2005

Down Sick, but back

ArchPundit June 24, 2005 No Comments

Don’t ask–never should have left Colorado. I think my body was protecting me from the first Red Air Quality Day here in St. Louis by making my stomach revolt against food for 36 hours.

Today, it’s 98 degrees of soupy air that I would swim in, but there’s no where to get a breath.

On that note, the must read is Zorn’s column

“I’m surprised. Though Mayor Daley can’t even pronounce Guantanamo–he says it `Gwa-ta-mahn-o.’ And even though he blithely presided over the Cook County state’s attorney’s office during the biggest police-torture scandal in Chicago’s history. And even though he mistily invoked `what America’s all about’ at the news conference in which he announced a `presumed guilty’ program of posting photos on the Internet of people arrested but not yet convicted in prostitution stings.

Coming at this as someone who thinks the analogy was unproductive and wrong, but not in the hyper whining of screaming the TROOPS, this was the greatest irony to me–Daley, who was Cook County State’s Attorney during the Burge torture ring’s days of operations and had plenty of warnings about it, never did a thing and to this day is strangely silent about it. While Dick Devine might be called on it as well, Devine has a very delicate situation since he worked for the law firm defending Burge and has recused himself from the case. But Devine didn’t say that Durbin was out of line and essentially lay a line of defense for the White House from probing such claims with seriousness. Daley not only attacked Durbin for something Durbin didn’t say, he essentially said such questions about the treatment of prisoners was beyond the pale.

What makes that so disturbing is that Daley didn’t stop at criticizing Durbin–obviously I did that though mildly. What he did was say that we should never say that US Soldiers might do something horrific. While it is reasonable to say that our military is one of the better disciplined and humane militaries to probably ever fight, we know individuals within the military also have done horrible things.

Worse, Durbin didn’t implicate troops–he implicated the administration. Many have tried to spin that as being about troops, but while it might involve US active military personnel, it might just as well be private contractors, CIA, or military intelligence that isn’t a typical GI. We know from Abu Ghraib that much of the prison operations were outside of the control of the typical chain of command and shadowy people showed up for interrogations with the typical command structure both overstretched and out of the loop on key decisions.

We also know that we’ve outsourced torture through extraordinary rendition that takes individuals from our custody to the custody of nations that will torture individuals without any rules to worry about. My second criticism of Durbin is that by choosing a bad analogy he sidetracked the conversation.

A Quick Question

ArchPundit June 22, 2005 2 Comments

Why isn’t there a strategic plan and fundraising document at the Democratic Commitment Conference ?

The report Locked Out has some good points and such, but misses some critical points. And the above question points out the issue. When someone tells me they want money to win a bunch of Congressional seats, I want to know how else they are going to raise money and how they plan to spend it.

If you tell me that the 9 candidates didn’t fundraise well, and one of them wants to correct the problem by distributing cash to a wider array of candidates, from where is that cash coming?

Daley Wankery

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 1 Comment

Nice

On Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley– a fellow Democrat– added his voice to the chorus of criticism, saying, “I think it’s a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military would act like that.”

Yeah, like it was a disgrace when anyone said that about a certain Police Commander?

Of course, Durbin didn’t say it was the fault of the military, he said it was the fault of the administration. Then again, one might see why the Mayor wouldn’t like that reasoning either.

The Better Editorials

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 5 Comments

Most From TalkLeft:

SJR:

Yet just as America does not benefit from the reduction of political debate to partisan name-calling, it also does not benefit from the stifling of debate. The real message of Durbin’s statement – that we must investigate and stop inhumane treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and other military prisons – is one we can’t afford to ignore.

Had Durbin not invoked the Nazis, Stalin and Pol Pot, it very well may have been.

The Daily Southtown:

The centerpiece of Durbin’s statement was criticism of President Bush and his top advisers for declaring that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to individuals taken into custody by the United States if American officials designate them as terrorists. The senator said the result has been mistreatment of prisoners, even torture, at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq

Kadner

In fact, the government shipped these prisoners off to Guantanamo Bay believing that since the naval base is on Cuban soil, our government could claim that the laws of the United States do not apply.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that argument.

Compared to government prison camps in other countries and the brutality of terrorists themselves, some of the tactics applied at Guantanamo Bay may not seem extreme.

Nevertheless, I hope Americans are shocked.

Republican and Democratic senators have expressed revulsion and asked the Bush administration to close the camp.

This country must not wait for the day to come when the U.S. applies torture tactics that are truly worthy of comparisons to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

During World War II, when Japan murdered American POWs and the Germans mistreated prisoners, Americans continued to treat captured enemy soldiers with respect and dignity.

The United States proudly stood by the Geneva Convention, which our government now tries to ignore.

Near the end of his speech, Durbin quoted from a Supreme Court ruling that claimed President Lincoln did not have the right to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War.

“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances …”

If we fight terrorism by behaving like terrorists, we will lose this war … and risk our country’s soul.

Greg Hinz

Now, war is not pretty. Some of the above may be defensible. But it is debatable. Mistreating people, some possibly innocent, in a harsh prison forever is not an Illinois value.

