From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Nice
Place to Visit
Guantanamo Bay: The American Gulag! A horrific torture chamber! Or maybe not.
Reuters--yes, Reuters--has a report from Brussels that counters the anti-American
stereotypes:
Inmates at Guantanamo Bay prison are treated better than in Belgian jails, an expert for Europe's biggest security organization said on Monday after a visit to the controversial U.S. detention center.
But Alain Grignard, deputy head of Brussels' federal police anti-terrorism unit, said that holding people for many years without telling them what would happen to them is in itself "mental torture." . . .
Grignard told a news conference that prisoners' right to practice their religion, food, clothes and medical care were better than in Belgian prisons.
"I know no Belgian prison where each inmate receives its [sic] Muslim kit," Grignard said.
Grignard said that while Guantanamo was not "idyllic," he had noticed dramatic improvements each time he visited the facility over the last two years.
The head of the OSCE lawmakers in the delegation said she was happy with the medical facilities at the camp, adding she believed they had been improved recently.
And what about that "mental torture" remark? A CNN report offers some perspective:
Prisoners from Uzbekistan, Yemen, Algeria, and other nations told tribunals that they or their families could be tortured or killed if they are sent home.
Some detainees worry about reprisals from militants who will suspect them of cooperating with U.S. authorities in its war on terror. Others say their own governments may target them for reasons that have nothing to do with why they were taken to Guantanamo Bay in the first place.
A man from Syria who was detained along with his father pleaded with the tribunal for help getting them political asylum--in any country that will take them.
"You've been saying 'terrorists, terrorists.' If we return, whether we did something or not, there's no such things as human rights. We will be killed immediately," he said. "You know this very well."
It may be that many of the Gitmo detainees are lucky to be there--and the self-styled do-gooders who are trying to get them out would condemn them to a much worse fate.
Roberts
Rules
Yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld
v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, which upheld Congress's
authority to order colleges and universities to allow military recruiters on
campus, is remarkable for several reasons. First, as we noted yesterday, it
was unanimous. National Review's Ed
Whelan speculates that this may herald a trend, and indeed this was at least
the third major unanimous ruling the Roberts court has handed down.
The first two, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood (abortion) and Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC (campaign finance restrictions) were both decided while Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was still on the court, and they broke little or no new legal ground. They merely restated existing law and sent the cases back to lower courts for reconsideration.
As we argued about Ayotte, the justices' goal in both cases seemed to be to avoid unsettling the law at a time when the court's membership was in flux. Rumsfeld, however, did make new law, and Chief Justice John Roberts was able to command the full support of all participating justices--not only no dissents, but no separate concurrences. This would seem to lend support to the proposition that Roberts is a jurist of superior political acumen.
Legal acumen too. The decision is a pleasure to read: clearly written, easily understood, with flashes of wit. Blogress Ann Althouse writes:
I want to express my deepest thanks to Chief Justice Roberts for gathering the Justices onto one clearly written opinion. There is no blather or hedging in the prose. He has obviously taken great pains to put every sentence in plain English. He deals with all the precedents, handling most of the cases in one or two crisp sentences. You may not appreciate how beautiful this thinking and writing is, but I do, and I think generations of law students will.
So do some of us who forwent law school.
The decision has won support from unlikely quarters: Daily Kos diarist "armando" and Andrew Sullivan both cheered it. We've searched, so far in vain, for opposition on left-wing blogs. Even the increasingly unhinged editorialists of the New York Times are silent thus far, though they did endorse the law-school plaintiffs' challenge in an October 2003 editorial and will likely waddle in to denounce the ruling later in the week.
The only support for the law schools' position seems to come from law professors themselves, and their inability to persuade even a single justice calls their competence into question. The Yale Daily News reports that the faculty at the Taliban-friendly New Haven campus are not giving up on a separate challenge to the law:
Robert Burt, the lead plaintiff in the pending lawsuit, said Monday was "not one of the happier days." But he said there are differences in the faculty case--which the Supreme Court has already refused to hear--that may distinguish it from the FAIR case enough that the Court of Appeals will uphold the district court's ruling.
