More on IQ

This piece links to papers at Cato

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmI5MTE3MTFlZTMwMTEwNGIyM2E5ZGM3OWM0NWVjNTA=

 

Derb on IQ

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGM1ZjEyOWQwNzkwMTZkNGY3NjhiNzBiYWVkNmE4ODg=

Part 2

 

Part 1 is here:  http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzEyZjFmOWQ4YzlmZDRhMTdlMWYyNWJlNjEwM2Q5NDI=

 

The strong US economy

From the New York Times

...it's worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear -- the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.

And that's just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world.

In the World Economic Forum survey, the U.S. comes in just ahead of Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany (China is 34th). The U.S. gets poor marks for macroeconomic stability (the long-term federal debt), for its tax structure and for the low savings rate. But it leads the world in a range of categories: higher education and training, labor market flexibility, the ability to attract global talent, the availability of venture capital, the quality of corporate management and the capacity to innovate.

William W. Lewis of McKinsey surveyed global competitive in dozens of business sectors a few years ago, and concluded, "The United States is the productivity leader in virtually every industry."

Second, America's fundamental economic strength is rooted in the most stable of assets -- its values. The U.S. is still an astonishing assimilation machine. It has successfully absorbed more than 20 million legal immigrants over the past quarter-century, an extraordinary influx of human capital. Americans are remarkably fertile. Birthrates are relatively high, meaning that in 2050, the average American will be under 40, while the average European, Chinese and Japanese will be more than a decade older.

The American economy benefits from low levels of corruption. American culture still transmits some ineffable spirit of adventure. American students can't compete with, say, Singaporean students on standardized tests, but they are innovative and creative throughout their lives. The U.S. standard of living first surpassed the rest of the world's in about 1740, and despite dozens of cycles of declinist foreboding, the country has resolutely refused to decay.

Iraq -- beyond the violence numbers

Those who opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 prefer to focus on violence, for it has seemed to confirm their claim that the war was wrong. They've downplayed all good news from post-Saddam Iraq - the end of an evil regime that had oppressed the Iraqi people for 35 years; the return home of a million-plus Iraqi refugees in the first year after liberation; the fact that the Iraqis got together to write a new constitution and hold referendums and free elections - for the first time in their history - and moved to form coalition governments answerable to the parliament.

The drop in violence is certainly a good thing. But other Iraq news, both good and bad, needs to be taken into account.

On the good side:

* More than 70 percent of the cells created by al Qaeda in Iraq have been dismantled, with vast amounts of money and arms seized from terrorists and insurgents. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq, set up by al Qaeda in parts of four provinces, has collapsed.

* Iraqis who'd sought temporary refuge in neighboring countries are returning home in large numbers - 1,000 a day returning from Syria alone.

* Thanks to mediation by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite coalition, the three groups that had withdrawn from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government are expected to return to the fold.

* The British forces' handover of Basra to Iraqi authorities was completed without a hitch; Iraq's second largest city is rapidly returning to normal.

* Iraq's national currency, the dinar, is trading at its highest level since 1990 against the Iranian rial, the Kuwaiti dinar and the US dollar.

* Iraqi oil production is at its highest since 2002. Oil Minister Hussein Shahrestani recently notified OPEC that Iraq intends to produce its full quota next year.

* There's a rush of applications to set up small and medium businesses. In Baghdad alone, the figure for October was 400, compared to 80 last August.

* The fourth American university in the Arab world, and the first in Iraq, has started work in Suleymanieh, close to the Iranian border.

And on the bad:

* All programs for training the new Iraqi army and police are behind schedule. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) hasn't met even a third of its quota. Only one Iraqi officer is training at Sandhurst, the famed British military academy. (Former Prime Minister Tony Blair had promised 22 places.)

* A new leadership elite has emerged locally, but isn't represented in central decision-making. In parts of the country, the officials in place are isolated, if not actually disliked, while unofficial leaders organize and manage some services that government should provide.

* The parties dominating the parliament have failed to set a date for local elections - without which full return to normal is unlikely. The former exiles who now dominate know they'd lose power in any elections to new groups led by homegrown figures.

* Prime Minister al-Maliki continues to prevaricate over draft legislation on oil exploration, production, export and revenue-sharing.

* Draft bills on limiting the effects of de-Baathification and facilitating the inclusion of thousands of former officers and NCOs in the new army remain backburnered. This gives the impression that the governing coalition, strengthened by the drop in violence, is reluctant to take measures that might loosen its hold on power.

As a result of pressure by the ruling elite, the crackdown on corruption and embezzlement, launched earlier this year, has ground to a halt. Public perception of widespread corruption - coupled with the government's inability to provide regular services - undermines the legitimacy of the authorities.

* The government has taken few steps to help those driven out of their homes to return to their original places of abode. Most returnees are persuaded to settle in other areas. The net effect is to "ratify" the ethnic cleansing imposed by militants in the heyday of the "war of the sectarians."

* With pressure from al Qaeda and the insurgency easing, the ruling elites (even the Kurds, who'd hitherto remained united) have become involved in bitter power feuds. The United States is doing little to persuade the elites to spend their energies on more productive endeavors.

* The command-economy mindset, discredited after liberation, is making a comeback. The new budget presented to the parliament is based on the principle of a rentier economy: The state, thanks to its control of oil revenues, affects all major decisions. The idea of a modern capitalist economy, much in vogue in 2003-'04, appears to have been shelved, at least for now.

* The authorities appear to be ignoring cultural fascists who are trying to impose their vision of an "Islamic society" through terror. This is especially the case in the predominantly Shiite provinces of the south, where the so-called campaign of "re-Islamicization" is openly funded by Iran. Friends of the new Iraq must impress on its leaders that these cultural fascists could, in time, prove as deadly as al Qaeda terrorists.

IRAQ today is a hundred times better than what it would have been under Saddam in any imaginable circumstances. Statistics of violence don't begin to measure the efforts of a whole nation to re-emerge from the darkest night in its history. And in that sense, the news from Iraq since April 2003 has always been more good than bad.

What is new is that now more Americans appear willing to acknowledge this - good news in itself. As long as the United States remains resolute in its support for the new Iraq, there will be more good news than bad from what is at present the main battlefield in the War on Terror.

Mutha clams up

ON MAY 17, 2006, outspoken Bush critic and erstwhile Iraq war opponent John Murtha (D-Pa.) shocked the world with a dramatic revelation.

At a news conference he'd convened to talk about "the situation in Iraq," the formerly pro-military lawmaker dropped a bomb on the Marine Corps when he revealed in his 24 minute presser that troops with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment had mowed down innocent civilians in a previously unknown town in north western Iraq called Haditha.

In stark language he accused the Corps of a massive cover-up and made the case that the Marines ran amok in a war with no direction. More shockingly, and without any corroborating evidence, he called the Marines involved in the bloody ambush and ensuing firefight cold-blooded killers.

....

But the subsequent investigation found the Marines acted within the rules of engagement--clearing the rooms "by fire" instead of waiting to be shot at when they entered. This is a controversial practice for sure--throwing a grenade in the room before you know who's in there can have tragic results, as this incident did. But it's important to recognize that Haditha was a perilous place in those days, and Marines had already learned the hard way in Fallujah that opening a door in a house from which you've received fire could mean an up close and personal encounter with the barrel of an AK-47. This time, they weren't taking any chances.

That's why over the last several months, a military court in California has dismissed charges against four of the seven Marines and one Navy corpsman charged in the incident. One officer, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani who commanded 3/1, was ordered to trial for dereliction of duty for not reporting the incident and violation of a lawful order. Another officer, a 1st lieutenant who commanded the intelligence cell that responded to the scene after the shootout, has just begun his Article 32 hearing--the military equivalent of a grand jury investigation.

Two other officers have had their charges thrown out.

Democrats at war

....against the surge.

