Cheney leaves me breathless.

But now that this once top-secret information is out for all to see - including the enemy - let me draw your attention to some points that are routinely overlooked.

It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Muhammed - the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about beheading Daniel Pearl.

We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country. We didn't know about al-Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.
Maybe you've heard that when we captured KSM, he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogations, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people. In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men."

Full transcript of Cheney speech

Cheney leaves me breathless.

At times like these, I SOOOO wish I were an interviewer to ask some questions I really am curious to hear the answer to.

What is the relevance that we only waterboarded three? Why does the number matter? For example, if you said, "We only killed three of their children in front of them" or "we only feed three of them their own mutilated dicks", would the number involved be a mitigating factor? So, in your own words, please explain why the number matters?

What makes Abu Ghraib a violation of law and decency, but waterboarding KSM not? Really, I'm not asking a rhetorical question. What in the world is the difference in your mind? The cynical answer is just that you're throwing others under the bus to distract from yourself, but I think you really do think there is a difference. So, what is it? They were both interrogating people thought to be trying to harm us. They were both attempts to "break" the prisoners and make them give us information. Is it just the numbers? Too many and it's a criminal disgrace, but it's only ok if it's just a few people? Or were these people too low level?

The US government under Bush was less professional than the smallest of small towns...

CNN drew my attention to a GQ article with a series of covers for intelligence briefings that shows war scenes and Bible verses. The picture above is one such cover. These are the covers of official US government intelligence briefings. Intelligence briefings! It boggles the mind.

While some commentators look at these covers and focus on the dubious merits of framing the war as a task from God, of the danger of mixing religion with war planning, and of the validation of Muslim fears that we're waging a war against Islam, I am personally so stunned by the utter lack of professionalism displayed by these covers that I can't make my mind focus on any of these other issues. I am shocked that there are ANY pictures whatsoever on the covers of intelligence briefings. Intelligence and war planning, being the most damn serious things government does should be the most antiseptic and professionalized topic in all of government. One fears that the intelligence reports found inside these covers will be laid out in cartoons.

Just to put this in perspective, would this seem professional if it came from a local McDonald's manager in the employee handbook? No.

I almost liked the Bush administration early on. I stopped once they started force feeding us lies to justify the Iraq war, which I still maintain is more about Thatcher calling Cheney a pussy than anything else. They have only gone downhill from there. I have been thinking of them as bad actors, but when shockingly unprofessional things surface like this, I increasingly entertain the theory that they are merely the biggest group of losers to occupy the office in memory. Maybe they are just well meaning hacks without a shred of the intelligence or professionalism we would expect from the lowliest mayor, or dog catcher. It is often said that Bush was only qualified to be baseball commissioner, not president. I increasingly doubt even that.

Waterboarding used to be a crime.

I can recommend the article: Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime. It's too bad Nielsen just died. It'd be interesting to get his views on US torture.

If you have still more time to read, I encourage you to read:

Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Time Bomb

Seriously, why stop with waterboarding?

Thomas Sowell over at Real Clear Politics shows us how unserious torture critics are:

One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death, issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about "torturing" captured terrorists.

People's actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn't descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

What if it was your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking time bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make water-boarding look like a picnic.

I don't want to be thought of as childish, so let me put on my serious hat and think about torture...

If waterboarding saves lives, maybe pulling fingers off with a vice would save even more. What do you think? After all, I hear a lot of people saying that waterboarding isn't really that bad, so maybe Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is still holding out on us? Maybe al Queda has obtained nukes and he knows where they are! Hundreds of thousands of lives may be on the line. So we should probably torture him a lot more to make sure. Maybe we should cut his dick off and threaten to feed it to him. Maybe then he'll tell us about the nukes? They've been trained to resist torture, though. So it could be that we have to find his family and pull their fingers off while he watches. Although I hate to drag in innocent people, the calculus is clear, a few terrorist family members for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent American lives.

