The American Conservative

What Russians lack in wit, they make up for in natural resources.

(Hat tip: Rachman)

Judging from some of the reported reactions to Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Israel this week, one might be forgiven for imagining that the pontiff had publicly denied the Holocaust and admitted to Nazi sympathies.

In truth, of course, he did the opposite. He cut a dignified and humble figure throughout the trip. And At Yad Vashem memorial, he said: “May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled or forgotten! And may all people of goodwill remain vigilant in rooting out from the heart of man anything that could lead to tragedies such as this!” Hardly mincing his words.

But he did not jump through the various PR hoops that the media had set up for him. He did not apologize for Christian anti-Semitism, denounce the war-time Pius XII as a closet Nazi, discuss his own forced service in Hitler Youth, or repeat his regret for the damage to Christian-Jewish relations caused by his lifting of the excommunication on the holocaust-denying British Bishop Richard Williamson. Thus the headlines reported Jewish “disappointment” and “anger” at Benedict’s insensitivity.

No doubt plenty of Catholics are distressed, too, to see yet more PR bungling from the Holy See. (Fr Federico Lombardi, the Vatican press spokesman, unhelpfully decided to announce at a Jerusalem press conference that the Pope had “never, never, never” been in the Hitler Youth. This is false.)

But it is not altogether surprising that Pope Benedict neglected to play the media-spin game. In fact, he had reminded reporters before leaving Rome this month that he is not a politician. He does not regard papal pilgrimages as opportunities to polish the Catholic brand. As John Allen puts it, he “seems to believe that occasions for grappling with the deepest and most painful mysteries about God’s plan require something more from a pope than good image management”. Exactly.

PS. Here’s a good piece from my old colleague Simon Caldwell debunking some of the often-hurled calumnies against Pius XII.

I confess that I have not seen the CIA memos referred to by Dick Cheney that he believes demonstrate that torture works, but have spoken to someone who claims to be familiar with the documents that the former VP is referring to.  The memos were drafted for the White House to demonstrate the success of the enhanced interrogation program and were not intended to look at the downside of the procedure, which means they provide only a very selective and uncritical overview.  They were written by the CIA staff tasked with carrying out the interrogations which inevitably had a vested interest in making the program appear to be both effective and legal.  Other Agency components, including its Inspector General’s office, opposed the program for various reasons, including its failure to produce any genuine intelligence, so there was hardly any consensus even inside the CIA on the procedure and effectiveness.

The memos cite several leads developed from the interrogations which may or may not have led to the thwarting of terrorist plots, but they make no attempt to critique the interrogation process itself to determine if the information might have been obtained more conventionally.  None of the interrogations of “high value suspects” related to a “smoking gun scenario” where a detainee knew details of an imminent terrorist attack, meaning that the waterboarding was carried out even when there was no pressing need to use that technique.  The memos also did not address the issue of the numerous false leads and bogus information derived from confessions under torture that made the entire process questionable.

The Brits have not yet got the hang of freedom of information and public accountability. Tony Blair launched these two novel ideas on the British public, and after covering up all the evidence to the contrary promptly went to war with Iraq on the phony pretext that Mr. Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Now the British parliament has offered to publish all the expenses claimed in addition to their salaries by Members of Parliament, but it was planning to release only a modified list with the most embarrassing details left out, when hey! presto! the Daily Telegraph got hold of the unexpurgated list and has been publishing it each day. Among the more venial of the sins committed by Labour ministers was the acquisition of two lavatory seats by John Prescott. He used to be called Two Jags Prescott because he had two Jaguar cars, but the recession has obviously reduced his venality count to two lavatory seats. Less venial and more venal is David Heathcoat-Amory for the conservatives who purchased 550 sacks of Cow poo with public money. It’s a hoot! But these two examples account for tiny amounts of money compared to the major carpet bagging activities that many of our politicians have been indulging in. The speaker of our parliament, who really doesn’t get it at all, has demanded that the police should investigate the mole who leaked the information to the Telegraph. David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative party, who does get it, has called in all the shadow ministers and threatened them with the sack if they do not return their ill gotten gains to the Inland revenue. Result: lots of cheques have started winging their way from conservative central office to the Inland revenue. On the eve of the E.U parliament elections, repaying the Inland Revenue has taken on pandemic proportions and politicians from all our parties are now at it; desperately trying to buy back their virtue. Ah well! There is a very comforting sketch enacted by Goldie Hawn and Dean Martin on YouTube about the drawbacks of being smart and the advantages of being dumb. Here it is:

Brendan gets his teeth into the narcissism of Mia Farrow and other celebrities who have been “dieting for Darfur” — ie trimming their figures as the public marvels at their humanitarian largesse.

