Better Angels - Diana wonders "Why is Jim being so soft on Hitchens?" Hey, you know me, Loyal Reader - I just can't stay mad at people. Heck, if Glenn Reynolds himself suddenly slapped himself on the forehead and said, "Hey! How did I, a libertarian, succumb to a freaking cult of personality for a politician? And George W. Bush, yet?" I'd want to drive to Tennessee and give him a big ol' hug. That's just the kind of sweet guy I am. The thing about the latest Hitchens column that's disarming is that it is forthright about what has gone on there at the beginning:

I

In a recent public debate, so I was told, an American officer referred to the Abu Ghraib scandal as a "moral Chernobyl." You might think that this was overstating matters, even if in one important sense-because Chernobyl was morally an accident, albeit in some ways a "systemic" one - it is actually understating them.

But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture - which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.

Sometimes people remember what they used to know, and Hitchens knew that that torture and rape and murder of the helpless were always wrong. Not just wrong when Saddam did them; not just wrong when someone did them more often than we do, not just wrong when the US government decides to use it as an excuse for a war, not just wrong when We Decide. Always. Wrong.

I have hopes for this guy.

This gets into my hierarchy of values right now. The War has been the most important thing for some time. However, it is being superceded by the explicit threat to constitutional government contained in the recently-unearthed Pentagon and DOJ memos, and the clear and present danger to our national soul that is our progressive transformation into a torture state. Let me be clear: The War is the source of the other dangers. It's classic Hayek: the state intervention that necessitates further state intervention. However, the threats of untrammelled Presidential power and acceptance of torture are so great and so immediate that I will happily accept the aid of war supporters in opposing them. At some point we'll need to have a talk about how you could have thought things would go otherwise, but in the meantime, to the barricades, dude.

Happy Happy Web - Absolutely nothing about the Alzheimer's of the republic in this item! Instead there's

o Corporate rock hack of the week: Nickelback's first hit and most recent hit in a single MP3 at Nintendorks, one coming out the left speaker and one the right. Can you tell them apart? (Via costello-l.)

o I'm not so into Neal Stephenson, but Nate is, and he has a bigass review of The Confusion.

o More Outsourcing: Brooke has added some temporary guest bloggers to Obernews. Less Brooke makes me sad, but I already want Adrienne Aldredge to get her own blog when her guest stint is over.

o Speaking of guest bloggers, Josh Marshall has hired Spencer Ackerman from TNR and Daniel Drezner wants a guest blogger. I guess you're nobody now unless you've had one and been one too. Hey, I hosted the Talking Dog for a week once while his site was down. I just didn't go anywhere.

o An item on Aaron Haspel's Killing Puppies for the Sake of Art has me pondering, once again, the annoying question of how to define poetry. It bugs me that the other art forms don't seem to have the problem of being impossible to define except in terms of merit - you can come up with definitions of the novel or dance that don't make the bad novel or bad dance a contradiction in terms. But according to a lot of definitions of poetry, there are no bad poems, only non-poems.

The other problem is definitions that are too vague to be useful, like Stafford's "A poem is any piece of writing that demands a certain kind of attention." No doubt! And what kind would that be, sir? Oh that's right, you went and died without really saying. And Stafford is not to be trusted anyway. I remain convinced that, in the guise of a genial sage, he spent decades trying to fool the competition with spectacularly false advice about how to write poems.

I find myself returning to a tentative definition Henry Taylor offered some years ago: poetry is a piece of writing you either remember verbatim or feel uncomfortable not doing so. We might paraphrase this as "Poetry is writing that has no satisfactory paraphrase." At first blush, this seems as normative as anything else, but I'm not sure it needs to be. I can think of two legendarily awful poems, Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" and Mary Oliver's excresence about the stillborn kitten, that are pathetically bad, but that I would want to quote exactly in any discussion of their awfulness.

Finally, it occurs to me that many of the problems of defining poetry go right away if you simply declare that the "prose poem" is a delusion. It's not that short prose effusions don't exist. They can even be a legitimate art form. (I am partial to "The Solution" by Sharon Olds.) But we don't have to agree that they are "poetry." Here's a limit case. We know that booklength narrative poems can exist and have been written (or composed, pre-writing) for thousands of years. Could there be a booklength narrative prose poem? How would you tell it from a novel? Most likely by waving hands at it and saying it took the top of your head off or something.

