Month: April 2009

Occam’s Razor

James Surowiecki thinks boldness is overrated:

[The] simple explanation—that Barack Obama, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke have adopted their strategy because they think it has the best chance of getting the economy back on track while taking the least systemic risk, rather than because they’re stupid, or corrupt, or “cognitively captured”—is one you rarely hear floated these days, even though it is, I think, almost certainly true.

Me too.

Americans Believe Waterboarding Is Torture

Greg Sargent looks at a new NYT poll on torture:

The relevant numbers are buried in the poll’s internals [pdf]: Seventy one percent think waterboarding is torture, while only 26% say it isn’t. Intriguingly, the paper’s article about the poll doesn’t mention this finding, perhaps because that might have necessitated using the word “torture.”

The Party Of Cheney

Douthat’s first column is up and it has provoked golf claps all around. The closer:

A large swath of the political class wants to avoid the torture debate. The Obama administration backed into it last week, and obviously wants to back right out again.

But the argument isn’t going away. It will be with us as long as the threat of terrorism endures. And where the Bush administration’s interrogation programs are concerned, we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus.

The only way to do that is a truth commission, broadly constituted with enough time, and money to do the job right. A lot of the work has already been done. Only after the commission reports should the question of prosecution be addressed.

“Enhanced Interrogation Technique”

Polpotwaterboard2


“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

– George Orwell, Politics And The English Language.


“The military has interrogated terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. And in addition, a small number of terrorists, high-value targets, held overseas have gone through an interrogation program run by the CIA. It’s a tougher program, for tougher customers. These include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. He and others were questioned at a time when another attack on this country was believed to be imminent. It’s a good thing we had them in custody, and it’s a good thing we found out what they knew.

“The procedures of the CIA program are designed to be safe, and they are in full compliance with the nation’s laws and treaty obligations. They’ve been carefully reviewed by the Department of Justice, and very carefully monitored. The program is run by highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law. And the program has uncovered a wealth of information that has foiled attacks against the United States; information that has saved thousands of lives,” – Dick Cheney, former vice-president of the United States, who conceived and ran a full-fledged torture program that resulted in the deaths of over a hundred prisoners, in violation of the laws and treaties of the United States.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"Statements like "thanks for the swine flu" or "I hope Susan Collins' kids get swine flu" are crazy responses to her opinions and the reality of the current funding situation. Just asinine. Same as actually calling or writing Senator Collins. Why? Why are you doing this? Schumer went so far as to call the pandemic prevention funding a "little porky thing," are you calling him? Are you yelling about him? Additionally, the money has been appropriated, so what's the point?," – Addison, Daily Kos.

What Obama Hasn’t Said

Andrew Bacevich is worried by Obama's super-cautious foreign policy so far:

What the president is doing and saying matters less than what he has not done. The sins of omission are telling: There is no indication that Obama will pose basic questions about the purpose of the US military; on the contrary, he has implicitly endorsed the proposition that keeping America safe is best accomplished by maintaining in instant readiness forces geared up to punish distant adversaries or invade distant countries. Nor is there any indication that Obama intends to shrink the military’s global footprint or curb the appetite for intervention that has become a signature of US policy. Despite lip service to the wonders of soft power, Pentagon spending, which exploded during the Bush era, continues to increase.

Larison adds his own two cents. I have to say the logic of empire is strong; and Obama has yet to question it in any serious way.

The Torturing Of Desired Intelligence

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray sees the torturing of Zubaydah to get a casus belli for invading Iraq as just part of an entire operation generating self-perpetuating falsehood:

In gathering evidence from victims of torture, we built a consistent picture of the narrative which the torturers were seeking to validate from confessions under torture. They sought confessions which linked domestic opposition to President Karimov with Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden; they sought to exaggerate the strength of the terrorist threat in Central Asia. People arrested on all sorts of pretexts – (I recall one involved in a dispute over ownership of a garage plot) suddenly found themselves tortured into confessing to membership of both the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Al-Qaida.

They were also made to confess to attending Al-Qaida training camps in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In an echo of Stalin’s security services from which the Uzbek SNB had an unbroken institutional descent, they were given long lists of names of people they had to confess were also in IMU and Al-Qaida. It became obvious to me after just a few weeks that the CIA material from Uzbekistan was giving precisely the same narrative being extracted by the Uzbek torturers – and that the CIA “intelligence” was giving information far from the truth.

I was immediately concerned that British ministers and officials were being unknowingly exposed to material derived from torture, and therefore were acting illegally.

I asked my Deputy, Karen Moran, to call on a senior member of the US Embassy and tell him I was concerned that the CIA intelligence was probably derived from torture by the Uzbek security services. Karen Moran reported back to me that the US Embassy had replied that it probably did come from torture, but in the War on Terror they did not view that as a problem.

In Search Of Sunlight

David Corn doesn't like the idea of a special prosecutor:

These liberals all want to see alleged Bush administration wrongdoing exposed. But there's one problem with a special prosecutor: it's not his job to expose wrongdoing. A special prosecutor does dig up facts–but only in order to prosecute a possible crime. His mission is not to shine light on misdeeds, unless it is part of a prosecution. In many cases, a prosecutor's investigation does not produce any prosecutions. Sometimes, it leads only to a limited prosecution…A special prosecutor, it turns out, is a rather imperfect vehicle for revealing the full truth.

How Bad Is It?, Ctd.

A reader writes:

It's worth noting that Megan's numbers assume a great deal. In the earliest stages of any flu outbreak, there will typically be far more people who have the virus than are actually tested and confirmed to have it. Only after public awareness of the virus rises substantially will many people with flu symptoms feel compelled to seek medical treatment (after all, most of us get the flu every couple of years and don't bother with the doctor), whereas most deaths will be investigated. When compounded with the lack of access to adequate health care in Mexico, it's even more likely that the ratio of deaths to those infected will inevitably appear higher than it will ultimately turn out to be. The comparative mildness of cases in the U.S. so far would go further to suggest this. Having said that, the young (but not too young) ages of those who have died so far is troubling, and of course, this could turn out to be a nightmare. But Megan is reading too much into the numbers as they exist now. For all we know, swine flu may turn out to kill not many more than those killed in your average annual flu outbreak. Nothing to be insensitive to, mind you, but not quite the apocalypse.