From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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Another
One Bites the Dust
A detainee at Guantanamo Bay has died in another apparent suicide, Reuters reports:
"The detainee was found unresponsive and not breathing in his cell by guards. The detainee was pronounced dead by a physician after all lifesaving measures had been exhausted," the U.S. Southern Command in Miami said in a statement. . . .
The latest death comes eight days after a new commander took over the military task force that runs the controversial detention center. Rear Adm. Mark Buzby took command of the prison camp last week, replacing Rear Adm. Harry Harris, who was new to the job when the previous suicides took place.
One wonders if the detainees plan these suicides as a sort of initiation for new commanders--or in the hope that the camp will be easier to disrupt in the immediate aftermath of a transition.
Unsurprisingly, even though little information has been publicly released about the detainee--all we know is that he was from Saudi Arabia, which presumably means he was al Qaeda rather than Taliban--the "human rights" crowd is happy to put on a show of pro-terrorist prejudice:
In Washington, Amnesty International advocacy director Jumana Musa said news of another suicide at the detention camp was not surprising.
"When you look at the conditions that people are in, so many people are in isolation so many people held without any kind of certainty. It's a really extreme result of what's a really extreme situation," she said.
"I don't know how many more indications need to be there that Guantanamo is not a good idea."
Amnesty International, of course, is notorious for its comic-book view of the world in which America is the ultimate supervillain.
Last summer we visited Guantanamo and interviewed Adm. Harris, the commander who has just departed. It's worth rehashing his account of the 2006 suicides:
Before Camp 1 closed, three detainees there--two Saudis and a Yemeni--succeeded in killing themselves. On the morning of June 10, guards found the trio, all in the same cell block, hanged with clothing and bedsheets.
Domestic foes of the war on terror wasted no time in trying to co-opt the detainees' martyrdom for their own cause. Human Rights Watch claimed that the detainees had suffered from "incredible despair" because they had been "completely cut off from the world." The New York Times editorialized that the suicides were "the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair beyond the laws of civilized nations."
Adm. Harris had a different view. "I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us," he said at the time--and he stands by that statement. In response, the Times scolded the admiral for displaying "a profound disassociation from humanity."
His case is the stronger one. The proximity and simultaneity of the suicides argue that they were coordinated rather than spontaneous. Although some detainees suffer from mental illnesses, for which they receive treatment at the camp infirmary, there is no evidence that these three did. "They recently had been given . . . a psychiatric evaluation, and they were all fine," Adm. Harris tells me. It may be hard to comprehend the mentality of one who would kill himself to make a political statement, but to doubt that these men could do so is to test the limits of fatuity. After all, that is exactly what 19 of their comrades did five years ago Monday.
Apparently it hasn't occurred to Amnesty International's Musa--or she wants us to think it hasn't, anyway--that when a member of a suicide cult commits suicide, it may not be for the same reason as when an otherwise normal depressed person does so.
My
Brilliant Korea?
"President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar
to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace
for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday," the Associated
Press reports:
Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said Bush has cited the long-term Korea analogy in looking at the U.S. role in Iraq, where American forces are in the fifth year of an unpopular war. Bush's goal is for Iraqi forces to take over the chief security responsibilities, relieving U.S. forces of frontline combat duty, Snow said.
"I think the point he's trying to make is that the situation in Iraq, and indeed, the larger war on terror, are things that are going to take a long time," Snow said. "But it is not always going to require an up-front combat presence."
The president is of course right on the substance, but the Korea analogy strikes us as a really bad one. The two Koreas have remained formally at war since the July 1953 armistice, and while South Korea has thrived, the North Korean regime has brutally repressed its own people and become an international menace through the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In retrospect, it's hard to deny that victory would have been a better outcome than "uneasy peace."
In fact, Korea is a better analogy for Iraq in 1991-2003 than today. The Gulf War cease-fire froze into place the status quo ante, with Kuwait liberated but Iraq remaining under Saddam's heel (with the addition of U.N. sanctions that impoverished ordinary Iraqis but allowed Saddam and corrupt foreigners to enrich themselves). The now-ended U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia--al Qaeda's chief grievance--was necessary to preserve the "uneasy peace" and protect the Arabian Peninsula from Saddam's ambitions.