Now is the Time - Useful Anne Applebaum column in the Post this morning:

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it. To see what I mean, review the content of a few items now easily found on the Internet.

And she does. All stuff you've seen, but useful to have it collected in such a prominent place. Along the way to her conclusion, she can't avoid one of those absurd constructions that comes of treating official institutions as if they were somehow entities rather than collections of variously self-interested actors, to wit:

But without political support, the military alone will be unable to push further, to uncover who, exactly, gave the military its orders . . .

Her conclusion is important:

Voters have some items of information available to them, as listed above. Voters -- ultimately the most important source of pressure on democratic politicians -- can petition their congressmen, their senators and their president for more. If they don't, the elections will be held, the subject will change. Without a real national debate, without congressional approval, without much discussion of what torture actually means and why it has so long been illegal at home and abroad, a few secret committees will have changed the character of this country.

Indeed, if the voters can't move the politicians, and the politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all.

Here we must change the word "can't" in the last sentence to either don't or won't. I am coming to have real concerns whether we as a people retain enough republican virtue to insist that the country remain true to itself. On one level, when Christopher Hitchens argues, in his latest column, that we're all to blame for the torture our government has been engaging in, it sounds like a cheap attempt to deflect blame from his warhawk buddies. But on another level, I think Hitchens is sincere, and also correct. Since September 11, 2001, this country has faced not an existential threat, but an essential one: who will we have the courage to be? Lately, abetted by an administration gone mad with vainglory, we have begun to fail that test. We take it as our right to commit the abuses we condemn in others. Worse, we take it as our right to transgress ourselves, and continue to condemn those who trespass likewise. I myself have been too willing to simply observe and record. This morning I will start making those calls Applebaum enjoins me to make. Please do likewise.

Leisure Reading - For you I dug up Stuart Taylor's Mumia article from 1995, "Guilty and Framed." There's also an article from a year later that's worth reading. Taylor's thesis is contained in the title of his first article, with the further wrinkle that, as he writes in the second one, "if he did, it was closer to manslaughter than to cold-blooded murder." Taylor is completely free of hippie-dippie Mumia fandom, and clearly expected to reach different conclusions than he ended up reaching.

Tortured Readings - Eve Tushnet finds an interesting-looking Stuart Taylor essay on the 2002 DOJ memo. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. In the excerpt Eve posts, he is kinder than other commentators to the sections construing the meaning of torture, but just as hard on the commander-in-chief clause that ate the constitution parts. I don't think the kind parts will prove justiifed, but have no doubt it's worth reading. Taylor is the moderately conservative legal analyst who famously concluded that Mumia Abu Jamal really had gotten jobbed, if I recall correctly.

Meanwhile, the Medium Lobster slips down a slope:

Imagine there is some weapon of mass destruction planted by terrorists in the heart of a city, ready to go off - a "ticking bomb," if you will. Would it be wrong to torture a terrorist to find the location of such a device and save the millions of lives at risk? Hardly. Now, what if instead of torturing a terrorist, interrogators had to torture a confederate of that terrorist - some associate who would know where the terrorist was so they could locate that ticking bomb? Is that dirtying of our hands such a high price to ask in the goal to protect millions? I think not. Now, what if instead of a terrorist's comrade, interrogators have a terrorist's relative or neighbor? Is it still justified to go as far to save innocent lives? I should hope so! And what if that terrorist has a lot of relatives and neighbors - hundreds, even? Would it be wrong to grant blanket authority to torture hundreds of prisoners knowing full well that any of them could have the crucial information required to save a city? Certainly not! And what if the threat we're faced with is not a bomb at all but an even more pernicious threat - a rogue nation with the potential capability to someday construct that bomb? Would it not be America's right - no, her duty - to invade that country, occupy it, and set up a system of torture-like interrogations to rid that country of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction once and for all? Absolutely!

