Igor! We Need to Recalibrate the Stupid-O-Meter!

Yes, our stupid-o-meter has been blown out by a gigantic stupidomagnetic pulse. And Ann Althouse is now the winner-for-life of the Stupidest Woman Alive contest:

Whiskey Fire: Ann Althouse always has the capacity to completely and utterly astound me. There is always another layer of just plain nuts. The pictures of Jose Padilla being led to the dentist in leg shackles and blackout goggles have provoked outrage and disgust and bafflement. Why the goggles? What's the point? Althouse has an answer:

Perhaps there is a fear that he will communicate in code by blinking.

And upon being informed that this is, in fact, completely absurd, she becomes characteristically petulant:

I'm not saying Padilla deserves to be treated the way he has over the years, but I am responding to the assertion that there is absolutely no conceivable reason for blindfolding him. Plainly, I have refuted that.

Plainly. She was blinking when she typed it.

I fear there is not snark enough in all the world for Althouse.

Fear not. When the One Who Is made Althouse, she also made Altmouse!

Comments

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/us/04detain.html?ex=1322888400&en=accb01df2436f791&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 4, 2006

Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect's Isolation
By DEBORAH SONTAG

One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C.

That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.

"Today is May 21," a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. "Right now we're ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant."

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla's bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla's legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla's cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla's lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush's powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla's electronic court file late Friday.

To Mr. Padilla's lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami....

[Ivan Johnson]

Not to make light of Mr. Padilla's horrendous treatment, I wouldn't mind having noise-blocking headphones and blacked-out goggles the next time I had serious dental work. There's a lot to be said in favor of sensory deprivation under those circumstances.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04BROO.html?ex=1383282000&en=a52dd59eac5f7517&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

November 4, 2003

A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down
By DAVID BROOKS

Iraqification is a strategy for the long haul, but over the next six months, when progress must be made, this is our job. And the main challenge now is to preserve our national morale.

The shooting down of the Chinook helicopter near Fallujah over the weekend was a shock to the body politic. The fact is, we Americans do not like staring into the face of evil. It is in our progressive and optimistic nature to believe that human beings are basically good, or at least rational. When we stare into a cave of horrors, whether it is in Somalia, Beirut or Tikrit, we see a tangled morass we don't understand. Our instinct is to get out as quickly as possible.

It's not that we can't accept casualties. History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence.

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.

The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East....

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60C13FE355D0C728DDDA80994DB404482

Avoid War Crimes

To the Editor:

In ''A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down,'' David Brooks writes, ''Inevitably, there will be atrocities'' committed by our forces in Iraq. Did he forget to add that they must be prosecuted?

War crimes are indeed more likely if influential commentators foreshadow impunity for perpetrators of the ''brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt.''

The choice is not between committing war crimes and retreating ''into the paradise of our own innocence.'' A third option is for the United States to strive to avoid complicity.

It is untrue that ''we have to take morally hazardous action.'' Those who choose it, or urge others to, cannot evade or distribute responsibility by asserting that ''we live in a fallen world.''

BEN KIERNAN
New Haven, Nov. 4, 2003
The writer is director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University.

[christofay]

the Iraqification process is going to drive us to the poorhouse before there are three Iraqis who will gather together to follow the orders of the Iraqi govt.

Few hundred thousand missing weapons, well they have to be in someone's hands, don't they?

Training and training hundreds of thousands of Iraqi police and military for our ost battalions, total forces to follow the central Iraqi govt squat, unless the person giving the orders is the local cult leader.

Brooks-mis-named, Cold Pee might be better, "Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense." He used the F U measure, and it was 6 F Us ago.

[Jonathan King]

Brad DeLong writes:
> Yes, our stupid-o-meter has been blown out by a gigantic
> stupidomagnetic pulse.

Wow; I didn't realize that stupidity had a magnetic component. (Or is this just stupidity in current events? :-)) I always thought stupidity was a candidate for the missing matter in the universe, due to its incredible density.

[Colin]

Is someone out there keeping track of her work? Who can forget this, on the police killing of de Menezes in London last year:

"Is it not true that yesterday's sad mistake has already solved the problem it represents? In fact, a further good has been created: as ordinary persons change their behavior and drop the bulky clothing and unnecessary running, the real terrorists will stand out more. Indeed, if anyone ever behaves like Jean Charles de Menezes again, the presumption that he is a terrorist will be so overwhelmingly strong that the police really must kill him."

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/07
/how-dangerous-is-that-shoot-to-kill.html

which has a certain similarity to this recent example -- Althouse has perhaps read too many pulp thrillers too credulously.

In a less-lethal genre of thickitude there was her famous work of photographic analysis:

http://feministing.com/archives/005716.html

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/opinion/l06padilla.html

Jose Padilla's Ordeal in the Brig

To the Editor:

"A Videotape Offers a Window Into a Terror Suspect's Isolation; Black-Out Goggles, Shackles and Years in Solitary":

I am horrified. I moved to Europe shortly after 9/11 and witnessed the decline in America's standing and loss of moral authority.

America is a wonderful country, and I say this particularly as the child of immigrants who have lived the American dream.

We are supposed to stand for liberty and human rights. Could any of us be declared enemies of the government, like Jose Padilla, and be locked up for years without charge and under such inhumane conditions?

