Waterboarding -- A follow-up

Few subjects I have written about in this column in 2007 provoked such an outpouring of response as the one last week about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.

In a nutshell, I argued that torture in all its forms should be banned, but that in some instances, as with the waterboarding of Zubaydah, it is defensible. The trial and punishment of those who break the law is always subject to the discretion of prosecutors, juries and judges. In rare cases, such as Zubaydah's, in which a coercive method is employed to prevent a greater wrong, the interrogators involved should not be prosecuted.

Many readers found this outrageous. I received the usual cascade of comment from the Sandbox School of Argument, the name-callers and those whose idea of persuasion is to state their own opinion loudly - lots of capital letters, bold type and underlinings. Several responders belong to the Ostrich School; they won't be reading this because they have forsworn reading anything I ever again write, presumably on the assumption that if you ignore opinions you don't like, they go away.

There is no question that something important is lost when we as a nation accede to tactics considered reprehensible. One correspondent asked: "What is the harm done to the citizens of the country whose agents have a policy that allows torture?" This correspondent argued that we ought to accept impending tragedy in the name of honoring a high-minded policy.

In my column, I raised the example of the German police chief who threatened a captured kidnapper with torture because he refused to reveal where he had buried alive his 12-year-old victim. The kidnapper promptly gave the location. The German police chief lost his job for making the threat.

It may well have been more noble on some level for him not to have made the threat, but I prefer a less rigid concept of morality. I would not have fired the police chief, or prosecuted him. I agree completely with his actions, even though torture is repulsive. The boy's life matters more than my rectitude or peace of mind.

In Defense of Waterboarding

When captured in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was one of the world's most notorious terrorists. The 31-year-old Saudi had compiled in his young life 37 different aliases and was under a sentence of death in Jordan for a failed plot to blow up two hotels jammed with American and Israeli tourists. The evidence was not hearsay: Zubaydah was overheard on the phone planning the attacks, which were then thwarted. He was a key planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was thought to be field commander of the attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole, and was involved in planning a score of other terror attacks, successful and unsuccessful. He was considered to be a primary recruiter and manager of al-Qaeda training camps.

He was, in short, a highly successful, fully engaged, career mass murderer. Think back to those pictures of workers crouched in windows high up in the burning World Trade Center towers, choosing whether to jump to their death or be burned alive. This was in part Abu Zubaydah's handiwork.

At the time of his capture in 2002, just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was strong reason to believe Zubaydah knew virtually the entire organizational structure and agenda of al-Qaeda around the world. He was supervising ongoing plots to kill hundreds if not thousands of people. He was, for obvious reasons, disinclined to share this knowledge. Subjected briefly to waterboarding - less than a minute, according to published reports - he became cooperative and provided information that, according to the government, resulted in preventing planned attacks and capturing other key al-Qaeda leaders.

Waterboarding is a process by which a detainee is strapped down and forced to ingest and inhale water until he experiences the terror of drowning. It is not torture in the traditional sense of inflicting pain; it inflicts fear, intense, visceral fear, without doing physical harm. It is a method calculated to straddle the definitions of coercion and torture, and as such merely proves that both methods inhabit the same slippery continuum. There is a difference between gouging out a man's eyes and keeping him awake, and waterboarding falls somewhere in between.

In the unlikely event that Zubaydah knew nothing of value and that every bit of information he pulged was false, it was still reasonable to assume in 2002 that this was not the case. If his interrogators were able to stop one terror attack by waterboarding him, even if they violated international agreements and our national conscience, it was justified. All nations have laws against killing, but all recognize self-defense as a legitimate excuse. I think the waterboarding in this case is directly analogous, except that Zubaydah himself, although he richly deserves it, was neither killed nor permanently harmed.

