I don’t. I assume you are an expert in language who helpfully corrects posts five days later and is a fan of Rob Reiner.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” -The Princess Bride, 1987

Fungible does not mean malleable or changeable. It means “exchangeable” or “interchangeable” in the sense that “one is like the next”.

Oil is a fungible. Grains are fungibles. If we have a bucket of water and we each drop a cup in it, we cannot determine which cup belonged to whom. Our cups of water are fungible.

By dressing up your nickel sentence with a two-bit word, you say the exact opposite of what you appear to want to say.

No, that’s not an accurate paraphrase of what I’ve written here.

As to your other point, I don’t believe that inflicting horrors on other countries’ citizens puts the U.S. in a morally superior position to countries that inflict horrors on their own citizens (which obviously this country has done, too, at various points in our history). Especially given the fact that one of the major premises behind Bush’s foreign policy is to show the world what a wonderful country we are, and how much we value democracy and freedom.

Rephtasing the points of others and appealing to your own authority without addressing the substance of why your analogy is flawed is a cheap way to end debate IMHO.

Actually, I think I responded just fine. It’s not like you’ll listen to me anyways — you’d much rather insert words into my mouth to set me up as a strawman for your arguments. For example:

You all believe [losing the Vietnam War] was a high point in US political history.

When did I ever say that? When did anyone ever say that they wanted to see the US defeated in war?

By and large, I don’t see much point of continuing this conversation since I know the likes of you — one of the wretched Goldstein’s ilk — will take it to the depths of inanity just to look like you have a point; ignoring all facts along the way that don’t fit into your view of things. I pointed out your reference to Vietnam simply for the fact that it had absolutely nothing to do with the discussion in the first place, it’s just a point that righties like to pound their chest over whenever possible like claiming that liberals lost the Vietnam War is something to be proud of. Wingnut name droppings of the conflict is comparable to Walter Sobchak constantly bringing up the topic in The Big Lebowski even when it had nothing to do with the conversation at hand — both situations are hilarious and pathetic.

The larger point of this discussion was that righties like yourself view AS in a hero’s light because of his championship of freedom and human rights. At the same time, you support the Bush administration’s destruction of those qualities. Vietnam has nothing to do with that.

Thank you for complimenting my civility. I appreciate it when that is noticed; it isn’t always.

When detaining individuals or moving large groups of detainees, how should they be moved? … (’threatened with rape”) I think there’s a distinct moral difference between being threatened with bad things as opposed to having the bad things happen. … it’s probably true that detainees get beaten while in US custody. Is that a new development, … There are probably beatings taking place in pretty much every penal system in existence. …

I think it’s pretty much a part of human nature that we humans can find a way to excuse, trivialize, or explain away really just about anything that we don’t want to deal with. Rape, for example, has been committed against detainees in U.S. custody, so we can label that very immoral and mere rape threats distinctly less immoral, but it will always be true that in any system designed to intimidate, terrorize, coerce, or abuse, gradations of difference will exist in the atrociousness or in the implementation of any one given tactic or technique or act.

Everything is relative. I would argue, that the larger system or program or policy of which these individual acts are a part is more important. I can’t convince you of that, however, if you don’t want to believe it.

When we’re talking about such systems in other countries, such as the former Soviet Union, for instance, we look at the system as a whole. We don’t tease out individual acts and say, well this is very different morally from this, or from that. Rape threats are less terrible than actual rape. Actual rape maybe is less immoral than Russian roulette, in which a gun is put to a person’s head and the trigger pulled with the victim not knowing whether one of the chambers is loaded or not, because there, even if the gun is not loaded, the person is being threatened with death, which is morally different from being threatened with rape. On the other hand, one could say that there is a distinct moral difference between threatening someone with a bullet through the brain via Russian roulette, and actually putting a bullet through that someone’s brain. If the gun is not loaded, and the prisoner does not die, that’s not in the same moral category as if the gun IS loaded, and the person DOES die. Even though the prisoner, obviously, does not know which it is, the other person, who is holding the gun to the prisoner’s head, knows whether the gun is loaded or not, so if he holds a gun to a prisoner’s head knowing it’s not loaded, that’s not as immoral as holding a gun to a prisoner’s head knowing the gun IS loaded and the prisoner will die.

