Whistling to the graveyard

I clicked over to The Corner this morning to see if they would have anything to say confirm my conviction that they would manage not to discuss the staggering revelations that the Times and the Post pulled from their advance copies of Jane Mayer’s new book. Glenn Greenwald runs through the lowlights (emphases his):

• “Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.”
• “A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were ‘enemy combatants’ subject to indefinite incarceration.”
• “[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees’ cases . . . ‘There will be no review,’ the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. ‘The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.’”
• “[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.”
• [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were ‘categorically’ torture, which is illegal under both American and international law“.
• “[T]he Red Cross document ‘warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.’”

If ever there were a time for the defenders of this regime to engage in some serious self-scrutiny, one would think that this would be it. At NRO, though, it’s been all Tony Snow, all the time, with no fewer than eighteen straight posts about his life and death since his passing was announced this morning. I’m happy enough to second James’s sentiments, and pray of course that the man will rest in God’s peace, but like I said – we get the media, and of course also the utter civilizational collapse, that we deserve. And if this is what passes for conservative commentary on the events of the day, do me a favor and count me out of that racket.

Filed under: civil liberties, conservatism, media/culture, torture