I can understand why someone at the CIA ordered the videotapes destroyed. It was both to protect those who did it (more from their own government, I suspect, than from terrorist reprisals) and to prevent the images from ever becoming public. We have seen the disastrous, self-defeating consequences of such pictures, which untethered from context assume a damaging life of their own. Whoever made the call now runs the risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice, a risk I am sure was evaluated before making the choice.

What does work? Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information. If that were so, then this would be a simple issue, and the whole logic of incentive/disincentive is false, which defies common sense. In one of the cases I have cited previously, a German police captain was able to crack the defiance of a kidnapper who had buried a child alive simply by threatening torture (the police chief was fired, a price any moral inpidual would gladly pay). The chief acted on the only moral justification for starting down this road, which is to prevent something worse from happening. If published reports can be believed, this is precisely what happened with Zubaydah.

People can be coerced into revealing important, truthful information. The German kidnapper did, Zubaydah did, and prisoners have throughout recorded time. What works varies for every inpidual, but in most cases, what works is fear, fear of imprisonment, fear of discomfort, fear of pain, fear of bad things happening to you, fear of bad things happening to those close to you. Some years ago in Israel, in the course of investigating this subject exhaustively, I interviewed Michael Koubi, a master interrogator who has questioned literally thousands of prisoners in a long career with Shin Bet. He said that the prisoner who resisted noncoercive methods was rare, but in those hard cases, fear usually produced results. Fear works better than pain.

It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one. Prosecutors and judges are permitted to weigh the circumstances and consider intent.

Which is why I say that waterboarding Zubaydah may have been illegal, but it wasn't wrong.

Here is a link to a Washington Times piece describing how waterboarding saved American lives.

Copyrighting the Pyramids

The Egyptian government wants to obtain copyright protection for Egyptian antiquities, including the Pyramids.

The premise is that the Egyptians invented these antiquities, and in the future, anyone making copies of them will have to pay royalties.

Wer hat's erfunden? Die Ägypter! Die Regierung in Kairo will sich per Gesetz das Urheberrecht auf ihre antiken Altertümer sichern. Wer die Pyramiden oder andere berühmte Monumente des Landes nachbauen will, soll künftig dafür zahlen.

A question about global warming

Arnold Kling has a question.

I am not a skeptic about the rise in average temperatures. Nor am I skeptical that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing. However, I remain skeptical about the connection between the two.

My question is this:

what are the most persuasive reasons for believing that the rise in temperature is due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide?

Why focus on black IQ?

John Ray looks at the question of black vs. white IQ, having been prodded by a post on the Rockwell site.

why do I, as a libertarian conservative, continue to expound the science of the matter? There are two reasons: Because we do not live in a libertarian world and because it is my own scientific discipline that is involved and I feel a committment to publicize the truth of the matter.

The second reason I will not expand on as it is simply a personal committment that I feel. The first reason is the important one: Vast errors in public policy are made because of the general refusal to accept the truth of the matter. Race is a most vexed topic in all countries where there is a substantial African minority and the problem is made much worse by the utter failure of many attempts to deal with it. The clearest example is in education.

Because the lesser ability of blacks is not accepted in education circles, every failure of blacks to do well at educational tasks is always attributed to "the system" or "racism". A perfectly normal and natural occurrence is treated as an emergency which must be remedied by hook or by crook. And because the real nature of the problem is not admitted, all the "solutions" that are tried are based on wrong theories so not only fail but normally make the problem worse -- generating much anger and feelings of victimization among blacks at the same time.

For the record, what I would advocate as regards black educational failure is simply for the authorities to be race blind. Let children be judged not by the colour of their skin but by their inpidual characteristics. Kids who are not doing well should get extra tuition whether they are black, white or brindle and after that let the chips fall where they may. That would be the least destructive policy.

Intention

Bill Keezer, over at Bill's Comments, takes up the subject of intentionality. What does it mean for something to do something "intentionally".

In a discussion between Maverick Philosopher> Bill and Waka Waka Waka Malcolm, the example of ant trails came up. Ants leave chemical markers which other ants can follow to find food (and find their way back to the nest).