On the other hand, there may be some acts that even you cannot condone or explain away. For example, you did not mention electric shocks to the genitals. It may be you didn’t mention these because you can’t find a way to trivialize the seriousness of such an act. But in that case, you have your other self-protective mechanism to fall back on; i.e., the “burden of proof” argument — as if thousands upon thousands of pages of proof in the form of government documents, survivor and eyewitness testimony, medical evidence, etc., were not already out there, to be examined by anyone at any time. But of course, one has to *want* to examine that evidence and be willing to believe what the evidence tells one.

When I speak of being a bit too vague, I am speaking of these words:

…from the mouths of people who are responsible for exactly the same horrors Solzhenitsyn experienced.

and of my assertion that the horrors Solzy was most about were the large-scale horrors inflicted upon his nation and his people.

Solzy was a Russian patriot. The large-scale horrors inflicted upon his nation and his people were far more painful, to him, than whatever local tortures were inflicted upon his person.

If your allegation were very narrow, e.g. the Bush Administration has allowed torture which is morally equivalent to the localized ways in which the Soviets tortured, then you could argue reasoned supposition about techniques likely vs. not likely employed vs. not employed, and about the morality vs. immorality of same. You’ve obviously done much research in this area. Your argument would be interesting, and in fact has already been interesting.

However, your invocation of Solzy is bit vaguer, and (unconsciously?) prompts your readers to reflect on the totality of the horror Solzy experienced as a Russian patriot and as a humanitarian, which totality of horror far exceeds the horror from the localized tortures which were inflicted upon him. Solzy was more about his nation’s pain and his people’s pain than his own personal, localized pain. When you invoke Solzy with any degree of written vagueness, readers properly consider the larger wounds which Solzy’s larger life was dedicated to exposing and opposing, and which were by far the most horrific tortures he endured.

Therefore, even if we grant every one of your allegations about Bush and Cheney and torture - even of thousands of people: scale nevertheless comes into play. Solzy himself would have never agreed that Bush and Cheney were the moral equivalent of Stalin and Krushchev.

Being herded like cattle into holding pens surrounded by razor sharp concertina wire.

When detaining individuals or moving large groups of detainees, how should they be moved? Into what sort of enclosure?

On another topic (’threatened with rape”) I think there’s a distinct moral difference between being threatened with bad things as opposed to having the bad things happen.

She also has three variations of ‘beatings’ in her list–beating while chained, beaten in general, and beaten with combat boots while praying. While it’s repetitious, it’s probably true that detainees get beaten while in US custody. Is that a new development, either policy-wise or culturally since the advent of the GWOT? Is that assumed mistreatment of detainees a bug or a feature?

There are probably beatings taking place in pretty much every penal system in existence. Are all of those penal systems different only in degree with the USSR’s gulag system? Some thug in a CO uniform beating an inmate does not invalidate the concept of a state-run penal system.

Finally, is the burden of proof on us or them? Do I have to prove a negative–do I have to prove that we don’t torture? Given that the concept of torture apparently includes ‘herding’, I’m curious how we can wage a war that will meet Kathy’s almost absurdly rigorous standards.

P.S. The fact that Kathy strongly disagrees with the PW commenters yet still manages to comment without a bunch of insults is impressive and rare.

Actually, no.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5368360.stm

Then, on an absolute scale, is the incidence of torture greater or lesser as a result of US intervention, in your view?

One answer would be greater. Or you might say it’s been a wash. A third way of approaching this question would be to say that the U.S. didn’t invade Iraq so that Iraqis could continue to be tortured, but not as much. At least, I don’t remember Bush saying that before the war.