Good bit:

Branson’s three-day “hunger strike” started over the weekend. On the first evening he said he was craving a “decent meal” and was feeling so disorientated that he “had a couple games of chess with somebody who doesn’t normally beat me, and he beat me both times”. Is there no sacrifice celebrities aren’t willing to make in order to Save Darfur?

The idea of saving the media is never going to get a bad press. This morning I went to an interesting New America Foundation conference entitled “Who Pays for the News?” The event was well attended, mostly by nervous looking journos uncertain about their futures. There was an almost palpable sense of goodwill toward the keynote speaker, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD), sponsor of the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which aims to facilitate the transfer of struggling media organs into non-profit, 501(c)(3) status. A long panel discussion about the existential crisis of modern journalism followed.

Obviously, nobody claimed to have cracked the future-of-media code: there is no answer … yet.

Read More…

I’m pleased to announce that John Schwenkler’s blog “Upturned Earth” (which also features regular contributions from J.L. Wall) has joined The American Conservative‘s on-line offerings. You can find a feed for the blog on our main page, and you’ll notice that we’ve moved the “blogs” button on our main toolbar a little further to the right to accommodate a drop-down menu that lists @TAC, Daniel Larison’s Eunomia, and now Upturned Earth.

TAC readers will recall John from his essay “Food for Thought” in our culinary conservatism issue, as well as his article on secession and his contribution to our presidential symposium last November. We think you’ll find Upturned Earth every bit as stimulating as @TAC and Eunomia. And we’ll be giving you more new content in weeks to come — stay tuned.

We’ve also added to the toolbar at the top of the page a link to a new page for credit card donations to TAC. Subscriptions only cover part of the cost for keeping us going — so if you enjoy the magazine and website, please consider making a donation. This goes double if you don’t get the print magazine and enjoy The American Conservative purely as an on-line experience. Help us keep improving the website by showing your support through a donation.

The headline says it all. Smack in a middle of his latest FOX News torture apologia, ex-Veep Cheney says President Obama would be “hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal” to lead the forces in Afghanistan.

Oh, and for good measure, Max Boot and Charles Krauthammer approve, too.

Coming from Cheney, who has spent the last month condoning torture, or so-called “harsh interrogation techniques,” of detainees in his administration’s GWOT (global war on terror), this statement is quite apropos. Too bad the perverse joke will be lost on most people reading the mainstream news accounts of Gen. McChrystal’s ascension this week. To read it, McChrystal is one resounding chord in the evolving ballad of the new Army versus the Old, the “fresh eyes”  versus the crusty cataracts, conventional versus asymmetric. McChrystal “gets it,” all the cool COIN blogs say. McKiernan — he was a stand-up guy — just didn’t.

Day two into this story and The New York Times is talking about McChrystal’s iPod and “encyclopedic” knowledge of terrorists, while WaPo talks about his “exhaustive energy” and being “big into road marching” in the 1980′s. Thankfully, the “scary smart” moniker has already done it’s rounds, for now. Both reports acknowledge the general’s role in the Pat Tillman cover-up might strain upcoming confirmation hearings.

But seeing that the whole of Washington is up to its very eyeballs in torture memos, torture hearings and the expected release of torture photos,  one would expect the major papers of record to talk about long-standing accusations of torture practiced by an covert elite task force headed up by one Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Sure they nibble at the edges — WaPo calls him a “manhunter,” who must transcend the “perception that he is, at his core, an Army Ranger, an elite practitioner of rapid-fire raids intended to ‘find, fix, finish’ the enemy.” Sounds like a Schwarzenegger film. The NYT admits, “Most of what General McChrystal has done over a 33-year career remains classified, including service between 2003 and 2008 as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite unit so clandestine that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence.”