Of course, I don't really know the most effective way to get information out of terrorists. So maybe we should do some research on the topic, try out different torture techniques, hell, maybe even try some non-torture things, see what works and what doesn't. We've got those guys in GitMo we don't know what to do with, we could research on them for starters. Maybe later, we could use prisoners in the US prisons.

We'll have to have experts. We have done with amateurs so far, but we'll need to open up a torture school, and start hiring professional torturers who can give the task their full attention. It will be an honorable profession that kids in high school will put on their list of career choices.

Once we've worked out the kinks, we can save even more lives by enhanced interrogation of serial killer suspects, uncooperative crime witnesses, and so on.

Seriously, where would you draw the line, Sowell, and why? Seriously.

The Onion's Good Suggestion for Republicans

What are Republicans doing to revitalize their image?

* Replacing apocalyptic fear-based rhetoric with more restrained fear-based rhetoric

The pernicious "we're all to blame" meme that's going around...

The issue we need to come to terms with is not just who in the Bush administration did what but how we were collectively complicit in their decisions - Jacob Weisberg at Slate

Michael Kinseley made the identical argument over at the Washington Post, and even over at the libertarian magazine Reason Kathy Young makes the same argument that prosecution "smacks of scapegoating" since "their actions reflected a broad consensus". This, "we're all to blame, so no one is to blame" meme seems to be the latest trial balloon being floated as a way to avert an ugly and unpleasant prosecution of those involved.

While it is definitely true that we were complicit, and true that we should look in the mirror and assess our own culpability, our complicity in no way absolves anyone. If the mob calls for blood and you commit murder in the mob's name, it is still murder. The Nazis could have made the same claim about concentration camps. Everyone knew it was going on, and no one made a stink about it, ergo no war crimes were committed. The rationale that we shouldn't prosecute torturers and those who approved it because the country implicitly approved is facile and weak. If that argument was valid, we could just scrap the Bill of Rights since the majority can do no wrong.

Personally, I dread the thought of a prosecution. It will be ugly and will cause a lot of strife in the country. What's more, the people involved, from the President on down are, I think, basically decent people trying to do their job. So I feel for them. Nonetheless, it seems to me that principle may demand some kind of accounting, that some kind of judgment be passed. Who else can do it but the courts and juries? Congress? It will be too easy to dismiss any congressional investigation as merely partisan showboating. The same will be said of courts as well, but there is undeniably more legitimacy to court proceedings and jury verdicts than to congressional hearings. I'd probably favor pardoning the guilty, if there are any. It will be enough to have them found guilty. This is for history, for precedent, not for retribution.

The most military spending is like none at all.

The relentless lack of context or scale in all news is one of the most depressing things to me. The cartoon below illustrates this in a fine way.



A defense budget that is larger than the REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED is portrayed as having only one arrow in the quiver [1]. Now, if they mean that we're buying, say, more bows and not more arrows, then maybe I agree with the cartoon, but the idea that we are being left defenseless by a "puny" budget is strange given the context.

On that same topic, I sure hope that Def Sec Gates is able to pull off his plans to kill some useless programs (given the current world), like the F22, and move money into more useful programs (given the current world) like the unmanned drones and additional support for soldiers [2]. I love high tech things more than most people, and think we should continue to design and build planes and other weapons that are at the limits of our technical abilities, and procure a handful so we can battle test them. We should only spend money to field large numbers of the most currently relevant assets, though. Some of our priorities in spending seem almost criminal because they seem aimed at some ficticious war, while letting the needs of the actual wars on the ground languish. If you're going to ask soldiers to patrol the streets of Bagdad or some hostile city, the least you owe them is all the air support they can request. That means more air support aircraft, fewer air superiority aircraft. Drones are probably the cost effective way to provide this to them. Sorry pilot jocks, I feel your pain at the passing of an era, I worship the pilot-hero too, but someone had to tell the knights that their days riding on horses in armor was over too.