In any case, it’s a false proposition, because overall torture and the absence of law and the threat of terrorism has increased as a result of Bush’s actions — all of them, not just the one issue of invading Iraq.

What exactly is it that was authorized in the minutes of those meetings?

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4583256&page=1

Nobody knows exactly what was authorized in the meetings. All we know is that the meetings took place and that a list of specific torture techniques was authorized, backed up by attorney memos saying it was legal.

Bush’s gulag privacy is as absolute as the Soviets? Absurd. Hamdan successfully sued in the Supreme Court. That would not have been an option for a Soviet citizen, much less enemy combatant.

Hamdan is Guantanamo, Dan. None of the people who have been disappeared into the secret prison network sue in the Supreme Court or any court. I should start keeping a list of how many times I’ve said that Bush’s gulag refers to the entirety, not just Guantanamo.

More later. Right now I have to go pick up the keys and sign the lease for my new apartment.

your encyclopedic knowledge of how detainees were captured is similar to your other scholarship on the subject, i.e. lacking in information, utilizing incorrect analysis, and arriving at a silly conclusion. The US government’s own reports estimate that 86% of the detainees were turned over for money/bounty from Northern Alliance or Pakistani groups. Very few of these folks were “captured on the battlefield with AK-47’s.” That is just a line of bull you learned from Rumsfeld, back when you and he were relevant (2004?).

You’d have to go a long way to convince Mohammed Arar, snatched from an airplane and tortured for years at the request of our government, that there is a huge difference between Stalin and John Yoo. After all, you, Yoo, Rummy, and your little band of true believers think that one Mohammed Arar is a tragedy, but 800 is a statistic.

Oh, and if my I may be a bit parenthetical, quit bringing up Vietnam. it was 40 years ago and, while its evident self-involved boomer have never stopped fighting the hippies, the rest of us don’t care.

Let me once again turn your argument around. Those who didn’t want to intervene in Iraq are selfish pigs who were happy to let the practice of torture and the farce of judicial review and the complete absence of habeas corpus continue to obtain there. And now you are going to lecture us about being torture enablers? If you go back to look at the archives at PW, you will find that we have always argued that human rights was one of the principal reasons that we backed the war in Iraq. We still have boots on the ground in Bosnia, you know. Quagmire.

You mischaracterize what we’ve said. We haven’t praised Bush for human rights abuses. What we have said is that the good outweighs the bad, though you will never deign to recognize it. Padilla, Hamdan: I have no problem with these decisions. In extraordinary times, one will expect to find the several branches of government at loggerheads, and indeed, this is one of the conditions that best defines the US as a non-totalitarian entity. I have yet to see a plausible solution for the treatment of stateless actors forwarded by the left, because it is much easier to criticize and whine about disenfranchisement than to come up with a strategy. Bush’s mandate was to protect the American people under a new set of circumstances. Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus under the conditions of a unique threat to the Republic, and was similarly savaged for having abused the Constitution. And yet, and in large part because Lincoln’s War resulted in the, at least theoretical, freedom of blacks from slavery, we tend to overlook the Constitutional issues, which were not always on his side.

There are differences, or course, between the Soviet system’s gulags and Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. For one thing, one was likely to be denounced by an an associate, hustled off by secret police in the middle of the night, and then forced to sign a confession that outlined his political crime. By contrast, most of these people were rounded up on the field of battle with AK47s. They were not Afghani regulars.

As far as Viet Nam goes, I’m simply pointing out that you seem to believe that we’ve no right to speak about AS because we disagree with his core principles. But then when I bring up something that he was very passionate about that is incongruent with your own beliefs, you dismiss it out of hand as a red herring. It is typical, I’m afraid. You seem to forget yourselves that he was a warrior by training and inclination. And what’s maddest about this whole thing is that in the process you appear accidentally to grant McCain absolute moral authority to speak to the issue of torture, by virtue of the “Chickenhawk” precedent.