Month: April 2009

Steven Berlin Johnson envisions the ebook future:

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.

I'm heartened that Jonah Goldberg is not taking the Krauthammer line on how torture is not in any way something a democracy need feel ashamed of, and I agree that its legality and morality are in no way related to its efficacy or otherwise in procuring accurate information. But then we get this:

Admittedly, this has sometimes been confused by the atrocity that was Abu Ghraib, which had nothing to do with CIA interrogations.

On what grounds does Jonah say this? All the things we saw in graphic detail at Abu Ghraib, from the forced nudity, hooding, dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, beatings, to the sexual abuse and the stress positions and murder, were all milder versions of what Bush and Cheney had already authorized. They fit perfectly into the softening up for the SERE techniques that Bush had agreed to. And all the reports show that these techniques were clearly imported from Gitmo on orders from above. If they were an "atrocity," then the real thing – so brutal, so vile and so inhuman that the CIA took it upon itself to destroy the evidence – must have been much worse. And yet the right wants to punish the grunts at Abu Ghraib and protect the men whose policy they were implementing. Reynolds wanted jail or execution for the Abu Ghraib torturers, but it's unconscionable that the people with real power who ordered all of it be investigated and prosecuted.

A.L. fisks Maggie Gallagher:

…the notion that differences of opinion between the Catholic church and U.S. law will somehow render Catholic judicial nominees unconfirmable is demonstrably ludicrous. In addition to opposing gay marriage, the Catholic church also opposes divorce, birth control, abortion, and any number of other things that are permitted by U.S. law. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized a constitutional right to many of these activities. And yet, somehow, even after those decisions, we've gone from having one Catholic Supreme Court justice in the 1980s to having five Catholic justices on the current Court.

What Gallagher is really worried about is that she will soon find herself in a world where her particular brand of close-mindedness is viewed by most as bigotry and people who believe what she believes won't be politically mainstream enough to be nominated and confirmed as judges. But that's a ridiculous thing to whine about because it pre-supposes that you've already utterly lost the public opinion battle. And if you believe something that the vast majority of people don't believe, you don't have a right to have everyone else agree with you. If you're right, try to convince people that you're right and stop whining about how you will be marginalized in the future when everyone disagrees with you. That's just pathetic.

Via Ta-Nehisi, Emily Bazelon proposes:

…if we’re going to investigate or prosecute anyone, it shouldn’t be the agents on the scene. In the wake of Obama’s carefully crafted statement fending off prosecution for anyone who relied in good-faith on the DoJ memos, some commentators have called for looking into whether CIA agents could go down for torturing before the memos were written in August 2002. This seems wrong to me. If we went that route, we’d get around version of Abu Ghraib: a few low-level scapegoats standing in for their far more culpable superiors. Much more interesting is another possibility Obama left open: going after the lawyers who wrote the memos and the officials who demanded and approved them–David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Jim Haynes.

But why not Cheney and Bush? They aren’t monarchs. They have no more right to flout the rule of law than anyone.

Take a bow:

Saudi Arabia executed some 1,750 convicts between 1985 and 2008, yet reliable information about the practice is scarce. In Riyadh, beheadings happen at 9 a.m. any given day of the week, and there is no advance notice. There is also no written penal code, so questions of illegality depend on the on-the-spot interpretations of police and judges.

[…] In Riyadh, beheadings take place in a downtown public square equipped with a drain the size of a pizza box in its centre. Expatriates call it Chop Chop Square. I showed up at 9 a.m. most days for several weeks. After arriving at the barren granite expanse for yet another morning, I'd drink tea with merchants in the bazaar next door. Popular opinion seems to allow more respect for the executioners than sympathy for those wrongfully convicted, and rumours about the mysterious swordsmen abound. He must kill, one carpet dealer told me. If he doesn't kill for a few days, they give him a sheep to kill. The job is a coveted one, often passed from father to son. In a Lebanese TV clip now on YouTube, a Saudi executioner shows off his swords and describes his approach: If the heart is compassionate, the hand fails.

At first, the argument was that waterboarding was so swift and its results so immediate, it couldn't be regarded as torture (so the Khmer Rouge were just conducting "enhanced interrogation"):

KSM “didn’t resist,” one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. “He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” Another CIA official told ABC News: “KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.”

Now, the defense, from Limbaugh, is as follows:

"[I]f somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn't torture… He didn't complain … Six times a day: it means you aren't afraid of it."

The point of torture is always torture. They will find any justification for it they can. 

The point is to exert total absolute control over another human being – and to break that human being into as many pieces – physical, psychological, spiritual – as possible. This breaking of another human being is what Cheney wanted; it is what gave him a sense of control after he had presided over the worst attack in American history. Even though the victim had nothing more to tell, the torture had to go on and on – in part to generate data to justify the torture. Can you imagine what it felt like to put Zubaydah on the waterboard the seventieth time, knowing he had nothing more to say, knowing he was the wrong guy?

This is how war criminals behave and how they think. Once they go down the path of barbarism, they need to torture more and more to come up with the rationales to justify the torture they have already practised. Their own guilt pushes them forward. It's a perfectly closed loop, the point of which is the total extirpation of human freedom in a cell-block. This moment of total darkness – total power – is what the torturer always craves; and what he never recovers from.

(Photo: torture authorizer Dick Cheney by Win McNamee/Getty.)

A new poll shows voters back the governor's bill by 53 to 39 percent. It's now up to the state senate to prevent that popular will from being implemented.

He's all upset that Obama's lame notion of cutting a mere $100 million from the federal budget is pathetic given the scale of the deficits ahead. He's right about that, which is why I'm relieved Obama is talking seriously about entitlement reform and has offered some small progress on military bloat. But is this the same Glenn Reynolds whose only criticism of spending when the GOP was in power was … pork, just as puny and unserious as Obama's $100 million? Yes, it is!

A staggering photo-display from outer space at the Boston Globe.