Indeed, the most unsettling question being raised by these latest news items is not the issue of torture itself, but the question of whether America will be strong enough to use that torture to defeat the enemies of life and liberty. The Medium Lobster can only hope that this great nation will retain its nerve.

It's like Goldy and Bronzy, only made of Iron.

Nostalgie de la Boo-Boo - Martin Rowson of the Independent is ticked that cartoonists won't keep their comics in the toy box where he put them. Yeah, I'm only linking this because I wanted to use the title. Via Hanging Fire.

Tortured Readings - Katherine R at Obsidian Wings, who has been coming at the subject from every angle since when US complicity in torture was a matter for sidebars of back pages.

The 2002 DOJ Office of Legal Counsel Memo and Michael Froomkin's exegesis. (Via everybody and her sister.)

The Road to Surfdom offers a Call and Response. (Quick, who said, "Today, on the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the United States declares its strong solidarity with torture victims across the world. Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere.")

Kieran Healy on a demurral. I can't say I'm surprised.

Robinson Jeffers tries to cheer you all up.

I've Been There. Literally. - I mean the progressive Vermont school Ignat Solzhenitzyn talked about in the Sunday Times:

In 1980, Ignat was an 8-year-old transplanted to Vermont by his father, the famous chronicler of Siberia's gulags. As Ignat tells the story, on the morning after the presidential election he got a taste of American political re-education at the progressive private school he and his brothers attended.

In response to the Reagan victory, the school's flag was lowered to half-staff, and the morning assembly was devoted to what today would be called grief counseling. The headmaster mourned "what America would become once the dark night of fascism descended under the B-movie actor," recalled Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who is now the music director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. "At one point he interrupted himself to inquire if anyone present did not share his gloomy view of the Reagan victory."

The only students to raise their hands were Ignat and his two brothers, Yermolai and Stephan. After a stony silence, he recalled, they were sent outside, without their coats, to meditate on the error of their ways underneath the lowered flag.

I visited said school in 1978 at the invite of a teacher there who used to teach at my high school. I remember the Solzhenitsyn boys were there - I saw one though I didn't really meet him. From what I saw of the place, Ignat's story is plausible, though it happened two years later.

The Pussification of the Western Male - Some of us, anyway, if we write for NRO. As usual, the Administration's supporters systematically stoke fear. The ticking bomb scenario makes an appearance. Our enemies are scary bad men and the world is dark and cold. We have the right, nay, the duty, to empty our revolvers into the darkness as we piss ourselves.

Arthur Silber puts our present pass down to worship of the State. He's close, but there's one further level. Our real god is Perfect Safety, whom we have elevated in our pantheon above its divine siblings Freedom and Dignity. The State is Perfect Safety's high priest. It preaches from the altar and whispers in the agora that it will bring the blessings of the god if we but bend the knee now and do the spastic dance of the flails when the oracles are propitious. The high priest is not innocent in this, but unless we remove the god to a humbler altar we shall remain under his sway.

Blog in Haste . . . - I sure remember a lot of crowing a couple of months ago when the State Department released figures showing that, worldwide, 2003 featured fewer major terrorist incidents worldwide than any year since, I don't know, Victor Davis Hanson BC or something. Oops. Anyway, I wasn't impressed then and I'm not overly-impressed by the reversal. Even in the brief glory days when comment thread commandos were hailing the glory, I figured that 2004 already looked like it would reverse any momentary downward trend. But beyond that, the definition of terrorism has proven elastic when it comes to official figures.

Fitness Blogging Reminder - All the action is over on my LiveJournal now, including injury reports and eating to win.

On the Radar - These stories about Iraqi "WMD components" shipped out of Iraq as scrap metal "before, during and after" the invasion phase of the war are frustratingly vague. The much-linked World Tribune story is, well, the World Tribune. It's not impossible that such an outlet could come up with a legitimate scoop - heaven forfend we had to rely on exclusively establishment sources for our information - but the kindest thing one can say about the World Trib is that it's not the sort of media organ that settles an issue. (Unless you're a cheap epistemological date.) Leaving aside the World Trib's reputation or lack thereof, the internals of the story are . . . weird. Consider the lede:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

If you parse that sentence like we learned in school before the Democratic Party ruined American education in the let-it-all-hang-out sixties, it says, among other things:

|Saddam Hussein| |shipped weapons of mass destruction components| . . . |after the US-led war against Iraq in 2003.|

Clearly we have a compelling answer to the question What can Brown do for you? here. ("He is the spider-hole that sits at the center of a web of shipping and receiving!")

Okay, so the anonymous WT scribe can't write. But his bad grammar serves, whether by accident or design, to confuse the issue. If we turn to establishment reporting on the story, we continue to find some blurring. Warren Hoge of the New York Times writes

Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004.

His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said that items removed from the site included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.

"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Mr. Buchanan said.

Let's consider some things. By May 2003, you may recall, "major combat operations [were] over." So whatever was there was there, and US troops were, in theory, in control of Iraq. What we are not looking at in this example is Saddam Hussein shipping his WMDs out of Iraq before the war. We're not looking at Saddam Hussein doing shit. Rather, the site gets dismantled over a period of some months during the US occupation, including during those times when US search teams were still seriously trying to find Iraqi special weapons programs.

Let's note some further blurring, because it gets at an important distinction we've talked about before here. The "items removed from the site" were "suitable for making biological or chemical weapons." This is not at all the same thing as saying that is what the Iraqi regime was doing with them. The things listed are, per Buchanan, dual-use equipment, stuff that could be used to make gas or weaponized germs, but also "legitimate" military materiel or civilian goods. A lot of things are "dual-use." It would be impossible to have a modern military or economy without all kinds of dual use equipment. Want to make fertilizer or pharmaceuticals? You'll need some "dual use" equipment. Want to make rocket fuel or hydrogen balloons? Likewise.

Which gets to the distinction that came up when we found the one old sarin shell last month - what counts as evidence of an Iraqi threat to the US and what might do as a legalistic excuse for an invasion you wanted to undertake anyway. In this case, the dual use stuff, outside Iraq, lying around scrap yards and wherever else, represents a threat, however small, to the United States. It doesn't represent evidence that Iraq had working WMD programs or even "related program activities."

More from Hoge:

Another photo showed an engine from a banned SA-2 surface-to-air missile that had been tagged by the United Nations in Iraq in 1996 and recently discovered in a scrap yard in Rotterdam, the port city in the Netherlands.

The report said that workers there had told inspectors from the monitoring commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency that as many as 12 such engines may have passed through the yard in January and February this year and that additional items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys with the inscriptions "Iraq" and "Baghdad" had been observed since November 2003.

"This is only a snapshot," Mr. Buchanan said. Two inspectors, he said, acting on information from the Netherlands, went to scrap yards in Jordan last week and found 20 more such engines in addition to tagged processing equipment such as chemical reactors, heat exchangers and a solid propellent mixing bowl.

The reference to tagging indicates that this is stuff UNMOVIC found and marked, not items the Saddam regime successfully concealed from the inspectors. Absent evidence to the contrary, we know that UNMOVIC-tagged items were segregated from regular stock and, presumably, disabled.

The actual specifics reported indicate that the story is not "Saddam snuck his WMDs out of Iraq!" but "The US occupation has exercised poor control of dual-use and previously-identified banned equipment." The story is larded up with non-nutritious details like "stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys." Had we declared, at some point I missed, that Iraq was to be forbidden modern metallurgy? If not, this is meaningless. Someone has put dry ice on the stage so the props will look spookier. Otherwise someone will notice that "surface-to-air missiles" may be banned items, but since the United States is not itself in the air, it's not remotely a threat to the country. Even Israel, sometimes mistaken for the United States, is a country that exists on the ground rather than cloud-borne. We're not talking about surface-to-surface missiles that could rain gas on Tel Aviv or Ankara. We're talking about things that are designed to defend your own airspace.

All of which is to say that there's enough to the current stories to make one worry what the heck we've been doing since we took custody of Mesopotamia, but not enough to prove that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was any more of a threat to the United States or anyone else than you thought they were before. If Iraq scared you, there's nothing here to make you less scared. If you were made of sterner stuff, you may rest unperturbed.

See also the AP reporting, which substantially resembles that of the NYT but somewhat less shifty with its categories.