President Bush recognized that this state of affairs was unacceptable. So did many Democrats, even though they now pretend they hadn't been born yet. In his Second Inaugural Address, Bush said his "ultimate goal" was "ending tyranny in our world." Some said this was overly ambitious, even for an "ultimate" goal. Even if so, we'd like to see the president set his sights a bit higher than "uneasy peace."
Assaulted
Nuts
Is Al Gore a genuine intellectual, as he would like us to believe, or is he
just pretentious à la John Kerry? He has a new book out called "The
Assault on Reason," and we suppose reading it would shed some light on
the question. But life is short.
Here's an excerpt from an interview Gore gave Gwen Ifill of PBS's "NewsHour":
Ifill: You write of a "determined disinterest" in learning the truth, on the part of the Bush administration on pre-war intelligence. You accuse the White House of an "unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception," very strong words. And you say that President Bush "outsourced the truth." Are you suggesting that President Bush deliberately misled the American people when it comes to the Iraq war?
Gore: Well, there was certainly a coordinated effort in the White House and in the Department of Defense simultaneously to convey the image of a mushroom cloud exploding over an American city and to link it to a specific scenario, the very strong and explicit implication that Saddam Hussein was going to develop nuclear weapons and give them to Osama bin Laden, and that would result in nuclear explosions in American cities.
"Explicit implication," huh? How do you know it wasn't an implicit explication? Such slipshod thinking leads one to think that Gore does have more in common with Kerry than with, say, Pat Moynihan.
Vær
Så God, Norway
"The United States is among the least peaceful nations in the world, ranking
96th between Yemen and Iran, according to a new index released on Wednesday
that evaluates 121 nations based on their peacefulness," Reuters reports
from Washington. Of course, if Reuters followed its scare-quote style to distance
itself from anti-American viewpoints, this sentence would have read:
The United States is among the least "peaceful" nations in the world, ranking 96th between Yemen and Iran, according to a new "index" released on Wednesday that "evaluates" 121 nations based on their "peacefulness."
The index, brainchild of the Economist Intelligence Unit, is described further in this press release, which also lists the countries in order of their ranking. It is a very silly exercise:
After compiling the Index, the researchers examined it for patterns in order to identify the "drivers" that make for peaceful societies. They found that peaceful countries often shared high levels of democracy and transparency of government, education and material well-being. While the U.S. possesses many of these characteristics, its ranking was brought down by its engagement in warfare and external conflict, as well as high levels of incarceration and homicide. The U.S.'s rank also suffered due to the large share of military expenditure from its GDP, attributed to its status as one of the world's military-diplomatic powers.
Let's just focus on that last measure, defense spending as a share of GDP. The most "peaceful" country, according to this survey, is Norway. OK, we guess Norway is pretty peaceful, but we seem to remember 60-odd years ago it was occupied by Germany, which comes in at a respectable No. 12.
Today both Norway and Germany are peaceful because America entered World War II and because America spends an outsize share of its GDP on defense in order to protect its allies from aggressive threats. But the Economist index faults the U.S. for the strength that makes possible Europe's peace. Of the 20 "most peaceful" countries, 12 are U.S. allies, and another five are formally neutral European states--i.e., free-riding nonmembers of the NATO alliance.
Another example of the survey's absurd bias: Israel places No. 119, ahead of only Sudan and Iraq. But of course most Israelis would like nothing more than to live in peace, as would their leaders. They are forced into frequent wars because they are surrounded by enemy states, almost all of which The Economist reckons as more "peaceful"--including Iran, which comes 22 places above Israel despite its pursuit of nuclear weapons and its president's vow to "wipe Israel off the map." Syria, at No. 77, actually places well ahead of the U.S., despite its support for terrorists in Iraq, Lebanon and Israel. The Palestinian Arabs aren't even mentioned in the survey, which covers only nations.
Then again, maybe this is all a clever ruse to discredit pacifism.
Slow
Learners
Remember Annie Jacobsen? In July
2004, she raised alarms after witnessing a group of a dozen or so Arab men
acting strangely on a Northwest Airlines flight. It turned out to be a musical
band and their promoter. Several commentators (see here
and here)
suggested that she had overreacted, and that seemed to be that.
