..there’s really no other explanation.

Today’s editorial was about “Rewriting the Geneva Conventions“, and criticized Administration efforts to lawyer their way through the standards for prisoner care in such a way as to allow rougher treatment of prisoners.

I’m flatly against torture, although I’m not sure that I subscribe to a set of standards that would make the ACLU happy; but I’m against them for three core reasons: they damage the people who do the torturing irremediably; they don’t necessarily work very well; the damage to they do to the perception of American might and behavior is typically out of proportion to any benefit gained (see “they don’t necessarily work very well”); and they damage my society through the acceptance of that kind of behavior.I’ve said in the past that the man or woman on the spot who decides to use duress or brutality to interrogate someone who’s planted a ticking time bomb should do so fully aware of the legal consequences he or she will face when it is over.

But the Times says we shouldn’t torture captives because:

The Geneva Conventions protect Americans. If this country changes the rules, it’s changing the rules for Americans taken prisoner abroad. That is far too high a price to pay so this administration can hang on to its misbegotten policies.

Maybe if our troops ever get captured by the French. But to suggest that the standards of behavior of those we fight or have fought since World War II match our own – or that by degrading ours we somehow risk their lowering theirs is just ludicrous.

From 2003:

The ground offensive in the 1991 Persian Gulf War was in its second day when Joseph Small III piloted his OV-10 Bronco toward Kuwait City. The low- flying plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. He ejected and was captured. Within days, the war ended and, after being beaten and tortured, Small was released.

“I’ll be honest, there’s not a day in the past 12 years when I haven’t given some thought to the experience,” he said Monday from his home in Racine, Wis.

Because of the grim experiences of Small and 22 other POWs from the last Gulf war — officials say all were beaten and one of the women was raped — the Pentagon is especially concerned about the fate of Americans now believed to be held in Iraq, including two pilots confirmed as POWs Monday. U.S. officials repeatedly warned Iraq on Monday to abide by the Geneva convention that prohibits mistreatment or humiliation of prisoners.

“It’s a concern,” said Lt. Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Defense Department. “It’s a brutal regime, and their past experience would make us concerned.”

From Andy McNabb’s memoir of his captivity in Iraq. Go to Amazon, look up Bravo Two Zero, search within the book for ‘beating‘:

1. on Page 195:
“… the crowd. The soldiers started pushing the people away. It was a wonderful feeling. Just a minute ago they were beating me up; now these boys were my saviors. Better the devil you know … I was lying on my stomach …”
2. on Page 204:
“… and moaned. Some of it was put on. A lot of it wasn’t. Then, as if on a signal, the beating stopped. “Poor Andy, poor Andy,” I heard, and a mock clucking of concern. I got to my knees and put …”
3. on Page 223:
“… site. The slaps became punches that knocked me off the chair, but it wasn’t very exciting compared with the last beating. Probably they thought they’d now …”
4. on Page 277:
“… BRAVO TWO ZERO 277 split in several places during the beatings, and the wounds kept trying to congeal. But even the slightest movement made them reopen. My arse and lower back …”
5. on Page 296:
“… certain point; beyond that, it’s not a viable inducer of the goods. They can assess your physical state from the beatings they’ve given you. What they can’t gauge for sure is your mental state. For that, they need to know your …”
6. on Page 325:
“… and for what must have been quite a few days, it just carried on. Hour after hour, day after day, beating after beating, taking my turn with the other two, lying curled up, cold and in pain, waiting for the terrifying …”
7. on Page 359:
“… an American. We weren’t sure about Russell. We decided to initiate some form of contact with them. We risked a beating or worse if we were caught, but we decided it was worth it. If they were released or escaped , …”
8. on Page 366:
“… “Come on, then.” They backed off, shouting, “We’re going to split you up.” The threat was more horrifying than a beating would have been. Miraculously, nothing happened. We could only surmise that the boys didn’t report the incident in case their …”
9. on Page 380:
“… amazement. He was wearing a dish-dash. His body looked wasted, and he still bore the bruises and scars of severe beatings. “When we had that last contact and we both went down, I went left and got caught up in fire. …”

