Month: January 2009

by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

I heard Marc Thiessen on BBC radio last night, angrily denouncing Obama’s actions to the world.  What struck me most was his dishonesty. He boldly asserted that waterboarding had saved lives because regular interrogation techniques weren’t working to uncover active plots.  And he insisted that we need to be able to use waterboarding when all else fails.  But he wouldn’t call it torture.

His argument was a utilitarian defense of torture, boldly -even proudly- made.  It’s a fair argument (with which I disagree), but his refusal to call torture torture undermines everything he says.  It shows how little the Bushies contemplated…well, anything.  As far as they’re concerned, they acted and because they acted, their actions were right.  Everyone else is wrong.

I suppose a principled defense of torture is possible, but Thiessen isn’t interested.  He’s just angry.

by Patrick Appel
Steve Coll ponders the radical group:

Among other specialists and national-security types…there is a drift toward the proposition that if the Taliban is in some sense indigenous or inevitable, perhaps we should just accept our limits and let Afghans sort them out, given that the Taliban only kill “occupying” American soldiers and civilians locally, and do not operate overseas.

This line of thinking has obvious appeal after the Bush Administration’s policies of operatic overreach, but it is erroneous for two reasons.

First, the Taliban are not indigenous to Afghanistan—their history and their present strength cannot be assessed in isolation from their relationship with the Pakistani state and other radical elements inside Pakistan. They are partially an Afghan problem and increasingly a Pakistani problem, too. Second, the Taliban are now so large and diverse, and have been so much changed by the international environment in which they fight today, that to generalize about their strategic intentions is to, well, guess, as we did, unsuccessfully, in the run up to September 11th. Are most Taliban local in their orientation and grievances? Sure. Are some interested in overthrowing the Pakistani state, which is endowed with nuclear weapons? Apparently. Do a few of them, like Al Qaeda, consider the United States as a legitimate Far Enemy, worthy of determined raid or two? I should think so, given the number of Taliban we have locked up at Guantánamo.

by Patrick Appel
Sargent tackles Marc Thiessen:

Here’s the thing about this. You have here an assertion that crosses over from mere opinion into verifiable or disprovable assertion. If you’re going to say that someone has already proven himself to be dangerous, as opposed to merely being potentially dangerous, you need to point to empirical evidence of this, such as lives lost to foreign threats on your watch. There haven’t been any such lives lost under President Obama yet, unlike other past Presidents.

by Patrick Appel
The National Republican National Committee is behind the times.

by Patrick Appel

Hilzoy whacks Cornyn for delaying Holder’s appointment to Attorney General. Cornyn has said that, "Part of my concern, frankly, relates to some of [Holder’s] statements at the hearing in regard to torture and what his intentions are with regard to intelligence personnel who were operating in good faith based upon their understanding of what the law was." Hilzoy:

If John Cornyn and his colleagues meant to immunize intelligence officials for whatever they did, they should have passed a law saying so. If they wanted to immunize intelligence officials for doing anything that the Bush administration said was OK, however implausible the administration’s claims might be, they should have passed a law saying that. And if they wanted to add a codicil saying: "For the purposes of this statute, the practice known as ‘waterboarding’ is not a form of torture", they should have done that.

But they didn’t do any of these things. They passed a law saying that people who engage in torture can be prosecuted for war crimes. Eric Holder, like many people, and like our government before George W. Bush got hold of it, believes that waterboarding is torture. Nothing in the Military Commissions Act says otherwise.

Second, because Eric Holder is not yet Attorney General, he has not yet had a chance to see what, exactly, people did to detainees over the last seven years. That being the case, it would be completely irresponsible for him to say whether he will or won’t prosecute them.

…no responsible prosecutor ought to say whether or not he will prosecute a given individual before he knows where the evidence leads. If Holder were willing, at this point, to promise either that he would or that he would not prosecute people for war crimes, I would regard that as disqualifying him for the position of Attorney General.

by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

The Web-Google-Wikipedia monoculture may, in fact, be a bad thing, or at least a phenomena of high risk and negative side-effects, but to call it a "fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service" is to show a fundamental lack of understanding of how systems work. Systemic integration always comes at the price of the diversity that emerges within isolated niches.

On a grand scale, when all the land masses of the earth were shoved together, biological diversity dwindled as successful species had few insurmountable barriers to expanding their territories. Conversely, separated continents and isolated islands made for extreme diversity, as Darwin noted in the Galapagos Islands. This global diversity began to collapse, not due to the remerging of the continents, but because the human race overcame the barriers of geographic isolation.

Other systems are similarly vulnerable. Diverse local economies give way to the monocultures of global trade. The plethora of local dialects give way to both mass media and to other global systems that require a common language (such as international air traffic control). "Mom and Pop" stores and local diners with distinct local cuisines give way to a homogenized food culture, not so much because of the multinational corporation (though that plays its part), but because of a nationally integrated highway system. Global systems are inevitably more homogenous than isolated systems. A loss of diversity is always the price of a globalized system. So to call the homogenization of a globalized information network a "failure" is to beg the question of how much success is feasible in anything other than a dream of what globalization could (but really can’t) be.

If you want more diversity in the Web, the solution is simple. Put up more barriers of one kind or another. Diversity will bloom. In fact, if you want to find places in the web where Google is not dominant, look for the places where Google is blocked. The services available may not be up to Google standards, but that’s not the point. By being able to evolve without competing for "habitat" with Google, they will become systemic species unto themselves. That’s what diversity means.

by Chris Bodenner
It’s for a sound production company:

by Patrick Appel
Ta-Nehisi joins me in hating the "I pledge" video.

by Chris Bodenner
"Listen, I think the world of Governor Palin. … Look, whenever there’s a losing campaign, there’s always a little bit of back and forth that happens postmortem. Uh, look, I’m so grateful to have her as a friend. … I think she has a big role to play [in the GOP]. … But let me just say, I don’t know who’s running and all that, but I will always be grateful to Sarah Palin for her friendship and her strong principles and leadership," John McCain, asked if he would support his 2008 running mate for president in 2012.

(Hat tip: Christopher Orr)