It seems to me that we are grossly underfunding robotic warfare of every type. In the old cold war days, the key problems with unmanned weapons were:

1. computers weren't smart enough to take over even the routine parts of the task (say, takeoff, landing, and navigation to target area, maybe identification of likely targets).
2. communications were too easily jammed or subverted by the enemy.

I still wouldn't trust computers to do the whole show, but I am sure that they are up to the task of taking off, flying to a target area, and scanning for potential targets, giving a human operator the buzz if something interesting is found. GPS greatly facilitates all of this. Communications is the bigger factor, though. Our actual enemies are generally much less sophisticated than the full-on Soviet effort we were preparing against. Our current enemies jamming capabilities are pretty much non-existent. Add to that vast increases in encryption and digital signing (preventing an unauthorized person from sending commands), exotic frequencies, frequency hopping, satellite networks, the ease of including multiple-redundant communication channels, and robust line-of-sight (e.g from a high flying AWACs) laser communications, and the overall picture is that we can remotely operate weapons often with total impunity, and at a minimum with absolute certainty that they can't be turned against us. The advantages of unmanned drones are so many to hardly bear enumerating: they can be made cheaply, they can be made small and quiet, because they are expendable, they can loiter over targets for a long time, their operators can operate with a cool head, free of the anxiety of being shot at, etc.

I see no particular reason that we can not have a lot more land based drones as well. Why should a gaggle of soldiers have to load into a small convoy of humvees to patrol some hostile area of Bagdad? Seems like you could load up three armored humvee-like drones with 50-cal machine guns and roll through the city with total impunity. It's bound to be a deadly combo. Obviously they can blow these up as well with roadside bombs, but it's bound to sap the enemy's motivation if it's 'only a robot'. More, if the first in a convoy of three gets blown up, the other two can be very calm and clear headed about picking targets for retaliation. If the foot soldiers are called for, say to enter and search crowded back alleys, you can send them to the site of the ambushed drone, in force and prepared. For that matter, my feeling is that it is within our technical grasp now to make robots that can also navigate the back alleys, and I think with the right kind of funding and attention, probably even going up the stairs and "kicking" in doors.

But that's my high tech vision. More immediately, a budget that funds lots of F22's and not something to help the guys actually in the field now, whether it's extra beer rations or whatever, is just not cool.

---

[1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm
Obviously, one could quibble with these numbers, who really knows how much China spends, for example, and they get cut rates on their soldiers, so who knows what we'd have to spend to field the same number of soldiers. Nonetheless, the basic point, that we outspend everyone is probably indisputable by any measuring scheme.

[2] http://www.slate.com/id/2215491/
Good article on the defense budget. I read a Texas Monthly article about Gates that came out a month or two before he got the Defense appointment, before anyone knew he was being considered. I came away from that article quite impressed with Gates, so I have some hope that he can pull it off.

Becoming disenchanted with Apple.

I have never owned a PC. I've worked with computers since 1980, and I've never owned a PC. I've had to use them at an engineering consulting firm I once worked with, I've written software for them, but I've never owned one. Since 1984, I've always owned a Mac. A while back, before Jobs' return to Apple, Apple stagnated and I had decided that I had bought my last Apple computer. I had already wiped the then ancient and outmoded Mac OS 9 from my disk and installed Linux on my Apple laptop. But then Jobs came back and they released OS X and I had something decent to run on my Apple hardware again. I've been very happy with OS X. I wish I could say the same for Apple hardware. I am starting to wonder if my next computer will be an Apple.

