Archive
April 19, 2009 - April 25, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 200925 Apr 2009 09:31 pm Mr Broder Wants Us To Move On
Well, of course he does. But the idea that this is about vengeance is a piece of fantasy. Or as Hilzoy nicely puts it, Who died and made David Broder Sigmund Freud?
The precedent of a torturing American president must be reversed. That means it cannot be allowed to stand.
Continue reading "Mr Broder Wants Us To Move On" » 25 Apr 2009 08:26 pm The Future Of Bookstores?Books, printed while you wait: According to On Demand Books, there are currently five Espresso machines in the U.S. (with 10 others in locations throughout Canada and the U.K.). This, though, will soon change. Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand, said that "within a relatively short period that number will be increasing dramatically." On Demand is releasing a new model of the machine, version 2.0, which will print books faster--roughly four minutes for a 300-page book as opposed to eight minutes--and be offered at a lower price point. Neller added that the Espresso machine can now be leased as well. The 2.0 model will be on display at the London Book Fair. (hat tip: Esposito) 25 Apr 2009 07:36 pm No ApologiesLarison praises Obama's Summit of the Americas performance: Obama’s willingness to acknowledge America’s past tendency to dismiss the views of allies and to disrespect legitimate foreign interests reflects a degree of self-confidence that has been oddly lacking in the strongest advocates of U.S. hegemony. This is especially notable for a Democratic president—who often feel must prove their hawkishness. Continue reading "No Apologies" » 25 Apr 2009 06:45 pm How Much Does Class Matter In America?
More than we might like to believe. Ryan Avent reads a study:
25 Apr 2009 06:31 pm Know Your EnemyJohn Mueller bucks the CW: The very notion that al Qaeda needs a secure geographic base to carry out its terrorist operations...is questionable. After all, the operational base for 9/11 was in Hamburg, Germany. Conspiracies involving small numbers of people require communication, money, and planning -- but not a major protected base camp.
25 Apr 2009 05:16 pm Cheney Lies Again
This is vital, because it reveals just how bad a card Cheney has to play in protecting himself from being prosecuted as a war criminal. The CIA inspector general's report found no evidence that torture had given any information that would not have been found using legal and moral means. Even one of the legal architects of the torture program, Steven Bradbury, had to concede that much:
More salient for future war crime prosecutions will be the fact that the actual waterboarding did not even follow the absurd attempts to make it non-torture: Continue reading "Cheney Lies Again" » 25 Apr 2009 04:40 pm Orwell's ArsenalPacker, a hardcore Orwell buff, reviews the Englishman's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London: His literary beginnings were full of failures and wrong turns. He was far from a natural at the kind of work he really wanted to do, which was fiction-writing. But recording experience without flinching or sentimentalizing or self-aggrandizement or self-laceration—this is what Orwell seems to have known how to do from the start, and it’s what makes “Down and Out” a classic early work. It shows all the strengths of the nonfiction writing to come, in books like “Wigan Pier” and “Homage to Catalonia,” and also in his essays. (Compare “Down and Out” to an essay he wrote fifteen years later, but about the same period of his life, “How the Poor Die,” or to “Such, Such Were the Joys,” one of his final essays, about his school days. The power of portraiture and description, the casual directness of the voice, the assertions and overstatements, the zeroing in on difficult truths: the whole arsenal of the Orwell style is already apparent from the very start.)