Another item discussed was piles of rock left as trail markers.

About intentionality, Bill says (among other things):

When we apply the term intention to the object it carries with it the implied, “who’s intent or for what purpose?” Inextricably tied to our use of the word intention is the idea of purpose or end. In the sense of there being an “end” to the pheromone trail, it is leading other ants back to the food source. But if it arose by chance, that some behaviors were more successful than other behaviors in survival of an ant colony, thus propagating them, can they be called purposeful? Especially in light of the changes in behavior being due to changes in the physical structure of the ant brain, not in some choice made by the ants.

A quick trip to Onelook.com shows that the verb "intend" implies purpose and meaning. Indeed, a child who argues an act was not intentional invariably says, "I didn't mean to". Moreover, the word "intend" traces back to the Latin for "turn one's attention toward". This implies that intention without conscious awareness is not possible.

It looks like Bill would agree:

To ascribe intentionality and in turn consciousness to any lesser animal or to plants or bacteria, much less to the inanimate forces of nature, is to render the term meaningless.

Does conscious awareness guarantee intention? Maybe not. There are such things as "unintended consequences". Either conscious awareness of doing something does not guarantee intention, or the phrase "unintended consequences" has no meaning.

---

So what is "meaning"? I'd say it's the act of forming a correlation between a real-world object or situation and an unrelated abstract entity. For example, in language, there is nothing particularly "two-like" about the word "two". Based on the physical properties of the sound, the word could just as easily be "too", "to", or "aardvark". In some ways, the fact that one refers to an abstraction in number theory and the other to a particular species of mammal is a historical accident. All the words listed above – indeed, all the words in this post – have meaning because they have been assigned a correspondence with real or abstract entities.

In the case of the ant trail, the act of laying the trail is essentially an inevitable consequence of how the ant is put together. It has no choice about laying down particular chemicals in particular situations. Other ants have no choice about following the trail – that's how they're put together. We have a simple cause-and-effect system. Effect A causes effect B, which causes effect C, and so on.

A biologist examining ants can dissect the ants involved and analyze the chemicals in the trail, and work out the effects of every part of the system. He can also attempt to put these effects in a hierarchy, from the most immediate (following a trail means other ants from the colony will find anything the trail-blazing ant found) to the most long-range (mechanisms that increase the efficiency with which an ant colony exploits food increases their ability to pass on their genes to future generations). The biologist assigns a model of cause and effect to the events he studies in the physical world.

But are these causes and effects intentional?

Not on the part of the ants. Ants do what they do.

Despite Richard Dawkins' title, The Selfish Gene, genes certainly don't intend to do what they do. They're a lot like lines of code in a computer. The line of code doesn't "intend" to make the computer do anything; it enters the computer and the computer automatically does what it says, whether it makes sense or not.

What the genes "mean" in terms of how well they survive, is determined by how well the effects they specify function in a particular environment. If some accidental change makes one organism's genes function better than the competition, it will have an advantage, even though it didn't "mean to".

In this case, the cause-effect chain is actually a circle. Genes cause the organism to interact in particular ways with the environment, and the environment causes certain genes to succeed or fail, depending on the results of this interaction.

---

Meaning that we impose on a situation may also have nothing to do with the actual intentionality of the situation.

For example: suppose two people are hiking across a meadow, and one wants to know where the other's house is. ("Are we there yet?")

"You see that cloud that looks a bit like a weasel?"

"A weasel? I see a salamander."

"'Methinks it is like a weasel.' Anyway, my house is right below the front paw of the weasel."

"OK, I see it. Maybe another hour?"

The cloud does not "intend" to help indicate the location of anyone's house, any more than it "intends" to look like a weasel. It just happens to do so, for at least one person at that moment. The shape of the cloud, and its utility as a reference marker, are imposed on it by a being capable of assigning meaning to a meaningless situation.

