June 16, 2005

Today I noticed this (my emphasis):

To the Republicans--

You have done a very nice job of making non-issues the issue. Great! You get an A for Spin. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter have decided to mimic Martha Stewart and talk about Orange Glazed Chicken that was/is served to detainees. In fact, someone out there, Karl Rove I assume, has paid to publish The Gitmo Cookbook. Again--great! A+ for distortion, distraction and getting your irrelevant message out there.

Well, I didn't think it actually needed to be said, but no, Karl Rove has nothing to do with this site or the cookbook (Oh, if only we had his numbers!). This is the brainchild of one Laura Curtis, who as far as I know does not even have Rove's assistant's assistant's cell phone number. The genesis of the idea came from this very site. Now while I'm taking Chris' remark above as tongue in cheek, I think there's a certain irrelevancy in bringing up Rovian conspiracies as a way to attack something...particularly in a piece excoriating Republicans for bringing up irrelevancies.

As for the cookbook itself being irrelevant to the larger issue of Gitmo conduct, I again disagree. It is indeed relevant, as a way to show just how bend-over-backwards we are being toward these detainees who want to get me a shotgun and kill every American I see. Kevin Craver puts it into perspective in an excellent post:

So what are Gitmo inmates served for breakfast and dinner (they eat an MRE lunch)? Among the delicacies are baked tandoori chicken breast, mustard-dill baked fish, Lyonnaise rice, and fish amandine. Where you get your ingredients is up to you, but the dishes at Gitmo are certified halal, which means the ingredients conform with Muslim dietary laws.

As for a little further perspective, let’s look at what it takes for meat to be certified halal — it’s a lot more complicated than an imam looking at it and saying, “looks OK to me.” Because animal blood is considered haram, or unclean, the halal way to kill an animal is to slice through the arteries after saying “In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful.” The animal has to be conscious — it is unclean if it is stunned first. If you forget to pray before you cut, the meat is unclean, because Muslim dietary laws forbid eating meat slaughtered in the name of anyone but Allah.

Many Islamic food stores not only certify their meats as halal, but also have videotape of the slaughtering so the discriminating and strong-stomached Muslim customer can cook for the family with a clean conscience.

This is what we do for men who were captured trying to kill our troops, and for at least one who helped plan Sept. 11. What did the hijackers feed their passengers that fateful day? Come to think of it, what meal, if any, did Iraqi hostages get before their heads were sawed off?

If the allegations are that we're torturing Gitmo detainees, then their conditions at Gitmo become very relevant...and one of those conditions is necessarily the food they are given. It's also relevant because it becomes part of the sniff test...if routine "torture" is the order of the day at Gitmo, does it really make sense to believe we're physically torturing people in the manner of Nazi concentration camps but then turning around and giving them halal-certified food?

Chris' post then goes on:

It might have been the right thing to do for the Republicans, Conservatives and "The Girls" I mentioned above to study a little about guerrilla war, fighting terrorists, and psychological operations before they threw their hissy fits about the idea of closing Git mo. Closing down prisons that have the reputation Git mo has is a certified, recognized tactic in the kind of war we are fighting. It is not some evil, liberal plot to destroy America.

Ok, that's fair as far as it goes. But look at who is aiding the terrorist tactic of putting out propaganda with the intent of closing down Gitmo. I don't think the serious non-strawman argument is, or was ever, that there's some evil liberal conspiracy afoot. Rather I think it's being snatched as a way for the Left to attack President Bush. And if it means going along with a tactic our enemies are using, well isn't that illustrative in and of itself? And we don't even need a conspiracy theory.

Chris goes on:

They also might have done some good had they acknowledged the few incidents at Guantanamo and in Iraq where soldiers stepped over the line and did bad things. They might have made the whole discussion easier had they said that this stuff shouldn't happen and those responsible for it should be punished. Hell, the Administration might have done that too. If we had been honest about the number of things we had done wrong, accepted responsibility for them and punished the people who did it instead of dancing around and looking like we were hiding things--we wouldn't be having some of the problems we are having now.

Again, that's fair as far as it goes. But I do need to point out that the Pentagon has in fact been investigating these things, and doing so even in lieu of media attention. The incidents at Abu Ghraib, for example, were under investigation well before a newsie got wind of it. And I think the Administration has been pretty honest about things. The soldiers who did do bad things have, in fact, been punished (or were those courts-martial something else?). But remember, the mere existence of an allegation does not make it true, nor is it necessarily worthy of attention. Didn't Newsweek go forward with a rumor...a RUMOR...about Korans being flushed down toilets? That the Administration denied it didn't seem to matter much at the time, did it? I guess the point here is if the default assumption is that the Administration is lying, don't waste time complaining that it isn't acknowledging allegations.

Posted by John Tant at June 16, 2005 08:13 AM

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