All posts by Mike

Politics, War on Terror

KSM BS

Well the Right is overjoyed. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is confessing to everything under the sun after his water-boarding. See, torture works!

Um:

  • To me, this shows not the usefulness but the uselessness of torture. KSM seems to have confessed to anything and everything, even wild fantasies about killing popes and blowing up buildings. I’m sure if he’d been tortured longer, he would have confessed to the Simpson murders, the Kennedy Assassination and the cancellation of Star Trek. That he screamed out a confession while being water-boarded does not help us. In fact, it may hurt. By seeing every terror act from Bali to Richard Reid as part of a vast conspiracy, we become blind to small groups and crazed individuals.
  • Will anyone believe his confession? KSM’s waterboarding casts into doubt anything and everything he has said, particularly in the view of the Rest of the World. Yeah, I know. Who cares what those foreigners think? All that matters is America. Well, you try invading Iraq without the support of the Saudis; or responding to Russian aggression without Europe; or China without Japan. Or stabilizing Iraq without anyone.

    When we tried and excuted the Nazis at Nurenberg, no one questioned our justice. Rent Judgement at Nuremberg sometime and see the great pains we took to be fair and just to the people who created the Holocaust. When the Israelis tried Eichmann, they gave him a fair trial. They didn’t torture him. And thus his conviction and execution had a legitimacy.

    But if we now convict and execute KSM, no one in the world will believe our moral authority. This will look like a frame-up job no matter how guilty he is. And we will be seen as monsters, not arbiters of jsutice.

    Had we just gone with case we had, we would have been bringing justice. Now we’re a lynch mob. Thanks, Attorney General.

  • So we sacrificed justice, honor and morality. What did we gain by it? We already knew that KSM plotted 9/11, so that wasn’t intelligence we gained. He had these “plots” to kill presidents, popes and buidlings. But were these plots in the same way the Sears Tower plot was a plot? Was he just sitting around saying, “yeah, I’d like to get that pope”. Has he given us anything useful like the identies of other terrorist or details of future plots or the location of Osama bin Laden?
  • One of things to watch is how this illuminates the pro-torture Right. A lot of them are now crowing about the torture and saying, “Gee, I don’t feel sorry for torturing him”. It reinforces Orwell’s point that the point of torture is torture. Listen to what these people are saying. Whatever intelligence may or may not have been gained, what this about is KSM shrieking in pain and suffering. Just remember that when they babble about the “Culture of Life” and the “Party of Death”. They are drawing satisfaction from the needless and pointless suffering of another human being. Yeah, KSM’s scum. He’s still got 46 chromosomes. What do you want out of the War on Terror? Victory? Or revenge?
  • And to respond to Rush in particular — no one is doubting the guilt of KSM. You know better than to impute that. What we are doubting is the moral quagmire we have sunk into in obtaining this useless information. We already knew and could prove he did 9/11. We already knew he was involved in the first WTC plot. But by waterboarding, sleep-depriving and stress-positioning him, we have destroyed what would have been an airtight case. We turned what could have been a Nurenberg triumph of justice into a travesty that will weaken our moral power in the world.

    And what would you think if this were done to an American citizen? Conservatives used to scorn the show trials and “confessions” that defined the Soviet legal system. Conservatives opposed the ICC because of valid concerns over civil liberties. Yet they now think it’s just fine to turn the wheel on someone else, just because he happens to be the scum of the Earth. Our justice system takes pride in how it treats the worst criminals; our nation takes pride in how it treats our enemies.

    Or at least it used to. It used to have George Washington demanding humane treatment of savage Hessians. Or Lincoln treating Confederate soldiers humanely in the wake of Andersonville. Or MacArthur insisting on humane treatment while the Japanese butchered our men. Or fair justice for the Nazis who murdered tens of millions.

    You have sold us out, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh and all you so-called conservatives. For the satisfaction of hearing KSM scream, you’ve sold out our honor, our sense of justice and our moral soul.

    Congratulations

    • Politics, War on Terror

    KSM Confesses

    A great post over at Right-Thinking on KSM confessing to trying to kill everyone on Earth:

    Everyone knows how I feel about torture. Inevitably there will be people on this blog who say, “See? This proves that torture works!” Allow me to head that argument off at the pass. It seems to me that what KSM is doing is talking himself up. He knows he’s caught, he knows he’s never going to see the light of day again. Why not show off to the Arab world his hot martyr status? Serial killers do this all the time, confess to crimes they didn’t commit just so their body count (and thus their notoriety) will go up. Henry Lee Lucas and Ted Bundy are just two examples off the top of my head.

    Of course, Lee is invoking facts here and torturing people is about emotional satisfaction.

    Politics

    What Liberal Bias?