"The argument presented by the lawyer for the FAIR case was not the strongest possible statement of the position that the Yale Law School plaintiffs took," Burt said. "We have a special claim that we have autonomy in running our affairs because we are a university, and there's a tradition of special respect for universities, and a special protection . . . to protect students from discriminatory or demeaning behavior. That argument was simply not presented to the court, and they didn't deal with it."
It seems highly unlikely that the Supreme Court, having rejected the argument that the access requirement is unconstitutional, will reverse itself on the ground that universities are "special."
Meanwhile, here is a complete list of universities that have said they will decline taxpayer funds rather than allow military recruiters on campus: .
Angry
and Proud
"Responding to Republican claims that she may be too angry to win national
office, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton[*] told an audience
Monday to wear such criticism as 'a badge of honor' and suggested that gender
[sic] played a role in the attacks," the Associated Press reports from
New York:
Democrats, particularly Democratic woman, who run for public office are "going to draw some unfriendly fire," Clinton said at a breakfast fundraiser hosted by black and Hispanic women supporters. "People will be attacking you instead of your ideas, they may impugn your patriotism, they may even say you're angry."
"If they do that, wear it as a badge of honor, because you know what? There are lots of things that we should be angry and outraged about these days," she said.
Mrs. Clinton is trying to make a virtue of necessity. It's a bit reminiscent of the fun President Bush has at being "misunderestimated" and caricatured as unintelligent--with this important difference: Bush actually is almost certainly of above-average intelligence, even if he is not a genius. More than half of all Americans are of average intelligence or below, so those who make sport of Bush's purported lack of intellectual gifts are thereby insulting a majority of Americans.
Hillary's pride in being described as angry will doubtless endear her to the Angry Left, but unless the majority of Americans are at least as angry as she is, it will not broaden her appeal.
* New York's junior senator, who speaks in even tones and conveys her displeasure with temperate phrases (except when she's really angry).
Dagger
Watch
"It is the No. 1 tax issue in New York. A lot of people will get clobbered,
unless changes are made. It is a dagger to the heart of the middle class."--Sen.
Chuck Schumer on the alternative minimum tax, quoted
in the Journal News (Westchester County, N.Y.), March 7
A dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.
Special
Treatment
Here's a curious Associated Press dispatch from Corvallis, Ore., last week:
A student's column in the Oregon State University campus newspaper has prompted protests by Muslim students, who say it is offensive to their faith.
The piece headlined "The Islamic Double Standard" was written by OSU microbiology student Nathanael Blake and published in the Daily Barometer on Feb. 8.
The column accused Muslims of expecting special treatment after a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Riots over the cartoons amounted to "savagery," Blake said. "Bluntly put, we expect Muslims to behave barbarously," his column said. . . .
At the Daily Barometer, editors said e-mail and phone calls poured in. Senior editors have met with the Muslim Student Association.
"The pain that it caused . . . did not subside with time," said DD Bixby, the Barometer's editor-in-chief. "It kind of just festered."
She said editors have been checking copy with Muslim students, and on Tuesday deleted one paragraph from a piece scheduled to be published the next day.
So let's see if we have this straight: Muslims are upset over being accused of "expecting special treatment," and they respond by agitating for the newspaper to allow them to censor material they find offensive. What's wrong with this picture?
Forecast
for Sun: Hot
"Sun-spawned cosmic storms that can play havoc with earthly power grids
and orbiting satellites could be 50 percent stronger in the next 11-year solar
cycle than in the last one, scientists said on Monday," Reuters reports
from Washington:
Using a new model that takes into account what happens under the sun's surface and data about previous solar cycles, astronomers offered a long-range forecast for solar activity that could start as soon as this year or as late as 2008.
They offered no specific predictions of solar storms, but they hope to formulate early warnings that will give power companies, satellite operators and others on and around Earth a few days to prepare.
What Reuters doesn't mention is what effect this may have on the Earth's weather. But a BBC story from 2002 reports that "German scientists have found a significant piece of evidence linking cosmic rays to climate change":
The amount of cosmic rays reaching Earth is largely controlled by the Sun, and many solar scientists believe the star's indirect influence on Earth's global climate has been underestimated.
Some think a significant part of the global warming recorded in 20th Century may in fact have its origin in changes in solar activity--not just in the increase in fossil-fuel-produced greenhouse gases.
So if in fact the solar cycle turns out to be particularly active, we can forecast that there will be no letup in "global warming" alarmism.
It's
Bush's Fault!
"Levee Flood Shuts Highway 121 at Schellville"--headline, San Francisco
Chronicle, March 6
As
if Flying Isn't Unpleasant Enough Already
"Aired Ads Target Up-in-the-Air Voters"--headline, Jerusalem Post,
March 7
No
Wonder Medical Costs Are So High
"Novartis to Pay Infinity to Develop Cancer Treatments"--headline,
The Wall Street Journal (link for subscribers), March 6
What
Would Small Children, Big Dogs Do Without Studies?
"Study Suggests Small Children, Big Dogs Don't Mix"--headline, Reuters,
March 6
Why
Would We Want to See This?
"Police: Watch for Man Who Exposes Himself"--headline, WDIV-TV Web
site (Detroit), March 6
'Brokebank
Mountain,' or 'Don't Tell'
"Gay Banker Brings Claim Over Dismissal"--headline, Financial Times,
March 7
1.
More Fertilizer; 2. Less Weeding; 3. More Fertilizer
"Weed Proposes Three-Point Plan for Farmers"--Danville (Va.) Register
& Bee, March 7
Bottom
Story of the Day
"Fireplace Was Source of Blaze"--headline, Mobile (Ala.) Register,
March 6
Great
Moments in Journalism
Yesterday we made
fun of the New
York Times for picking up on Sunday a "report" that the World
Health Organization had concluded blondes would go extinct--a claim that had
been exposed as a hoax in October 2002. It turns out that among the organizations
that reported on the hoax back then--a day earlier than we did--was the
Times itself:
Apparently it fell into the category "too good to check."
Last Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated on Friday by anchors for the ABC News program "Good Morning America," and on Saturday by CNN.
There was only one problem, the health organization said in a statement yesterday that it never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject.
Also yesterday, we noted a ContactMusic.com story about a speech by erstwhile CNN newsman Aaron Brown. We just poked fun at the headline, but several readers called to attention this howler:
Brown, speaking to a First Amendment forum, noted that while CNN was spending a fortune covering the 2004 tsunami, Fox News was channeling its resources into the missing teenager Natalee Holloway. The contest, he noted, was won hands down by Fox. The result, he suggested, was not lost on his former employer, CNN.
The tsunami, as CNN itself notes, was the result of an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26, 2004. Natalee Holloway disappeared May 30, 2005. Was CNN "spending a fortune" covering five-month-old news, or was Fox reporting on Natalee five months before she disappeared?
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Dan O'Shea, Evan Slatis, Daniel Foty, Brendan Schulman, Ruth Papazian, Cliff Thier, Michael Segal, Lewis Sckolnick, Ken Pokalsky, Steve Jackson, Stephen Wyse, Kevin Patrick, Thomas Dillon, Joseph Tully, Chris Garvin, Mark Finkelstein, Greg Giaccio, Richard Weltz, Rick Mott, Evan Norris, Douglas Welsh and Terri Hubbard. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: The Pentagon's union rules make for a not-so-flexible civilian fighting machine.
- Brendan Miniter: Bill Thomas's retirement gives Republicans another chance to leave the DeLay era behind.
- Leon de Winter: Is Europe willing to fight for anything, besides a welfare check?