Nor is it an Illinois value to take a person who might possess some intelligence of possible value, stake them out naked on the ground, turn up an air-conditioner until they?re shaking with cold, play ear-splitting music, and watch them defecate and urinate on themselves. That, in fact, was the conduct Mr. Durbin was protesting.

Andy McKenna, the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, released a statement calling Mr. Durbin ?mean-spirited? and demanding that he ?defend those Illinoisans who are, or have, sacrificed in the nation?s service.?

He did, Andy. He did by arguing that America doesn?t torture people, whatever some leaders may want. And besides, with former Gov. George Ryan?s trial coming up, don?t you have better things to do than issuing misleading statements to please the White House?

The Peoria Journal Star

What he did was read an FBI account about a Guantanamo Bay prisoner chained to the floor, in a fetal position, subjected to extreme heat and cold, and without food or water. Durbin said Americans who read that report would never think the reference was to an American-run prison, but that “this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot or others – that had no concern for human beings.” The line came toward the end of a long speech which argued that whether the prison at the Cuban base should be kept open or closed is the wrong issue.

The treatment of prisoners is the right issue, and so is how long we will keep those we have taken in a war on terrorism that is unlikely to end in our lifetimes, if ever. Unfortunately, Durbin’s rhetorical gluttony has diminished our efforts to grapple with these issues in a way that will both protect the United States and honor a long history which holds Americans to a higher standard. At a minimum, the senator should have said that the vast majority of those Americans assigned to our prison camps treat their charges in a manner that honors our history.

One should invoke the names of Hitler and Pol Pot, or Stalin and Mao, sparingly, first because it diminishes the brutality of regimes that together are believed to have killed 100 million civilians. And secondly because it is harder to hear the rest of the message when one misuses the names of tyrants.

The Quad City Times:

To the human being Durbin described laying on a Guantanamo prison concrete floor, chained in excrement, alternating between stifling heat or chilling cold, it’s torture plain and simple.

Extreme and sometimes cruel measures can be necessary to extract specific information from enemy combatants. What rightfully aggravates Durbin is that this torture of prisoners in U.S. custody doesn’t seem to meet any kind of end. The cruelty in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib seems a random result of a breakdown of discipline and procedure. It obviously isn’t leading to great gains in the war on terror.

You want reason for American outrage? How about this: The death rate of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is escalating. Six more soldiers died in Iraq Friday. And there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And Osama bin Laden remains at large.

Who Let the Tools Loose

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 No Comments

Normally a fan of the Trib Editorial Page, this one got me

We know what Durbin thinks about the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners. So what’s the proper treatment of our coverage-hungry senior senator when he displaces the ever-present microphone long enough to insert his foot in his mouth? Ignore him. That would be torture.

Nice and pithy and utterly obnoxious given the subject. Saying he screwed up is fine, that is what editorial boards do. However, distracting from a serious issue in which Durbin simply made a bad analogy is far worse of a stunt than anything Durbin said. This isn’t a typical media hound just trying to get attention–it’s a serious story and one that the news hasn’t covered very well. To it’s credit the Trib did mention it in an editorial, brought about by another report that they crticized.

Perhaps if the Trib and other news organizations were doing a better job keeping the issue in front of the public, we wouldn’t have to wait for someone to say something over the top to get the subject attention.

Making matters worse, Americablog points out the Ed Board left out important details about the description of events.

Trib Board:

He read an account by an unnamed FBI agent of the alleged treatment of a prisoner who was “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water.” The prisoner, the agent said, had been subject to extremely hot and cold temperatures, and loud rap music.

Full Text of the description by Durbin:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold….On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

Of course, Kass makes even a pithier comment out of it, but Kass didn’t seem to read the actual speech either. On part stuck out to me:

Former Congressman Pete Peterson of Florida, a man I call a good friend and a man I served with in the House of Representatives, is a unique individual. He is one of the most cheerful people you would ever want to meet. You would never know, when you meet him, he was an Air Force pilot taken prisoner of war in Vietnam and spent 6 1/2 years in a Vietnamese prison. Here is what he said about this issue in a letter that he sent to me. Pete Peterson wrote:

From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival….This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us….We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime.

So a guy who went through it thinks differently.

Blogs are supposed to be the ones doing silly pithy posts about politicians, I’d hope the larger media would have the sense to know when it’s inappropriate.

Lott=/Durbin

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 No Comments

The most odious of comparisons out there is comparing the situation from Trent Lott’s comments to Strom Thurmond to Durbin’s comments. I wrote the following over at Rich’s as well.

===Sen. Trent Lott had the decency to resign HIS party leadership position after he put his foot in his mouth. No matter how many times he apologized, Dem critics were relentless in demanding his scalp. He did the right thing for his party in giving up his leadership job. I doubt Durbin will have the class to do likewise. Of course the media won’t hold Durbin to the same standard as Lott.

Well, let’s examine what they both said:

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

So then, brutal segregation was a good thing. Notice the difference here–Lott wasn’t comparing segregation to a nasty practice in another country, he was saying things would have been better underneath it.

What did Dick Durbin say:
“”If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings,” Durbin said Tuesday.”

