Month: February 2010

Disabled 4-Year-Old Told to Remove Leg Braces and Walk Through Metal Detector. Damn. He already got there.

Isn't it telling that as Cheney spent Sunday morning attacking the president for not being serious about the war on terror (by which he seems to mean solely Obama's refusal to commit war crimes), Biden must have already known about the capture of Mullah Baradar? The administration could have blown Cheney out of the water, but, of course, chose not to.

Why?

Because they are serious about national security and do not put domestic political games before it. Unlike Cheney, who never wasted an opportunity to use a war to score political points at home. In the end, I believe this president's calm and sincere and determined efforts to keep this country safe and to defuse the appeal of Islamist terror will be better understood and appreciated. And that he has done so by adhering to American values will go a long way to repair some small part of the damage Cheney inflicted.

Some Sunni politicians are still banned from participating in the upcoming Iraqi elections. Marc Lynch is worried:

[B]y this point significant damage has probably already been done no matter how (and even if) the crisis is worked out. The prospects for the March 7 election to be a transformative event heralding a new Iraq, with fresh leadership, robust legal institutions and a post-sectarian complexion now seem scant. The legitimacy of the electoral process and the independence of Iraqi institutions have been thrown into serious question among both Iraqis and the international community. Sunni-Shia resentments have been rekindled, with such polarization evidently being seen as a winning electoral strategy in certain quarters. Sunni participation may well be depressed, though a full-out boycott is unlikely. The damage is likely to me measured in increments, not in a single apocalyptic collapse.

I have long had foreboding about this, and every moment we get some good news about declining sectarianism, we seem to get a dose of cold reality immediately thereafter. I particularly want to insist that the conventional wisdom that the surge worked be measured by the criteria by which we were originally asked to judge it.

It was designed not just to tamp down violence, but to tamp down violence explicitly to create a political framework for sectarian reconciliation and cooperation. It has had some success in this, especially on a local level, but this is Iraq. It was designed by the Brits to be riven with sectarianism for ever. The cynical work of colonialism is still salient. So is the mercurial and opaque nature of Iraqi politics that most of us cannot even begin to grasp.

I therefore find Biden's recent premature bragging about Iraq to be as idiotic as Cheney's once was. History tells us that just as you believe that what Churchill called the "ungrateful volcano" is dormant, it explodes again. And every time we think some crisis has been resolved, it often turns out it wasn't. The next few months are full of potential explosions and the Beltway's shallow notion that this is an old story is not reliable. This is not over by any means. And anyone who confidently says so is a fool.

The Pakistani media is not exactly blaring the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Sprung reports that Dawn is reporting that Pakistan's Interior minister is calling it "propaganda."  The only other news outlet that seems to think such an important victory in the war on Jihadism is minor news is, er, Drudge:

The top headline is still blaring, "BAYH BAYH!"

Scott Horton adds to the legal ramifications of Dick Cheney's remarkable confession of committing a war crime on national television:

Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. Prosecutors have argued that a criminal investigation into torture undertaken with the direction of the Bush White House would raise complex legal issues, and proof would be difficult. But what about cases in which an instigator openly and notoriously brags about his role in torture?

Cheney told Jonathan Karl that he used his position within the National Security Council to advocate for the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques. Former CIA agent John Kiriakou and others have confirmed that when waterboarding was administered, it was only after receiving NSC clearance. Hence, Cheney was not speaking hypothetically but admitting his involvement in the process that led to decisions to waterboard in at least three cases.

What prosecutor can look away when a perpetrator mocks the law itself and revels in his role in violating it? Such cases cry out for prosecution. Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors should give him what he wants.

Jonathan Karl has gotten a similar statement out of Cheney before, if not quite so specifically.

Real Climate has a long and convincing defense of the IPCC:

[T]he IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm. All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science.

Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam. It is not up to us as climate scientists to clear up this mess – it is up to the media world itself to put this right again, e.g. by publishing proper analysis pieces like the one of Tim Holmes and by issuing formal corrections of their mistaken reporting. We will follow with great interest whether the media world has the professional and moral integrity to correct its own errors.

On twitter.

Ryan Avent faults regulation:

Products intended to power people along roads must satisfy a host of federal, state, and local regulations pertaining to safety, operational capabilities, and so on. With any new product, there would be immediate questions about what sort of licensing requirements would be necessary: who can use it, do they need a special certification, will insurance cover this operation, and so on. Basically, use of the roads by powered vehicles is a highly specified realm; only certain kinds of vehicles can legally do it, meeting certain design requirements, operated by people with certain certifications.

All of these rules have been put in place for good reasons, but they’re deadly to innovation.

There is simply no place on the road for broad experimentation and competition between innovative designs. Because of this, it’s far from clear that any new vehicle technology could have the potential financial upside of an iPhone, and so many potential innovators stay away. Getting a product street legal could take years of grinding and expensive legislative and legal work, and it wouldn’t do consumers much good if the process had to be repeated by subsequent market entrants, since its competition that will produce the desired improvements in personal transportation.

Celebrities are getting the treatment, Palestinians are protesting in Na'vi garb, and below is a tongue-in-cheek video on Live Avatar Role Playing in Wisconsin: