Month: August 2009

by Chris Bodenner

NIAC relays the news:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the prosecution of opposition leaders on Friday, stating that the activists currently on trial in Tehran should not be the only ones punished. More from AP via NY Times:

“Serious confrontation has to be against the leaders and key elements, against those who organized and provoked (the riots) and carried out the enemy’s plan. They have to be dealt with seriously,” Ahmadinejad told a crowd of thousands in the capital Tehran before Friday prayers. Ahmadinejad did not specifically name the opposition leaders. However, many hard-liners and members of the Revolutionary Guard have publicly called for the arrest of defeated presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi as well as former president Mohammad Khatami.

Ahmadi's words, however, are diametrically opposed to what Khamenei said yesterday. Juan Cole explains:

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei say on Thursday that he did not believe Iran's protesters against the official presidential election results was instigated by the West. […] The supreme leader also cautioned that trials of dissidents should not be based on hearsay evidence but rather on solid evidence. Khamenei was signalling to hard liners such as Ayatollah Misbah-Yazdi that he would not permit treason trials against the defeated presidential candidates or their supporters. Such actions have the potential to tear the country apart, and could well backfire on the regime as the show trials it is conducting against arrested protesters have already done.

In contrast, regime critics have not also backed down but rather have become if anything more vocal than ever.

by Chris Bodenner

Dan Fejes applies Cheney’s Law to the economic crisis:

[W]e are looking at near-double digit unemployment through the end of next year, and the economic picture is generally pretty bad. […] We should therefore create a program with a catchy name like Work Makes Freedom to address it. The WMF’s could be involuntarily matched up with employers, who for a nominal fee would provide permanent food and shelter in exchange for labor. A classic win-win situation. Unemployment would plummet, GDP would go up, and the economy would soar. Illegal immigration would all but end by virtue of eliminating the economic incentive to come here, business costs would go down and that would presumably redound to consumers in the form of lower prices. It would, in a word, work. While reasonable people might disagree on the morality of the WMF program, its effectiveness would be beyond dispute.

This outcome-focused approach to policy is perfectly in line with Antonin Scalia’s recent observation that the legal system is not ultimately concerned with actual guilt or innocence. All that matters is that we have a well-defined, efficient process that comes to a final, immutable conclusion.

by Hanna Rosin

A very interesting article in Scientific American this week explores new research showing that depression may be a mental adaptation that helps promote sharper analytical thinking.  The research begins with the question: Why isn't depression more rare? Maybe, like obesity, it afflicts us because modern conditions are so different than the ones in which we evolved. But no, apparently depression is common to all cultures, even small scale, isolated ones.

One strain of research points to adaptive advantages that come from depression:

So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

If that's true, I say meh to evolution.

by Chris Bodenner

Eli Lake gets the scoop:

The U.S. military authorized the arrest and interrogation last year of a top aide to Ahmed Chalabi on suspicion that the aide served as a liaison to a Shi'ite group thought responsible for the 2007 execution-style slayings of five U.S. Marines and other violence against foreigners and Iraqis […] Mr. Chalabi had access to sensitive information about the campaign against the special groups through his relationship with the Iraqi government and U.S. military. "This was a friendship killer," the U.S. official said, leading the U.S. military to cut ties with Mr. Chalabi in May 2008.

And just a quick refresher:

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, under [Chalabi's] guidance the [Iraqi National Congress] provided a major portion of the information on which U.S. Intelligence based its condemnation of Saddam Hussein, including reports of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda. Nearly all, if not all, of this information has turned out to be of questionable accuracy.

Casting a cloud over the story, however, is the alleged mistreatment of the aide in question:

The aide, Ali Faisal al-Lami, was released without charge earlier this month. […] Mr. al-Lami said he asked to know the charges against him. His interrogator, whom Mr. al-Lami described as an American in civilian clothes, replied: " 'You are a dangerous criminal, and you support terrorism, and there are so many charges against you. … You are in the custody of coalition forces with the approval of the U.N. and Iraqi forces.' "

Mr. al-Lami said he was kept in a squalid cell infested with insects and fed military rations, known as MREs, that were past their expiration dates. The only furniture in his cell was a small metal bench and the temperature, he said, was near freezing. He said he suffered from diarrhea but was not allowed to go to the bathroom for five days. As a result, he said, he soiled himself. He said he was deprived of sleep by a light that remained on at all times and by guards who would bang on the door when he started to nod off. Mr. al-Lami also asserted that he was subjected to psychological pressure. At one point, he said, he was shown pictures of his family in their backyard that appeared to have been taken from his house. He was told he would not see his family again – a threat he interpreted to mean that if he did not cooperate, his wife and children would be harmed.