Bill's emphasis on choice in his post:

...I am going to take a short-cut here and offer as demonstrated that most of the mammals can be said to exhibit intentional behavior. Even if we ascribe most of their behavior to innate neural structure, evidence can still be argued for forms of choice, desire, communication, etc....

Since a rat can be trained to change its behavior, and negotiate a maze, yet based on the preceding paragraph cannot be said to exhibit choice in the correct sense, trainability is exhibited by intentional creatures, but trainability does not guarantee intentional behavior or the capability for it.

In the cloud example, one person chooses a cloud, and indeed, a part of a cloud, to use as a reference mark to direct another toward his home. He could have chosen a different marker – a tree, a large rock, a mountain, or even a compass reading. He simply chose what was (presumably) most convenient. There was no inevitability in his choice, so he had a free choice.

Was his choice intentional? Probably. It serves the function of indicating where his house is, and is the one of a large number of possible choices of marker that would not have done so. Occam's razor leads us to say it's probably not a coincidence. It was more likely made with an awareness of cause and effect. In this case, the cause of being directed toward a particular location would have the effect of letting someone know where his friend's house is.

---

So to me, "intention" has to be a matter of creating an abstract representation of the world, even if it's "only" a model of cause and effect, and then making a free choice to produce an effect using that model. Unless both of these are present in an action, the act is not intentional.

Smoking in the restaurants

A German restaurateur has come up with a novel solution to a new ban on smoking in restaurants: He has made three holes in the wall of his restaurant so that customers can smoke "outside."

Michael Windisch, proprietor of the "Maltermeister Turm" restaurant in Goslar in the state of Lower Saxony, was frustrated by the state's ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, which was introduced on Aug. 1. His solution was to get out the saw.
With the "smoking point," customers can put their heads through the large hole in the middle and one hand through each of the two smaller side-holes. The patrons can then legally enjoy a cigarette without having to leave the comfort of the inn.

Neat stuff online

Blackstone's commentary on the laws of England was cited on Clayton Cramer's blog. Apparently the book is online. (Well, it *is* out of copyright.)

Climate models

New study increases concerns about climate model reliability

ROCHESTER, NY (Dec. 11, 2007) – A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.

This research, published on-line Wednesday in the Royal Meteorological Society's International Journal of Climatology*, raises new concerns about the reliability of models used to forecast global warming.

"The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth's climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic," said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. "Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? "It seems that the answer is no."

Scientists from Rochester, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the University of Virginia compared the climate change "forecasts" from the 22 most widely-cited global circulation models with tropical temperature data collected by surface, satellite and balloon sensors. The models predicted that the lower atmosphere should warm significantly more than it actually did.

"Models are very consistent in forecasting a significant difference between climate trends at the surface and in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere between the surface and the stratosphere," said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH's Earth System Science Center. "The models forecast that the troposphere should be warming more than the surface and that this trend should be especially pronounced in the tropics.

"When we look at actual climate data, however, we do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface. For those layers of the atmosphere, the warming trend we see in the tropics is typically less than half of what the models forecast."

The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

The atmospheric temperature data were from two versions of data collected by sensors aboard NOAA satellites since late 1979, plus several sets of temperature data gathered twice a day at dozens of points in the tropics by thermometers carried into the atmosphere by helium balloons. The surface data were from three datasets.

After years of rigorous analysis and testing, the high degree of agreement between the various atmospheric data sets gives an equally high level of confidence in the basic accuracy of the climate data.

"The last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations, and more realistic modeling efforts," said Dr. Fred Singer from the University of Virginia. "Nonetheless, the models are seen to disagree with the observations. We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models should be viewed with much caution."

The findings of this study contrast strongly with those of a recent study** that used 19 of the same climate models and similar climate datasets. That study concluded that any difference between model forecasts and atmospheric climate data is probably due to errors in the data.