So, he’s not saying brutality and inhumane treatment are good things as the South was under segregationists like Thurmond, he was saying America is better than brutal dictators.

I think it’s always a bad idea to compare torture to genocidal practices so I think Durbin should have been more circumspect. However, comparing the two types to statesments is nothing more than a craven attempt to compare two statements based on entirely different moral systems. One that believes some classes of humans are inferior and should be exploited, and one that believes the United States’ special role in the world is to defend the dignity of man and in doing so should set an example.

If you still want to compare the two statements I’d suggest you find a moral compass.

{end}

It’s absolutely stunning that someone can compare a call for the country to strive for justice and a higher standard to that of a man who suggested a vile system of repression would have been better than modern America.

Durbin’s Right and Wrong

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 2 Comments

Durbin was both stupid and wrong to compare the torture allegations to what we might hear out of Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge or the Soviet Gulags. He’s correct in a strict analogy that is where we expect to hear such horror stories, but the simple expanse of horrors under those regimes makes it a bad comparison. Since the US isn’t doing this systematically to entire populations it distracts attention and trivializes the victims. The ADL points this out well.

Zorn also points out Wes Clark’s point that pretty much raising Hitler in any political discussion means you lose–unless you are talking about Matt Hale, but that dipnuts is going to be in prison long enough that shouldn’t be a problem for a while.

The next part is what I posted over at Rich’s yesterday:

Nothing Dick Durbin did is going to help recruit young Islamic men to Al Qaeda. However, ignoring due process and engaging in prisoner treatment that is torture will only make the case against America stronger in the Middle East.

Due process in the modern world is largely a construct of Anglo-American political history–ignoring that proud tradition helps our enemies, not pointing out how we are ignoring it.

The prohibition against torture was enshrined in our own Constitution. If we can’t live up to our own social contract it’s a bit hard to sell our system as the better one–and it is.

Calling on The United States to live up to it’s social contract isn’t helping our enemies, it’s standing up for the ideals our Founders layed out in the Declaration of Independence.

There’s a lot of crap on this subject that’s obscuring the basic point–the United States of America is denying individuals access to due process and engaging in torture whether by our hands or by the hands of our allies.

There is no excuse for either of the above. We are better than that and we should thank those who point that out. Confusing the point with genocide is stupid and Durbin allowed this to get off target by choosing cases that involved genocide. Why did he do that? Anger? Probably. Would Uzbekistan be better? Hard to say. We don’t shoot people for mass protests, but we do engage in torture. What’s most bothersome is that people feel the need to distinguish The United States from these horrible governments by saying we aren’t that bad.

The defense of the United States shouldn’t rest upon being not as bad as despots and genocidal lunatics, it should rest in our unfailing commitment to the rule of law–something we aren’t living up to now.

The odd thing is that the press would have yet again ignored the problem if he hadn’t used those examples.

Indy Poll for Governor’s Race

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 No Comments

A lot of attention focused on Lisa Madigan and the Govenor being about even in the recent poll by the Glengariff Group and then how Topinka faired against the Guv.

But that’s not the news. Neither is Topinka’s being on top. The news is who is at the bottom and Rich Miller catches it. Gidwitz is at one percent raising the question how the hell did they call him and his mother both.

The real news is Steve Rauschenberger down at 3% (4% with leaners) in a poll coming only a little over a year after his candidacy for US Senate. His big challenge is raising cash which he hasn’t been particularly good at in the past, but if he can do that, he can raise his name recognition, but despite a last minute surge in the Senate race, his showing doesn’t seem to have any lasting effect.

Oberweis shows no improvement from last time with 15-16% total support. It’s hard to imagine he breaks the 25% he got in the Senate primary and LaHood is at 8-9% which isn’t bad or good–just about right for a guy who isn’t actively campaigning, but is a Member of Congress.

This race is shaping up to be one between Lahood, Topinka and Oberweis with Rauschenberger being the potential 4th candidate if he can raise enough cash. Assuming Rauschenberger can be competitive and O’Malley siphons off the 10% kool aid drinkers, Topinka is in a very strong position to win the nomination and that is the hardest race for Blagojevich (with LaHood perhaps close behind).

The Details (sub required)

A Glengariff Group (R) poll; conducted 6/2-4 for their own consumption; surveyed 600 regis. IL voters; margin of error +/- 4% (Capitol Fax, 6/15). Dem subsample: approx. 225 Dems; margin of error +/- 6.5%. GOP subsample: approx. 180 GOPers; margin of error +/- 7.4%. Tested: Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D), AG Lisa Madigan (D), Treas. Judy Baar Topinka (R), ’02 and ’04 IL SEN candidate/dairy farmer Jim Oberweis (R), Rep. Ray LaHood (R-18), ’04 SEN candidate/state Sen. Steve Rauschenberger (R) and businessman Ron Gidwitz (R).

Vallas

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 2 Comments

Oh well. Next?!

The Question Isn’t Why I Went to Colorado, Ralph

ArchPundit June 21, 2005 2 Comments

It’s why the hell did I come back to this infernal city

Ralph and I had a beer. I graded about 2000 AP Government tests. I had many more beers. Pray for our children and our future because studying sure as hell isn’t working.