...in the left's imagining, the blame will fall on the press and the Democrats who, by pulling the plug at just the wrong moment, caused the loss of Iraq. "Nobody I know in a rational condition believes that the United States is going to have any kind of a military victory," Mark Shields said in August. "So the idea is going to be, 'We were on the cusp of victory and the rug was pulled out from under us by these willy-nilly, weak-kneed, nervous Nellies back home.'"

The problem with this is (1) that we may really win, and have no failure to blame upon anyone, and (2) that the nervous Nellies really did try to keep us from winning, indeed fought fang and claw to derail our best efforts.

Denying reality is seldom sound politics. President Bush is still suffering from the aftereffects of the reality gap of 2006, when he insisted, in the face of mounds of contrary evidence, that things were improving in Iraq when it was clear they were not. The Democrats are now doing the same thing in reverse, closing their minds to all news that is not catastrophic, or, on the rare occasions they admit to a small sign of progress, denying all credit to our strategy, to our leaders, or, worst of all, to our troops. Perhaps what the Democrats really want is for the surge to succeed, but to appear to be failing, at least until the 2008 elections are over. But this seems a fairly hard thing to explain to the public.

As they took control of Congress at the start of 2007, the Democrats vowed this would be a year of historic importance, and it seems they were prescient: Seldom before in the annals of governance have so many politicians fought so long and so hard to completely screw up a winning strategy being waged on their country's behalf. Some cruelly define this as treacherous conduct, but this is imprecise and unkind. They tried, it is true, to do serious damage, but were compromised in the event by their chronic incompetence, as well as by being too above-board and open to try to do things on the sly. A stab in the back as a concept was wholly beyond their capacities. This was not a stab in the back that works via guile and subterfuge. It was 41 different stabs in the front, that always fell far short of serious damage, unless you count the damage they did to their own reputations (the approval ratings for Congress are now in the twenties). It was the Stab in the Front, the Surge-against-the-Surge, the Pickett's Charge of the Great War on Terror. It was a year to remember, that will live in the annals of fecklessness. It was historical. It was hysterical. It was the Stab that Failed.

Media Minute Matters

For all the hoopla surrounding Media Matters, and their army of paid tattlers, there doesn't really seem to be anything truly meaningful there.

The whole thing amounts to using mounds of nit-picking verbiage, hearsay, rumor and innuendo (a verbal smokescreen) to accuse journalists of misrepresenting their Nanny-Founder. This creates a distraction from substance, and would seem to allow Hillary Clinton's supporters to believe that they are buying a scrupulously well-tested "product." I need an ambulance; my side is splitting.

Soros vs Rush

Hillary's media attack machine Media Matters first tried to hush Rush by attempting to have him thrown off the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service in May 2004. In a letter to Secretary Rumsfeld, they demanded Rush be silenced after his "trivialization" of the military misconduct at the Abu Ghraib prison. The gag on Rush was necessary, they wrote, "to protect our troops from these reckless and dangerous messages."

Senator Tom Harkin jumped on the Hush-Rush Campaign that time too, just as he is now, demanding "balance" in media. With the taxpayer-funded, liberal propaganda organ, NPR, being broadcast to the troops 24/7, it's hard to believe that anyone could feel one hour a day of Rush Limbaugh is a threat to balance. If anything, that one hour of Rush may be the only balance to the unending, livestream of "The-War-Is-Lost" Harry Reid and his Democrat followers: Tom Harkin, John Murtha, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

The only reason that Hillary Clinton keeps up the public façade of "moderation," and doesn't dare to go on record with her deep disdain for our military is that she is following the Alinsky model, which admonishes revolutionaries to milk their white, middle-class backgrounds and appearances to achieve the political power necessary to carry out the socialist revolution.

According to the Alinsky model of bloodless socialist revolution, Rush Limbaugh represents a Have as opposed to a Have-Not. Now what does Rush Have that Hillary Clinton and George Soros Have-Not? [A lot, actually, good ideas being perhaps the first thing that comes to my mind.] But in the current battle, what he definitely has is an established and quite verifiable reputation for unabashed patriotism. This reputation is so strong that as soon as someone attacks it, then real, living, American Armed Forces and Veterans immediately come to his defense.

They are using Alinsky's "basic tactic in warfare against the Haves," which Alinsky refers to as "political jujitsu." (Rules for Radicals, p. 152) This tactic advises the Have-Nots to "club the enemy to death with his own book of rules and regulations." (p. 152) Rush is a great patriot, playing by the American patriot rulebook. But even a true patriot can be caught every now and then using one or two words, that when taken out of context, might be used to choke him on his own "petard" (p. 152).

This works especially well for the revolutionaries in our high-tech age, and some of Soros' money goes to pay full-time listeners and media-watchers at Media Matters to monitor every word of the Haves.

IQ and education

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=111907A

Imagine that instead of intelligence, what we really cared about in our society was fishing aptitude. At age 10, a child is given tests that involve fishing while wading in a stream, fishing while standing on a bridge, fishing while riding in a boat on a river, and fishing while in a boat on the ocean. Let us suppose that a child's percentile in any one test is highly correlated with that child's percentile on all of the other tests. For example, a child who is in the 85th percentile for catching fish when wading in a stream is likely to be in the 85th percentile for catching fish in the other situations. We could say that this child has a relatively high Fishing Quotient, or FQ.

Common folk wisdom might be that one intuitively identifiable subset of the human race, called Good Ol' Boys, has a higher FQ on average than another subset, called City Fellers. Suppose that results of FQ tests bear out this folk wisdom. In that case, some researchers might try very hard to identify genetic differences between Good Ol' Boys and City Fellers, and they might try very hard to tell "Just-So" stories about how those genetic differences might explain the difference in average FQ. But we should be cautious about concluding that the intuitively identifiable differences reflect fundamental biological differences or that those biological differences are what explain FQ.

Racial differences in average FQ would be one indication that FQ is innate. More powerful evidence would be:

--the fact that someone's FQ as a child is highly correlated with that individual's FQ as an adult, indicating that the environment has relatively little effect on FQ.

--the fact that policy interventions intended to change FQ, including many experiments with fishing education, fail to make a significant difference in FQ.

--the fact that identical twins raised apart tend to have about the same correlation of FQ as identical twins raised together.

One argument against the innateness of FQ would be the Flynn effect, which says that re-norming has occurred over time. In this context, the Flynn Effect is that on two of the tests--say, the boat on the river and the boat on the ocean--the number of fish that you need to catch to be in the 50th percentile has gone up gradually but steadily over the past hundred years.

Some researchers say that this means that the environment affects FQ. Other researchers say that this means that performance on those two tests are not comparable over time, but that FQ is still innate. There are bound to be many indicators of FQ that change over time. For example, fishing income is correlated with FQ, but fishing income can change over time for many environmental reasons. The fact that any one indicator changes over time does not prove that FQ is not innate. In the words of Linda S. Gottfreson "No one would mistake a thermometer for heat."

A theoretical way to rescue environmental determinants of FQ is the Dickens-Flynn hypothesis. This hypothesis is that children with a bit of aptitude for fishing are given lots of opportunity and encouragement for fishing, so that small innate advantages lead to large differences in FQ.

IQ, by Slate

http://slate.com/id/2178122/entry/0

One objection is that IQ tests are racially biased. This is true in the broadest sense: On average, African and Asian kids have different advantages, and IQ tests focus on the things at which more Asian kids have the edge. But in the narrower sense of testing abilities that pay off in the modern world, IQ tests do their job. They accurately predict the outcomes of black and white kids at finishing high school, staying employed, and avoiding poverty, welfare, or jail. They also accurately predict grades and job performance in modern Africa. The SAT, GRE, and tests in the private sector and the armed forces corroborate the racial patterns on IQ tests. Kids of different backgrounds find the same questions easy or hard. Nor do tests always favor a country's ethnic majority. In Malaysia, Chinese and Indian minorities outscore Malays.

....