The problem with Apple hardware is simple. There isn't enough of it. Their streamlined product line no doubt helps to keep their high margin image up and their headaches down. It's probably smart for Apple, but it isn't working for me. The problem for me is that as a developer I devote a LOT of time and energy to the OS. I only have enough time in my life to master one OS at any given time. So that one OS, whatever it is, has to satisfy all of my needs. I love OS X, I mean I really love OS X, but it's failing me as my One OS To Master because it's not available on some of the kinds of platforms I need. I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro, which is a fine laptop that I have no complaints about. It's just that I don't always need a laptop. I download tons of media, including books and journal articles, but most of that is useless to me on my laptop because most of the time I don't want to lug it around. It's a very thin and nice laptop, but I'm still not going to carry it with me most places I go. It's too big, too intrusive. The iPhone is cute, and a fun little gadget, but other than being a good phone it's a useless toy. I can't read a newspaper or journal article on the iPhone. I can't stand to watch a movie or TV show on it. So what Apple product is there that I can load up fifty journal articles and a bunch of music and carry around with as little fuss as I would have with a paperback? Which product can I use to read while I am standing in the bus? And when I am in meetings discussing technical things, where is the Apple product I can take notes with? I have virtually banished paper from my life entirely, save for this one thing. I need to pull out the pen and paper to copy down diagrams. It feels primitive. Here I've got this beautiful, and expensive, laptop with this really slick OS, and I can't even draw a goddamn circle on it. The crudest sketch has me reaching for the nearest napkin.

And so I find myself looking at all the cute netbooks and, better, netbook tablets, out there and I think, "If only Apple would introduce such a thing". I'm not the only one. Google for "Mac tablet" and you will find people begging Apple for it. Not only has Apple not introduced a tablet or netbook kind of computer, Jobs has down talked these products. Too niche for Apple. Historically, I have liked Apple because they actually innovate, they don't just sit on their ass and milk the cash cow that they have. I am worried, however, that Apple has become too successful to do that effectively. Their products of late have been such home runs, they seem increasingly unwilling to risk a mere single or double. They are unwilling to fill holes in their product line for just some of us.

So what to do? Linux is weak and Vista makes me want to gag. But it might be worth it, to have the computer hardware I actually want, instead of the One True Hardware Jobs seems determined to force me to use.

Sara "Heartbeat" Palin did not say Iraq war was a task from God.

Well, I saw the video today of the speech where Palin supposedly said the Iraq war is a task from God. Around 3:35 into he speech she makes the much cited remark, which I have tediously transcribed for you here with the relevant context. She is talking about Track, her son who is going to deploy to Iraq:

Track...pray for our military... he's going to be deployed in September to Iraq....pray for military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country... that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God...that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that that plan is God's plan. So bless them with your prayers, prayers of protection for our soldiers.

This entire quote is just one pretty straightforward prayer request. It's pretty clear to me, listening to this, that she is saying "Pray that our leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God", and "Pray that there is a plan, and that it's God's plan". There is a big difference between saying "Pray that it's a task from God" and saying "It's a task from God". I don't know what more to say than that. I think this quote has been grossly misrepresented by lots of people. I'd like it if she said that the Iraq war was a mission from God, because that would make her into the kind of yahoo that I'd love to oppose. But I'm for honesty and accuracy first and I just don't think she said that.

That the Bible has no FAQ does not speak well of it's authorship.

Iraq War Task that is from God

Reading casually about Sarah "Heartbeat" Palin in the news I ran across the above article where she is supposed to have said that the Iraq war is a "task that is from God". If I were a reporter who had a chance to interview her, I'd first ask her if this report is true, and if so I'd ask her which other wars were tasks from God, and which where not. Spanish American war? World War I? Vietnam? How about Bosnia? And are only American wars tasks from God? How about the Hundred Years War? How about the Boxer Rebellion? Was the Iran-Iraq war a task from God? And then I'd ask the even more important question, "Do you know if God has any other wars in the planning stages?"

I suspect that the view that the Iraq war is a task from God has several sources. The first is the idea of America as the New Israel. These are not the words that evangelicals use but it is a common view going back to the Puritins that America is God's chosen nation on earth at this time. From this view, most of what America does is a task from God, except when we stray from the path and allow gay's to marry or something, but then, because we are the chose nation, God will rebuke us with calamity and give us a chance to repent. The second reason, related, is that Iraq and the whole Middle East are a hostile zone for Christianity, and so it seems only natural that the Christian's God would want to change that state of affairs and use the chosen nation as the instrument of that change. And then there is just the near universal human tendency to conflate God's will with one's own. If you're a Republican who supports the Bush administration, it seems only natural that God would be of like mind.