Now, however, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general has issued a report siding with Jacobsen. The Washington Times summarizes it:
According to the Homeland Security report, the "suspicious passengers," 12 Syrians and their Lebanese-born promoter, were traveling on Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on expired visas. . . .
The report also says that a background check in the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, which was performed June 18 as part of a visa-extension application, produced "positive hits" for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12 Syrians, who were traveling in the U.S. as a musical group.
In addition, the band's promoter was listed in a separate FBI database on case investigations for acting suspiciously aboard a flight months earlier. He was detained a third time in September on a return trip to the U.S. from Istanbul, the details of which were redacted. . . .
The FBI issued a warning in April 2004, just two months before the flight, that terrorists may be trying to enter the country under cultural or sports visas, the same visas carried by the 12 Syrian men who claimed to be musicians.
But the Transportation Security Administration is standing behind its actions: "The reported suspicious activity was determined to be unfounded, and not a terrorist threat, and therefore did not merit an HSOC [Homeland Security Operations Center] referral," says deputy administrator Robert Jamison.
The inspector general's report recommends various steps the agencies in question should take to deal with future such situations. If this was a terrorist dry run, then, our side learned something from it too. Better late than never, but the U.S. security bureaucracy has to learn more slowly than the terrorists only once to produce disastrous results.
Sandra
Day Deadline
In an item yesterday, we faulted the New York Times's Linda Greenhouse for saying
that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor "would almost certainly have voted the
other way" than Justice Samuel Alito in Ledbetter
v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. This led reader Ted Clayton to write:
I would guess that it's Greenhouse's view that O'Connor would have voted the same way as she did on similar cases in the past, in the same way that I could pretty easily predict how Clarence Thomas will vote on upcoming abortion and civil rights cases based on how he's voted in the past.
The trouble with this is that while we know, for instance, that Justice Thomas correctly believes Roe v. Wade was bad law and should be overturned, no case in the past has raised precisely the issue in Ledbetter.
That issue has to do with the deadline for filing administrative complaints under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A plaintiff alleging a discriminatory pay disparity on account of sex has 180 days to file. But the question is whether that deadline is 180 days from the time the pay was set or 180 days from the last paycheck. The court's majority adopted the former meaning, a reading of the law favorable to defendants in such cases.
A case that is similar in some respects is National Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Morgan (2002). That was a case of race, not sex, discrimination; and at issue was the allegation of a "hostile environment," not pay disparity. In that case, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, adopting a more lenient construction of the deadline. But one justice wrote:
I join Part II-A of the Court's opinion because I agree that Title VII suits based on discrete discriminatory acts are time barred when the plaintiff fails to file a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) within the 180- or 300-day time period designated in the statute. I dissent from the remainder of the Court's opinion, however, because I believe a similar restriction applies to all types of Title VII suits, including those based on a claim that a plaintiff has been subjected to a hostile work environment.
The dissenting justice was Sandra Day O'Connor. The majority opinion, siding with the plaintiff, was written by Justice Thomas.
A
Yankees Fan Who Also Loves the Jets
"Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that she followed all Senate
rules when she accepted rides on a private jet from a longtime benefactor,"
the Associated Press reports. Mrs. Clinton's jet-set lifestyle is a bit awkward,
given her class-warfare message:
Sen. Clinton, who complained about corporate America's largesse and skyrocketing executive pay during campaign events Wednesday, said she did not believe her message was undermined by her acceptance of the private flights. In line with Senate rules then in effect, Clinton's campaign has said she reimbursed [contributor Vinod] Gupta at the cost of a first-class flight, typically a significant discount off the expense of a private jet.
"Those were the rules. You'll have to ask somebody else whether that's good policy," she said.
Yeah, why would Mrs. Clinton know whether Senate rules are good policy? After all, it's not as if she's a senator or anything.
Who'll
Stand Up for the Cynics?
It looks as though Fred Thompson is running for president, and columnist Robert
Novak describes a recent talk Thompson gave before a GOP group in Stamford,
Conn.:
The Connecticut Republicans, down to one seat in Congress after 2006 election losses, cheered when Thompson told them: "I think the biggest problem we have today is what I believe is the disconnect between Washington, D.C., and the people of the United States. People are looking around at the pork barrel spending and the petty politics, the backbiting. The fighting over all things, large or small, is creating a cynicism among our people." That cynicism, Thompson contends, mandates a different kind of campaign for 2008.
