracity of the DoD’s claims. Horton, in turn, amplified four of the Center’s claims:
• DOD now asserts only one detainee had a rag in his throat at the time of death, but the NCIS investigation shows all three had rags in their throats.
• DOD asserts that more than 100 interviews were conducted during the first three days of the investigation; however, only 24 personnel were interviewed on June 10 and none on June 11, 12, and 13. No more than 45 individuals were interviewed during the entire investigation.
• DOD now asserts that NCIS reviewed all available video footage, and found nothing of evidentiary value. The record shows NCIS had a videotape of the events. Since either activity in the camp or lack of activity would be relevant to the conflicting claims, it is implausible that there is nothing of evidentiary value on the tape.
• DOD now asserts that the detainees hanged themselves while lights were dimmed. The Admiral concluded the detainees hanged themselves with the lights on. The DOD does not explain this discrepancy.
Strangely, the Center (and thus Horton) decided to make a big deal of the DoD’s quantification of their interviews. The DoD said they conducted over “100 interviews”; to that the Center says that the DoD interviewed only 24 people over the first three days. Of course, both of these claims may be true, a fact that the Center acknowledges.
While NCIS and CITF may have conducted 100 interviews, they interviewed no more than 45 people, and most of those interviewed did not have first-hand knowledge of the core
events (p. 19).
I understand that the Center (and, thus, Harper) are trying to deflate the DoD’s claims about the number of interviews that they conducted, but both sides seem equally disingenuous here. A more damaging claim comes later,
The grad life communication #2 – B-time
A few days ago, I dedicated an afternoon and early-evening to working on the dissertation. I spent the first half or so of that time rolling along on a chapter, content. I imagine myself stupidly grinning, blissfully accepting the words as they arrived, blissfully imagining that I’d make progress all day long.
Of course, at one point or another, I had to break for food, or caffeine, or to stretch. It doesn’t matter. What does, though, is that when I returned to paper, sat myself down before it, put fingers to the keyboard, put that dopey smile back on, started to think thoughts, all that arrived was [ ]. Literally.
When I write early drafts of papers, I use brackets to cover over words or phrases, citations or data, that I do not have at my immediate disposal. This allows me to press on with the work. Yet too many [ ]s and a paper begins coming apart at the seams. Imagine these holders of empty space stretching into the writing, gradually outnumbering the meaningful phrases, until it is impossible to link one thought with the next, for it is, “Senator [ ] pointed to [ ] as evidence that Abu Ghraib [ ]. This shows [ ].”
This, mercifully, is only an illustration of what might have become of my paper had I not given up on it. Or had the paper not made it brutally clear that it had given up on me. Whichever. It doesn’t matter.
Did President Obama lose the national security debate…9 months ago?
If we may still believe some of the things that we read, President Obama is close to losing — may have already lost — the national security debate. At Slate on Wednesday, Dahlia Lithwick responded to the controversies surrounding the executive’s handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (aka: The Christmas Bomber; The Detroit Bomber) by diagnosing America with
its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome.
Policies and practices that were perfectly acceptable just after 9/11, or when deployed by the Bush administration, are now decried as dangerous and reckless. The same prominent Republicans who once celebrated open civilian trials for Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber,” now claim that open civilian trials endanger Americans (some Republicans have now even gone so far as to try to defund such trials). Republicans who once supported closing Guantanamo are now fighting to keep it open. And one GOP senator, who like all members of Congress must take an oath to uphold the Constitution, has voiced his concern that the Christmas bomber really needed to be “properly interrogated” instead of being allowed to ask for a lawyer
Then, on Thursday, NPR peaked inside the administration’s effort to close Guantanamo and founds that the White House shorted the Department of Justice’s efforts to dissuade Congress from passing a bill barring the movement of detainees from Guantanamo to the U.S.
Justice officials wanted to go to Capitol Hill to persuade lawmakers not to vote for the bill. But the White House said no, arguing that it would distract from other administration priorities, like the stimulus package and health care.
These pieces follow weeks of bad news (for the President) on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial; apparently, it may not be held in NYC after all and Congress is resisting the President’s requests to provide $200 million for security.
To be sure, it wasn’t all bad news for the President.
How to explain the Guantanamo deaths, ctd.