25 Apr 2009 04:20 pm Mental Health Break"Watch the American housing market spiral out of control."
25 Apr 2009 04:14 pm "Overzealousness"Frum warns: After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush drew a curtain of oblivion against all the errors and mistakes that had led up to the attacks. There was accusation and counter-accusation in the media, but at the official level there was no recrimination against president Clinton's decision not to kill bin Laden when he had the chance, no action against those who had failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers from entering the country. If Obama proceeds to take legal action against those who did what they thought was right to defend the country, all that will change. Prosecutions launched by Obama will not stop when Obama declares "game over." If overzealousness under Bush becomes a crime under Obama, underzealousness under Obama will become a crime under the next Republican president. This isn't about "overzealousness": it's about enforcing the law. Clinton not killing bin Laden wasn't against the law. And there is a difference between good faith mistakes and a criminal conspiracy to violate and make a mockery of the rule of law. That's why a real investigation of all of it - including the alleged results - needs to take place and take its time. Give it two years to report, to allow emotions and tempers to cool. Then and only then make a decision on prosecution, so that there is no scintilla of haste or heat. One more suggestion: ask Patrick Fitzgerald to run it. 25 Apr 2009 04:11 pm The Weed CortexScience Daily reports on U.S. and Brazilian scientists' discovery that the brain manufactures proteins that act like marijuana at specific receptors in the brain: "The War on Drugs has hit very close to home," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "Last year, scientists found that our skin makes its own marijuana-like substance. Now, we see that our brain has been making proteins that act directly on the marijuana receptors in our head. The next step is for scientists to come up with new medicines that eliminate the nasty side of pot—a better joint, so to speak."
25 Apr 2009 03:15 pm Quote For The Day"As a senior interrogator in Iraq, I conducted more than three hundred interrogations and monitored more than one thousand. I heard numerous foreign fighters state that the reason they came to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Our policy of torture and abuse is Al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool. These same insurgents have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of our troops in Iraq, not to mention Iraqi civilians. Torture and abuse are counterproductive in the long term and, ultimately, cost us more lives than they save," - former senior military interrogator Matthew Alexander. 25 Apr 2009 02:14 pm Judge Bybee RegretsIt's second hand, but at least it shows that some who played a part in turning America into a torturing nation do not retain Cheney levels of shamelessness:
"I've heard him express regret at the contents of the memo," said a fellow legal scholar and longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while offering remarks that might appear as "piling on." "I've heard him express regret that the memo was misused. I've heard him express regret at the lack of context -- of the enormous pressure and the enormous time pressure that he was under. And anyone would have regrets simply because of the notoriety." The question is what actually constituted the "enormous pressure." And whence it came. But there is one thing he could do to prove exactly how he feels: resign. Be the first person to express real remorse for the crimes committed. And then explain in great detail what he was instructed to do. 25 Apr 2009 02:00 pm The Friday WrapFor those catching up, Friday on the Dish we discovered that torture photos are forthcoming, Bush interrogators used religion as a weapon, and the US once executed soldiers for committing the same crimes advanced by Cheney. The media elite will not rock the boat, lest they implicate their pals in government or disrupt their false "balance" on the torture issue. Among the apologists of the day, Rove tweeted his dark thoughts, Goldfarb prepared his stand-up routine, James Taranto jumped the Orwellian shark, and Cliff May shocked even me (though I did eat crow for Ed Whelan). Among the helpful punditry, DailyKos made a torture timeline, Maggie made a measured stand against her colleagues, Ta-Nehisi tackled Peggy, and A.L. showed the apologist bar to be impossibly high. In marriage news, Connecticut continued the march towards equality. We also aired the confessions of pot addicts, the premonitory powers of the Ghostbusters, and sneeze porn. 25 Apr 2009 01:41 pm Why Torture Doesn't "Work"This point in Philip Zelikow's op-ed yesterday in the NYT is essential: What the committee may well find, after all the sifting, is that the reports were a critical part of the intelligence flow, but rarely — if ever — affected a “ticking bomb” situation. Yet the main rationale for using extreme methods is to save time. To the extent that the methods are more than just a way of debasing an enemy, their added value is in breaking people quickly, with the downsides including unreliability. That is one reason the methods of torment do not stack up well against proved alternatives that rely on patience and skill. After you’ve tortured and humiliated someone, how can you possibly know what he would have told you if you’d gained his confidence instead?