Talk about God's tasks bother me because it's so hard to argue with. How can you argue with the claim that the Iraq war is a task from God? To what source or authority will you appeal? The Bible? The Bible, for all it's words, doesn't address the Iraq war. If you think it does, you are reading much between the lines. How can you argue with someone's reading between the lines? When an evangelical says that a single fertilized human egg is a "person" and destroying it is murder, well, how can you argue with them? This view came from the Bible, they will tell you. I know the Bible, though, and I can assure you that there is nothing in there about fertilized eggs. There are some poetic ramblings about God knowing you in the womb, or before you were born even. But it's all rather fuzzy stuff. It's not clear to me how this fuzzy stuff solidifies into a point of dogma. It's even less clear to me how these dogmas change. They do change, from time to time. They respond to reality, to external pressures, to knowledge, but only slowly, only indirectly. My own views about, say, embryonic stem cells are based on knowledge of what cells are and on a firm belief, backed I think by lots of evidence, that "being a person" is a function of the brain, so that it is impossible for anything without a brain to "be a person" in any meaningful sense. Brain death is a good measure of when the person is no longer there, and "brain birth" is, I think, a good measure of when a person has arrived. I would love to argue this point with someone like Palin, but I think it would be a waste of time because their ideas about personhood are religious. I'd love to argue the scripture with them, since I am no small Bible scholar myself, but there again their belief that the scripture is clear on this is, itself, a religious belief whose basis lay largely outside of the Bible itself. The Bible is a huge rambling sprawl of a book that addresses only a very few issues in a straightforward manner. Despite the tedious length of Leviticus, Jews have felt the need to spend the last two millennium trying to clarify what, exactly, the Levitical laws mean in the Talmud and other writings. Christians don't even have that. They claim the Levitical law isn't binding, but still pull it out of the hat now and then for rhetorical purposes. In either case, the Bible just doesn't answer the questions we'd like it to. Why is that?

The absence of a FAQ in the Bible is, I think, the ultimate proof that the Bible is not authored by God or, possibly, that if God authored it it is evidence that God is pernicious. Even carefully written texts, texts that take pains to remove ambiguity (precisely the opposite of the Bible), inevitably fail answer every question that comes up. Once it became easy for readers to pose their questions to authors and get responses, the FAQ became a nearly universal feature of any documentation. Surely God must know the questions we will ask. So then, the absence of a FAQ in the Bible can only point to some kind of serious neglect in it's authorship.

The Latent Creationism of Environmentalists

Listening to a radio program about the effect of global warming on migratory animals I was struck once again with something that bugs me about the way environmentalists talk about such things. They were discussing how finely tuned migrations are. Certain birds time their migrations based on, say, the amount of daylight, sensing that the days are shorter by a certain amount. Their prey at the migration destination, certain caterpillars, however, are sensing changes in temperature. With climate change, these two signals can be out sync, so that the birds arrive, but there is not the bounty of insect prey they expected. This is happening with some small European bird, whose numbers are declining as a result, and presumably will happen with others.

I doubt none of this. Nor do I doubt that climate change could push some of these species to extinction. Nor do I quibble with the idea that we, as humans, would miss these birds when they are gone, or that biodiversity is intrinsically useful on several dimensions. I don't really quibble with the whole idea that we should be concerned about this. However....