"The question was, what would the models 'forecast' for upper air climate change over the past 25 years and how would that forecast compare to reality?" said Christy. "To answer that we needed climate model results that matched the actual surface temperature changes during that same time. If the models got the surface trend right but the tropospheric trend wrong, then we could pinpoint a potential problem in the models.

"As it turned out, the average of all of the climate models forecasts came out almost like the actual surface trend in the tropics. That meant we could do a very robust test of their reproduction of the lower atmosphere.

"Instead of averaging the model forecasts to get a result whose surface trends match reality, the earlier study looked at the widely scattered range of results from all of the model runs combined. Many of the models had surface trends that were quite different from the actual trend," Christy said. "Nonetheless, that study concluded that since both the surface and upper atmosphere trends were somewhere in that broad range of model results, any disagreement between the climate data and the models was probably due to faulty data.

"We think our experiment is more robust and provides more meaningful results."

Time waits for every man

A Spanish scientist suggests that the universe's end will come not with a bang but standstill - that time is literally running out and will, one day, stop altogether.

Professor Jose Senovilla, of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, has put forward the theory as a rival to the idea of "dark energy" - the strange antigravitational force that is posited to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.

It was noticed ten years ago that distant stars - the ones on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space. Dark energy was suggested as a possible means of powering that acceleration.

....

He takes the basis for his idea from the superstring theory, which suggests that dimensions of time and space can move around and change places. His suggestion is that our solitary time dimension is slowly becoming a new space dimension.

In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether - and everything will stop.

"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Prof Senovilla told New Scientist magazine.

"Our planet will be long gone by then."

While the theory is outlandish, it is not without support. Prof Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, believes the idea has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect," he said.

Interrogation vs Torture

Patterico comments here on a Keith Olberman interview on the subject of torture. He was debating writing up a comment, but then Stuart Taylor beat him to it.

Here's one quote of interest, and it pokes another hole in the assertion that harsh methods only yield bad information.

In a 2004 book titled The Interrogators, for example, co-author Chris Mackey, who conducted Army interrogations in Afghanistan, condemned torture but detailed how "the harsher the methods we used -- though they never contravened the [Geneva] Conventions, let alone crossed over into torture -- the better the information we got and the sooner we got it."

The Interrogators

When everyone's a felon...

...then what will felonies mean?

An elementary student in Marion County was arrested Thursday after school officials found her cutting food during lunch with a knife that she brought from home, police said. The 10-year-old girl, a student at Sunrise Elementary School in Ocala, was charged possession of a weapon on school property, which is a felony. According to authorities, school employees spotted the girl cutting her food while she was eating lunch and took the steak knife from her.

The girl told sheriff's deputies that she had brought the knife to school on more than one occasion in the past. Students told officials that the girl did not threaten anyone with the knife. The girl was arrested and transported to the Juvenile Assessment Center.

IQ and media filters

John Derbyshire notes the New Yorker had to publish a retraction on a piece by Malcolm Gladwell.

He made a nasty error in a New Yorker piece. Here's his correction. Another will be in the magazine. I often enjoy reading Gladwell, though I've got some criticisms of his work, but the error (he basically said Charles Murray wants to round up dumb people. He doesn't) is totally in line with the way liberals and the left treated Murray. I discuss this quite a bit in my book.

It should tell you something that the most famously fact-checked magazine in the English language saw Gladwell's charge against Murray and never thought to double check it. It just made so much sense.

Moore's Law and terrorism

The thoughtful private Intelligence company Stratfor just released a piece suggesting what it thinks are the limits to jihadi terrorists being able to conduct their terrorist planning and training online: The Role and Limitations of the "Dark Web" In jihadist Training. Stratfor acknowledges that the Internet has been an enabler for terrorism but it doubts that the required tradecraft of terrorist operations can be taught online. Where Stratfor makes an error in this article is in not taking account of the enhanced capabilities of 3-D virtual worlds to assist the next generation of jihadi terrorists. The educational abilities of virtual worlds have been well-documented and as Stratfor points out bomb-making is best learnt from an expert. With the abilities available within virtual worlds there is no reason why this knowledge cannot be passed from teacher to pupil within a persistent 3-D environment. The real-time communication systems incorporating VoIP and the ability to produce sophisticated, "working" 3-D models makes training in the engineering of terrorist technique a current reality.

