Month: April 2007

The Japanese edition. Top American: Edison. Top Brit: Florence Nightingale. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution).

A reader writes:

I was born (in 1937) and raised a fundamentalist protestant. I slowly moved from fundie to moderate to agnostic to the atheist that I have now been for several decades. It took me a few decades to no longer have those occasional twitches of "what ifs" even though I  knew the twitches came from irrational and idiotic foundations.

I was very impressed (positively) with Sam’s arguments and his questions posed to you.  I was very impressed (negatively) with your irrationality, although I was also impressed (positively) with your honesty. Most religious folks are not so honest about their favorite religious magic. For that I thank you.

My atheism was neither strengthened nor confirmed by anything Sam Harris wrote.  It was both strengthened and confirmed by everything you wrote, both in particular and as a whole.

The use of blogs and websites by campaigns in the twelve days before an election is verboten. This kind of censorship gets John McCain’s approval. I’d rather live in America.

A reader points out what Andy McCarthy plainly fails to grasp with respect to baseline Geneva protections against coercion, abuse and torture:

It’s fairly evident Mr. McCarthy isn’t particularly conversant with Geneva. His sentence in his latest reply,

"But you do have to be able to ask them more than name, rank and serial number, which is all they’d be required to tell you if you gave them full-fledged Geneva rights"

is almost the exact opposite of what every Western army teaches its interrogators about the Conventions.

Here’s the short version. The Canadian army that I’m most familiar with trains interrogators and tactical questioners, and yet has no quibble with Geneva. The American army professionals I have worked with are apparently of similar mind. That’s because there is nothing in Geneva that prevents any military interrogator from interrogating any detainee, or asking any question of them that they would like. What Geneva says is that the detainee is not obliged to offer anything more than information sufficient to identify themselves to their interrogator. In practice, that means that the interrogator cannot then treat a person worse than other detainees simply because they refused to answer his other questions. On the other hand, nothing prevents the captor from treating the detainee better than the minimum requirements, should they cooperate. This is, ultimately, what normally gets the most reliable answers out of detainees, apparently: small favours and patient listeners.

The issue is complicated slightly if there is the prospect of criminal prosecution of the detainee (for war crimes, etc.), where the military’s neglect of the "right to remain silent" and cease interrogations can lead to incriminating information they elicited from a detainee being inadmissible in court later on. But interrogators are not stopped by Geneva from posing their questions, even though they have to be aware of the risk to a future prosecutor’s case in doing so. Both General Noriega and Saddam Hussein were both captured, pronounced to be PoWs under Geneva rules, treated accordingly … and yet also interrogated.

And if you’re not a POW as such, but still protected by Geneva baseline protections, you can be interrogated endlessly. That’s how we got Zarqawi. The pro-Bush right seems to believe that the only choice is between throwing out Geneva protections and getting no intelligence. That’s empirically wrong. What Geneva forbids for everyone, including those beneath POW status, is coercion. "Coercive interrogation" is an Orwellian term for torture. All coercion is torture – in varying degrees. The good news is that, after Abu Ghraib, the use of torture has been scaled back. But it has become formally legal, thanks to last year’s Military Commissions Act, which gave the president lee-way to apply whatever torture techniques he thinks are appropriate. That law must be repealed, if this country’s honor and reputation is to be restored. It really is as simple as that. And then we will have to go through a process of prosecutions of various war crimes. It won’t be pretty; but there’s no other way.

More pleasantries from the Pentagon under Bush and Cheney.

Radio show host Don Imus waits for the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show to begin, where Imus talked about complaints that he made racially charged comments in a recent broadcast April 9, 2007 in New York City. On his morning show April 4, Imus referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team, which had lost the national championship game the day before, as "nappy-headed hos." Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty.

Yes, they’re running the government. David Lat reports on a particularly diva-esque 33-year-old Christianist in the Minneapolis US Attorneys office.

A reader writes:

Here’s Zack Johnston in his interview on winning the Masters.

"I don’t even know what I shot, but I know that I had a lot of people giving me some good words of wisdom over the last week. My coaches clearly, our Tour chaplain, and being Easter Sunday, I felt like there was certainly another power that was walking with me and guiding me … Today, the only thing different was the fact that it was Easter. I felt like regardless of what happened today, my responsibility was to glorify God and hopefully He thinks I did."

If you play Find and Reply on your original text:

The contrast in the national cricket teams golf players of Pakistan the US PGA generation ago and today is quite startling. The overt Islam Christianity on display today was much more subdued in the past.

As I said, fundamentalism demands no less.

I’ve developed a soft spot for John Derbyshire – mainly for his rude, English empiricism among the cloying Christianists hither and thither on NRO. But it’s important to remember that he really is a reactionary, not a Tory. Hence this passage, lamenting for the millionth time the passage of the England he once knew:

I caught the tail-end of that old England — that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior — the English Gentleman — that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It’s all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.

And they call me excitable? Orwell had it right, of course, in an essay that, when I read it as a twelve-year-old, persuaded me in one sitting that I wanted to be a writer:

This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

(Photo: from a reader’s window in PateleyBridge, Yorkshire, England.)

"Whenever I asked Iraqis what kind of government they had wanted to replace Saddam’s regime, I got the same answer: they had never given it any thought. They just assumed that the Americans would bring the right people, and the country would blossom with freedom, prosperity, consumer goods, travel opportunities. In this, they mirrored the wishful thinking of American officials and neoconservative intellectuals who failed to plan for trouble. Almost no Iraqi claimed to have anticipated videos of beheadings, or Moqtada al-Sadr, or the terrifying question ‘Are you Sunni or Shia?’ Least of all did they imagine that America would make so many mistakes, and persist in those mistakes to the point that even fair-minded Iraqis wondered about ulterior motives. In retrospect, the blind faith that many Iraqis displayed in themselves and in America seems naïve. But, now that Iraq’s demise is increasingly regarded as foreordained, it’s worth recalling the optimism among Iraqis four years ago," – George Packer, the New Yorker.

(Photo: Iraqi Shiite men wave Iraqi flags during an anti-U.S protest called by firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to mark the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime on April 9, 2007 in the holy Shiite city of Najaf south of Baghdad, Iraq. Large crowds held flags and anti-US banners to show support for the cleric. Meanwhile the capital Baghdad was put under a 24-hours curfew. By Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.)