Back of the Envelope

We're on time this week, maybe even a few hours early.

Sluggy Freelance -- It looks like they aren't hitmen afterall, but freelance bums. Now it's time for a "Queer Eye" parody.

Day by Day -- There's plenty of discussion about Abu Ghraib, plus the disparity between the coverage of Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg's murder.

It's Walky! -- It's Walky to the rescue, with a little help from Melonpool.

College Roomies from Hell! -- Dave loses hope, Mike changes clothes, and Roger meets some mythological creatures. There's a good chance the guys will be together for the big finale.

General Protection Fault -- Fooker's back! Now if only he and Sharon would stop missing one another.

Schlock Mercenary -- Schlock talks to his lawyer. If only he didn't think Schlock was guilty.

Update: I bumped this post to put it at the very end of the week.

All right, time for one of my pet peeves. Since I complain often enough about the mainstream (i.e., liberal) media, I ought to toss a complaint in the direction of Fox News. And this is it. I think their use of the term "homicide bomber" rather than "suicide bomber" is, well I was going to say silly, but that seems wrong for such a grim subject matter. I know that it comes from something President Bush said, saying that suicide bombers are really homicide bombers. When he said it, it was a rhetorical device denying suicide bombers the matyrdom they tried to claim. The fact that Fox uses the term for all suicide bombers annoys me. Suicide bombing is accurate and specific. They are detonating bombs which kill themselves in the process. Homicide bombing is, while not exactly inaccurate, not very specific. Any terrorist using bombs is trying to kill people, but the term homicide bomber doesn't really tell me whether the method the bomber was using would have killed himself as well. Or rather, it does, but only because I already know "homicide bomber" really means "suicide bomber." I know Fox wants to be different, but did they really have to adopt the term "homicide bomber"? I'd be happier if they called the "insurgents" terrorists, which would be more accurate.

Update: A bit of rewriting for clarity. Nothing substantive.

New Post: I'm not the only one who thinks this way. More above.

Howard Tayler, the artist behind Schlock Mercenary, has started a Live Journal blog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Tayler. Now if we could only convince Pete Abrams to start blogging. Come on, Pete, everybody's doing it. No, it's not just an intricate plot to get me another Instalanche.

In other news, Mr. Tayler likes Cox and Forkum's politics. I suspected he was a political conservative.

It looks like Rumsfeld is using my analogy:

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (search) did suggest that Iraqi troops might be on their own sooner than they would like. He said Iraqi forces are being trained, and the process is similar to teaching a child to ride a bicycle.

"They might wobble and fall, in which case you pick them up, dust them off, put them back up. But if you don't take your finger off, you're going to end up with a 40-year-old that can't ride a bike," he said.

(From Fox News)

Here's what I said:

I think our primary reason for waiting [before moving on Fallujah] has been to give us a chance to bring in the Iraqis. Remember, the handover is on June 30th. By then, the Iraqis will have to be able to handle their own problems. Oh, we'll still be there, and we'll still be hunting down terrorists and Ba'athists (assuming there's a difference), but the more the Iraqis do for themselves, the better. They'll look less like US puppets, they'll develop their own sense of mission and pride, and in many ways, they can be more effective in this job than we can. By bringing them in now, while the US is still in control, we're teaching them how to handle the problems they'll deal with later. It's like having the training wheels of American support as they learn to ride the bike of self-rule... Okay, I'll stop now before this metaphor becomes like one of Dave Barry's.

I guess we Donalds think alike. I better not mention this to the other Donald, as he doesn't particularly like Rumsfeld.

I've almost caught up to where I should have been last weekend, but I've run into a problem. I need to do some research for technical accuracy. That may put me a bit behind.

Captain Ed links to a New York Times article describing how the CIA was authorized to use harsh interrogation techniques:

The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.


At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

The last statement seems unlikely. If the rules were secret, how could they generate a "new understanding" for people who knew nothing about them?

Still, there's an important question which arises here: What are the limits to how you interrogate terrorists? These are not US citizens, protected by our Constitutional rights, nor are they POWs, since it would take an extensive re-writing of the Geneva Convention to classify them as such. So there are no legal limitations, just moral ones. What moral duty do you have to preserve the dignity and well-being of one human being when the cost of doing so may be the death of hundreds or thousands of others? Interrogation is used in criminal investigations as well, but the rules governing it are much stronger in that case. Clearly, you need to be able to do more than politely ask questions. So we need to allow at least intimidating body language and raised voices. How about warm or cold rooms? Sleep deprivation? Humiliation? Restraints? Long periods of solitary confinement? Physical threats? Physical abuse? Where's the line here? In the case of Abu Ghraib, everyone agrees that the soldiers crossed the line. In the circumstances described in the article above, it looks like threatening with a gun is over the line, but waterboarding is not (although it sure sounds like it should be).