Moore's law makes any kind of virtual training environment we consider pie-in-the-sky now almost inevitable in a few years -- decades at most.

One of the problems we'll be addressing in the future is that advancing technology puts more and more power in the hands of the individual, and for less and less money. This trend isn't going to stop any time soon.

Who's against waterboarding again?

Jonah Goldberg looks at who rose to speak against waterboarding when it counted.

[[Earlier this week, we learned that congressional leadership, Republicans and Democrats alike, had been informed in 2002 that the CIA had harshly interrogated high-value al-Qaida operatives, using, among other methods, waterboarding. One of the Democrats in the room: Nancy Pelosi, the current speaker of the House.

....

There "was no objecting, no hand-wringing," an official who was there told the Washington Post. "The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.'" Not only did Pelosi not offer a peep of protest, the Washington Post reports that at least two lawmakers (out of only a few present) pressed the administration about whether the methods were "tough enough" to get the job done.

Either Pelosi asked the question herself, or she sat quietly while one of her colleagues inquired whether the screws were being turned tightly enough.

From this, Jonah draws some conclusions about the character of these congress-critters:

Time magazine's liberal columnist Joe Klein writes: "There was fear that we would be attacked again by terrorists, and on a regular basis. Few were thinking clearly about the nature of the threat and how to deal with it." So, what's the big deal?

Well, it's a big deal for a lot of reasons. But the one that left-wingers should take to heart is that you can't rely on your leaders and champions when the buildings collapse, the bombs explode or the planes fall from the sky.

If it's OK for liberal Democrats to condone what they consider to be torture when they're scared and angry, then the lesson is that the only way you can count on Democrats not to be scared and angry is to prevent future 9/11s.

....

And if you're the sort of person who thinks George W. Bush and his evil henchmen have stolen our civil liberties and our souls, you need to at least consider the likelihood that in the wake of another 9/11 a President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama wouldn't do things very differently. Or, if that's too gloomy for you, comfort yourself in the fact they'd be powerless to do things very differently. In the wake of another 9/11, the voters and Congress would roll right over them.

In other words, if the likes of these folks are in charge after another major attack, we may find ourselves longing for the type of President who waited half an hour to finish reading to a class of second-graders.

When Waterboarding Works

Byron York offers his thoughts.

About a year ago, I had dinner with a man who played a key role in the U.S. war on terror.

The talk turned to allegations of torture. He said that our policy should be that we do not torture. And we should adhere to that policy.

Unless, that is, a truly special situation comes up and we decide that we have to violate that policy in an extremely narrow set of circumstances./p>

Then, we explain what we did -- by that, I think he meant the executive branch would be open with members of Congress -- and move on.

What he couldn't understand was the determination, on the part of some lawmakers, to pass a law that would deal with any and all situations in the future. It's just not possible.

CIA interrogators tried a variety of techniques of escalating severity on Zubaydah. Each one had to be specifically authorized in advance at the highest levels of the CIA.

Still, Zubaydah resisted. Finally the interrogation worked its way up to waterboarding.

"Was it used on Zubaydah?" Ross asked Kiriakou.

"It was."

"And was it successful?"

"It was."

....

"So in your view the waterboarding broke him?" Ross asked.

"I think it did, yes."

"And did it make a difference?"

"It did. The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

"No doubt about that? That's not some hype?"

"No doubt."

I've been having an argument with someone who describes himself as a professional interrogator with the Army. My major disagreement with him his his "utilitarian argument" -- "Torture Doesn't Work", he says. Not "hardly ever", not "is less effective than other methods", not even "extracts too high a price". "Doesn't work".