Another common critique is that race is a fuzzy concept. By various estimates, 20 percent to 30 percent of the genes in "black" Americans actually came from Europe. Again, it's a good point, but it bolsters the case for a genetic explanation. Black Americans, like "colored" South Africans, score halfway between South African blacks and whites on IQ tests. The lowest black IQ averages in the United States show up in the South, where the rate of genetic blending is lowest. There's even some biological evidence: a correlation between racial "admixture" and brain weight. Reading about studies of "admixture" is pretty nauseating. But the nausea doesn't make the studies go away.

My first reaction, looking at this pattern, was that if the highest-scoring blacks are those who have lighter skin or live in whiter countries, the reason must be their high socioeconomic status relative to other blacks. But then you have to explain why, on the SAT, white kids from households with annual incomes of $20,000 to $30,000 easily outscore black kids from households with annual incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. You also have to explain why, on IQ tests, white kids of parents with low incomes ­and low IQs outscore black kids of parents with high incomes and high IQs. Or why Inuits and Native Americans outscore American blacks.

 

Is not truth, truth for all?

Truth is very stubborn. It is no respecter of persons. It never ceases to amaze me when I see a movie or read a book that other Christians have told me not to read or watch even in private and I find a biblical truth in it. Atheist Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" was a classic example of an atheist making a theistic point, only he did it better than 99% of theists could do. The book and the movie are a must have. But the ending of the book is even better. It didn't translate to the screen for logistical reasons, more an intellectual than visual scene. It's a must read so I'm not going to tell you what it says.

Gene Roddenberry created the great "Star Trek" series and is listed as a great atheist. But how transparent was the "Prime Directive" as worldly wisdom as opposed to transcendental wisdom? The Prime Directive always lost the debate. It was always on a shaky, morally relativistic ground; what the culture thought was right was what the technologically advanced aliens were supposed to honor. The Prime Directive was almost always violated by Kirk and company because it was almost always wrong. I was actually surprised to see Roddenberry on the "A list" to be honest. Many of my views of moral absolutes were strengthened by watching this show created by an atheist.

Truth has a way of coming through when people choose honesty and sincerity. We are all made in the image of God and He shines through when we let Him.

....

One of the most disappointing Christian responses was to the Harry Potter book and movie series. Sure it used magic to set up its plot, and we know only God can over-ride the laws of nature, but magic was the vehicle for a distinctively Christian narrative. Two authors even combined to write a book called "The Gospel According to Harry Potter". I have it on my shelf.

Clinton, Libby, and Bonds

...oh My!

....baseball isn't the Oval Office and Democratic excuses for being sexually satisfied by an intern while you're on the phone with a congressman talking about sending American troops to the Balkans. Baseball isn't a list of names of foreign operatives that can be linked to a CIA officer outed only because the Republican Bush administration didn't like her husband's politics. Baseball isn't sacred. It's a professional sport. Bookies make a living on it.

This is what happens when we abandon the principle that no one is above the law, and exchange it for the warm comforts of partisanship. It's something many Democrats did years ago for the Clintons. They prattled on that lying under oath was OK as long as it involved sex. It wasn't. It was lying under oath.

It's something many Republicans did recently for the Bush administration, saying it was OK for "Scooter" Libby to lie under oath because he wasn't the original leaker in the Valerie Plame affair. It wasn't OK. It was lying under oath.

Yes, there's something to be said for consistency.

VDH on the state of the war

The military -- unlike the Bush administration -- is strangely silent about its recent successes. The caution is not just due to uncertainty over whether the Sunni Triangle will stay won for good.

Instead, the September testimony of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and the reaction to it -- whether the "General Betray Us" Moveon.org ad or Sen. Hillary Clinton's jab that to believe the general's testimony required a "willing suspension of disbelief" -- reminded officers how Iraq will loom large in election-cycle domestic politics. Getting drawn into such politicking is something responsible military leaders try to avoid.

Nevertheless, we may be witnessing one of those radical, unforeseen reversals in America's wars that have often changed our history.

The White House was burned by British forces in late August 1814; a little more than four months later, the British were routed at New Orleans. During the Civil War, the Union army was on the ropes in July 1864 yet outside Atlanta by September. The Germans were driving through France in March 1918, but fleeing toward the Rhine by August. The communists took Seoul in early January 1951, yet were pushed back across the Demilitarized Zone a little more than three months later.

Of course, we don't know the final outcome in Iraq, given the remaining problems of Shiite militias and diehard al-Qaidists -- and the question of our own remaining resolve.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps may well soon stabilize the Iraqi democracy once deemed lost. Or perhaps, in the manner of Vietnam between 1973-5, the public may have become so tired of Iraq -- despite the improvement -- that it simply wants it out of sight and out of mind.

Either way, history is now being made while we sleep.

Iraq's WMDs

Was Saddam bluffing? It looks like it.

The answer, according Ronald Kessler in his new book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, is that Saddam ultimately feared United Nations actions less than he feared an attack from Iran . . . which, he calculated, would be much more likely if the leaders of Iran knew he had no WMDs. Kessler based his conclusions on information obtained by an Arabic-speaking FBI agent named George Piro who debriefed and befriended Saddam after the dictator's capture in Iraq, during his months of captivity before his eventual execution.

What Saddam never counted on, of course, was September 11, 2001. Kessler's book should put to rest, once and for all, the notion that Saddam was somehow involved in Osama bin Laden's plot. The 9/11 attacks were Saddam's worst nightmare because they changed the risk equation for the United States. Suddenly, the prospect of Saddam hiding WMDs went from being an ongoing nuisance to a mortal dread. What was to stop him from handing them off to al Qaeda?

President Bush decided the risk was intolerable -- and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Ried plays hardball

Lieberman calls him on it.

The godless delusion

Need to comment on this piece.

Vicar of Bray

Finally found the lyrics.

Stereotypes

A piece at American Thinker:

But, as I wrote about Dr. James Watson's comments regarding Africans, intelligence and genetics, this is part of a very distressing pattern.  Everyone fixates on the fact that such comments constitute generalizations (about groups that are supposed to be immune from such things), as if this is an offense in and of itself. Yet, no one seems to ask the only relevant question.

Are the generalizations true?

More perspectives on waterboarding

At Captains Quarters

Earlier, I wrote about the practice of waterboarding after reading a piece in the New York Daily News by Malcolm Nance. Nance, who served as an instructor at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE), wrote that he considered the practice to be torture, without question, and therefore illegal. Given his description of the practice, I thought he made a good argument. A number of commenters questioned Nance's conclusions, description, and qualifications, and I decided to get a second opinion.

....

Captain's Quarters readers will remember Mike the SEAL, who has served this nation in several capacities, including as a decades-long member of the elite commando team as well as a first responder in his community. Mike wrote several extensive posts here at Captain's Quarters while overseas in various capacities in 2004 and 2005. I'm fortunate enough to count Mike as a personal friend for the last several years, and I know him to be a man of courage, honesty, and absolute integrity. For obvious reasons, I will not identify him any further.

....

Without getting into specifics on his experiences, Mike strongly disputes Nance's exaggerations of waterboarding. There is a word for people who have "pint after pint of water" filling their lungs: dead. "In fact," according to Mike, "they would be very, very dead.

....

Mike emphasized that modern military interrogators receive excellent training and know that coercive techniques do not usually work as well as "positive incentives" and they will generally work through "echelons" of interrogation to obtain critical information. Mike would not go into any detail on "positive incentives" anymore than he would about coercive interrogation techniques generally used as a last resort. He continued to emphasize operational security (OPSEC). However, there are many different scenarios for interrogations, including time-critical emergencies, such as hostage rescue or impending attacks. "Effective interrogators need every range of options in these cases, including methods that use coercion to elicit information, for the different situations that our forces not only might face, but have faced. He used the examples of rescuing captured American soldiers from terrorists when we know they will be brutally tortured and murdered if not found immediately and rescued. "I'm guessing that the vast majority of Americans who vote would not have a problem with us using coercive tactics to get that kind of information from a terrorist."

Zero Tolerance page

Randy Cassingham, author of thisistrue.com, has zero tolerance for "Zero Tolerance" laws and rules.

The stories on this page illustrate why.

Readability test

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Dershowitz on torture

Alan Dershowitz doesn't like torture. But...

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

The kind of torture that President Clinton was talking about is not designed to secure confessions of past crimes, but rather to obtain real time, actionable intelligence deemed necessary to prevent an act of mass casualty terrorism. The question put to the captured terrorist is not "Did you do it?" Instead, the suspect is asked to disclose self-proving information, such as the location of the bomber.

One of the points made about SERE training, which does (or at least has) included waterboarding, is that the anti-torture laws of this country don't have an exception for training of our soldiers. If it's torture, it's banned. Period.

Another implication raised by SERE training is that if waterboarding is torture, then it works. If torture only produced false information, there'd be no need to train people to resist it.

Nature and Nurture

(Hat tip: John Ray)

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

...

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.

Which is a continuing attempt to sidestep a basic question: What if some important differences are real and genetic?

Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.

Granted, other snippets are found more commonly in Africans, and some folks are trying to show Africans are genetically smarter than Europeans. But if it is true, either way, what do we do about it?

Lieberman and the war on Bush

Dinocrat notes Senator Lieberman's comments about the party that threw him out for thought crimes.

Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

there is something profoundly wrong — something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops. There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base — even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.

A computer for every starving child?

If the goal is to broaden children's horizons through connectivity, why must OLPC reinvent the wheel? Repackaging the XO as an inexpensive mobile device could excite significant consumer demand and make an immediate impact on education. The current plan will have a different impact.

Children will suffer if governments divert scarce resources away from essential services. To avoid that outcome, professor Negroponte should channel his ingenuity into a product compatible with existing markets. Success will be achieved not by forcing technology on children, but by bringing children to technology.

Global Warming

An article in the London Telegraph:

More serious, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.

Mukasey confirmed

Despite not declaring waterboarding illegal.

Captain Ed has some (comments )

Mukasey doesn't get to classify waterboarding as torture. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the AG and the DoJ don't get to write their own laws. Congress writes the laws, and the AG makes sure that they are enforced. Congress has explicitly forbidden the Pentagon to use waterboarding as an interrogation technique, but has not yet passed that same restriction on other agencies -- and until they do, any instance of waterboarding cannot be said to be explicitly illegal.

That is what makes the Post's description of Democratic angst so irritatingly ironic. The debate partly centered, according to this report, on the boundaries of executive power. Yet the Senate wants the AG to enforce laws Congress has not passed, which would be a rather obvious and objectionable expansion of executive power at the expense of the judiciary.

Congress does not want to take responsibility for restricting the options for time-critical interrogations. Many of these same Senators have thought what a future commission looking into a massive terrorist attack on the US might say if we had a member of the conspiracy in custody and failed to save hundreds or thousands of American lives through coercive interrogation techniques. They want to make sure that they don't have to answer for their choices in those circumstances as those involved in building "the wall" between law enforcement and intelligence agents did after 9/11. They like being in the position of demanding to know why dots weren't connected when they kept putting barriers between the dots themselves.

One person who taught SERE courses describes waterboarding as torture.

In his column at the Daily News, Nance wrote that "pint after pint" of water enters the lungs, and that the subjects actually start to drown. That description got disputed in two separate interviews I conducted, one with a former SERE instructor and another with a SEAL. The latter, whom I have known personally for years, explained why Nance's previous description made no sense. Mike's secondary specialty in the SEAL force is as an advanced combat medic. Without getting into specifics on his experiences, Mike strongly disputes Nance's exaggerations of waterboarding. There is a word for people who have "pint after pint of water" filling their lungs: dead.

Remember, waterboarding is (or at least has been) part of SERE training for our own soldiers. If they were being subjected to such a lethal technique, I have to imagine someone would have spoken up and put a stop to it. We don't like killing off our soldiers during training.

However, Nance's testimony highlights exactly why Mukasey had to answer as he did. If waterboarding under all circumstances is torture, then we torture our own soldiers. Will Mukasey prosecute SERE instructors, too? Or does it demonstrate that context and circumstances make a difference when deciding whether an ambiguous standard has been violated?

In addition, if SERE is legal, it implies SERE uses a form of waterboarding that is not torture. That means there are at least two procedures, both called "waterboarding", at least one of which is not torture. Mukasey is being perfectly reasonable in refusing to say whether "waterboarding" is torture until he knows which form of "waterboarding" is being discussed.

A look back at Communism

An examination of our historical "inordinate fear" of communism might shed some light on what some consider our new inordinate fear of terrorism.

....

Let us examine the myths and realities of communism and anti-communism, and see if our fear really was inordinate. Were we fighting a phantom menace? Was the only thing we had to fear our own fear? Let's start at the beginning.

Myth: The Communist ideal is quite innocent, for example, "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities."

Myth: The Russian Communists overthrew the czar; they were simply replacing a violent dictator.

Myth: The Russian Communists were no more violent than the czar.

Myth: The Communists were guilty of some violence, but no more so than any other form of government, especially considering the Christian Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, slavery in the U.S. and its treatment of Native Americans.

Myth: Communist movements were subverted by their leaders, who were not practicing true communism.

Myth: Communism offers a more fair distribution of wealth.

Myth: Anti-communism in the U.S. is a Republican product, part of their "politics of fear", from the Red Scare to the House Un-American Activities Committee to the Cold War itself.

Myth. Joe McCarthy ran the HUAC and blacklisted hundreds of innocent Hollywood artists. He ruined the lives of innocent people by irresponsibly accusing them of being communists.

Myth: The anti-communists warned us of a "domino effect" and a "bloodbath" if we left Vietnam. Those warnings turned out to be unfounded.

Myth: Communism was flawed and would have fizzled out on its own. "George Bush taking credit for the Berlin Wall coming down is like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise." Al Gore in the 1992 Vice Presidential debates.

Myth: Communism is so over; didn't you see Rocky IV?

Racism

James Watson, the geneticist who helped unravel the structure of DNA, came under fire for saying that Africans are not as intelligent as Westerners. Aside from his remarks being deemed baseless and unscientific, he has quite predictably been labeled "racist." Why, some thought police even want him charged under Britain's Orwellian "racial hatred laws" (Watson is conducting a speaking tour in Britain presently). He has apologized, and averred, "I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said."

And what is the Truth about racial differences? For one thing, is it logical and rational to claim that, except for appearance and a few diseases and conditions of the body, every group is the same in every way? This is the left's implication, and it's absurd. It seems especially odd when you consider that most of these inquisitors are secularists who subscribe to the theory of evolution. Yet, despite their belief that different groups "evolved" in completely different parts of the world, operating in different environments and subject to different stresses, they would have us believe that all groups are identical in terms of the multitude of man's talents and in every single measure of mental capacity. Why, miracle of miracles, all these two-legged cosmic accidents, the product of a billions-of-years journey from the primordial soup to primacy among creatures, whose evolution was influenced by perhaps millions of factors, wound up being precisely the same. It's really the best argument for God I've ever heard, as such a statistical impossibility could only exist if it was ordained by the one with whom all things are possible.

Lastly, if we really care about a race's welfare, shouldn't we "diagnose" its condition -- whatever that condition may be -- properly so that its gifts may be best utilized, its inherent weaknesses best mitigated and its problems best remedied? If this makes sense with physical crosses such as sickle-cell anemia and heart disease, it makes sense for all crosses, be they spiritual, social or, dare I say, intellectual. Stating this isn't wrong or racist, and it shouldn't be repressed. And as Dr. Watson might say, that's something you don't have to be a Sherlock to understand.

The left has hijacked torture

quite simply, in much of the debate over "torture", we're not talking about actual torture at all. We're talking about rough treatment, harshness, or coercion.

The American left has defined these upward until they mean the same thing as torture, all as a part of their efforts to undermine the War on Terror in general. The core of this stance is the assertion that a slap on the head, several days without sleep, or hearing Rage Against the Machine played at full volume is fully the equivalent of torture in the classic sense. (Well... maybe we should reconsider that last....)