What has our country come to in the name of security? How will history judge all of us who stood by and allowed our government to act this way?

We should be holding demonstrations around the country to show Washington and the world that America's people do not believe that this is what America stands for.

Alka Agrawal
Farmington Hills, Mich., Dec. 4, 2006

•

To the Editor:

Our mistreatment of prisoners has incalculable consequences. That we lose the moral high ground and expose our soldiers to possible mistreatment by enemy governments is important. That we degrade our own constitutional protections when we degrade those of another is important.

A military historian and a constitutional scholar might help us weigh these consequences and balance them against the exigencies of the day. But who can estimate the harm we have done to our individual souls and to the soul of our nation through this treatment of Jose Padilla and the other so-called enemy combatants?

David Chrisman
Los Angeles, Dec. 4, 2006

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/opinion/l06padilla.html

Jose Padilla's Ordeal in the Brig

To the Editor:

I read "A Videotape Offers a Window Into a Terror Suspect's Isolation" with shock and horror. Is this America?

Jose Padilla has not yet been convicted of anything, and yet our government sees fit to confine him in complete isolation, and even more cruelly, to block his sight and hearing when he is let out of that bleak cell. It's like something from a Soviet gulag.

We treat convicted serial killers better than this.

Treating accused prisoners humanely is not "coddling terrorists." And any country that does this to a human being no longer deserves the label "land of the free and the home of the brave."

Dana L. Hoffman
West Hartford, Conn., Dec. 4, 2006

•

To the Editor:

I am disgusted by the depth of depravity of the treatment of Jose Padilla by our government. This administration has turned our country into a Kafka novel.

The cover-up of the government's mistake in pressing its original charges is just as bad as the original charges. When will this insanity end?

Mary Beth Mauer
Jackson, Ohio, Dec. 4, 2006

[Minnesotachuck]

I'm defending neither the treatment of Padilla nor the quality and quantity of Ms. Althouse's synapses, but there is precedent for her concern about communication via blinking. On an occasion during the Vietnam war when a number of American prisoners were trotted out for a press event by the North Vietnamese, one of them was determined to be blinking out the word "torture" in Morse code. IIRC it may have been Jeremiah Denton, a Navy aviator who later went on the the US Senate from Alabama. Then again, it may not, given the decline of my own aging synapses.

[Matt]

Minnesotachuck, the question of course isn't whether such an action is concievably possible. Of course it is. The question is whether anyone who wasn't a moral midget of the first order would think about this in this case and use it as a possible justification since it's quite obvious that this wasn't happening here. Althouse has shown over and over that she's a moral midget, unfortunately.

[anne]

"I'm defending neither the treatment of Padilla nor the quality and quantity of Ms. Althouse's synapses, but there is precedent for her concern about communication via blinking."

There is no precedent for barbarity, there is no precedent for lack of heartbreaking concern for barbarity, there is no precedent for an American descent to inhumanity; none, never, ever.

[anne]

Where is a sense of decency in an Administration that could foster such inhumanity? But, of course, the sentence is already illogical, for there can be no decency in an Administration in which such inhumanity would be tolerated for a moment.

[kharris]

Communicate by blinking? Communicate what? Kinda out of the loop, ain't he? What's he going to communicate to the blink-savvy dentist, in cahoots with al-Qaeda? Avoid the pea soup?

[Dave Parker]

"Communicate by blinking?"

Hey, it's the best method Dubya's come up with, don't knock it.

[johne]

Minnesotachuck brings up a good point: the possibility of prisoners communicating by means of blinks should only be of concern to governments with outlooks similar to those of 1970's North Vietnam.

[Dave Parker]

Or governments that communicate by the likes of "It is now a base of operations for international terrorism, including al-Qaeda. Iraq is a centerpiece of American foreign policy"

[Anderson]

"the possibility of prisoners communicating by means of blinks should only be of concern to governments with outlooks similar to those of 1970's North Vietnam."

Ka-CHING, as they say.

[BruceR]

If you can't see the difference between Denton blinking "SOS" during the process of making a false statement that he was not being tortured he was reading under threat of further torture, and Padilla's situation, you're no longer a fully rational individual.

Worst possible thing he could ever do in this circumstance is he'd see a camera, skip the blinking nonsense, and start shouting, Oswald-style, that he was a patsy, he'd been subject to brutality, etc. So what we're really talking about here, best-case, is that a man is being deprived of basic human rights simply to avoid embarrassing the state.

The worst-case is, well, worse.

[Emma Anne]

He might have blinked "SOS." Can't have that might embolden the terrorists.

[Dave Parker]

It's "Hi Mom" that you need to watch out for. There's no telling where these guys are going to draw the line.

[Anthony Damiani]

The bandwidth limitations and high potential error rate for blink based transmission make it a poor mechanism for communicating information of any sophistication. Even if he had been trained in an Al-Quaeda code-blinking camp. Bearing in mind that he can't possible have any current intelligence, what possible message could he have sent that would have been of such significance to merit this kind of treatment?

Ridiculous. This only further underscores that there is no action taken by the state which will not prompt apologetics from the rightists.

[entlord]

This reminds me somewhat of the circumstances in the "Man without a Country" except Padilla has never been tried, has never even been charged, and the Feds have resisted filing charges,taking the point of view that charges are really superfluous.
When John Yoo left the DOJ, I think his replacement was Franz Kafka.