Well, if we take this premise as given, we can do the following logical analysis:
IF a procedure is torture, THEN it won't work.
Waterbording works.
THEREFORE (denial of the consequent) Waterboarding is not torture.

I'm glad that's settled.

Rape and HDS

That's Halliburton Derangement Syndrome.

It's gotten to the point where I take any allegations made against certain targets with a truckload of salt. Too many people have expended too much of their credibility in throwing hysterical fits that turn out later to have little, if any, support.

Michelle Malkin has a link to comments at overlawyered.com regarding the rape allegations.

In February 2006, Jamie Leigh Jones filed an arbitration complaint, complaining that, for her administrative assistant job with KBR in Iraq, she was placed in an all-male dorm for living arrangements, and a co-worker sexually assaulted her. (KBR says the co-worker claimed the sex was consensual, though Jones claims physical injuries, such as burst breast implants and torn pectoral muscles, that are plainly not consistent with consensual sex. The EEOC's Letter of Determination credited the allegation of sexual assault.)

Fifteen months later, after extensive discovery in the arbitration, Jones, who lives in Houston, and whose lawyer is based in Houston, and who worked for KBR in Houston, sued KBR and a bunch of other entities (including Halliburton, for whom she never worked, and the United States), in federal court in Beaumont, Texas. The claims were suddenly of much more outrageous conduct: the original allegation of a single he-said/she-said sexual assault was now an allegation of gang rape by several unknown John Doe rapists who worked as firemen (though she did make a claim of multiple rape to the EEOC, though it is unclear when that claim was made); she claims that after she reported the rape, "Halliburton locked her in a container" (the EEOC found that KBR provided immediate medical treatment and safety and shipped her home immediately) and she threw in an allegation that a "sexual favor" she provided a supervisor in Houston was the result of improper "influence." (But she no longer makes the implausible claim that she was living in an all-male dorm in Iraq.)

People with legitimate claims usually don't have lawyers trying so desperately to forum-shop that they file amateurish briefs like this, and Jones loses a ton of credibility with me over that. At a minimum, Jones's story has changed over time, and has gotten considerably more lurid. The original allegations are bad enough, and, if true, actionable. If the implant rupture and other physical injuries are true, I'm inclined to believe that she was raped, perhaps even gang raped. (Machismo environments like fraternity houses and athletes' dorms are responsible for a disproportionate number of gang rapes, which is why the Duke Lacrosse allegations had so much weight in the early going.) I'm inclined to believe that there was a hostile work environment, and that it was possible that KBR was not doing enough to correct that problem. I'm not currently inclined to believe that the criminal action was the employer's fault, unless the employee in question had shown signs of criminal behavior while working for KBR. And it is entirely consistent with what I know about government if Jones's allegation that the government botched the criminal investigation is true.

Blackfive on the CIA Tapes

There are two good reasons to destroy the tapes. Hayden put the first one front and center, our interrogators are shown on them. Keeping their identities secret is very important, and something Valerie Plame could have paid more heed to. Once the interrogations were completed and transcribed, there is no use to them other than the ghoulish watching of human suffering.

Which brings us to reason number two. They were almost certainly horrifying and awful and their viewing by many Americans would cause a reaction. It would likely move public opinion toward more restrictions on what methods may be employed. We have already put too many and the unpleasantness of the coercive techniques would be offensive to some who would otherwise approve of using all techniques short of torture.

I believe there are quite a few things being discussed in open forums, that belong back on the dark side. It is right and proper that our government does unpleasant, unsavory and sometimes awful things in defense of our freedom. This should happen out of sight of all, but we are a little too paranoid as a country for that. So those with agendas constantly leak classified information and weaken our abilities.

Given that the mere existence of these tapes created bad possibilities they did the prudent thing and destroyed them. They broke no laws and were not even required to have made the tapes, they were done as an internal safeguard. They were also reviewed to see if any breaches of interrogation policy occurred by the Inspector General, none were shown.