Of course, it's no such thing. Torture is easily defined as physical assault carried out over a prolonged period against a victim under complete control and holding the possibility of permanent physical or psychic damage. Official legal terminology contains the proviso that torture consists of acts that "revolt the conscience" We can also add, by way of Dashiell Hammett, that such actions must have "threat of death behind them". If they contain these elements, they are torture. If not, they're something less. Not necessarily something justifiable or commendable, but not torture either. (Another method of judging these actions is to ask whether the activity would excite an individual like Mengele or Yezhov.)

The left has succeeded, through a relentless media campaign (is there any other kind?) in obscuring this distinction. According to the latest criteria, torture is anything unpleasant that occurs to a prisoner while in American custody. (Overseas it's different. It's very, very difficult -- almost impossible, in fact -- for any developing or left-of-center regime to commit torture, no matter what they do to their prisoners. Unless, as in the rendition uproar, the U.S. is somehow involved.)

Insta-torture

Well, not quite. But Glenn Reynolds does have some comments about who's for, who's against, and who's on the fence.

Lieberman speaks out on Mukasey

Follow the link.

Watson and IQ

Very long post linked here

Confirm Mukasey and ban torture

Of course, torture's already illegal.

Those senators who truly want to bring the nation back from the disgrace of Mr. Bush's interrogation policies should do two things. They should confirm Mr. Mukasey, who is far more independent and qualified than either of Mr. Bush's previous two nominees. And they should do something which, for all the rhetoric, they have so far declined to do: ban torture, by passing the National Security with Justice Act sponsored by Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.). The act would limit all United States personnel -- military and civilian -- to using only interrogation techniques authorized by the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation, which expressly prohibits waterboarding and which military leaders have said gives them the tools they need to get reliable information from difficult subjects.

Of course, that would require taking a stand.

Space Elevator

An article in today's TCS compares the Space Elevator project with the Erie Canal.

To many, the idea of constructing an elevator into geosynchronous orbit might be, to echo the words of Jefferson, a splendid project a century hence but little short of madness today. Nevertheless the idea is beginning to elicit consideration from a growing number of serious scientists.

In its simplest form, the elevator would consist of a ribbon of super-strong carbon nanotubes be tethered to a large platform located near the equator and attached to a space structure at the other. To get from earth to space a cab would climb the ribbon. (Further details can be found at www.spaceelevator.com)

....

But like the Erie Canal, a space elevator would be more than just a testament to good old-fashion American ingenuity and know-how. It would have broad, practical economic and political ramifications. For instance, just as the Erie Canal lowered the cost of shipping a ton of flour from $120 to less than $6, a space elevator could similarly open up space by radically reducing the price of hauling the equipment and supplies into orbit. Today, it costs anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 to launch a single pound of material into space. With a space elevator, replacing and updating the communication and satellite infrastructure upon which modern society is now so dependent would be fast, inexpensive and easy.

Beyond this, if America is serious about establishing a permanent presence on the moon -- and, ultimately, Mars -- this country will need a dramatically more efficient process for delivering cargo and personnel into a space. Our present system of using individual rockets is about as efficient as hauling flour by horseback.

It has been estimated that a space elevator can be built for $12 billion. It is a large amount of money to be sure, but so too was the Erie Canal. Thanks, however, to some farsighted and courageous leadership a profitable canal was built and, in the process, it turned the course of history. How fitting then if on October 26, 2025 -- the bicentennial of the opening of the Erie Canal -- America could send a group of people into space on an elevator. It is possible but first we must enlarge our minds to "so great an object."

The Erie Canal was expected to cost $6 million -- three quarters of the Federal budget in that era. Granted, the Federal budget was a lot smaller in proportion to the GDP back then. If we call the Federal budget a trillion dollars, then $12 billion is 8.3% of the Federal budget.

Shall we outlaw waterboarding?

Fox News reports that in connection with passage of the 2006 Military Commissions Act, Sen. Ted Kennedy proposed an amendment that would have expressly defined "waterboarding" (among other indignities) as a grave breach of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The Amendment lost, 46-53.
That is, the same senate that wants Mukasey to say waterboarding is unambiguously illegal in all circumstances declined to make it unambiguously illegal in all circumstances. I realize that the senate was in Republican hands then and it is in Democratic hands now; I realize if the vote were retaken today, the Amendment would have a better chance of passing. But the stubborn fact remains: it didn't pass – it lost.

Of course, you may have to waterboard Senators to get them to admit it.

More on torture

What does the Democrat front-runner say about torture?

The "ticking bomb scenario" represents a narrow exception to what should otherwise be our categorical prohibition against torture. After all, "in the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans," it might be necessary for a president to make "the decision to depart from standard international practices[.]" The president, of course, "must be held accountable" for such a decision; but the president would have to be prepared to make it in such dire circumstances.

Who says so? Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, that's who. The Democrats' coronee-in-waiting made the comments in an interview by the New York Daily News last October.

What Congress should do if it really believes "waterboarding" is illegal:

If Democrats, and Republicans led by John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are determined to criminalize waterboarding, they should do it the way law is made in a democracy. That would mean proposing clear legislation and arguing that it is better to risk the death of thousands of Americans in a terrorist attack than it is for Khalid Sheik Mohammed to be subjected to non-lethal, simulated drowning that causes neither great pain nor lasting injury.

(source)

How the Bush Administration should be handling the issue:

Here is how the administration can extricate itself and fight back on this crucial issue: First, remind people of the legal niceties and creature comforts enjoyed by detainees at Guantanamo. Contrast these humane, relatively luxurious conditions with the genuine torture that al Qaeda unleashes on its victims.

Then, outline the priceless intelligence America has gleaned and the plots we have unraveled, thanks to intense interrogation of the Islamofascist killers who our brave soldiers and spies have captured.

Finally, for both psychological and tactical reasons, the Bush Administration should announce that America will reinstate waterboarding as an interrogation technique, effective immediately.

(source)

Irish Bulls

I note this article:

It's a harmless enough hobby. I collect flights of rhetoric that suddenly crash. They exert the same fascination for me that toy train wrecks do for little boys.

....

My old friend Father John O’Donnell has sent me a batch of similar sentences, all collected in one article by a connoisseur of the art, Francis Griffith. The genre turns out to have a name: Irish bulls. This herd arrived in time for last Saint Patrick's Day, and I've been laughing ever since.

An Irish bull, I learned, is not a branch of the Hereford family. It is "a verbal blunder which seems to make sense but after a moment's reflection is seen to be wildly illogical."

Torture on NRO

A couple of articles about torture at NRO:

Clifford D. May writes:

On one extreme of the debate over interrogating terrorists are the Jack Bauers, those who – like the lead character in Fox's hit series 24 – think you do whatever it takes to get the information you need from someone plotting mass murder. At the other extreme is the antiwar Left: They wouldn't harm a hair on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's head to save Disneyland at Christmas.

Those of us who hold views somewhere between these poles ought to be having a serious discussion about what methods should be permissible and under what circumstances. But that's become close to impossible. A case in point: I was on The Abrams Report on MSNBC last week to discuss whether Judge Michael Mukasey, during congressional hearings, should have said whether "waterboarding" "simulated drowning" constitutes torture and therefore must be prohibited.

(source)

Andrew J. McCarthy writes:

Jonathan Turley has penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times claiming that Michael Mukasey, President Bush's nominee to become the next attorney general, should be disqualified for failing to condemn waterboarding as torture. According to Turley, Judge Mukasey's confirmation-hearing testimony was evasive, and the nominee flatly lied to the committee when he said he did not to know what was involved in the technique called "waterboarding." The accusation about lying is noxious and what passes for legal reasoning in Turley's piece is especially shameful for a George Washington University law professor.