25 Apr 2009 01:17 pm The View From Your Window
Clonakilty, Ireland, 1 pm 25 Apr 2009 01:13 pm Why A Catholic Despises TortureHere is a passage from the encyclical Gaudium Et Spes: Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator. I do not refer to my religious convictions very often in the torture debate precisely because I want to make an argument for secular society, on secular and moral grounds, and want to persuade more than Catholics. But I do want to say that the Church gets to the core of the issue - the true definition of torture here: whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; The point here is not to make some deranged distinction between waterboarding a human being with a cloth rather than cellophane, for twenty seconds rather than forty, or, God help us, 183 times in a row rather than 100 times in a row. People who define torture by these absurd qualifications are missing the forest for a stack of twigs. The point of torture is to violate the integrity of the human person and to coerce the will itself. So when Cliff May writes the following paragraph, he is explicitly describing the very infamy the church understands as torture:
Continue reading "Why A Catholic Despises Torture" » 25 Apr 2009 12:05 pm The Evolution Of Charles JohnsonThe legend of the pro-war anti-Jihadist blogosphere, Charles Johnson, founder of the Little Green Footballs site, has had enough of the far right: Johnson supported Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, but he spent some of the campaign attacking anti-Obama conspiracy theorists... “I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watch some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.” It's a fascinating piece of political subcultural reporting from Dave Weigel. The times are changing. 25 Apr 2009 11:57 am Playing The Flux-Capacitor CardThe Miss California kerfuffle was played out from the start, but, well, food for thought (and love the cat):
25 Apr 2009 11:23 am Should We Shut Down The SERE Program?Slate re-prints (re-digitizes?) SERE graduate David Morris's testimony: The experience of torture at SERE surely plays a role in the minds of the graduates who go on to be interrogators, and it must on some level help them rationalize their actions. It's not hard to imagine them thinking, Well, if I survived this, then it's OK to do it to this guy. This acceptance of abuse from up high down to the lowest levels is the root of our military's torture problem. Unlike other Western militaries (Britain's, for example), ours thrives on sometimes-cartoonish authoritarianism and contrived rites of passage (like those hazing scandals that continually plague all the service academies). To young, impressionable soldiers, it is a too-short mental leap to the depredations of Abu Ghraib, as evidenced by a 2007 Army Times poll showing that 44 percent of enlisted Marines thought torturing a detainee was OK under certain circumstances. As John McCain said of torture in 2005, "It's not about them—it's about us."
25 Apr 2009 10:36 am What Caused The Recession?Robert Solow reviews Richard Posner's new book, A Failure of Capitalism:
Continue reading "What Caused The Recession?" » 25 Apr 2009 10:17 am SeamlessAlan Jacobs wonders about the future of memoir: ...does Facebook make self-narration less compelling, less necessary? In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates a false sense of seamlessness in lives that have actually undergone significant ruptures.
25 Apr 2009 08:34 am ObamanomicsFrom a piece by Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber about Obama's governing style: Obama has set out to synthesize the New Democratic faith in the utility of markets with the Old Democratic emphasis on reducing inequality. In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers. Derek Thompson agrees. Friday, April 24, 200924 Apr 2009 10:27 pm Face Of The Day
Victoria Rose experiences the new Butterfly Jungle at the Natural History Museum on April 24, 2009 in London, England. The new tropical butterfly house in the grounds of the Natural History Museum, opens on Friday May 1, 2009, and will let the public come face to face with hundreds of tropical butterflies. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images. 24 Apr 2009 08:47 pm Yes, The Democrats Are Guilty TooPunishing politically powerful criminals is about vindicating the rule of law. Partisan and political considerations should play no role in it. It is opponents of investigations and prosecutions who are being driven by partisan allegiances and a desire to advance their political interests. By contrast, proponents of investigations are seeking to vindicate the most apolitical yet crucial principle of our system of government: that we are a nation of laws that cannot allow extremely serious crimes to be swept under the rug for political reasons. That's true no matter what is best for Obama's political goals and no matter how many Democrats end up being implicated -- ethically, politically or even legally -- by the crimes that were committed. For me, this has absolutely nothing to do with party. I'd be as insistent with any president who authorized torture of whatever party. And there is very good reason to believe that Pelosi knew a lot more than she has said. She should be investigated as well. 24 Apr 2009 07:44 pm Quote For The Day"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," - an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency in July 2002. So the military knew it was torture and said it was torture. Because it was torture. And the United States has statutory and treaty obligations to investigate all charges of torture and to prosecute the guilty. Or are we to withdraw from the treaty that Ronald Reagan signed and championed? 