    Reading the NYT’s article onCAIR, you would think that this is just an organization coming under fire from xenophobic Republicans. At no point do they mention prominent members advocating sharia law in this country or doctoring photos to put headscarves on women or exaggerating the number of Muslims in this country by a factor of three.

    Oh, that liberal media!

    Politics

    Gonzalez

    Well, its seems NRO has gotten their talking points. The Bush Administration is going to throw Gonzalez under a bus.

    Not that this is undeserved for the Little Legal Creep who found the argument to support torture and rendering. But this just shows . . . again! . . . that loyalty in the Bush Administration goes one way.

    Civil Liberties, Politics

    More on Guns

    Cato, which was heavily involved in the suit, has the details.

    Shelly Parker lived in a high-crime neighborhood in the heart of Washington. People on her block were harassed relentlessly by drug dealers and addicts. Parker called the police, time and again, then encouraged her neighbors to do the same. She organized block meetings to discuss the problem. For her audacity, Parker was labeled a troublemaker by the dealers, who threatened her at every opportunity.

    One dealer tried to pry his way into her house, repeatedly cursing, then yelling, “I’ll kill you. I live on this block too!”

    For obvious reasons, Shelly Parker would like to possess a functional handgun within her home for self-defense; but she feared arrest and prosecution because of the District’s unconstitutional gun ban.

    You see, Shelly is not a good little minion, allowing herself to be raped and killed at will — which is what the gun-grabbers apparently want. Doesn’t she know that the appropriate response to crime is to let them do what they want and die content in the knowledge that the police — maybe — will put the in jail for a few years?! Sheesh. It’s like she thinks her life is worth something.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation, War on Terror

    Don’t Panic

    One thing I can’t stand is panic-mongering. I used to buy it, now I’m deeply skeptical of anyone who claims the world is ending.

    Here are two BS artists called on their crap. First up, Sullivan debunking the “Eurabia” myth being pushed by the Right.

    So did Steyn confuse “million” for “percent”? D’oh! Or is Steyn referring to another source? It is the premise of the entire book, after all

    And here, in the same journal, is Easterbrook taking on the Global Warming hysterics. I agree with every word he says:

    And to the extent that the media has been pushing doomsday on this, one of my worries is that the press corps has totally shot its credibility in a classic crying wolf exercise all through the ‘80s and ‘90s. The big deal press corps—The New York Times, everybody—has repeatedly demonstrated total incomprehension of the relative risks of environmental issues. We’ve heard an awful lot about arsenic in drinking water and electromagnetic emissions from power lines and things that even in the worst case analysis are really marginal threats and affect only very small numbers of people and only very slightly raise risks. Since the press corps—and the worst is The New York Times—constantly demonstrates that they have no sense of relative proportion in what are serious risks and what are minor risks, well, now they’re saying, “OK, now there’s proof of global warming.” They’re right, but Americans aren’t paying attention. They’ve cried wolf so many times when there was no wolf that now, when there is a wolf, no one believes them.

    Read the whole thing. It’s brilliant.

    Politics

    Is it Just Me?

    Or does it seems like Congress is spending all their time investigating Bush and very little time, you know, legislating.

    If this continues, it’s absolutely wonderful. Anything that keeps politicians slashing at each other instead of the tax-payer is good. Hopefully, the Democrats will continue to hound Bush for the next two years and never really get around to socializing the nation.

    Politics

    Fox

    I have to agree with Boortz. The Democrats are not pulling out of the Fox News sponsored debate because of this lame joke.

    And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’

    Which, if you read it, is a joke at Bush’s expense, not Obama’s. (And a joke that their much-loved show 30 Rock made just the week before). No, they’re pulling out because this is a way of humiliating Fox News.

    I’ve been around the left enough to understand their hatred of Fox News. ABC/NBC/CBS/WaPo/NPR/etc. have so blurred the line between opinion and news that libs can’t tell the difference between Brit Hume’s news report and Hannity’s/O’Reilly’s opinion shows. And I would feel confident saying most of Fox News’ critics have never actually watched the channnel, just as Limbaugh’s critics have never listened to his show. These things become obvious when you are a viewer/listener and hear the critics.

    My local talk radio station gets their news from Fox. If there’s a right-wing bias to the news, I don’t hear it. This in sharp contrast to say, NPR.

    The phrase de jour in response to this from libs lately has been that the facts have a liberal bias. This is one of those clever-sounding stupid things that politics is built on. But I’m sorry, when NPR starts out their report on Family Leave with the question, “Why is the US so far behind Europe in paying for family leave?” and presents only one opinion, that’s liberal bias — taxpayer funded liberal bias, as a matter of fact. The fact that the US doesn’t have labor mandates like Europe does not automatically support the opinion that government must intrude. Yet it is presented as such.