To begin with, interrogation tactics used in top-secret Central Intelligence Agency programs are classified. The fact that Professor Turley, Judge Mukasey, I, or anyone else may know, as a general matter, what waterboarding is does not mean we know how it has been practiced (assuming it has been practiced) by the CIA. Just a brief perusal of the available literature on the Internet demonstrates that there are variations – and those are just the ones we know about.

Mukasey on Water boarding

...At the Wall Street Journal

This Year's Fires

Predictions about this year's fire season in Southern California can be found here:

Quis custodiet?

OK, the FISA court decides when surveillance is OK, but what oversight is there? How much oversight should there be?

For one who recently returned from Europe, where a colleague and I interviewed an array of domestic security officials in key European democracies, it is a bit of an out-of-body experience to examine the various bills now pending on Capitol Hill that aim to govern how the U.S. government conducts foreign electronic surveillance. While the exact mechanisms for intercepts and wiretaps vary from nation to nation, the overwhelming standard for such collection in Europe is simple: Does it make sense to target someone for surveillance, and is it, on its face, reasonable to do? Overwhelmingly, the judgment about whether it is reasonable is left in the hands of either the executive or an investigating magistrate. Any oversight is minimal.

A discussion of the amendments to FISA.

A review of Gould "Mismeasure of Man"

(Hat tip: Dissecting Leftism)

After carefully reading the book, I charge Gould with several counts of scholarly malfeasance. First, he omits mention of remarkable new discoveries made from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which show that brain-size and IQ correlate about 0.40. These results are as replicable as one will find in the social and behavioral sciences and utterly destroy many of Gould's arguments. Second, despite published refutations, Gould repeats verbatim his defamations of character against long deceased individuals. Third, Gould fails to respond to the numerous empirical studies that show a consistent pattern of race differences in IQ, brain size, crime, and other factors that have appeared since his first edition went to press.

Dr Watson, continued

James Watson continues to write on genes and intelligence.

...genetics can be cruel. My own son may be one of its victims. Warm and perceptive at the age of 37, Rufus cannot lead an independent life because of schizophrenia, lacking the ability to engage in day-to-day activities. For all too long, my wife Ruth and I hoped that what Rufus needed was an appropriate challenge on which to focus. But as he passed into adolescence, I feared the origin of his diminished life lay in his genes. It was this realisation that led me to help to bring the human genome project into existence.

In doing so, I knew that many new moral dilemmas would arise as a consequence and would early on establish the ethical, legal and societal components of the genome project. Since 1978, when a pail of water was dumped over my Harvard friend E O Wilson for saying that genes influence human behaviour, the assault against human behavioural genetics by wishful thinking has remained vigorous.

We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science.

To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers. It is very likely that at least some 10 to 15 years will pass before we get an adequate understanding for the relative importance of nature versus nurture in the achievement of important human objectives. Until then, we as scientists, wherever we wish to place ourselves in this great debate, should take care in claiming what are unarguable truths without the support of evidence.

The logic of torture

Gabriel Schoenfeld looks at what torture is, what it isn't, and the gray areas between.

The Population Bomb

One of the 50 worst books in history?

Even worse than The Eye of Argon?

(I suppose so. No one takes Eye seriously.

Giuliani on torture

A moderately hysterical NY Times piece, with a collection of shrilly hysterical comments.

IQ

IQ differences are real, but do they matter?

The evidence is that IQ, as conventionally measured, does differ between racial groups. Many studies have shown differences of about 15 points between the mean scores of white and black groups, and some have shown that Chinese and Japanese groups score higher still.

A second argument - that IQ doesn't matter anyway -is easier to dismiss. A large body of evidence shows that IQ is linked to success in life, both educational and economic. This is why the gap narrows when corrections are made for socio-economic status, because in a mobile society success is largely determined by intelligence.

Watson, up the crick?

Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners

Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"

By Cahal Milmo

Published: 17 October 2007

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

And....

Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

Mukasey and Torture

Jonathan Turley opines in today's L.A. Times:

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote in favor of Michael Mukasey to be the new U.S. attorney general, sending his nomination to the full Senate for confirmation. What is most surprising is the wave of support from the committee's Democrats, who seem determined to ignore what they clearly view as a minor flaw in the nominee: his refusal to denounce the deplorable practice of "water-boarding" and his apparent willingness to lie to duck the issue.

Declaring "water-boarding" a "clear and unambiguous act of torture under international and U.S. law", Turley calls for the Senate to reject Mukasey's nomination.  What does he object to in Mukasey's responses?

At first, he repeatedly stated that he does not support torture, which violates the U.S. Constitution. This is precisely the answer given so often by President Bush like a mantra. The problem is that Bush defines torture to exclude things like water-boarding. It is like saying you do not rob banks, but then defining bank robbery in such a way that it does not include walking in with a gun and demanding money from the cashier.

Well, if you must use this analogy, walking in to a bank with a gun and demanding money from the "cashier" is only robbery if the "cashier" actually hands over money. Otherwise, it's assault. (And Turley's a law professor? Come on!)

The senators pushed Mukasey to go beyond the Bush administration mantra. He refused and then said something that made many of us who were listening gasp: "I don't know what is involved in the technique," he said.

Actually, that's still a valid answer, despite the publicity water-boarding has received.

Terry Karney, who has screamed and wailed that "the Administration condones torture" has equated water-boarding with "mock executions", which are explicitly banned under the Geneva Conventions. So the question becomes, is water-boarding administered in such a way that the subject believes he's not going to survive? Not too long ago, a news reporter was water-boarded on TV. I think we can assume he had every expectation that he would survive the process, nevertheless it was still no picnic. Are terrorists who are being water-boarded told they're going to die, or that they'll survive the process? That could make a critical difference to a judge reviewing the legality of the technique.

If the administration is unable to find a nominee who will denounce torture, then it should be left with an acting attorney general who will lead the department without the consent of the Senate. After all, there are worse things than being denied confirmation. You could be water-boarded, for example.

The thing is, there are worse things than being water-boarded. The Al Qaeda manual that was captured some months ago displayed a number of them. Although a reporter was willing to be water-boarded on TV, I've yet to see one volunteer to have his skin burned with a hot clothes iron, or have holes drilled in him with an electric drill.

There's a line between what constitutes torture, and what does not. Some things will lie very close to the line, and reasonable people may differ over what technique belongs on which side of the line. To declare that people who disagree with your placement of that line "refuse to denounce torture" is more of a hysterical fit than a reasoned argument.

Progress in Iraq

The death tolls are dropping.

Phony Outrage about Rush Limbaugh

David Limbaugh has a piece looking at the phony outrage about his brother's "phony soldier" comments.

Jena Six timeline

Look for it at the link above.

Twelve Myths about the Jena Six

Gee, that's two myths per Jena thug!

Myths looked at are:

Myth 1: The Whites-Only Tree.

Myth 2: Nooses a Signal to Black Students.

Myth 3: Nooses Were a Hate Crime.

Myth 4: DA's Threat to Black Students.

Myth 5: The Fair Barn Party Incident.

Myth 6: The "Gotta-Go" Grocery Incident.

Myth 7: The Schoolyard Fight.

Myth 8: The Attack Is Linked to the Nooses.

Myth 9: Mychal Bell's All-White Jury.

Myth 10: Jena 6 as Model Youth.

Myth 11: Jena Is One of the Most Racist Towns in America.

Myth 12: Two Levels of Justice.

These are just 12 of many myths that are portrayed as fact in the media concerning the Jena cases. (A more thorough review of all events can be found at www.thejenatimes.net – click on Chronological Order of Events.)

Five myths about rendition

These myths are:

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

2. People who are "rendered" inevitably end up in a foreign slammer -- or worse.

3. Step one of a rendition involves kidnapping the suspect.

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

5. Pretty much anyone -- including U.S. citizens and green card holders -- can be rendered these days.

Dark Networks

This post from Belmont Club opens with an unsettling tale:

A Ferrari engine makes a deep, distinctive sound. When the children at Portugal's most famous orphanage heard the sports car roaring down the driveway, fear swept through the dormitories.