24 Apr 2009 07:35 pm Jordan's King Abdullah II Says Bush TorturedBig news from Goldblog. The king gets to the nub of the matter: these were "illegal means of treating detainees." And the king of Jordan knows a great deal about torture. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy 24 Apr 2009 06:58 pm Protecting Religious FreedomI don't think concern for it should be dismissed in the push for marriage equality, although I do believe that most of the fears are overblown. But the Connecticut law seems to me to strike a very good balance: Religious groups warned that the bill would infringe on religious freedom and did win a late bipartisan compromise, as sponsors agreed to modify the proposal to more explicitly exempt church-affiliated groups from some provisions. The language closely mirrors that in a bill recently passed in Vermont, overriding a gubernatorial veto to legalize same-sex marriage in that state. The language expressly permits churches and related organizations - including church-owned venues and adoption agencies - to continue to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation as long as the specific services that discriminate do not receive funding from the state or federal government.
24 Apr 2009 06:56 pm Chris Matthews Gets RealOne of his finer interviews: Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy 24 Apr 2009 06:42 pm Liberals And The Rule Of LawNorm Geras remains puzzled. 24 Apr 2009 06:20 pm CorrectionThe passage I referred to in this post, is from the Senate Intelligence report not the Senate Armed Services Report. I linked to the right one, but mislabeled it. I've been blogging too fast. 24 Apr 2009 06:02 pm You Can't All Be The EconomistMatt Pressman explains why the news weeklies will never catch up:
24 Apr 2009 05:43 pm After AntwerpA hundred Beyonce wannabes in Leicester Square. 24 Apr 2009 05:26 pm The Torture Of ZubaydahWho authorized it before the legal cover was ginned up? And what country would you think rendered a prisoner into this state: "At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue." This is America. Just a reminder. 24 Apr 2009 05:22 pm Blog For SaleJulian Sanchez, a sharp, young, libertarian-minded fellow, could use a new home: ... if you’re an editor with a Julian Sanchez–shaped hole in your featurewell, I happen to be one of the world’s leading suppliers of Julian Sanchez. The Market will provide. 24 Apr 2009 04:52 pm Evidence And MindsRyan Sager: I have yet to see a single pundit or politician change his of her position on torture or “enhanced interrogation” based on anything that’s come out since the torture memos.
Isn’t that odd?
24 Apr 2009 04:39 pm Deal Hudson And TortureIs this consequentialist view of its morality really his? Worth clarifying. I'd really like to know why the Catholic hierarchy remain so quiet on this issue. 24 Apr 2009 04:38 pm When America Executed Waterboarders For War CrimesPaul Begala gets his facts straight: After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as 'water cure,' 'water torture' and 'waterboarding,' according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning." Politifact went on to report, "A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps." Now, waterboarders, according to John McCain's former spokesman, are American heroes. 24 Apr 2009 04:20 pm Mental Health BreakA different kind of Fox News: 24 Apr 2009 03:53 pm Obama And IndependentsThe crucial barometer as the 100 Days milestone approaches: Republican discontent - a very different trend line - after the jump: Continue reading "Obama And Independents" » 24 Apr 2009 03:39 pm Reagan On Torture ProsecutionsFrom his signing statement ratifying the UN Convention on Torture from 1984: "The United States participated actively and effectively in the
negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the
development during this century of international measures against
torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the
Convention by the United States will clearly express United States
opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still
prevalent in the world today. My italics. Reagan was admant about prosecuting torture, but also prosecuting inhuman treatment that some might claim was not full-on torture. Now go read National Review or The Weekly Standard. And look what has happened to conservatism in America. 24 Apr 2009 03:33 pm The Cannabis Closet: Addiction, Ctd.A reader writes:
24 Apr 2009 03:23 pm Bad PositioningChristopher Orr finds Palin's current maneuvers very odd:
24 Apr 2009 03:12 pm What Torture Proponents Have To Prove
A.L. lays it all out: ...even if we were starting from a blank slate and we could simply ignore the fact that techniques like waterboarding are proscribed by numerous laws and treaties, to make a policy case for the use of such techniques, you would have to do much more than establish that they occasionally have produced actionable intelligence. Among other things, you would have to prove that 1) such information could not have been extracted using other means, 2) that the misinformation produced by such methods doesn't overwhelm the accurate information to the point of rending the whole exercise pointless, 3) that the strategic costs of using such techniques (international outrage, increased radicalization of the Muslim world, increased danger to U.S. troops, etc.) don't outweigh the benefits, and 4) the value of the information produced is worth the tradeoff of never being able to use that information (or the fruits thereof) in court and severely jeopardizing any hope of ever convicting that individual in any constitutionally compliant legal proceeding.