Scott Horton is not giving up. A week or so ago, Harper’s published his lengthy critique of the official investigation into the deaths of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2006. While the government’s report found that all three detainees had committed suicide on June 9, 2006, Horton finds compelling evidence that the three detainees were tortured to death. Although the article has barely registered with the media or the public, it has drawn the scrutiny of Joe Carter and Jack Shafer, neither of whom buy Horton’s account of the incident.
Horton, for his part, appears to be aggressively responding to Shafer and Carter by keeping quiet. Instead, his editor has addressed Shafer’s concerns and Horton has busied himself with producing new allies, armed with new evidence, in order to bolster his side of the argument.
Debating health care reform: “Health reparations.”
A few nights ago, four friends and I spent two hours discussing or priorities for health care reform. We discussed two major issues: sustainability and fairness and sketched the contours of what a reformed system would look like. All told, it seemed to amount to this: such a system would be universal and, as such, it would not be tethered to employment; such a system would diversify its services, providing for preventive care alongside care for sickness and the like; and such a system would be aware of its own limits, which means that an infrastructure for prioritizing medical services and for distributing limited resources (medical services) would be necessary. This put us on dangerous terrain, that which the word “ration” and the notion of “death panels” have mapped. We concluded, perhaps as “realists,” perhaps out of resignation, that it is better to do the hard, if not politically unpopular, work of figuring out how to distribute resources amongst everyone than closing our eyes, humming pop music, and pretending that, with millions of Americans currently uninsured, we don’t already ration.
About three-quarters of the way through that conversation, the group confronted a hypothetical: if universal health care was delivered, should “priority” be given to those who currently – that is, before reform – lack health care? Significantly, what we meant by priority was unclear; however, I believe we imagined it, for a time at least, to mean medical priority. Initially, there was consensus on these two points:
How not to explain the Guantanamo suicides, ctd.
This morning, Slate printed a letter from Harper Senior Editor Luke Mitchell, who worked on Scott Horton’s Guantanamo expose. The letter takes aim at a short rebuttal Slate writer Jack Shafer wrote last week, in which he criticizes several of Horton’s conclusions and encourages his readers to
read the Harper’s piece yourself, preferably with a red pen in hand, to note its slipperiness and many flights of illogic.
Last week, I wrote a brief post on the back-and-forth. I argued that Horton’s critics, which include Shafer and Joe Carter, have a bit more to go on—namely, fifty individuals who provided sworn testimony to the four or five on which Horton stakes his account. But I also noted that neither Shafer nor Carter constrain their accounts to “just the facts”; both provide peculiar alt-theories to Horton’s. Shafer happily imagines how one ought to go about torturing to death three people, while Carter argues that because “enhanced interrogations” are “are useful only in the initial phase of the interrogation process” they probably would not be used on detainees who had spent years at Guantanamo. (Not to mention that Carter provides an explanation for the missing organs that, as far as I know, no public official has provided: that the government kept it for further investigation; no worries.)
The back and forth between Mitchell and Shafer is not, in the end, all that enlightening. For those keeping score at home, here are their arguments, distilled…
Fear of a book: “For Needham family, a WWII copy of Hitler’s book is an Heirloom of Uncertain Value.”
Last week, I made a case for the printed book.
E-readers may allow you to scribble on books or add notes to them. But, with a material book, one’s relationship with it leaves so many more traces. The notes, the highlighting, the scribbles, the creases, the stains, the yellow pages, the crinkled binding. Paper books may be less durable than digital books, but the reading experience, impressed into a paper book, remains more durable than the reading experience of digital books.And let me end with this: Paper books are social things. If one buys a book used or stumbles upon one lost or left behind, one reads alongside that book’s earlier readers, evaluating their markings and notes, their contributions to the text. There is, near as I can tell, no such thing as a used copy of an e-book.
Yesterday, the Boston Globe made things a bit more complicated, describing the burden of a single book – a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf - on a Needham, MA family. It’s an extraordinary story, written by a member of the family itself, and so I recommend reading it in its entirety. But I’ll summarize the article, as best I can, and then try to tease out some observations on it.
The copy of Hitler’s book is a 1937 edition. It belonged to a Nazi soldier, killed in battle by Americans and, perhaps, by the Jewish-American soldier who retrieved the book, Eddie Cohen. Eddie’s son believes that Eddie’s retrieval of the book was a deeply symbolic act,