But how will the Thompson campaign be different from Barack Obama's? The New York Sun reports that Obama is going negative on Thompson opponent Rudy Giuliani:
Mr. Giuliani also went after another Democratic contender, Senator Obama of Illinois, attacking the health care plan he rolled out this week as "socialized medicine" that would also require tax hikes.
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, called Mr. Giuliani a "cynic" who was returning to a tired political tactic. "Comments with that familiar Washington ring have created just the kind of atmosphere preventing Congress from moving forward to offer affordable health care to all Americans," the spokesman said.
If Thompson and Obama are the nominees, there may be an opening for a third-party candidacy. If one doesn't materialize, the cynics just may decide to stay home on Election Day.
Wannabe
Pundits
What follows is an excerpt from the New York Post. See if you can guess which
section it is from and what the topic of the article is:
They were all instant gratification with no concern for the future, kind of like driving a Hummer today with no concern that will some day lead to your grandchildren clearing the polar icecaps from their back yards.
No, silly, the Post doesn't have a science section. Actually, this is a sports column by Joel Sherman, complaining about the dismal performance of the New York Yankees.
Someone Set Up Us the Bomb
- "How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us. You are on
the way to destruction. . . . You have no chance to survive make
your time. Ha Ha Ha Ha . . ."--from the video game Zero
Wing (1989)
- "Enemies of the homeland, particularly those behind the scenes, I will give you a name: Globovision. Greetings gentlemen of Globovision, you should watch where you are going. I recommend you take a tranquilizer and get into gear, because if not, I am going to do what is necessary."--Venezuelan protodictator Hugo Chavez, May 30
He
Couldn't Put Out the Flame in Her Heart
"An Era of Loveless Firefighters Ends"--headline, Daily Herald (Provo,
Utah), May 15
Adding
Insult to Injury
"Death Camps May Charge Entrance Fee"--headline, Jerusalem Post, May 31
Is
'Chick' an Appropriate Word for the 21st Century?
"Irish Eagle Chick Is First in Century"--headline, BBC Web site, May 30
News
You Can Use
"Children Good at Approximate Math: Study"--headline, Reuters, May 30
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "US Library Books in Jordan Encourage Creativity"--headline, Associated
Press, May 30
- "Emergency Room Doctors Investigate Local Man's Eye Irritation"--headline,
WTOV
Web site (Steubenville, Ohio), May 31
- "Al Qaeda Video Threatens Attacks on U.S."--headline, Associated
Press, May 30
- "Spelling Bee Competition Creates Tense Moments for Participants"--headline,
Waterloo-Cedar
Falls (Iowa) Courier, May 31
- "Fired Transsexual Not Picked for New Job"--headline, Associated Press, May 30
Animal
Crackers
"Study: Female Cheetahs Sleep Around," reads CNN.com's headline over
a Reuters dispatch:
For female cheetahs in the Serengeti, the call of the wild is just too hard to resist as new research shows nearly half of their litters are made up of cubs with different fathers.
As a clever man once said to a cuckolded cheetah, "Isn't loyalty a bit much to expect from a wild animal? She's a cheetah, for crying out loud. How can you be surprised that she cheetah'd on you?"
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Mark Brown, Michael Segal, Buddy Smith, Doug MacGibbon, Joel Goldberg, Blaise Rhodes, Brendan Schulman, Andrew Joseph, Hans Bader, John Nernoff, Gerry McCracken, Charlie Gaylord, Nathan Wirtschafter, Doug Bentley, Brad Robins, Christian Peck, Carl Larsen, Yishai Mendelsohn, Ivo Vegter, Monty Goolsby, Abe Beyda, Chris Stirewalt, Frank Walter, Albert Gibson, John McElwee and Dan O'Shea. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Zoellick's clean-up duty: The World Bank tries to silence its anti-corruption unit.
- Dan Henninger: Conservatives will pay a price for demoting the market in immigration.
- Gerard Baker: Europe shows signs of life, but Walter Laqueur argues that it's still dying.