But what the blogs have been talking about at length and what the mainstreamers seem to be afraid to acknowledge, is that McChrystal can be placed at the very center of the controversy the Obama Administration is now wrestling with and Cheney seeks to defend:  the torture and abuse — sanctioned and delegated from the top — of battlefield detainees throughout the GWOT theater under President Bush. It doesn’t take long to click through and read in-depth accounts of the goings-on under McChrystal’s special operations command in The Atlantic (May 2007) and Esquire (August 2006).

Just a taste from Richardson’s piece:

This was Camp Nama, the home of Task Force 121, the Special Ops team that chased Osama bin Laden and caught Saddam Hussein and would ultimately locate and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the self-described leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. It was Rumsfeld’s baby, the Platonic ideal of his fast and mobile army. From its size to its mission, everything about it was and remains an official secret. (Snip)

It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in — they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.”Given Task Force 121′s history, that was a remarkable promise. Formed in the summer of 2003, it quickly became notorious. By August the CIA had already ordered its officers to avoid Camp Nama. Then two Iraqi men died following encounters with Navy Seals from Task Force 121 — one at Abu Ghraib and one in Mosul — and an official investigation by a retired Army colonel named Stuart Herrington, first reported in The Washington Post, found evidence of widespread beatings. “Everyone knows about it,” one Task Force officer told Herrington. Six months later, two FBI agents raised concerns about suspicious burn marks and other signs of harsh treatment. Then the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that his men had seen evidence of prisoners with burn marks and bruises and once saw a Task Force member “punch [the] prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention.”

Not to diminish it’s importance, but why the NYT and WaPo would think the Pat Tillman cover-up might be  more of an obstacle to McChrystal’s confirmation than stuff like this is beyond me. Really. I feel like I am missing something here. Perhaps it’s simply because the anointed, conventional media filters on the Right and Left like this guy, and have already embraced a narrative of why he was chosen: because he “gets” the “new war” and that the “new” President is “changing course” to overcome the quagmire that “Af-Pak” became under his predecessor.

That McChrystal himself might carry the ugly baggage from that predecessor’s policies just doesn’t fit the script.

Dennis, I wish I had blogged about “The Thick of It” and “In the Loop”, yet sadly no. Perhaps you were thinking of Stuart Reid, who recently wrote about the new film in his excellent column.

As you say, “The Thick of It,” the TV series, is wonderful – a hilarious (and distressingly accurate) satire on British politics in the time of New Labour. It’s hard to get a DVD copy in America, though early episodes can be seen on YouTube. (Sensitive readers be warned: the language is foul — suitably so for a portrayal of modern British pols.)

I have not seen “In the Loop,” the film version, which is scheduled for limited U.S. release on July 28th, but I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews. Depressingly, the actor Chris Langham, who was tremendous as the hopeless and cowardly minister Hugh Abbot in the TV show, got arrested for being a pedophile and so could not star in the film. I’m told, however, that his replacement Tom Hollander is excellent.

I am not sure I agree, though, with Dennis’s disparaging assessment of American television in contrast to what’s on the small screen in the UK. “The West Wing” is indeed boring. And it is true Britain has produced some very good comedy TV in the last decade – “The Day Today”, “Brasseye”, “Peep Show”, “Alan Partridge”, “The Office”, and “The Thick of It” spring to mind — and the odd good drama. But there are many equally high-quality American comedies, and it is worth remembering that the vast majority of TV in all countries — especially Britain — is very, very bad.

Plus, the UK has nothing as good as HBO, which has produced countless first-rate and absorbing shows. But I’d better stop being typically Caucasoid.

London Mayor Boris Johnson offers his thoughts on a story Freddy flagged up last week — British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s refusal to let Michael Savage into the country. Johnson writes:

Every day the American airwaves are churned by the paranoid rantings of Michael Savage and his kind. Has this stuff warped America, or deformed its political psyche? On the contrary, the Americans have just had the good sense to elect a supremely gifted and eloquent black man – when the prospect of a black British prime minister still seems some way off. What are we, some sort of kindergarten that needs to be protected against these dangerous American radio shows? Does Jacqui Smith think we are all dimwits, who can’t tell when a man like Savage is talking rubbish? Why can America take it, and we can’t?

The answer is that America still has a constitutional protection of free speech, and I have been amazed, over the last few days, to see how few people in this country are willing to stick up for that elementary principle. Across Fleet Street, swords have stuck in their scabbards, swords that normally leap to the defence of liberty.

Hear, hear. If only Britain would take Savage, and we could have Boris Johnson instead…