The noise could mean only one thing: the man known as The Doctor was coming to call. Yet this medical practitioner had no intention of adhering to the ancient Hippocratic Oath.

Instead, arriving at Casa Pia (House of the Pious), a 17th century Lisbon orphanage where more than 4,000 children are cared for each year behind high stone walls, the doctor would summon selected boys and girls from their beds for examinations one night each week.

Where possible, he chose deaf-mutes.

They were being used as sex slaves and for kiddie porn.

(link)

Also cited is the case of Marc Dutroux, a convicted pedophile.

Wretchard mentions the crime of child sexual abuse almost in passing, turning his attention to the networks that support it.

How do these networks of scum form? My intuition is they form in a way not very different from any Small World Network, of which terrorist cells are a familiar example: that there are hubs, to which a new arrival on the scene can easily form an attachment. As with all Small World Networks, there are probably only a small number of "hops" which separate a footsoldier like Marc Dutroux from the evil Mr. Bigs. The existence of hubs will guarantee that.

One piece of academic research which might help us understand the structure of pedophile rings is The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution, a monograph by Microsoft which examines how illegally downloaded music or video is shared across a Darknet -- a private network of distribution. It's usefulness lies in that the abstract characteristics of illegal file sharing systems it describes are probably shared to some degree by the pedophile networks. By examining the architecture and vulnerabilities of one, we better understand the organization and weaknesses of the other.

Early attempts to shut down large scale illicit content distribution focused on closing down servers from which the material was downloaded. This would be the equivalent of closing down the Casa Pia orphanage described in opening paragraph. But just as the architects of content distribution sharing systems responded by creating a peer to peer structure where the "goods" were passed from one anonymous system to another, so will the pedophiles have adapted. It was suggested that if Madeleine were indeed abducted, she was "abducted to order". You don't download a child from the server any more, just from another peer node. But even this switch from a client-server model to a peer to peer system did not remove the vulnerabilities entirely. The Small World Property reasserted itself in video and music file sharing networks and created super-peers which were themselves like the old content servers. And these too can be targeted. This means that even in a pedophile network without wholesale warehouses like the Casa Pia orphanage, there are "hubs" of users which occupy important positions in the system. Taking down those hubs will degrade the system seriously.

In effect, networks are networks, and are constrained by the same laws whether they deal in music (and video) downloads, child abuse, or terrorism. The tools that work on one are very likely to work on others.

Rush on dot org

Just a link

The mugging that wasn't

An Air America host was reported to have been mugged. One of the other hosts on the station speculated that it was a hate crime – some right-wingers had beaten her up.

This was all over the blogosphere before the truth came in: She had tripped and fallen. No attack squad in sight.

Is Waterboarding Torture?

The new Attorney General doesn't seem to have an answer.

The post, at Patterico's blog, is not very interesting, but the comments are.

In particular, we have a pointer to this piece at Blackfive. It in turn links to a post at National Review Online's "Corner" blog here.

...As a former Army Counterintelligence Agent, I conducted battlefield interrogations of enemy prisoners of war as well as strategic debriefings of higher value targets, and I've served in bad places where bad things will happen if you don't get the information.

On more than one occasion, I had discussions with some of our operators regarding the obtaining of information in the ticking bomb scenario. Our discussion ran along the lines of "It's against the law. It's against the UCMJ. We'd go to jail. But if we knew the bomb was ticking, and this guy had the information that could save dozens or hundreds or more people, or if the team (the operators and the unit) were going to be wiped out if we didn't get it, I'd whip out a hatchet and an entrenching tool and go to work on him."

We were comfortable with this fairly horrible ambiguity and the bad consequences that would accompany it only because the military ethos was to sacrifice ourselves for others, and the notion of incurring legal jeopardy to save others struck us as a righteous cause, but it had to be predicated on the necessity of the ticking bomb....

Nuclear Al-Qaeda?

Mowatt-Larssen has been gathering this evidence since a few weeks after Sept. 11, when then-CIA Director George Tenet asked him to create a new branch on weapons of mass destruction in the agency's counterterrorism center. He helped Tenet prepare the chapter on al-Qaeda's nuclear efforts that appears in Tenet's memoir, " At the Center of the Storm." Now that the uproar over Tenet's mistaken "slam dunk" assessment of the Iraqi threat has died down, it's worth rereading this account. It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaeda's nuclear ambitions.

Mowatt-Larssen argues that for nearly a decade before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5 million to buy uranium for a nuclear device, according to testimony presented in federal court in February 2001. When the al-Qaeda leader was asked in 1998 if he had nuclear or chemical weapons, he responded: "Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so."

Even as al-Qaeda was preparing to fly its airplane bombs into buildings, the group was also trying to acquire nuclear and biological capabilities. In August 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a campfire with Pakistani scientists from a group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device. Al-Qaeda also had an aggressive anthrax program that was discovered in December 2001 after bin Laden was driven from his haven in Afghanistan.

General Sanchez on Iraq

[Retired Lt.] General Sanchez covered a lot of ground in his recent talk to military affairs reporters, from media-military relations, the political climate in the US and what that means to the fight in Iraq and what the US has to do moving forward. But it's clear the MSM have decided to emphasize only one aspect of the General's speech – his harsh critique of the Administration's planning and execution of the war in Iraq. I know, it's shocking that that's what they have chosen to emphasize.

Gray vs. Gore

(Dennis Prager interviewed this professor this morning.)

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

Genocide resolution

From the Worldwide Standard blog.

So passage of the resolution is likely to constitute a serious blow to the war effort. Was this foreseen by House leaders? Was it the motivation?

Good questions.

Worldwide Standard on torture

And for what? The Times indicts the Bush administration for exposing terrorists captured abroad to "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." Boo hoo. And why does the Times consider this such a dangerous policy? The reporters end the story with this quote, from former Navy lawyer John Hutson, which they must believe to be compelling:

"The problem is, once you've got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?" he asked.

As Jules Crittenden notes in response:

[The] article neglects to mention we are fighting an enemy that considers powerdrills into kneecaps and videotaped beheading of captives business as usual. That in fact, we have yet to face an enemy in the modern era that observes anything approaching the standards we do. Germany, Japan, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq. Disorientation, isolation, beatings, starvation, summary executions, torture … of the bone-breaking, organ-smashing, electrocuting, bloody-drawing variety.

That is, real torture. And it trivializes the seriousness of it to apply the word to "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." It also trivializes the seriousness of real war crimes for someone to throw around the charge so promiscuously.

S-CHIP recipient

You may remember the Democrats' S-chip poster child, Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old boy from Baltimore, MD, whose parents relied on Maryland's S-chip program to pay for his health care following a severe car accident. Graeme recounted his sob story to Congress in an effort to show the mean Republicans that poor kids need health insurance, too. Baltimore Sun reporter Matthew Hay Brown profiled the "poor" Frost family, but failed to ask some important questions. As it turns out, little Graeme isn't so poor, and bloggers are on the story.

• The Frost kids attend a private school, with a $20,000 per child price tag.
• Halsey Frost, the father, owns the company he works for. He chooses not to give himself insurance.
• Halsey Frost owns the $160,000 building that houses his business.
• The Frost family home is valued at $485,000.

Apparently, a significant number of S-CHIP recipients under the recently-vetoed plan would also be required to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax. Maybe it covers a number of people who aren't all that "poor".

Another leak -- another outcry?

Here's another story about a secret being leaked by someone, somewhere in the Administration.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

I'll be curious to see if this leak provokes anywhere near the reaction the leak of Valerie Plame's identity provoked.

I'm betting it won't. Those who act as gatekeepers for media outrage consider the war on terrorism optional, but the war on George Bush is mandatory.

Clarence Thomas Corner

At The NRO Corner blog, links to interviews with Justice Clarence Thomas.

RCP "torture talk"

For the moment.

Saddam and Al Qaeda

Another post on the question of Saddam Hussein's involvement with Al Qaeda. 

