Seltsame Foltervorwürfe eines Wall-Street-Journal-Reporters

--- Folter kann unterschiedlichste Formen annehmen. Der Wall-Street-Journal-Reporter Bret Stephens fühlte sich jüngst etwa von einem deutschen Diplomaten auf den Folterstuhl verbannt. Unter der Überschrift "The German Chair" ("Der Folterstuhl") schreibt er:

the diplomat had no patience for my small talk. Apropos of nothing, he said he had recently made a study of U.S. tax laws and concluded that practices here were inferior to those in Germany. Given recent rates of German economic growth, I found this comment odd. But I offered no rejoinder. I was, after all, a guest in his home. The diplomat, however, was just getting started. Bad as U.S. economic policy was, it was as nothing next to our human-rights record. Had I read the recent Amnesty International report on Guantanamo? "You mean the one that compared it to the Soviet gulag?" Yes, that one. My host disagreed with it: The gulag was better than Gitmo, since at least the Stalinist system offered its victims a trial of sorts. Nor was that all. Civil rights in the U.S., he said, were on a par with those of North Korea and rather behind what they had been in Europe in the Middle Ages. When I offered that, as a journalist, I had encountered no restrictions on press freedom, he cut me off. "That's because The Wall Street Journal takes its orders from the government." By then we had sat down at the formal dining table, with our backs to Ground Zero a half-mile away and our eyes on the boats on the river below us. My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: "The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles." After further bizarre pronouncements, including a lecture on the illegality of the Holocaust under Nazi law, my wife said that she felt unwell. We gathered our things and left.

Unhöflich allemal, das Verhalten des New Yorker Diplomaten, der wohl ganz oben im Dienst in Manhattan stehen soll. Aber den wenig stilvollen Zeitgenossen gleich als "Diplomaten der Hölle" abzustempeln, wie dies die rechten Bloggerkollegen nun tun -- das ist wohl etwas übertrieben und wenig taktvoll. Auch im Blätterwald ist das Thema inzwischen angekommen, etwa in der Berliner Zeitung. Demnach prüft das Auswärtige Amt derzeit die Vorwürfe der sprachlichen Folter unter Freunden.

Und sonst: Gehts noch weiter rechts mit dem US Supreme Court? Nomination Could Be Defining Moment for Bush. There are few genuine earthquakes in American politics, but yesterday's announcement by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor easily qualifies as one. Her retirement is likely to trigger one of the most consequential confirmation battles in a generation, with the ideological balance of the Supreme Court and the future of contentious social issues now firmly in the hands of President Bush.