The most common defense of waterboarding is that we subjected our own soldiers to it. That’s true–as a way of training them to withstand enemy torture. When you reverse engineer a torture-resistance program, you’re almost by definition engaging in torture.
In reality, Bush’s waterboarding methods did differ from the U.S. military’s torture-resistance training, in that our soldiers knew how far we’d go and could stop the exercise if they couldn’t bear it. Conservatives have inadvertently confirmed this point. Numerous Republicans object that the release of the torture memos will render waterboarding and other techniques useless–“terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them,” complain former Bush officials Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey.
It’s true. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, or torture methods devised thereby. Our chief weapon is surprise. (Surprise and fear. … Amongst our weaponry are such elements as surprise and fear, as Michael Palin might put it.) That’s exactly why training soldiers to withstand waterboarding is different than actually waterboarding.
Taco Town
You know what’s pathetic? I think this actually sounds kind of yummy.
Monday Linkorama
It’s the Bash Obama edition!
So we have a President with basically no business experience, guided by a bunch of Ivy League policy wonks most of whom have limited real world business experience, deciding how big businesses should be and where young people ought to work.
That about says it, doesn’t it?
USAir
I have to wonder if whoever is running USAir is trying to bankrupt the company. We just go an update on their fee policies:
Meanwhile, the most successful airline in the country charges no ticket change fee and checks the first two bags free (although we got tripped up by one being too big).
Whatever.
I Knew I Liked The Midwest
A plot of sin, although I disagree with their methodology in a lot of cases — STD incidence, for example, tracks ignorance better than lust.
Traffic Jam
The reports that the internet is running out of space seem needlessly hysterical to me. It’s again the fallacy of the unbroken trend and the assumption that human beings will not adapt by improving the infrastructure or by finding more efficient waves of moving information on the internet — or by pricing content and bandwidth more efficiently.
Thursday Linkorama
Colors
Maybe it’s just me, but the FEMA coloring book on natural disasters, including a nice paint-by-numbers depiction of 9/11 — creeps me out.
Tuesday Linkorama
And Then There’s Maude
How funny was Bea Arthur? So funny that she could make a teenage boy (me) watch a show about a bunch of old ladies in Miami.
MADDened
Radley Balko lets fly at Obama’s worst appointment idea — heading NHTSA with the head of MADD.
Longtime automotive writer Eric Peters wrote recently in the Detroit Free Press that motorists have much to fear from a Hurley-led NHTSA, including a possible return to federally-mandated speed limits, a national blood alcohol count as low as .04, federally-mandated speed and red light cameras, and even the installation of GPS responders on vehicles for the possible implementation of future “pay as you go” driving taxes (Britain already keeps tabs on the whereabouts of every driver in the country).
But Hurley’s record is most troubling when it comes to overly aggressive measures allegedly aimed at preventing drunken driving. MADD’s top priority during Hurley’s stint as CEO was to get state legislatures to pass laws mandating ignition interlock devices in the cars of all first-time DWI offenders. The device requires you to blow into a tube before starting your car, then blow again at set intervals as you’re driving (which, come to think of it, doesn’t really seem all that safe). Under Hurley’s watch, MADD gave a “qualified endorsement” for bills in the New York and New Mexico legislatures that would have required the devices in all cars sold in those states. Fortunately, neither bill became law.
Hurley and MADD were also at the heart of the effort to force the states to adopt the .08 minimum blood alcohol standard back in the late 1990s, under penalty of losing federal highway funds for noncompliance. Studies show that both significant impairment and most DWI fatalities occur at much higher blood-alcohol concentrations.
Hurley has also aggressively pushed for the use of constitutionally-dubious roadblock sobriety checkpoints to enforce the new standard, even though there’s convincing evidence these invasive tactics have actually made the roads more dangerous. DWI deaths began inching upward again as the roadblocks were implemented in the early 2000s. It isn’t difficult to see why. Roadblocks are designed to catch motorists who aren’t driving erratically enough to be caught with conventional law enforcement methods. The officers who staff them would otherwise be out on the streets, looking for actual drunks who pose an actual threat to highway safety.
By far, MADD’s worst policy is that they endorse imprisoning parents who have supervised parties for their kids. MADD would apparently prefer that kids get drunk like kids in my generation did — in the middle of nowhere right before getting in a car.
Torture Round-Up
The other blog has been chock-a-block with torture posts, so I’d thought I’d post up a few links here. There’s other stuff to talk about, too. I flayed Obama’s national service initiative yesterday.
Super
I used to be superstitious as all hell. Seriously, a bad hand of cards would seem like an omen to me. Fortunately, I’ve (mostly) outgrown that. So Cracked’s look at dumb superstitions is a great read. Here’s there explanation of why cats are bad luck:
It didn’t help that a number of pre-Christian peoples such as the Norse, Celts and Egyptians had cat gods, or at least considered the animal sacred. Once Christianity became the sexy new religion in town, old beliefs were branded witchcraft and cats found themselves guilty by association. Often simply owning a cat was considered proof of witchery. There was even widespread extermination of cats during medieval times, which kind of backfired when they were no longer around to kill plague-infested rats, which in turn wiped out half of Europe. Whoops. But hey, at least they were safe from those goddamn witches.
We had nothing but black cats when I was growing up. Of course, maybe they were the reason I couldn’t get lucky in high school.
Will on Duncan
I was cooking up a post on Arne Duncan’s destruction of the DC voucher program. But George Will’s hits the high points:
The president has set an example for his Cabinet. He has ladled a trillion or so dollars (“or so” is today’s shorthand for “give or take a few hundreds of billions”) hither and yon, but while ladling he has, or thinks he has, saved about $15 million by killing, or trying to kill, a tiny program that this year is enabling about 1,715 D.C. children (90 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic) to escape from the District’s failing public schools and enroll in private schools.
The District’s mayor and school superintendent support the program. But the president has vowed to kill programs that “don’t work.” He has looked high and low and — lo and behold — has found one. By uncanny coincidence, it is detested by the teachers unions that gave approximately four times $15 million to Democratic candidates and liberal causes last year.
Not content with seeing the program set to die after the 2009-10 school year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan (former head of Chicago’s school system, which never enrolled an Obama child) gratuitously dashed even the limited hopes of another 200 children and their parents. Duncan, who has sensibly chosen to live with his wife and two children in Virginia rather than in the District, rescinded the scholarships already awarded to those children for the final year of the program, beginning in September. He was, you understand, thinking only of the children and their parents: He would spare them the turmoil of being forced by, well, Duncan and other Democrats to return to terrible public schools after a tantalizing one-year taste of something better. Call that compassionate liberalism.
After Congress debated the program, the Education Department released — on a Friday afternoon, a news cemetery — a congressionally mandated study showing that, measured by student improvement and parental satisfaction, the District’s program works. The department could not suppress the Heritage Foundation’s report that 38 percent of members of Congress sent or are sending their children to private schools.
The failure of the Obama Administration to support the program was a punch in the gut. And it’s telling that, in true government-worshiping fashion, their idea one education is more input. Longer school days and a longer school year.
Which I’m sure delights their campaign contributors no end.