At that point they served no purpose other than as torture pron, and that is an ugly thought. Not that that would have stopped any number on the left from putting it out there.

Why would the CIA destroy interview tapes?

The former intelligence official who described the decision to destroy the tapes said Mr. Rodriguez's primary concern was the safety of C.I.A. agents whose faces could be identified in the tapes. The tapes were destroyed amid growing Congressional and legal scrutiny into the C.I.A's detention and interrogation program.

...

Rodriguez's concerns have been validated by the reaction of the Democrats to the knowledge the tapes were destroyed. It is clear that many Democrats would like to turn them into abu Ghraid photo ops to be passed to media hostile to the administration. Making the agents pawns in their political games would be just part of their bad faith arguments against the administration now that the fear of another horrific attack has passed. Now they will want to attack the lawyers too. I look for Democrats to make further attacks on an already weak intelligence agency and use this as an excuse to gut clandestine operations again.

A Lancet Doubter

How did I come to participate in this dispute? I have no background in survey research and no expertise in Iraq. But I do make a habit of reading blogs written by smart people with different views from my own. Indeed, there is no better way to test your beliefs than to confront the best proponents of alternate theories. To that end, I read Tim Lambert's blog Deltoid. Lambert has defended the Lancet surveys extensively and, for the most part, his defense is correct. Indeed, the Lancet authors have benefited from the mistakes of many of their critics.

Yet just because many of the Lancet critics have been wrong does not mean that the articles themselves are correct. My first reaction to L1 was that its confidence interval for excess deaths, 8,000 to 194,000, was suspiciously close to zero. Every good statistician is skeptical of a result which just barely rejects what researchers call the "null hypothesis," in this case that mortality in Iraq was unchanged after the invasion. A small change in the model assumptions could easily make the effect go away. Since it was obvious that the Lancet authors had political motivations/ambitions (Roberts ran for Congress in 2006), I thought that they were probably guilty of cherry-picking their model, at least to some extent. They would not be the first researchers to do so.

Yet these suspicions were, for me, overwhelmed by my disgust with the behavior of the authors and their supporters. Although they provided some summary data for L1, they refused to pulge the household-level data and computer code that would help outside researchers (like me) to replicate their results. This is not the way that scientist ought to act.

In August, I made a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association which argued that the results of the first Lancet survey were internally inconsistent. The technical details are opaque at best but the implication is that the authors purposely presented their data (by including outlier data from Falluja in some parts of the analysis and excluding it elsewhere) to mislead. Specifically, the 8,000 to 194,000 confidence interval is claimed to be "conservative" because it excludes the carnage in Falluja. I show that including Falluja would have widened the confidence interval enough to include zero, thereby not allowing the authors to reject the null hypothesis of no increase in mortality.

In English, my claim is that the authors specifically refused to provide the confidence interval for excess deaths using all their data because they knew that doing so would provide too much ammunition to their critics. Even today, they stubbornly decline to tell me or anyone else what the confidence intervals would be with Falluja included.

That paper was discussed at Deltoid and then picked up from there by Michelle Malkin. Suddenly, I was part of the Right Wing Noise Machine, even invited as a guest on my local talk radio station. Alas, I misinterpreted the orders from my Rovian overlords and spent most of the time defending the Lancet authors from the innumerate complaints that the host was making. He choose not to keep me on the air long enough to get to the point of my actual critique.

Fortunately, other scientists are working on the topic. Colin Kahl writes that the Lancet estimates are "dubious." Fritz Scheuren, past president of the American Statistical Association, claims that the response rates from L2 are "not credible." Stephen Fienberg, one of the most respected statisticians in the country, insisted that Les Roberts' refusal to share data with Michael Spagat and his co-authors was:

"just the wrong response. I, as an editor, would not publish a study for which the data was not shared."

If scientists like Kahl, Scheuren, Fienberg, Spagat and others think that your results are flawed and your behavior suspect, then you likely have a problem.