24 Apr 2009 03:06 pm What Cheney Wants Released21 pages from his personal file. Ackerman explains the possible relevance of the files Cheney wants released to his attempt to cover up and retroactively justify the illegal program. 24 Apr 2009 02:29 pm The View From Your RecessionA reader writes:
Continue reading "The View From Your Recession" » 24 Apr 2009 02:07 pm Abortion WarsMarc reports that Dawn Johnsen's confirmation is in question because of her time as a former counsel to NARAL: ...the White House wants to see her confirmed, but they are not going to expend more than a certain amount of energy to see her through. Senior officials discussed Johnsen's nomination on a conference call yesterday evening. The opposition to Johnsen, an outspoken opponent of torture and the politicalization of the Justice Department, was at first denoted by references to her legal views. There were hints that the White House somehow was using the OLC memos as a cudgel to force Republicans to confirm Johnsen. That turned out not to be true. Johnsen may be the last Democratic victim of the abortion wars. The most prolific and passionate opponent of the nomination of Harold Koh, is Ed Whelan. 24 Apr 2009 01:46 pm Infectious IgnoranceTa-Nehisi confronts Peggy Noonan: The job of journalists is to challenge the government and to challenge their readers and viewers. What sort of journalist tells his readers that some things must be mysterious? What sort of writer tells her readers, and viewers, essentially, to not ask too many questions? We have a fine era, when otherwise respected, intelligent, and well-read people step on a national stage and endorse national ignorance. What a mess. Noonan's more measured, if still misguided, column is here. 24 Apr 2009 01:40 pm Walking And Chewing GumJohn Judis doesn't have time to enforce the rule of law: I have a nagging worry that the eagerness of some Democrats in Congress and some activist organizations to press for what would be months and even years of inquiries and investigations into Bush-era war crimes is due in part to an eagerness to divert themselves, and us, from the seemingly insoluble problems we face in the present, which require every minute of attention from the White House and Congress. The past can wait. The rule of law is never a past issue. It is always present. But I see no reason why a mature democracy cannot both investigate its own failures while addressing its current problems. 24 Apr 2009 01:36 pm Taking Away Their Only ArgumentTimothy Kincaid looks at the religious protections written into the Connecticut marriage equality law: The language adopted by the State of Connecticut seems reasonable to me. It exempts churches, religious societies and other religious non-profits from “services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges” if the refusal is based on their objection to a marriage which is “in violation of their religious beliefs and faith”. It also exempts religious fraternal benefit societies (eg. the Knights of Columbus) to deny membership and insurance benefits. The third provision would exempt religious organizations from recognizing marriages for purposes of adoption, foster care and other social services provided that they don’t receive public funds for those services. I have no objection to these provisions and I dare say that most gay folk are just fine with them as well. In fact, I don’t see them as any additional protection than was already guaranteed by the US Constitution. What else you got, Maggie? 24 Apr 2009 01:26 pm Cool Ad WatchThis PSA is sure to please the sneezing porn crowd:
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