I do quibble with a certain tone. When environmentalists talk about these things, they really sound like creationists. The environment we've got, right now, is portrayed as the penultimate, as creation perfected. Nature, capitalized "Nature", is portrayed as a static thing. It's quite striking, because they really sound like they feel that God created the nature we've got, balanced and fine tuned it just so, and now bad old us is tinkering with perfection. This is excusable among lay people, what do they know after all, but the people talking in the report were biologists. Nowhere in this rather long discussion of migration and climate was there any acknowledgement of the fact that nature changes all the time, with or without us. A mere ten thousand years ago, not even an eye blink to evolution, none of this was as it is today. We were then in the middle of a glacial period. The Europe these migratory birds are disappearing from was under a sheet of ice. Where were those birds, and their caterpillar prey, then? They must have some ability to adapt to climate change, or else they would have gone extinct then. Or in the previous interglacial period before the last ice age. Or the one before that. They also discussed sea turtles who lay eggs on very specific beaches, beaches that will disappear completely when the sea levels rise. Ok, I see that point, but the obvious question is, "If they are so sensitive, how have these turtles survived for the last sixty million years?" Those turtles have been swimming the oceans, reproducing somehow, when our ancestors were just little shrew-like things. And here they are, still, almost unchanged. The entire planet is vastly cooler now than it was when sea turtles shared the earth with the dinosaurs. We've gone through hundreds of glacial cycles since then, yet they persist somehow.

Now, I realize that this may be a new thing. Although glacial periods are short by geologic standards, maybe this is unique in that we're compressing what would be 10,000 years of change into 200 years. Maybe these animals have adapted in the past by having enough variability in their populations so that while lots died, the few who were tuned to the new conditions thrived. Perhaps this time the shock is too quick for that effect. So I share the concern. Nonetheless, I think there is something subtly pernicious, and creationist really, about this way of portraying Nature as perfected accomplishment. The correct view is of nature as a constant flux that only seems fixed because of our puny time scale. Change, not static perfection, is the rule for nature. In the accurate view, nature doesn't need us, it doesn't need anything because it isn't a conscious entity. Even if it did, it will do fine with or without us. It is, rather, us that we are concerned about. We will miss the turtles if they go. Nature won't. Likewise, we'll be sad if only pigeons survive with us into the coming centuries, but nature won't give a damn, and will over time even erase our impact. Environmentalism is about us, in the end, not about The Planet, or Nature. Any talk about The Planet or Nature independent of us and our aims, goals, and desires, is just a new religion, with a new and made up god. It is striking because I feel sure that these biologists look down their noses at superstitious creationists, but here they are, with their own brand of creationism, their own anti-humanist god to worship.

Al Qaeda is in Iraq for one reason.

"Al Qaeda is in Iraq and they're there for a reason," Bush said.

Yeah, the reason being that you put them there, dumbass.

Al Qaeda had little, if any, presence in Iraq until you smashed the evil, but effective, Hussein government and so created the great terrorist playground that Iraq is today. Nice work. For an encore, why don't you swat the hornet's nest of Iran too and see if we can get any more angry stingers flying around, eh?

Green shamans shaking their rattles at global warming.

Jack Shafer has an excellent article over at Slate: Green is the new Yellow

In this article he critiques the cloying and alarmist response of the press to mushy headed green pronouncemens, or perhaps more accurately to green poser pronouncements. He particularly excoriates Slates series written by TreeHugger.com. Shafer says, "But that [saving energy] is not good enough for the green worshippers at TreeHugger, whose aesthetic is ascetic.", and goes on to outline their various other prescriptions of dubious merits.

Well, that pretty much sums up what is wrong with them. They seem to be, at core, an ascetic religious movement. Much of what passes for environmentalism has more in common with religion, and fundamentalist true-believer religion at that, than it does with any kind of serious problem solving effort. Their articles are full of the sanctimony and ex cathedra pronouncements that I recall from the fundamentalist tracts from my youth (on the evils of dancing, say), and are light on the science and engineering that really matters.

Personally, I want an army of green engineers working on environmental problems. Unfortunately, what we seem to get is an army of green shamans shaking their rattles at it.

Scalia is facile and disgusting.

"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so." Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, on torture

Jack Bauer, if you don't know, is the good guy on the show 24. He's routinely confronted with terrorists who are going to kill everyone in LA with a bomb or poison gas or something sometime in the next three hours if Bauer doesn't get the info out of them. From what I understand, I've only seen two episodes, Bauer resorts to whatever he has to in these cases. As would most people, I think, given the stark situations he finds himself in. Nonetheless, the facileness of even invoking the kind of cartoon situation portrayed on 24 is so stunning as to make me want to wretch to think that it came out of a Supreme Court Justice's mouth.