    And as for the defined editorials? Hey, newspapers are free to say anything they want on the editorial page. Keith Olberman routinely spews as much left-wing dribble as Hannity does right-wing hot air. And, as I’ve noted below and on a lost post, the editorials of the New York Times and Washington Post are often indistinguishable from Democratic Party press releases. That’s fine with me, as long as they admit it’s opinion. So why is Fox News not entitled to clearly demarcated opinion segments?

    Civil Liberties, Politics, Science and Edumacation

    HPV

    I’ve of two minds about the HPV vaccine. I don’t like being friends with the religious zealouts who think that eliminating VD and pregnancy risk will turn women into wanton harlots. But at the same time, I’m not comfortable with mandating the use of the vaccine. This post from Cato is as good a response as any, making both good points:

    The rate of all 37 types [of HPV] together is high – 34% among women ages 14 to 24, but the rate for the types 16 and 18 that are responsible for 70% of cervical cancer cases in the U.S. – is only 1.5% and 0.8% respectively.

    And unfortunately hysterical ones:

    Risk assessment is not easy, particularly when, as is the case with Gardasil, the long term effects of a vaccine are totally unknown. Women who participated in the drug trials were followed for an average of less than three years. Consider this totally hypothetical example: what if 90% of all school age girls are vaccinated within the next five years and then ten or twenty years from now it is discovered that the vaccine made them sterile or actually caused them to get a different type of cancer than what they were vaccinated against?

    Side effects don’t magically appear at 20 years. They phase in slowly. If Gardasil were going to ruin women’s reproductive systems, it would already be showing up.

    I am also disturbed by the deliberate deception and buying of politicans Merck is displaying (and I own stock in them). My fundamental philosophy of human nature is that we are basically good people but we are easily tempted to be bad. And with $10 billion in Gardasil on the line, it’s easy to fudge the ethics.

    My opinion? Recommend it but don’t mandate. This isn’t like polio or measles, which can be spread by casual contact and become an epidemic. This is spread by intimate contact and actually kind of rare (although Sue’s grandmother died of it). I will probably get my soon-to-arrive daughter vaccinated when she is of age. Of course, by then, we’ll have ten years of data to show how effective the HPV vaccine is and if there are any side effects. And as anyone who knows me or reads this blog is aware, I have nothing but antipathy for the anti-vaccination crowd, be they ignorant libs, faith healing theo-cons or ideology-addled libertarians.

    But let’s take it slow, huh?

    Civil Liberties, Politics

    Fisking the Wapo

    The Washington post has a preditaby hysterical reaction to the Second Ammendment ruling striking down the anti-gun statute that has made DC ever so safe with no violence whatsoever.

    IN OVERTURNING the District of Columbia’s long-standing ban on handguns yesterday, a federal appeals court turned its back on nearly 70 years of Supreme Court precedent to give a new and dangerous meaning to the Second Amendment. Yes. The intended meaning. Freedom is always dangerous, isn’t it?

    If allowed to stand, this radical ruling will inevitably mean more people killed and wounded as keeping guns out of the city becomes harder. Any evidence to support this hysterical prediction? No? I didn’t think so. As shown in Freakonomics, More Guns, Less Crime and other studies, there is no proven connection between gun laws and crime unless it favors a crime decrease with gun ownership – since the criminals now fear the public. I’ve never understood why the gun grabbers are so convinced that society is better off when the law-abiding live in terror of the criminals, rather than vice-versa.

    Unless the logic is that the mere possession of a gun turns someone into a criminal. The gun is, apparently, an evil talisman that makes people go out and commit crimes.

    Moreover, if the legal principles used in the decision are applied nationally, every gun control law on the books would be imperiled. Great! And when the Supreme Court over-turned segregation, it imperiled every cracker-ass Jim Crowe law in the nation, too!

    The court grounded its unprecedented ruling in the finding that the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends beyond militias to individuals. Gee. It’s almost like they read that part of Constitution that says: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” In modern language – because a standing army is necessary to keep the American people free, we must make sure that the people have weapons of their own to avoid tyranny. Goddammit, WaPo, could do you fucking research? Do you think that perhaps the opinions of the men who wrote the Constitution should count slightly more than those of FDR’s packed 1939 Supreme Court? If you want to rewrite the Second Ammendment, pass a 27th repealing it.

    The Supreme Court, in its landmark 1939 decision United States v. Miller, stated that the Second Amendment was adopted “with obvious purpose” of protecting the ability of states to organize militias and “must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.” This was when FDR was packing the court and it is utter bullshit. Total absolute complete crap. Nowhere in the Bill of Right are powers given to the states (they are merely reserved in the tenth). The Bill of Rights is about . . . Duh! . . . people’s rights! That FDR was concerned about some wave of anarchy sweeping the nation is irrelevant. The Supreme Court was wrong in 1939, just as they were wrong with the Commerce Clause, with seperate-but-unequal laws and with Dred Scott. Legal precedent is written by men not brought down from Mount Horeb on stone tablets. And sometimes, men are wrong.