At an initial glance, the ideal solution would be one not requiring these sort of techniques. It'd be much better if we could give the prisoners some drug which would make them answer questions, truthfully. I doubt there is such a drug (Sodium Pentathol's effect is to lower inhibitions, which doesn't guarantee truthfulness), but if there were, would its use be problematic? I don't see why it would be in questioning terrorists. What about criminal suspects? Surely it would be, since the Fifth Amendment denies the government the ability to coerce citizens to testify against themselves. What about a terrorist who is also a US citizen? Even if there are thousands of lives at risk, are we unable to use the drug? Could a suspect waive this right and take the drug in an attempt to prove his innocence?

Clearly, I'm asking more questions than I'm answering here. Any thoughts?

The brutal beheading of Nicholas Berg was supposedly in retaliation for the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The fact that the terrorists blamed the Abu Ghraib atrocities for Nick Berg's beheading tells us more about the media-savviness of the terrorists than their motivation. Nicholas Berg was kidnapped two weeks before the scandal broke. The circumstances were odd, as you'll notice if you read the first article. He clearly wasn't kidnapped because of the prisoner abuse. He may have been taken because he was more vulnerable, since he wasn't attached to the military or the CPA. There may have been some other reason. Once he was taken, his odds of survival were slim.

There's a very good post at the Belmont Club about the situation in Iraq. It looks like we're winning. It's been slow--I expected it to be over much more quickly, but the commanders have acted with subtlety rather than brute force, which is slower, and frustrating to those of us who can't see what's happening, but the result looks to be better than I expected.

I'll be hosting the next Christian Carnival. Here's the information from the e-mail Nick Queen sent to people:

This coming Wednesday is the next Christian Carnival, and will be hosted at Back of the Envelope.

http://crankshaw.blogspot.com/

If you have a blog, this will be a great way to get read, and possibly pick up readers in the process, or highlight your favorite post from the past week.

To enter is simple. First your post should be of a Christian nature, but this does not exclude posts that are political (or otherwise) in nature from a Christian point of view. Then do the following:

email Donald at

cranksha@ece.rochester.edu

Provide the following:

Title of your Blog
URL of your Blog
Title of your post
URL linking to that post
Description of the Post

Cut off date is Tuesday by 8 PM EST.

You can also send the e-mail to my alum address listed in the sidebar. It'll get to me either way.

Old Post: My last post on Fallujah was here.

Hugh Hewitt has posted a letter from a Marine in Fallujah which gives some insight into the strategy there:

We are approaching a very significant phase in Fallujah. Very soon, we will execute the first "joint patrol" into the city. The concept is that Marines and elements of the new Iraqi force will enter the town together. To suggest that the cessation of hostilities is fragile is an understatement. The environment is very fluid and one day things look better but the next we gather intelligence that suggests we are making a mistake. The leadership has gone way out on a limb here making a tremendous gamble that the course of action decided on will bring some degree of stability to this area.

Of course, in order to allow the Fallujans a chance to stabilize themselves, we must eat a little crow. We know that people are running around the city proclaiming that the Marines were defeated and the insurgents stopped us. To our dismay, this has even been picked up by our own media. Again, I can barely stand to read it. However, we fully realize that the only way the Iraqis will take control of their own destiny is to regain some of their long lost self image/national pride. They were crushed by Saddam brutally for 35 years, the last 12 of which, the US also had its way with them. They saw us cut right through the worlds 4th largest military in 1991 and then enforce no fly zones along with limited offensive actions against them with impunity for the next 12 years. Finally, we destroyed a regime and occupied their country in less than 3 weeks last year.

Regardless of whether or not the Iraqis hated Saddam, all of these elements above resulted in a tremendous amount of shame in this culture. Later, when we captured Saddam and put pictures and stories in the media of him surrendering like a lamb and sticking his tongue out for doctors, that was further humiliation. Until they start to feel some pride in themselves as a nation, we cannot expect them to want to vest themselves in its future. If that means we have to stand by and let them strut, that is what we will do. It is very hard to swallow as there is not a Marine here who does not know in his heart that we could have taken the entire city down if we were allowed. The whole environment requires discipline and confidence.

This is pretty much in line with what I was thinking: the idea is to put the Iraqis in charge of their own security. A lot of bloggers think the administration has gone soft on Fallujah. While I think putting the Iraqis in charge is the right idea, I'm worried that looking weak could make things worse for us, even if it's better for Iraq. However, as I've said before, I hope the commanders in the field know what they are doing.

The Christian Carnival is up at Spare Change. Included are posts at Parablemania and View from the Pew concerning the Evangelical and Fundamentalist debate. I do intend to get back into this, probably by the end of the week.

John Zimmer at Letters from Babylon has some interesting thoughts on nanotechnology and how it's viewed in the media. If that post doesn't deserve an Instalanche, I don't know what does. As an inorganic materials chemist, Zimmer's more qualified to talk about the subject than most bloggers, including myself. (I may do quantum computation, but most of it's mesoscopic quantum systems.)

