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![]() Just Above Sunset
May 30, 2004: A whole Lott of love here... Conservative Thought
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Some views from the conservative
right… Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly follows rationalizations (everyone need a hobby). Here’s his take on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. A few weeks ago I half-jokingly noted that mainstream conservative reaction to Abu Ghraib
had shifted over time. Well, he thinks the mainstream
conservative right has reached this Phase 4. ”Frankly, to save some American troops' lives or a unit that could be in danger, I think
you should get really rough with them," Lott said. "Some of those people
should probably not be in prisons in the first place." But you see the logic. … wimps unwilling
to torture even these randomly detained and probably useless bystanders, for the greater good, endanger us all. The possible information to be obtained matters more far more than any foolish moral scruples or legal
niceties. This is war, as he says. The questioning of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners last fall in the newly established interrogation
center at Abu Ghraib prison yielded very little valuable intelligence, according to civilian and military officials. Oh well. Wrong guys. They were just useless bystanders. Sorry about that. ____________ Footnote: This
fellow has a few things to say about the current meme from the conservative right regarding those prison pictures. Postcards from the culture wars… Frank
Rich International
Herald Tribune, Friday, May 28, 2004 New
York Times, Sunday, May 30, 2004 Excerpt
1: … How do we square the tales
of American cruelty with the promise of democracy we thought we were bringing to Iraq?
One obvious way might be to acknowledge with some humility that Americans' often proud history has always had a fault
line, running from slavery to Wounded Knee to My Lai. But there's an easier way
out in 2004: blame Janet Jackson for what's gone wrong in Iraq. Excerpt
2: … To blame every American transgression
on the culture, whether the transgression is as grievous as Abu Ghraib or the shootings at Columbine or as trivial as lubricious
teenage fashions, is to absolve Americans of any responsibility for anything. It
used to be that liberals pinned all American sins on the military-industrial complex; now it's conservatives who pin them
all on the Viacom-Time Warner complex. Indeed. Maybe Bush should get out more. But
does this argument – Janet Jackson made them do it (one thinks of Flip Wilson’s famous “The Devil made me
do it!” routine) – really get Bush off the hook. Recommended
reading? Appoint
a special counsel to investigate Geneva violations. Now Neal Katyal teaches law at Georgetown University. He is chief counsel to the military defense lawyers in the Guantánamo case pending at the Supreme Court. What’s
he argue? In the past week, details have emerged of not only more prisoner abuse in Iraq, but also a concerted effort by the
president's chief lawyer to try to insulate such abuse from domestic criminal investigation.
A 2002 memorandum from White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales tells the president to refuse to apply the protection of the Geneva Conventions
to detainees because Americans could be charged in domestic courts with war crimes.
Now that photos and Army reports suggest that just such crimes have been committed, a criminal investigation is necessary. And because the administration's own memoranda reveal that it tried to adopt policies
to frustrate precisely such prosecutions, the attorney general must now appoint an outside prosecutor to investigate whether
war crimes actually occurred. This is the paradigmatic case for a special counsel. Really. The whole thing is long and detailed, a legal argument. And there is a smoking gun. |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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