Now, there is some ambiguity about his comment. He could have meant either:

1. Jack Bauer is doing the right thing in these situations and it's reasonable to codify the use of torture into law.
2. Jack Bauer is doing the right thing in these situations and so any jury will ignore whatever we code into law, in these striking cases, so
we should codify a ban on torture into law secure in the knowledge that, when it comes to it, people will not let that keep them from saving LA.

If he meant #1, pox on him and all his kin, the miserable bastard. If he meant #2, well, good for him. #2 is the point I get out of such cartoon scenarios. If ever some agent starts smashing the fingers of a terrorist with a hammer and so learns the location of a nuke, which he then disarms, I'm pretty sure he'll never be charged under any anti-torture statute, and if he is, he won't be convicted by any jury, and if by the most bizarre circumstances he is convicted the president will pardon him. It just won't happen. However, if some yahoo smashes the fingers of a terrorist suspect, who turns out not to have a bomb at all, or not to even be a terrorist, well, then, that yahoo agent should get what's coming to him.

It just seems self-evident to me that in the cartoon situations portrayed in 24, where you unambiguously have an atomic-bomb planter on your hands, that the agent himself should be willing to go to jail, if that's what it takes, if he's any kind of hero like we make him out to be, in order to save a million people in LA. Wouldn't you risk going to jail to stop an atomic bomb going off in LA?

It seems self-evident to me that what really happens, though, is that you have armies of federal agents out there who imagine themselves to be Jack Bauer and who imagine that whomever they have in their hands at the moment is Bin Laden, and that all you will get out of giving them any latitude up front to torture is the torture of lots of innocent or insignificant people, and absolutely zero increase in your ability to deal with ticking-time-bomb scenarios.

Anyway, I find the thuggish and sloppy thinking of my fellow humans offensive. From a supreme court justice, it makes me feel ill.

Please, let the insultingly transparent manipulation stop.

In fall of 2002, he was told specifically that there was a high level source in Saddam's government that was saying, 'We don't have WMD,' " Johnson said. "George Tenet's hands are just as bloody as everybody else in this administration in helping gin up what was an unfounded case for war."

Johnson is a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.

Tenet, who's authored a new book on his tenure at CIA titled, "At the Center of the Storm," told CBS that he was outraged that senior officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, used Tenet's "slam dunk" reference to bolster Bush's decision to launch the war. (Read about how Rice said Tenet's 'slam dunk' comment didn't lead to war)

Johnson said Tenet "was willing to tell the president, 'Yeah I'll go out and help manipulate public opinion to build the case for war.' That's not the role of an intelligence chief. The role of the intelligence chief of the United States government is to tell the facts to the president and to the Congress regardless of what the political import of those are."

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday that while much attention is on Tenet's "slam dunk," comment, the CIA was not alone in its assessment of Iraq's WMD capability.

"There doesn't seem to be any dispute about the fact that the best intelligence available to the United States, the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill, to intelligence services around the world, was that Saddam had some weapons of mass destruction he was pursuing further weapons of mass destruction," said Snow.
-CNN

If I could have just one wish related to the Iraq war, just one, I'm afraid it wouldn't be any of the obvious: peace and stability, etc. My one wish would be to never, ever, hear the absurd term WMD again. What the hell is a WMD? What WMD did Saddaham possess? Poison gas? Who the hell cares? What country wouldn't we invade if possessing some poison gas were the casus belli? Nukes, that'd be something. Poison gas? Give me a break. I could handle "to avenge an insult" as a reason for the war better than I can stand the constant sense that I am being cynically manipulated with an insultingly transparent hyperbole. WMD strikes me as nothing more than a cynical attempt to obscure what you're actually talking about. If we invaded over poison gas, then say, "We invaded over poison gas."