Here’s Admiral James Stockdale, a year after his return from North Vietnam:

For the sane man there is always an element of fear involved when he is captured in war. In Vietnam the enemy capitalized on this fear to an extreme degree. We were told we must live by sets of rules and regulations no normal American could possibly live by. When we violated these rules and regulations, we gave our captors what they considered sufficient moral justification for punishing us–binding us in ropes, locking us in stocks for days and weeks on end, locking us in torture cuffs for weeks at a time, and beating us to bloody pulps. As we reached our various breaking points, we were “allowed” to apologize for our transgressions and to atone for them by “confessing our crimes” and condemning our government.

Or this, from the Korean War:

Confinement of U.S. military personnel in the POW camps located in North Korea operated in three phases: July 1950 until the entry of the CCF into the war in November; the winter of 1950-1951 when several temporary camps were created that included the three “Valleys”; and the permanent camps. As mentioned, the NKPA had no POW system, just collection points. During the summer and fall of 1950, the NKPA moved POWs to the rear on foot, often by a death march. For example, during a 120-mile forced march during November 1950, approximately 130 of 700 POWs died. The First Offensive of the Chinese Communist Forces in late 1950 resulted in the capture of several thousand U.S. soldiers and Marines. Like the NKPA, the CCF at that time had no established POW system. As an expedient, the CCF set up a temporary camp called the “Valley” located 10 miles south of Pyoktong, North Korea, near the Yalu River. Primitive living conditions there resulted in the death of 500 to 700 of the 1,000 internees. American soldiers, most of them members of the 2d Infantry Division captured at Kunu-ri in November 1950, were kept at a place called “Death Valley,” 30 miles southeast of Pukchin. Forty percent of the camp’s 2,000 inmates died within three months. The other internment point known as “Peaceful Valley,” located near Kanggye, that held about 300 U.S. POWs, had better living conditions than the other two “Valleys” and only a 10 percent death rate.

Iraq, Vietnam, Korea. In which of these wars were captured American or allied troops treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions? What is the liklihood that a future American soldier, captured by Hizbollah will meet the standards in Guantanamo?

Again there are dozens of good reasons to insist that we treat captives firmly but decently (no matter how badly they may behave).

The reason proposed by the Times editors has nothing to do with reality or history, and isn’t one of them. But it speaks volumes about how they see the world, and what they know about it.

Wow. Based on the comments, my post below on “Les Mains Sales” and Grim’s “On The Virtues Of Killing Children” missed the mark entirely. It’s an important issue, I believe, so let me take sometime soon and try to reframe it.

A capsule version is that I believe that Grim’s post was really about bearing the unavoidable costs of warfare – which include killing children – by, in no small part, soldiering well and winning. Mine was about bearing the unavoidable cost of living in modern Western society. Or any society with a long history, where what you have comes in no small part from the historical accident of your birth, and what you owe comes in no small part from that.

Working on a longer, clearer explanation…

Over at BlackFive, Grim posted a piece which has become … kinda controversial.

It’s called “On The Virtues Of Killing Children” and you ought to read it.

It reminded me, strongly, of an old post of mine which I’m reproducing here.

LES MAINS SALES

So I was stuck in traffic riding my motorcycle to the client site today, which meant that the ride was more contemplative than usual (if I’m riding through traffic, I can’t think about anything but riding…).

And I was thinking about Avdeon Carol’s post, and what it is that I find so grating about many people (not including her at this point, since I don’t know her well enough) who share the general ‘attitude space’ I’m trying to talk about.

And I had an idea I just had to try out on you guys.

A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting…that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem…I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s ‘Dirty Hands’.

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

But I accept the blood on my hands. I can’t enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don’t get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to.

