Posts from — April 2009

I enjoy listening to both of them… Stephen’s impersonation of Ira is especially apt:

If you haven’t tried listening to This American Life before, you should. It’s the top podcast on itunes for good reason.

NY Post editorial on torture:

Al Qaeda kidnaps Americans, tortures them, then decapitates them on TV.
We deprive captives of sleep, push them into walls and put harmless caterpillars that we say are poisonous in their cells.
Then we’re the ones who are condemned as the worst human-rights violators on the planet.

My parents taught me that “just because other people do it doesn’t make it right”, a lesson the NY Post editorial board would do well to learn. The actions of Al Qaeda barbarians bears no influence on what is right or wrong, and if the difference between right and wrong doesn’t matter, then what are we fighting for?

Also, I read a lot about this issue and I haven’t heard anyone refer to the U.S. as “the worst human-rights violators on the planet”. That’s a textbook straw man.

Finally, the editorial trivializes their description of torture: we waterboarded one detainee 183 times in a month, for example, something they declined to mention.

About halfway through, though the whole thing is pretty good:

(previously)

… check out what’s on the wall at 1:02 in this google video:

Classic.

Bank robbery on April 15:

San Francisco police today asked for the public’s help in finding a bank robbery suspect who reportedly told a bank manager he was angry about corporate bailouts.

According to the article, the robber was “smiling throughout the encounter”, which is creepy.

Sometimes you need to swear a little:

From earlier that day:

I enjoyed this segment. Some language NSFW, though it’s generally tame:

The most spectacularly stupid thing I’ve heard this month, if not year, goes to Peggy Noonan:

Her quote in the discussion about whether or not to investigate war crimes:

“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking, Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”

She’s certainly not the only person to express this, but the way she expressed it is exceptionally mindless. I’m at a loss for words to express the magnitude of this.

Obama had a similar outlook. NYT:

Mr. Obama condemned what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history” and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again. But he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the program, saying that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

In fact, “laying blame for the past” is the point of the Judicial system, which is one of the branches of government, as you may have heard. Our laws and treaties are meaningless unless we enforce them. We live in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, but suddenly we think that war crimes are not worthy investigation? Seriously?

Also, shouldn’t the torture defenders be advocating our withdrawal from the UN Convention on Torture? If we aren’t going to adhere to it, why bother? How can we expect other countries to follow a standard we don’t?

We’re still prosecuting Nazi war criminals, FWIW.

I’m much more certain about this issue than I used to be. We’re a country of laws, not a country of men. And for you tea-partiers: unchecked executive power is a lot closer to tyranny than Clinton-level tax rates.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to write up a cohesive, coherent reaction, so I’m just going to start writing and see what happens…

The released memos don’t contain much groundbreaking information about methods themselves. There were some minor revelations about the use of insects and “walling” (throwing a detainee into a semi-flexible wall of some sort), but the more important aspect was that the memos provided a window into the justification and cognizance that the Bush administration had of what it was doing.

Looking at the practices authorized in the memos, you can’t help but wonder why the administration would bother acting upset about the Abu Ghraib scandal while it was authorizing similar detainee treatment anyway.

Navy SERE trainer Malcolm Nance made an important point in
his article in the Daily News:

Have no doubt: As a counterterrorism practitioner, should I find bin Laden I will cut his heart out with a plastic spoon. That would be about justice and revenge, not interrogation. But that job – finding him and bringing him to justice – has been made incalculably more difficult for our soldiers and intelligence officers around the world by these documents and what they mean.

Torture defenders are put into an awkward situation: they must both defend the techniques as being rather tame (“sleep deprivation? I didn’t get much sleep last night! It’s not torture!”) and also claim that the techniques are more effective than all other interrogation techniques. There’s a bit of a paradox there.

Here are some clips to give you a sense of that argument:

The memos should be read in context, some of them came from 2002, in which America was still whipped up into a frenzy, and there was a tendency to overreact. The memos from 2005, after Abu Ghraib, are still making the same arguments, and we’re still hearing those today. This isn’t a panicked disregard for the law, it’s a methodical disregard for the law.

Here’s the puzzle:

The answer is a single word.

Puzzle is from Wired. Don’t click that link unless you want a hint: they text they wrote around it gives too much away. This one was fun, though had planned on going to bed a bit earlier…

Enjoy!