Joanne Mariner, director of terrorism and counterterrorism for Human Rights Watch, also interviewed Mr. al-Lami and said she found his story credible.

by Patrick Appel

David Rothkopf sketches out the rough transition that may be ahead:

We're also going to witness the complex consequences of the simultaneous rise and decline of petrostates. First, the soaring price of oil — which could skyrocket to $250 a barrel, according to some recent Wall Street estimates — will fill their coffers. Sovereign wealth funds will grow fat again, and with the dollar likely to be weak for years to come, oil fat cats will be buying cheap U.S. assets and making American nationalists uncomfortable all the while…the oil states will be rich, influential, and, paradoxically, in decline. The forward-looking among them might use the time they have to plan, to hedge their bets. But the slow death of the oil economy will undoubtedly lead to flare-ups as social pressures translate into political fractures and opportunistic politicians cling to wealth the old-fashioned way — by grabbing it from their neighbors.

by Patrick Appel

Jason Zengerle offers his final thoughts on the gun debate just as E.D. Kain enters it:

People should have the right to bear arms. The government should not be in the business of taking law-abiding peoples’ guns away.  But is it so much to ask – such an affront to liberty – that we leave them at home while listening to our politicians give speeches?  Unlike gyms or church services or gas stations, these events generally have security on the premises.  If a shooter shows up, other guys with guns will be on the scene already.  I totally understand having a gun in many, many other scenarios, where you might actually need it to protect yourself.  But at a town hall meeting?

I'm with Thoreau on this one. Whether or not one has the right to bear arms at a political event, tactically it's an incredibly idoitic move unless that event is about the right to bear arms. Fans of the second amendment aren't winning any converts.

by Andrew

"People love honesty, but they hate the truth. To frankly acknowledge and address the ineluctable reality of healthcare rationing is not merely to touch the proverbial third rail of American politics; it is to lie across the tracks in front of the onrushing train. Come, let us speak of unpleasant things. How is health care to be rationed? Who gets the short end of the stick?" – Eric Chevlen, First Things, via Megan.

by Andrew

Charles Murray responds to my small riposte to him on the question of torture. I should say I am second to few in admiring Murray's work. I risked my entire career to bring his brilliant book, The Bell Curve, into the bounds of respectable conversation because I believe his intellectual honesty is self-evident, even if you believe he is wrong about everything. His work debunking the claims of welfarism is central to understanding the best conservative critique of the liberal entitlement state. I have long counted him and his brilliant wife as friends. (And a tiny example of his honesty is in the post I link to, where he discovers he has been unfair to the late great Pauline Kael.)

And I do not disagree with him that it should be possible to debate even torture in amoral terms, in terms of political repercussions, polling, cultural attitudes and so forth. The same can be said of abortion, child abuse, or the death penalty and other horrors. What still stuns me, however, is how supine many on the non-statist right have been in the face of the massive evidence that the US government instituted a systematic, bureaucratized torture-and-abuse program for captured and imprisoned terror suspects (many of whom turned out to be completely innocent). If Charles has written about this, I must have missed it. I have done the usual Google search for his statements condemning torture by the US government and have come up empty. Maybe I missed something. I will gladly post anything he has written or said in condemnation or criticism of these torture techniques. 

It is not the amoral discussion of torture that appalls me; it's the amoral discussion proffered without any moral discussion ever being offered.

And to go straight to the amoral argument without dealing with the fact that the government secretly and illegally, walled, froze, beat, contorted, stripped, shaved, near-drowned, near-suffocated, and denied sleep for hundreds of hours to unknown numbers of prisoners and murdered 100 of them that we know of – this befuddles me. It was illegal; it was unethical by any standard of ethics; it was immoral and indecent; it required a conscious subversion of democratic norms to accomplish; and it is a terrifying precedent in a country allegedly founded on the rule of law. I do not understand how a libertarian cannot stand up against this and be counted – for once and for all on the grounds that is remains the greatest violation of individual liberty and dignity and due process in recent times in America. 

I know the social and communal pressures on the right that mitigate against this kind of stand. The pressure to fall in line behind Bush and Cheney at AEI must be intense. AEI has a war criminal as a fellow, and has hosted forthright defenses of war crimes by the perpetrators. To my knowledge, no criticism of torture as government policy has emerged from a think tank crafted to defend individual liberty. But I always took Charles to be a man alone, immune to such pressure, capable of facing it down because his integrity as a public intellectual has been a lodestar in my own professional life.

It saddens me to argue with him over this. But I feel I have no other option.

by Andrew

"There are plenty of Old Media haunts where the marquee writers still turn up their noses at the web," – Frank Foer, on the revamped TNR.com.

“The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes," – Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of TNR.

by Hanna Rosin

That's how much Gerald Marzorati, editor of the New York Times magazine, says it cost to produce the 13,000 word piece running in this Sunday's issue, about the hospital in New Orleans that euthanized several patients during Hurricane Katrina (here is a preview online). The cost does not interest me. I'm thrilled to see any newspaper pouring its heart and its resources into long form narrative journalism, and in my view, this particular story is fantastic – deeply reported, humane, riveting and enlightening.

Here is what does worry me: The story is set up as an exploration of what happens when a certain kind of medical necessity or expediency butts up against serious human illness. You see where I'm going with this: Death panels. Like the circumcision debate, this is likely to be used as an example of what the Obama administration will do when they start to weigh whether it's worth saving sick, old people. Dr. Anna Pou, the story's ambiguous villain who may have authorized the injections, will be the stand in for Obama.

In case that happens, I here provide my preemptive rebuttal. This story shows the opposite of what would happen under government mandated health care reform. The reason the hospital staff got stuck having to make all these terrible decisions is because they were abandoned, and on their own. There were no established procedures, no regulations, no guidelines. There was just them, exhausted and overwhelmed, and a few dozen very ill patients unhooked from their respirators.

As one staff member said, "This was totally against every fiber in my body.” But “we were abandoned by the government, we were abandoned by Tenet, and clearly nobody was going to take care of these people in their dying moments.”