Posted by Armed Liberal at December 11, 2002 11:19 AM

My local paper, the Daily Breeze, which I love because high school sports dominate the Saturday sports page, runs a front-page article on what a 10kt nuke in Long Beach harbor would do … my nightmare scenario.

It’s a long, great article, and you ought to go read it.

Titled “Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack” the report warns that in the weeks and months after an attack, costs would exceed $1 trillion in medical care, insurance claims, workers’ compensation, evacuation and construction.

“The $50 billion to $100 billion for (the 9-11 terrorist attacks) put this figure into perspective,” the report states. “In general, consequences would far outstrip the resources available to cope with them.”

I’ll beg you to go read it, because it gives a sense of the stakes involved.

And when you’re done, ask yourself this…absent a calling card from the scientists at Natanz…who do we respond to when it happens?

And yes, the Times covered it as well – in the California section.

Shrinkwrapped blog has a pretty insightful riff on my rambling post on “Some Thoughts On Violence, Suicide, And Bad Philosophy“

Such people have no dependable core of their own and their chronic frustration and rage at a world which refuses to satiate their desperate inner hunger cannot be contained but must be externalized.

When the rage is externalized, all it needs is a coherent idea to give it meaning and shape. Islam, par excellence, is an ideology of Meaning. After all, by submitting to one’s God, there are no further questions; all questions have been answered.

Perhaps at one time vulnerable children could have found Meaning in their religion, but our Western elites have managed to destroy religion as a source of inner strength for too many. Without meaning, they have nothing, which is the core of nihilism. Modern Multiculturalism and the deconstruction of Western reality has left too many of our elites with no fixed beliefs; nothing they believe has any meaning beyond their belief that nothing has any meaning. There is one exception for the Left:

All cultures are equal except for Western Civilization , which is evil and the source of all that is wrong with the world.

And if that’s the case…well, no action is unjustifiable.

I’ve had a variety of reactions to author Gunter Grass’ admission that he was a member of Hitler’s (the real one, not the metaphorical one) SS during World War II.

Then it hit me. And I went to the bookshelf, and pulled down my copy of ShrinkLits, by Maurice Sagoff.

Dafoe’s “Moll Flanders”

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous
Moll Flanders, who was born in Newgate, and
during a life of continued variety, for
threescore years, besides her childhood,
was twelve years a Whore, five times
a Wife (thereof once to her own
brother), twelve years a
thief, eight years a
transported Felon in Virginia,
at last grew rich, lived honest,
and died a penitent.
Written from her
own memorandums.

– original title page

That’s the story,
…Briefly told.

At age 70,
…Weak and old,

Pricked by conscience,
…Moll retires,

Banks her savings
…And her fires;

She repents her
…Sins and all…

Love your sense of timing
…Moll.

Over at one of my favorite local blogs – it’s iconoclastic to the max – “Mayor Sam’s Sister City” (for Sam Yorty, a dead former mayor of Los Angeles) I tripped over this image:

Do you find this picture as offensive as I do? Can you imagine an image more insulting to the people who serve in our military than this one?

Let me tell you where it comes from: the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The post is about SPLC’s position – as reported by one reporter – that various anti-illegal immigration groups are “hate groups”.
The image is the head on a SPLC expose on white radicals in the military – it’s cropped, and the full image is here:

The Mayor Sam’s blog posts’ author, Walter Moore, needs to use Google more.

Back in 2000, SPLC was the subject of an article in Harper’s. You’d assume an anti-hate group would get plaudits from a progressive magazine. Assume again.

Here’s the article (reprinted at Freep, but the substance is exactly as I recall reading it).

Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its “Teaching Tolerance” program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of “hate groups” and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama’s highway patrol. That was then. Today, the SPLC spends most of its time–and money–on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” The Center earned $44 million last year alone–$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments–but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

It’s profitable because they work at it.

Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”

Now I like a good hate-group bashing as much as the next guy. But when I wrote my posts on “Skybox Liberals”, this article was a part of what I was thinking about. Doing well by doing – kinda – good.

