Month: August 2007

It’s a bad, bad place and we have to keep attacking it until they like us. Or something like that. Actually, the Foreign Affairs piece seemed mainly boilerplate to me. The conflation of all our many enemies in the Middle East into one homogeneous whole called Islamist terror strikes me as unintelligent and not very helpful in advancing our interests in the region. Worse: If the choice is between the tiniest risk of terror and your civil liberties, be assured your civil liberties will be extinguished. Henley is less charitable:

Rudy Giuliani hired a ghostwriter to produce the requisite manifesto, "Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned," for Foreign Affairs magazine. It’s full of lies, oversimplifications and vagueness, but makes up for all that by being very, very tedious. Because the genre requires him to name-check every part of the world – perhaps to assure the alleged author that it exists, perhaps to reassure the FA reader that the alleged author has heard of the world – you get whole sections of "I see India out there tonight. Keep rocking, India! And lemme give a shoutout to my peeps in Germany!" Those passages read like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on "The State of the World Today."

The rest of it reads like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on "The State of the World Today" after being maddened by bees.

Read it for yourself. Matt has a comment here and another here. Another blogger finds the analysis very 9/12. I was and remain a great admirer of Rudy Giuliani’s transformation of New York City. I’m glad he’s not a Christianist. He’s inclusive and largely right about healthcare policy. I like his low tax emphasis. But if you want a continuation of Cheney foreign policy, with less finesse, you know whom to vote for. We’ve seen its limits very very clearly. It’s silly to pretend it has worked, when it has clearly made us less secure. More salient: I think the Constitution has only a 50-50 chance if another terror-strike attacks and Giuliani is president. Above everything else, that matters.

Junk science and psychology in a children’s book.

A reader writes:

Sad as it is to see Tony Wilson dying, the article you link to shows the NHS appears to have been right in denying him Sutent.

The story is dated July 11, 2007 and Tony Wilson is quoted as believing "his condition has improved" and "the drug has stopped the cancer in its tracks." Furthermore, his friends had donated enough money to provide him a five-month supply of the drug. Tony Wilson died on August 10, 2007 which means he did not last even a month although he had access to the drug. [Update: Wilson died of a heart attack unrelated to his cancer.]

Every healthcare system, public or private, must choose which care to provide and the cost versus efficacy arguments must be weighed carefully. It is always bad to base public policy on a single anecdote and we certainly should not be denying people Sutent solely because someone taking it died within the month.  It is telling, however, that you used this story to bash the NHS for being conservative with other people’s money – rather than bash the drug company for refusing to sell its product at a price the customer is willing to pay.

Terror suspects must be denied all hope and face undefined torture – because it’s the best way to get information from them. That’s the actual public defense of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the war on Islamist terrorism. Marty Lederman explains that the administration does not defend detention without charges because the suspects detained may be dangerous. It defends such detention because only if suspects know that they have no hope of due process, legal counsel or a day in court, will they cough up important intelligence. Money quote from Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool. Even seemingly minor interruptions can have profound psychological impacts on the delicate subject-interrogator relationship. Any insertion of counsel into the subject-interrogator relationship, for example — even if only for a limited duration or for a specific purpose — can undo months of work and may permanently shut down the interrogation process. Therefore, it is critical to minimize external influences on the interrogation process.

By "external influences," he means the rule of law, the Geneva Conventions, the US Treaty obligations, and the Constitution. Marty goes on:

The Solicitor General even placed the Jacoby Declaration in the Appendix in the Padilla/Hamdi cases, and cited it liberally in support of its argument to the Court that the Administration should be entitled to detain persons not only for purposes of incapacitation, but also for purposes of long-term interrogations.

That is why, just as the Jacoby Declaration is the single most revealing document released by the government in the conflict against al Qaeda, so, too, the single most important sentence in any of the Supreme Court’s decisions in the al Qaeda cases was a stark rejection of the government’s rationale — indeed, a remarkable rebuke to the Jacoby Declaration — in Justice O’Connor’s controlling opinion in Hamdi. After explaining at length that the laws of war and the Authorization for Use of Military Force permit detention for purposes of incapacitating combatants, Justice O’Connor wrote (542 U.S. at 521):

"Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized."

No citation offered, because none should be needed. "Certainly."

Alas, certainty that we still live in a republic governed by the law is no longer possible.

An insight into Giuliani’s mindset.

This is now what’s coming out of the front-runner’s campaign:

"It sounds like Karl Rove is writing Senator Obama’s talking points."

I’m sure Karl Rove will have plenty of his own talking points next year, if Hillary is the nominee. Clinton’s current negative rating is 43 percent. Obama’s is 22.

A reader responds:

Oh dear, maybe I don’t want to see the wedding photos after all….

But speaking of Whitman and weddings, I wandered across this the other day.  It’s from Song of the Open Road.

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe–I have tried it–my own feet have tried it well–be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the
court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Old Walt really speaks to me and to my own love (16 years together this week) and how it stands up all by itself, "before preaching or law".  Same-sex marriage is a good thing (and many thanks for fighting for it for so long). But I fear that when full federal marriage is finally available to all we’ll lose the small but glorious conceit that our love is truer than others because it exists and thrives in spite of the doings of preachers and law makers.

Mark Kleiman on Clinton.

The professional organizations for lawyers and psychologists are finally resisting the war crimes of the Bush administration:

The Bush Administration has finally achieved something unprecedented. The organized bar–with a vote just one short of unanimity–has declared one of Bush’s executive orders illegal and vowed to seek Congressional action to override it. And psychologists appear poised to join their legal colleagues in an equally harsh denunciation.

Vive la resistance. Scott’s post is worth reading in full. America is coming back.

A University of Michigan study seems to fly in the face of much evidence and reporting from Iraq in the past four years. I don’t know what to make of it, but here it is. Iraqpundit wants to know why this isn’t a bigger story. Maybe because it seems like such an outlier? Tom Bowler has more.