I haven't commented on this yet, mostly because there doesn't seem to be much to say. The behavior of the accused soldiers was reprehensible; they should be punished to the full extent of the law, which I think will become increasingly difficult with all the publicity. Which brings me to my main point: can we move on? This story ceased to be front page news a week ago, and yet everytime I take a look at Rochester's paper (The Democrat and Chronicle), there it is as the top article. Today's article is "Bush Shown New Torture Pics," although I may have the phrasing wrong (the actual headline is not online). There may be an important story there somewhere, but there must be other news going on in the world. It clearly wasn't important enough to warrant front page treatment on the website, where the lead article is about the Lilac Festival. I don't want to hear any more about the ins and outs of the investigation than I wanted to know about the details of the OJ trial or the Rodney King beating trial. I may have been curious, but in each case I think justice would have been better served had the media not decided it was part of the jury.

In case you're wondering about the story progress, it's going slowly. I got next to nothing done this weekend for obvious reasons. Call it 41%. I'll try to make it up during the week, but I can't make any promises.

It turns out Dean Esmay is an INTJ according to the Myers-Briggs test. I was rated that way too the last time I took the test, which must have been eight or nine years ago, which means I'm Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Judging. Although I'm always a little bit skeptical of tests that ask you questions about yourself and then tell you things about yourself, especially those that are hard to answer objectively and easy to answer in such a way that you'll get the result you expect, I do think Myers-Briggs is more or less accurate. I'd be a little bit hesitant to make major decisions based on it, so I haven't read the books telling you how to choose a career or a spouse based on your Myers-Briggs personality type.

You probably already noticed due to my previous post.

One of the more macabre things I noticed is that a lot of Google searches for information on my friend's death are leading people here. These are probably MIT people, as he was well known on the MIT campus and MIT students certainly know how to use Google. I do mention him in some old posts, but I don't know any more about his death than anyone else yet. I probably won't post it on this blog when I do find out.

Don't expect too much from me right away, but I'm sure I'll be posting something every day, even if I don't feel like jumping back into the long, intensive Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism posts.

There's a nice article on anti-anti-communism in Reason:

More broadly, people like Schrecker can’t or won’t understand that their culture of denial is what created McCarthyism. It was the palpable indifference of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations toward Communist penetration of the American government that finally triggered the backlash led by HUAC [House Unamerican Activities Committee] and McCarthy. McCarthy’s accusation that Roosevelt ushered in "20 years of treason" is an absurd exaggeration. But if Roosevelt didn’t deserve to be executed as a spy, he most certainly ought to have been horsewhipped for his cavalier dismissal of Whittaker Chambers’ accusations. As early as 1939, Chambers warned Roosevelt about Alger Hiss and named at least 12 other U.S. officials who would later be proved Soviet spies. Roosevelt airily told his aides that Chambers could "go fuck himself." The spies kept passing secrets to Moscow for another nine years, until HUAC began making noises about the case. Chambers’ warning was only one of several by regretful spies during that period that first Roosevelt and then Truman ignored. Truman was so lackadaisical that the military code breakers working on the Venona Project kept it secret from him for fear word would leak back to the Soviets.

Fifty years later, the pattern is repeating itself. The character assassinations and lies of the die-hard defenders of American communism have given rise to a movement to rehabilitate McCarthy and other bully-boy anti-communists of the 1940s and ’50s. Some efforts of this movement, such as George Washington University historian Arthur Herman’s Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator, are relatively judicious attempts to correct some of the exaggerations about McCarthy -- for instance, the widely repeated but totally erroneous claim that he never correctly identified a single Communist. Others, such as conservative attack-blonde Ann Coulter’s Treason, attempt a radical makeover. McCarthy (who accused everybody from Harry Truman to George Marshall of secret Soviet sympathies) was actually too charitable, Coulter argues; he was too tenderhearted to say, as she does, that all liberals -- everybody from Lyndon Johnson to Tom Daschle -- are traitors at heart. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes. "This is their essence."

That’s idiotic, to be sure, but no more so than American University historian Anna Kasten Nelson’s argument that Venona isn’t important because there are all kinds of good reasons a perfectly innocent person might be secretly passing microfilm to a KGB agent. (No, she doesn’t list any of them.) "It is time to move on," she wrote recently, instead of "rehashing old debates" (because, you know, historians get bored with old stuff). Then there’s the psychobabble contention of Bard College’s Joel Kovel that J. Edgar Hoover hunted spies not because foreign espionage is against the law but because he had some previously undiscovered Freudian condition in which anti-communism "might be interchangeably a womb or anus." Writing stuff like that amounts to handing the Coulters of the world a loaded gun and daring them to pull the trigger. As somebody once said: Have you no sense of decency, Sir?

Communism killed 93 million people. I have little patience for its apologists.