    You can’t just fall back on precedent and declare the debate over. That’s no better than falling back on the Bible and stoning gays.

    While the ruling caught observers off guard, it was not completely unexpected, given the unconscionable campaign, led by the National Rife Association and abetted by the Bush administration, to broadly reinterpret the Constitution so as to give individuals Second Amendment rights. I like it that an interpretation – one that was upheld by the Supreme Court of 150 years is “unconscionable” – that certain opinions are now politically incorrect. Plus, the WaPo is ignoring that the NRA opposed this lawsuit. And what is wrong with the NRA anyway? Why is an organization that teaches responsible gun ownership evil? Oh, because they oppose the liberal police state. Gotchya.

    The NRA predictably welcomed yesterday’s ruling. Wrong. They were upset. Because they think the Supreme Court will strike it down. Which it probably will. The three liberal justices will do what they always do – rewrite the Constitution for their own ends. The two moderate justices will go along, not wanting to upset precedent. As to the four conservatives — Thomas and possibly Alito and Roberts will uphold the decision. But who knows what planet Scalia will be on. This is a man who thinks we no longer need the exclusionary rule. I’m sure he’ll say the “new professionalism” of our government means we need no longer fear tyranny.

    According to its myth, only criminals have had guns in the city and now law-abiding citizens will be able to arm themselves for protection. Um . . . if guns are outlawed, by definition those with guns are outlaws, no? How is that a myth? This is a piece of logic I have never understood — mainly because it’s not logic, it’s emotion. It’s based on the totalitarian fantasy that you can stop something by passing a law. But what is it in the deranged anti-gun mind that thinks criminals won’t break gun laws? Can someone please explain this to me? I mean, outlawing drugs sure cleaned up that problem, didn’t it?

    Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) counters that argument with the sad record of what results from a proliferation of guns. As he points out, more guns mean only more violence. A statement given (as usual) without proof. There is zero evidence to support this. Every time gun laws are liberalized, such as in Florida a decade ago, a crime wave is predicted. We’re told people will be shooting each other over traffic accident, abusive men will murder their wives and kids will blow their brains out. And every single time it fails to happen. But facts don’t matter to the gun control crowd. Emotions do. Banning guns gives the illusion of safety. And illusions are all they have.

    Well, here is an illusion I’d like to cling to. If there ever comes a time when our government becomes tyrannical — and it’s closer now than it was six years ago — I’d like to think that Americans could resist. If a criminal comes barging in my house, I’d like to think I could have a chance to defend myself. If a woman is attacked on the streets of DC, I’d like to think she’d blow some crook’s brains out rather than blow a stupid fucking whistle and hope the cops come before the criminal finishes raping her and gets around to blowing her brains out with a gun that is banned but manages to exist anyway.

    That’s my illusion. And I’m sticking to it.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation

    GW Panic

    When the IPCC sticks to the scientific facts, they’re fine. But now we have their new report that is nothing but a collection of potential panics about things that could happen as a result of global warming – potential secondary effects of a primary process that is poorly understood at best.

    In fact, parts of it have already been disproven. And parts of its are demonstrable nonsense. Global warming will produce longer growing seasons. How precisely does this cause famine?

    (There’s a wonderful critique of famine specifically in P.J. O’Rourke’s All the Trouble in the World in which he goes over numerous studies that have shown that no famine in the last millenium has been the result of a lack of food. All of them have been the result of politics.)

    This is precisely what I’ve been ranting about on global warming. It’s not enough to present the facts – we have to be presented with disaster scenarios.

    The dire predictions this reports makes are precisely the predictions Paul Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb – famine, pestilence and destruction of the world’s poor. Well, the hysterics were wrong then and they’re probably wrong now. Among other things, they assume no adaptation of human beings. No flood walls. No slow migration to higher elevation. No pesticides to wipe out malaria. No improvements in water infrastructure. No adaptation by the bears either. It’s the Fallacy of the Unbroken Trend all over again.

    Law and Order, Politics

    Crime Spike

    Oops. You know his dad had a crime spike under his watch. I thought Republicans were supposed to be tough on crime.

    Local police departments blame several factors: the spread of methamphetamine use in some Midwestern and Western cities, gangs, high poverty and a record number of people being released from prison. But the biggest theme, they say, is easy access to guns and a willingness, even an eagerness, to settle disputes with them, particularly among young people.

    A lot of this is crap. It’s been shown that gun access and poverty have nothing to do with crime. I suspect the Meth problem is more closely related to this – just as the crack boom created a crime wave in the early 90’s. But the bigger issue is violent criminals being turned loose from prison . . . so that we can make room for drug addicts.