Raising tempests in teapots appears to be their stock in trade. Slandering the troops is just the latest marketing communications from their ad shop.

So yesterday we took delivery of our new Civic Hybrid (in an attractive shade of Magnetic Pearl, with the dealer-$-packed options including a custom leather interior). We’ll be selling the Odyssey in the next few weeks (anyone want a nice 2000 Odyssey?), and this will be our only car (well, we do have four motorcycles…).

The tipping point toward decision was a spill TG took on her motorcycle while commuting; minor, little damage except to the cosmetics of her new bike and to my lifespan as the anxiety hit my adrenals…The program in California that lets hybrids use the HOV lanes is about to close, and by buying a hybrid now, we could get stickers allowing her to drive to work and still use the carpool lane – a saving of about 15 minutes on her otherwise 50 minute drive.

Hopefully, she’ll use it…

But there were other reasons as she & I discussed it last week.

The biggest one is simple; we’re down to one kid in the house, I’m not racing motorcycles (requiring a trailer), and so we haul around a bigger vehicle than we need. Objectively, the environmentally soundest thing we could do would be to put another 60 or 70,000 miles on it, and not buy a new vehicle.

But I do think it’s worth something to make tradeoffs between long-term and short-term impacts, and right now the thing we need to do is buy less oil. And while the difference between a 25mpg Odyssey and a 35mpg Civic Hybrid isn’t great, there’s some difference – back to my minor steps that add up theory.

And like it or not, it’s a public statement. In my case it’s not a public statement about global warming or saving the ice cap. It’s a public statement about lowering the price of oil and starving the funding for Finbury Mosque and all the other places around the world where people are being taught to hate me and my children.

So yes, I know we’ll likely never see a ROI on the price we paid unless gas is $4.00 per gallon. The value to me is the security of TG commuting more miles on 4 wheels instead of 2, and of my putting our money – literally – where my mouth is on what we ought to do about energy policy.

Once we get a few miles on it, I’ll talk about it some more.

Actually, a bunch of us who have been severely critical of Tim Rutten are probably kind of awestruck by his column today in the L.A. Times.

Lebanon photos: Take a closer look

THE controversy this week over Reuters’ distribution of digitally manipulated, falsely labeled and — probably — staged photos of the fighting in Lebanon hasn’t been nearly as large as it should have been.

Holy cow.

Rutten is the man who I criticized for thinking of the journalistic profession as a priesthood.

He said:

There is a certain kind of bright but brittle mind that loves this sort of either/or thinking. What such minds cannot accept is the common-sensical notion that real life — including that of the press — is lived mostly in the pragmatic middle. There, experience has demonstrated that intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline enable journalists to gather and report facts with an impartiality that — though sometimes imperfect — is good enough to serve the public’s interest in the generality of cases.

I said:

Rutten seems to have missed that whole Reformation thing; the notion that truth might not have to be derived from a priesthood – and make no mistake, when he starts talking about ‘intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline ,’ he’s talking about a priesthood – is something that went by the wayside in Western society a number of years ago. Frighteningly, it appears to be coming back.

Today, I tip my hat to him. Not because he said something that supports position I’ve taken (although that’s nice), but because he’s willing to publicly complain about this:

There are, however, two problems here, and they’re the reason this controversy shouldn’t be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media’s grudging response to the revelation of Hajj’s misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.

Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson’s website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj’s photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there’s anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies — including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj — are sending out of tormented Lebanon.

Well said. Rutten may feel there is a priesthood of journalists, but he sees that it needs to police it’s own, or else the laity will do it for them. I’m thrilled to hear him say that, and I’ll go put on a hat so I can tip it.

Meanwhile I’ll go see if Mrs. Patterico can throw some ice water on Patrick and bring him out of his dead faint.

You were in L.A. got to go to Coop’s and Gale Banks’, had my phone number and didn’t invite me!!

Great. Now I know where I rate. You’ll pay, he said darkly, you’ll pay.

I’m so ronrey…