 

Is there a more confused issue in the public discourse than the matter of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda prior to the March 2003 invasion? I doubt it. At an ABC News blog, Jake Tapper claims that Senator Barack Obama was right to call out (in a speech he gave yesterday) Senator Hillary Clinton for saying the following back in October 2002:

"[Saddam] has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001."

Tapper writes:

As Don van Natta and Jeff Gerth have written in their book about Clinton and the New York Times, Clinton's linkage of Saddam and al Qaeda was unique among Democrats and "was unsupported by the conclusions of the N.I.E. and other secret intelligence reports that were available to senators before the vote." [Note: The vote mentioned here is, of course, the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq]

The problem is that Sen. Clinton's statement was supported by the intelligence available, contrary to what Tapper and apparently what Don van Natta and Jeff Gerth argue.

...as George Tenet writes in his book At the Center of the Storm, there was "more than enough evidence" of a relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda, including intelligence demonstrating that more than a dozen al Qaeda agents "had found a comfortable and secure environment" in Baghdad. According to Tenet, these al Qaeda agents used their safe haven in Baghdad to move supplies to other al Qaeda agents in northeastern Iraq. Tenet cites a variety of other pieces of evidence that were contained in the CIA's reporting on this issue from the summer of 2002 through January of 2003 as well. Safe haven, discussions of collaboration, sharing VX nerve gas technology ... it's all there.

The 9/11 Commission found evidence of a relationship as well. The one sentence in the final 9/11 Commission report that says there was "no evidence" that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda developed into a "collaborative operational relationship"--that is, that there was no evidence the two collaborated on attacks against Americans--has been widely trumpeted. But the Commission also found (see p. 61) that there were "indications" that Saddam's regime had assisted al Qaeda in northern Iraq, which was outside of Saddam's centralized control, but where Iraqi Intelligence still had a heavy footprint. The Commission also provided citations showing that President Clinton's administration had uncovered evidence of Iraq’s cooperation with al Qaeda on chemical weapons development projects in Sudan (p. 128). Admittedly, that issue has now become greatly clouded as well. But suffice it to say that the Clinton administration had found significant evidence of a relationship before some former Clinton administration officials decided there wasn't any evidence.

Regardless, the Commission clearly did find that there was a relationship. Here is what Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission said about the matter: "There was no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Goldfarb on "torture"

George Bush is being accused of "war crimes" for allowing the "torture" of detainees.

As Jules Crittenden notes in response:

[The] article neglects to mention we are fighting an enemy that considers powerdrills into kneecaps and videotaped beheading of captives business as usual. That in fact, we have yet to face an enemy in the modern era that observes anything approaching the standards we do. Germany, Japan, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq. Disorientation, isolation, beatings, starvation, summary executions, torture – of the bone-breaking, organ-smashing, electrocuting, bloody-drawing variety.

That is, real torture. And it trivializes the seriousness of it to apply the word to "head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures." It also trivializes the seriousness of real war crimes for someone to throw around the charge so promiscuously. A quick search of Sullivan's blog for "war criminal" turns up 34 hits, all of them referring to members of the Bush administration. No doubt hit number 35 will be Andrew's attack on the war criminals of the Worldwide Standard.

Sen. Harkin -- phony soldier?

Check out the Instapundit's piece.

More phony soldiers

Betsy Newmark has a post on the whole "phony soldiers" kerfuffle.

All this outrage being ginned up by the Democrats and Media Matters over a badly edited report that Rush Limbaugh referred to soldiers who criticize the war as phony soldiers is just funny. When the full context of Limbaugh's comments are played, it's clear that he was talking about people such as those exposed in an ABC news report who claim to have served in the military, yet really didn't. He wasn't criticizing real soldiers who have criticisms of the war.

As Instapundit reminds us, Tom Harkin campaigned in the 1990s as a former combat air pilot from the Vietnam War. But it turned out, as James Taranto reported a few years ago, that his service was limited to flying ferry flights in Japan during the war.

Hat tips to Michelle Malkinand Instapundit. If you want a clear summary of what Limbaugh said and didn't say and how Media Matters was able to pull the strings of the congressional Democrats, go read Byron York's report on the matter. And you'll see the role of the George Soros-funded Media Matters to supply a fake outrageous story for the Democrats to run with in order to try and distract from the Moveon.org ad on General Petraeus.

Limbaugh and "phony soldiers"

On Monday evening, September 24, Rush Limbaugh was struck by a story that appeared on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson. “A closer look tonight at phony heroes,” Gibson said in his introduction to the report, which was about men who claim to be veterans but are not. In the story, reporter Brian Ross discussed two men who claimed to have served in wartime, possibly to receive free veterans’ hospital and other benefits.

And then this: “Authorities say the most disturbing case involves this man, 23 year-old Jesse Macbeth,” Ross continued. “In a YouTube video seen around the world, Macbeth became a rallying point for anti-war groups, as he talked of the Purple Heart he received in Iraq and described how he and other U.S. Army Rangers killed innocent civilians at a Baghdad mosque.” Ross played video of Macbeth saying, “Women and men, you know — while in their prayer, we started slaughtering them.”

As it turns out, none of that happened. Macbeth was in the Army for just six weeks, was discharged before completing basic training, and was never in Iraq. “Last week in federal court in Seattle,” Ross concluded, “Macbeth offered an apology for defaming the real American heroes as he admitted to lying about his service record and his supposed atrocities.” Ross’ story was headlined “Phony War Vets” on the ABC News website.

During his program the next day, Wednesday, September 26, Limbaugh spoke to a somewhat emotional caller who claimed to be a Republican fed up with the war in Iraq. After a long and sometimes testy exchange, Limbaugh cut to another caller, a man named Mike in Olympia, Washington who said he had served two tours in Iraq. Discussing war critics on the left, the caller said, “What’s really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue — “

“The phony soldiers,” Limbaugh said.

“The phony soldiers,” the caller repeated. “If you talk to any real soldier and they’re proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice and they’re willing to sacrifice for the country.”

“I was thinking of Macbeth when I said ‘phony soldiers,’“ Limbaugh told me. As the caller talked, Limbaugh told a staff member to print out the previous day’s commentary on the ABC “Phony Heroes” story. After “vamping” a bit while the commentary printed out, Limbaugh moved on.

“I want to thank you, Mike, for calling. I appreciate it very much. I gotta — here is a morning update that we did recently, talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. And they have their celebrities. One of them was Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth…” Limbaugh read the entire commentary from the day before and wrapped up that segment of the program. From there, he moved on to a discussion of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Where the controversy goes now is not clear. Democrats, and particularly their supporters in the left-wing blogosphere, are pressing for payback over the MoveOn.org affair. But Limbaugh’s explanation will likely make it harder to make the clear-cut case against him that Republicans, and some Democrats, made against MoveOn. The fact that Limbaugh, on the original September 26 program, brought up the ABC report, unbidden, to explain the “phony soldiers” remark suggests that that indeed was what he had in mind at the time he said it. That’s also supported by the fact that he had recorded a commentary on the story the day before, and that he printed out and re-read that commentary on September 26 as he explained “phony soldiers.” It was clearly on his mind.

And even though there are political arguments on all sides of this controversy, independent-minded critics who look at Media Matters might conclude that its political motivations are simply too strong to merit serious consideration. In addition to its ties to major Democratic donors and to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Media Matters is a deeply politicized organization down to its lowest levels. In the past few days, it has posted eleven stories on the Limbaugh matter. Those postings were written by, among others, Julie Millican, a veteran of the Kerry campaign, MoveOn.org, and the Democratic turnout organization America Coming Together; Sarah Pavlus, formerly of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; Andrew Ironside, who worked for the Howard Dean campaign; Adam Shah, a lawyer who worked for the Alliance for Justice, the organization best known for opposing President Bush’s judicial nominees; Jeremy Schulman, a former spokesman for Colorado Democratic congressional candidate Dave Thomas; and Matthew Gertz, former deputy campaign manager for Connecticut Democratic congressional candidate Diane Farrell, as well as intern for New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer.