Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Once a Racist, Always a Racist? (Leiter)

So it seems.

Friday Poem: "As I Began"

As I Began

As I began
so I am
my ideology intact
my fears remain a fact
the difference is
my liberated tone
from knowing proof's
no longer asked
or needed
I've stepped aside
neat in my disquietude

The dishes in my rack
will last me out
a book some bread
paper and a pen
will keep me gay
from now to then

The world's buzz
has ceased confounding
I keep my ignorance exact
beyond philosophy's thicket
and politic's tract
I'm tunneled in
too deep for sin
my thoughts too dark
for grace abounding

5/29/94-l/19/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Reaction Formation Watch (Leiter)

Story here:

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned from Congress on Friday, effective immediately, in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former teenage male page....

Campaign aides had previously acknowledged that the Republican congressman e-mailed the former Capitol page five times, but had said there was nothing inappropriate about the exchange. The page was 16 at the time of the e-mail correspondence.

The page worked for Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who said Friday that when he learned of the e-mail exchanges 10 to 11 months ago, he called the teen's parents. Alexander told the Ruston Daily Leader, ''We also notified the House leadership that there might be a potential problem....''

ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former teenage male pages. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page: ''Do I make you a little horny?''

In another message, Foley wrote, ''You in your boxers, too? ... Well, strip down and get naked.''

Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect.

''We track library books better than we do sexual predators,'' Foley has said....

Regime Change (Edmundson)

According to Bruce Ackerman (Yale, Law) the "antiterror" legislation that the President will soon sign with great fanfare "is a real shocker":

The compromise legislation...authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops "during an armed conflict," it also allows him to seize anybody who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

And how do the Geneva Conventions fare under this legislation?  The Wall Street Journal exults:

it's a fair bet that waterboarding--or simulated drowning, the most controversial of the CIA's reported interrogation techniques--will not be allowed under the new White House rules [Says who? --ed.]. But sleep deprivation and temperature variations, to name two other methods, will likely pass muster. This is not about "torture" or even "abuse," as some Administration critics dishonestly charge, but about being able to make life uncomfortable for al Qaeda prisoners who have been trained to resist milder forms of interrogation.

A "fair bet"?  Does anyone know?  --asks Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate:

So, what did we agree to? Is hypothermia in or out? What about sexual degradation or forcing prisoners to bark like dogs? Stress positions?  I'd wager that any tie goes to the White House. One hardly needs a law degree to understand that in a controversy over detainee treatment between the executive and legislative branches, the trump will go to the guy who's holding the unnamed detainees in secret prisons.

But maybe the worst of it all is that this legislation will assure that no one will know.  Lithwick writes:

Congress doesn't want to know what it's bargaining away this week. In the Boston Globe this weekend, Rick Klein revealed that only "10 percent of the members of Congress have been told which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act." More troubling still, this congressional ignorance seems to be by choice. Klein quotes Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican, as saying, "I don't know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know." Evidently, "widely distributing such information could result in leaks."

We've reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well....

For the five years since 9/11, we have been in the dark in this country. This president has held detainees in secret prisons and had them secretly tortured using secret legal justifications. Those held in secret at Guantanamo Bay include innocent men, as do those who have been secretly shipped off to foreign countries and brutally tortured there. That was a shame on this president.

But passage of the new detainee legislation will be a different sort of watershed. Now we are affirmatively asking to be left in the dark. Instead of torture we were unaware of, we are sanctioning torture we'll never hear about. Instead of detainees we didn't care about, we are authorizing detentions we'll never know about. Instead of being misled by the president, we will be blind and powerless by our own choice. And that is a shame on us all.

And we thought Iraq was in for a regime change.

The smell of sulphur (Edmundson)

Global warming is known to the State of California to be bad for us.  But how bad can it be?  Evidence has accumulated that global warming--rather than asteroid impacts--was responsible for some of the planet's prehistoric mass extinctions.  The hypothesized mechanism involves an enormous outgassing of hydrogen sulphide from the oceans.  Details here.

Philosopher Kurt Smith Pulverizes Pathological Liar Horowitz (Leiter)

Nice account of their recent "debate" at Bloomsburg University here:

David Horowitz, the former wacky-left editor of Ramparts magazine turned wacky right smear-monger and foundation pimp, came to Bloomsburg University in rural central Pennsylvania to pick up a $7000 check and spout lies and misinformation in a debate with local college philosophy professor Kurt Smith....

The debate was decidedly one-sided, with Horowitz offering one misstatement of fact after another, and Smith batting them down with the dispatch of a seasoned squash player.

At the start of the debate, Smith explained to the assembled audience of mostly Bloomsburg U. students that Horowitz, during the several years since the American invasion of Iraq, has been following the lead of the right-wing American Council of Trustees and Alumni, attacking academia for alleged left-wing bias, Under the leadership of disgraced Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney consort Lynn Cheney, ACTA since 9-11 has been hounding liberal academics, accusing them of being disloyal-indeed of being the only segment of American society to be "unpatriotic."

Smith explained that in Pennsylvania, where the Republican-led legislature last spring impaneled a committee to investigate alleged liberal bias on state college campuses, Horowitz had come and testified, citing alleged cases of student abuse-all of which proved to be bogus. Smith then declared that Horowitz's proposed "Academic Bill of Rights," which in some versions would give students the right to sue their professors for allegedly political grading or for speaking outside of their formal field of study, was nothing but "politics pure and simple-it's about seeking a place for right-wing propaganda" in the university.

Horowitz attempted to deny that he was seeking to punish liberal faculty, claiming his proposed bill had "no teeth." He insisted that he had "nothing against" liberal professors and in no way sought to single anyone out.

This claim, however, was belied by the table in the lobby piled high with his latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a libel-filled compendium of factual errors and innuendo (even the title is erroneous-there are only 100 dangerous professors listed!) passing itself off as scholarship....

During the debate, Horowitz attributed the failure of the Pennsylvania legislative Academic Bill of Rights committee to recommend any action (the Republican-run committee, after months of hearings, concluded that there was no evidence of a "liberal bias" problem or of professorial "indoctrination" of students on the state's campuses), to "sabotage" by the Democratic co-chair of the committee, State Assemblyman Lawrence Curry, a professor of history in Philadelphia. Curry, he charged, had repeatedly denounced the hearings as "McCarthyite." In fact, the soft-spoken Curry never made such a statement at the hearings, and only gently insisted that Horowitz and the panel's right-wing chair, Assemblyman Gibson "Gib" Armstrong, supply facts to back their fevered charges-which neither ever did....

Horowitz's real reason for singling out Rep. Curry as a villain is that Curry, during a televised hearing at Temple University last spring, exposed one of Horowitz's most outrageous "examples" of liberal professorial abuse and lack of adequate patriotism as a fabrication and a fraud, and had the right-wing propagandist reduced to an incoherent sputtering. This particular "example" of liberal indoctrination was a supposed biology professor at a Pennsylvania university who gave his class a showing of Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 911." As Curry said, it never happened.

Horowitz tried the same tactic again in the Bloomburg U. debate, this time using an already discredited "example": the alleged case of a student, Kelly Keehan, purportedly an opponent of abortion who was said to have been "forced" by a woman's studies professor at Penn State to chant "abortion, abortion, abortion!" until she was in tears. At a Pennsylvania legislative hearing, Horowitz had declined to even name the school at which this alleged incident occurred. He subsequently claimed it was at Penn State. But in last week's debate, Smith observed that no such student has ever come forward with a complaint, no such incident was ever reported as having occurred at Penn State, and that in all probability, the incident never happened....

Smith won boisterous applause for insisting that university classrooms are not public spaces where all speakers have equal rights. In the classroom, he asserted, there is a natural asymmetry, as a consequence of the professor's "experience and credentials." In a dig that caused Horowitz to visibly stiffen, Smith said, "You only have a master's degree in English, have never sat on a hiring committee, and never taught, and yet you are expressing expertise about higher education." He concluded, turning to the audience, "Mr. Horowitz should follow his own advice about professors sticking to their subject areas. Since he has no experience in higher education, he should not offer to solve higher education's problems. He's feigning to be an academic."

Horowitz pointedly refused to shake Smith's hand in the Green Room before the event began, even when invited to do so by the university president, who was moderating the event....

Kudos to Professor Smith!

What is it like to be treated like a bat? (Edmundson)

Over at Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank, Keith DeRose (Yale, Philosophy) ponders "Our 'Rough Treatment' Technique of the Day."  Comments open.

Pathways to torture (Wilson)

HR 6054, the 'Military Trials for Enemy Combatants' bill, is presently scheduled to be brought before the House of Representatives.  Certain Republican senators and Bush had a minor tussle over whether, as Bush demanded, the legislation would formally reinterpret U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions.   On the face of it, the compromise legislation does not do this; however, there appear to be three clear routes to reinterpreting such compliance: one legislative, one semi-legislative, and one executive.

First, a legislative loophole.  The present bill extends chapter 47 of title 10 of the U.S. Code to allow that the President or Secretary of Defense (or those acting under their authority) may designate a person an "enemy combatant" to be tried by a military commission; the President may also establish such commissions.  One concern here is that the definition of "enemy combatant" is worded so that its targeted designees might very well not count as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions:

The definition of Lawful Enemy Combatant diverges substantially from the Geneva Convention III Article 4 (for example, "regular forces" vs "armed forces") definitions for a Prisoner of War, thus restricting the domestic law position as to the applicability of the Geneva Convention to covered groups. The effect is to return to a pre-Geneva Conventions standard of the kind described by Justice Thomas in his dissent in Hamdan, and implicitly the harsh treatment accorded such persons pre-1949.

Somewhat tempering this concern is the explicit recognition that a military commission is "a regularly constituted court, affording all the necessary ‘judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples’ for purposes of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions", which among other things forbids (subsection 1(a)) "Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture" and (subsection 1(c)) "Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment" . 

So far, so good, until you get to the part where conformity with Article 3 is defined:

IN GENERAL.—Satisfaction of the prohibitions against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment set forth in section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 2000dd) shall fully satisfy United States obligations with respect to the standards for detention and treatment established by section 1 of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, with the exception of the obligations imposed by subsections 1(b) and 1(d) of such Article.

That is to say, conformity to the prohibitions stated in subsections 1(a) and 1(c) (cited above) is interpreted as per the relevant section of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (sponsored by John McCain).  So, what standards for conformity does that act impose?  Answer: the standards provided by the Army Field Manual on Interrogation, long serving as a fairly constrained basis for interrogation operations, which Rumsfeld and others had discarded on the way to Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. 

One problem with basing conformity to the Geneva Conventions on the Field Manual is that the the Manual has long required that interrogation techniques conform to the Geneva Conventions. But the larger problem is that, as McCain acknowledged, the Act "would not set the Field Manual in stone – it could be changed at any time".    Indeed, one month after McCain introduced the legislation Rumsfeld announced that the manual would be rewritten by the Pentagon; the revision scheduled for release this past spring contained 10 classified pages in the interrogation techniques section, and moreover specifically elided various proscriptions from Article 3 of the Geneva Convention (not, presumably, in order to avoid HR 6054's being circular). Thankfully, the State Department and other factions put up sufficient resistance to the proposal that it was scrapped in favor of a new version (not yet released) according to which "All detainees will be treated consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention" (so says an unnamed military official, anyway).  Still, the concern remains that since the Manual is not "set in stone", HR 6054's standards of conformity to the Geneva Conventions could end up being such as to clearly abrogate the conventions.

Second, a semi-legislative loophole.  Upon approving the Detainee Treatment Act (tagged on as an amendment to a Defense Appropriations Bill), Bush issued one of his infamous signing statements, stating

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

Title X specifically covers Section 1003 (named in HR 6054 as setting the standards of conformity to the Geneva Conventions).  Signing statements arguably impact the interpretation and implementation of the associated legislation:

Rather than veto laws passed by Congress, Bush is using his signing statements to effectively nullify them as they relate to the executive branch. These statements, for him, function as directives to executive branch departments and agencies as to how they are to implement the relevant law.

Hence even supposing the Field Manual retains formal conformity to the Geneva Conventions, HR 6054's conformity to these Conventions as per the "Detainee Treatment Act" may ultimately be subject to Bush's (more generally, executive) reinterpretation.

On to the third, directly executive, loophole.  In any case Bush evidently intends to ignore any limits that might be set by (a proper understanding of) the Geneva Conventions:

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation. Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.

Perhaps one form of such an "executive order" will take the form of a signing statement, assuming HR 6054 is passed. The upshot of this and the previous loopholes:

In effect, the agreement means that U.S. violations of international human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with Congress's tacit assent.

"A mindless brute for President" (Leiter)

Ruchira Paul comments.

Universities and Class (J. Stanley)

As most non-Americans realize, often, when an American tells you that she attended Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, or Yale as an undergraduate, she is not doing so to give you information about her educational attainment. She is rather informing you of the privileged status of her birthposition. This article, basically a review of Daniel Golden's book “The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates”, is a good brief read for anyone teaching in a US academic institution, as well as for those outside the United States, who wonder about the moral complicity American educational institutions have had in maintaining and strengthening America's increasingly rigid socio-economic class structure.

Kukla and Manning from Carleton to South Florida

Rebecca Kukla (philosophy of medicine, epistemology, 18th-century philosophy, feminist philosophy) and Richard Manning (metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, early modern philosophy), both at Carleton University, have accepted senior offers from the University of South Florida, to start in fall 2007.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Oo, this is fun (Hellie)

Watch Clinton pulverize Fox News scum here.

Which War Are We Winning? (Edmundson)

The newest National Intelligence Estimate is leaking out, and the Attorney General had better get on the case unless he wants the other party to get control of Congress.  According to the New York Times (Sept. 23):

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

This assessment contradicts the White House line that "we are safer, though not yet safe," and must dismay those Republican candidates who have taken heart from Karl Rove's blitzkrieg to set "terrorism" rather than "Iraq" as the number one issue in the midterm elections coming up in seven weeks.  Or are we all in for a suprise?

"Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling?" (Hellie)

Josh Marshall digs this out of the archives:

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain's amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist's handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin -- a firm squeeze of the victim's palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin's "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don't, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

If America's leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID, has historically been an instrument of oppression -- not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to "legalize" torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn't stopped, torture will destroy your nation's important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: "You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . "

Off we go, back to the caves.

Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the author of several books, including "To Build a Castle" and "Judgment in Moscow." Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since 1976.

America's leaders "must recognize that torture [. . .] has historically been an instrument of oppression -- not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering" -- indeed they must.

October surprise (Hellie)

Some data:

1. The 13 Sep Weekly Standard reported Bush's "heads up" that two "interesting indicators" undermine predictions that the Dems take congress: in Bush's view, "these elections will come down to two things: one, firm belief that in order to win the war on terror there must be a comprehensive strategy that recognizes this war is being fought on more than one front, and, two, the economy". On the latter, he noted that gas prices are coming down. About the "comprehensive strategy" for fighting the "war on terror" on "more than one front", Bush was less specific. Whatever he had up his sleeve, this interesting post makes a plausible case that it is more than a "bluff".
2. The loathesome Rove has also been promising his buds an "October Surprise" to help win the elections.
3. Now, apparently, the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower, "bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles", and its supporting "attack group" of ships, has been issued orders that would put it on schedule to launch bombs on Iran on 21 October:

Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College, says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about like the date" of any possible military action against Iran. (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article.

So what is the White House planning?

On Monday President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly at its opening session, and while studiously avoiding even physically meeting Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was also addressing the body, he offered a two-pronged message. Bush told the "people of Iran" that "we're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis" and that he looked forward "to the day when you can live in freedom." But he also warned that Iran's leaders were using the nation's resources "to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons." Given the President's assertion that the nation is fighting a "global war on terror" and that he is Commander in Chief of that "war," his prominent linking of the Iran regime with terror has to be seen as a deliberate effort to claim his right to carry the fight there. Bush has repeatedly insisted that the 2001 Congressional Authorization for the Use of Force that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan was also an authorization for an unending "war on terror."

It seems pretty clear what the "October surprise" is to be.

I wonder how this will play with the US public. Plausibly, there's pretty serious war fatigue, so this might just backfire. But I can't find any polling data about this.

MIT Press Blog (Leiter)

MIT Press has a blog!  Who knew?  Is this a first for a university press?  I believe it is.

UPDATE:  Thanks to everyone who wrote to inform me that there are many university press blogs, including some linked from the MIT blog itself! 

Chomsky Book Sales Are About to Spike (Leiter)

Check out this photo from CNN.  If only Hugo Chavez had been holding a copy of Nietzsche on Morality or The Future for Philosophy!  But I guess those books wouldn't have been as relevant to his topic (though Chapter 9 in the former, and Chapter 3 in the latter are actually not totally unrelated...).

(But which Chomsky book is he holding?  Is that Hegemony or Survival?  Comments are open for anyone who knows.)

UPDATE:  About 4 pm EST in the US, Chomsky's book ranked around #540 for sales on Amazon; it is now (nearly 11 pm EST in the US) at #57. 

Jules Coleman, International Man of Mystery! (Leiter)

Who knew that the well-known legal philosopher and famed audiophile was a figure of such intrigue?  Faculty web pages would be a lot more interesting to read if most were written like this!

UPDATE:  Jules writes:  "Now outed, I want to add two small points. The first is that his daughter has now joined his son in the band Murder Mystery. They and their music can be found at www.myspace.com/murdermysterymusic.  Second, the unflattering pictures at the end are the result of a bad photo angle and a worse relationhsip with the publisher who took the pictures."

One More PGR Update

Tomorrow, new invitations will go out to the folks for whom we had dated or incorrect e-mail addresses.  Since I've heard directly or indirectly from one or two who thought they hadn't been invited as evaluators this year, let me just note here the philosophers who should receive their original invitations (if all goes well) during the day tomorrow:  Volker Halbach, Gabriel Uzquiano, Tad Brennan, Connie Rosati, Alva Noe, Jerrold Levinson, Jeff King, Benj Hellie (yes, we screwed up the e-mail address of one of my co-bloggers!), Joel Kupperman, Roger Ariew, Bryan Van Norden, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Bjorn Ramberg, Thomas Kelly, Brie Gertler, and Thomas Ricketts.  If any of you folks are reading and don't get the invitation during the day tomorrow, please e-mail me!

Apologies for the mix-up--though with 450 invitations going out, things could have been much worse!  And many thanks to all the many evaluators who have already started the surveys or indicated that they will complete them.

"Scary Bible Quotes" (Leiter)

Here, courtesy of philosopher Michael Huemer (Colorado), who usefully explains the purpose of this list here.

Bernecker from Manchester to UC Irvine

Sven Bernecker (epistemology, philosophy of mind, Kant and German Idealism), previously Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester, has accepted appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy (with tenure) at the University of California at Irvine.

May from Irvine to UC Davis

Robert May (philosophy of language and logic) at the University of California at Irvine has accepted the senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at Davis, to start in January 2007.

PGR Update, Again (Leiter)

Invitations to participate in the survey for the 2006-08 Philosophical Gourmet Report went out this morning to 450 philosophers around the world who were nominated by members of the PGR Advisory Board (a list of current Board members appears below).  About two dozen invites have bounced back with e-mail address problems, but we will hopefully get through to most of those folks at the right e-mail address in the next 24 hours.  Surveys will continue through October 9, and the new PGR should be on-line at www.philosophicalgourmet.com by early November.  I may preview some results here on the blog starting in mid-October.  To those of you who have received the surveys, my sincere thanks, on behalf of all prospective students, for your help.

ADVISORY BOARD for 2006-08 PGR

 

Julia Annas (Arizona), Frederick Beiser (Syracuse), Cristina Bicchieri (Penn), Ned Block (NYU), Christopher Bobonich (Stanford), David Brink (UC San Diego), Alex Byrne (MIT), Craig Callender (UC San Diego), John Carriero (UCLA), David Chalmers (ANU), Edwin Curley (Michigan), Justin D'Arms (Ohio State), John Deigh (Texas), Keith DeRose (Yale), Michael Devitt (CUNY), Lisa Downing (Ohio State), Julia Driver (Dartmouth), Delia Graff Fara (Princeton), John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside), Graeme Forbes (Colorado), Michael N. Forster (Chicago), John Gardner (Oxford), Sebastian Gardner (UCL), Don Garrett (NYU), Peter Godfrey-Smith (Harvard), Alvin Goldman (Rutgers), Anil Gupta (Pittsburgh), Gilbert Harman (Princeton), Thomas Hurka (Toronto), P.J. Ivanhoe (BU), Shelly Kagan (Yale), Pierre Keller (UC Riverside), Scott MacDonald (Cornell), Patrick Maynard (Western Ontario), Cheryl J. Misak (Toronto), Calvin Normore (UCLA), Graham Priest (Melbourne & St. Andrews), Michael Rosen (Harvard), Alexander Rosenberg (Duke), Mark Sainsbury (Texas), Simon Saunders (Oxford), Jonathan Schaffer (U Mass/Amherst), Christopher Shields (Oxford), Susanna Siegel (Harvard), A. John Simmons (Virginia), Brian Skyrms (UC Irvine & Stanford), Ernest Sosa (Rutgers), Jason Stanley (Rutgers), Robert Stern (Sheffield), Stephen Stich (Rutgers), Ted Warfield (Notre Dame), Timothy Williamson (Oxford), William C. Wimsatt (Chicago), Jonathan Wolff (UCL), Allen Wood (Stanford), Crispin Wright (St. Andrews & NYU), Julian Young (Auckland)

Willi

A decisive moment? (Leiter)

Jack Balkin (Law, Yale) thinks so:

In the next few weeks, if not days, there will be votes on two very important bills. One bill would legalize the President's NSA domestic surveillance program and insulate it from judicial review. The other would ratify the President's views on military commissions, restrict the ability of defendants to see the evidence used to convict them, limit the Geneva Conventions' protections against prisoner mistreatment and outrages to human dignity, and eliminate the use of habeas corpus and the ability of an independent judiciary to inquire into the legality of the detention and treatment (or mistreatment) of human beings held at Guantanamo Bay.

I can't remember a time when two pieces of legislation were on the verge of passage that would so radically alter Americans' sense of our country--and its principles-- for the worse.

What is at stake in these two bills is whether we want the President to be free from judicial oversight and accountability; whether we want to maintain a system of secret trials with secret evidence; whether we want to announce publicly that our forces are not bound by the minimum requirements of human decency found in Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions. In their own way, each of these three issues revolves around our fidelity to the rule of law, and the meaning of America as a land where the rule of law is respected.

Our President-- with his prevarications and euphemisms, like "alternative sets of procedures"-- has been unwilling to speak the truth about what he has done in the past and what he wishes to keep doing in the future. He wants to be free of Congressional and judicial oversight when he spies on people in the United States. He wants to hold, imprison, and detain people without letting them know the evidence used to condemn and convict them. He wants to let the CIA and other operatives continue to use abusive and inhumane interrogation methods. And he wants to make sure that those who have engaged in torture and inhumane treatment are never brought to justice or held responsible for their crimes-- including especially those who authorized these terrible practices.

In short, this President wants legislation that will confirm that he is a law unto himself.

What have we come to, as a nation, when our President demands these things and expect us to follow him meekly? He seeks to maximize his power by maximizing our fear. Will we let him?.

It is bad enough that the whole "war on terror" is a fake from top to bottom; so, strictly, were the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty."  But no one in those latter cases made extraordinary claims of executive power on the basis of the abuse of a metaphor.

"Hey douchebag!" (Leiter)

Via Pharyngula, I learn of this amusing idea for a regular feature:

My goal is to confront the problems with Slate magazine's contrarianism. They post any number of ridiculous things in the course of a week, and they need more watchdogs. Among their most telling efforts, see Christopher Hitchens' bizarre attack on Juan Cole.  Of course, he chides Cole not for his published writing, but for a comment on a closed discussion board. ...

So why "Hey douchebag!" and not, say, "A reasonable dissent from the tone and style of Slate?"  Because I'm aping their silly contrarianism, the penchant for startling headlines....

For the first installment, let's look at how Slate approaches science:  with dilettante Gregg Easterbrook, who has no qualifications to write on science.  Yet he tries to tell us that String Theory is junk, based on the fact that he's read one (count 'em, one) book....

Slate gives us the review of Smolin's book through the filter of a writer manifestly unqualified to write about science, a writer who clearly has other axes to grind. For example, here's Easterbrook's opening paragraph:

"The leading universities are dominated by hooded monks who speak in impenetrable mumbo-jumbo; insist on the existence of fantastic mystical forces, yet can produce no evidence of these forces; and enforce a rigid guild structure of beliefs in order to maintain their positions and status. The Middle Ages? No, the current situation in university physics departments. I just invented the part about the hoods."

So we know what Easterbrook begins with. All university physicists are trying to protect their narrow, myopic world. (By the way, Easterbrook only recently came around to "believing" in global warming, and he advocates teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. Just fyi.) Easterbrook again:

"If you worry that even in the 21^st century, intellectual fads have as much to do with university politics and careerism as with the search for abstract truth, The Trouble With Physics is a book you absolutely must read."

Yes, folks, that's right, let's base our approach to this book on overgeneralized biases about the state of the university. Because nothing helps out "the search for abstract truth" like overgeneralized biases.

"The physics establishment reacted adversely to Smolin's cosmic natural selection because the idea implies direction: Over time, existence progresses toward a condition more to the liking of beings such as us. In recent decades it has become essential at the top of academia to posit utter meaninglessness to all aspects of physics."

I'd like to note that Easterbrook cites absolutely no one who claims that science must look toward meaninglessness. I'm sure he can find plenty of scientists who note the difference between study of the physical world and study of the metaphysical world (i.e. science and religion). However, noting that separation and arguing for meaninglessness are not the same thing. Of course, then we get to Easterbrook's particular axe to grind:

"Today if a professor at Princeton claims there are 11 unobservable dimensions about which he can speak with great confidence despite an utter lack of supporting evidence, that professor is praised for incredible sophistication. If another person in the same place asserted there exists one unobservable dimension, the plane of the spirit, he would be hooted down as a superstitious crank."

Poor Gregg, unable to tout his religious ideas in a scientific forum. But let me be the first to say: whether or not Easterbrook is a superstitious crank, I don't know. But he's certainly a crank.

It's good they limit it to contributors to Slate, as it would be impossible to know how to pick among the many deserving folks in the blogosphere for a "Hey douchebag!" feature!* 

*Note:  "Hey douchebag" is not be confused with the very different endeavor of satirizing "righteous douchebags!"

E-voting concerns (Wilson)

As per this WaPo article, more than 80 percent of voters will use electronic voting machines in the Nov 7 election, with a third of all precincts using the technology for the first time.  The massive switch to e-voting machines was initiated by the Help America Vote Act, supposedly in order to prevent the sort of problems plaguing the 2000 Florida recount debacle, involving hanging chads and the like.  But such systems are prone to new and horrible technical difficulties, of the sort characterizing last week's "debacle" in Maryland (see here for details).

By now it has also been multiply established that these systems contain serious security flaws (see also this article and this report).  This first-person account of a hacking of a Diebold system really brings it home:

So, TJ became convinced that it was all right to upload the memory card, which he did.  And there, on the central tabulator screen, appeared the altered results: Seven "Yes" votes and one "No" vote, with absolutely no evidence that anything had been altered. It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as "conspiracy theorists" and "technophobes" when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.

Why not use the voting procedure used in Canada?  Besides making elections too hard to manipulate, such a simple system wouldn't involve yet another massive transfer of taxpayer money to U.S. corporations.

Torture Reasoning (Edmundson)

Over at Balkinization, Marty Lederman (Law, Georgetown) brings some clarity to the torture debate on Capitol Hill:

At Last, the Issue is Publicly Joined . . . and When All the Smoke has Cleared, the Central Question is Quite Simple      

And it is this: Should the CIA be legally authorized to breach the Geneva Conventions by engaging in the following forms of "cruel treatment" prohibited by "common" Article 3(1)(a) of those Conventions?:

-- "Cold Cell," or hypothermia, where a prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees, during which he is doused with cold water.

-- "Long Time Standing," in which a prisoner is forced to stand, handcuffed and with his feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours.

-- Other forms of "stress positions" and prolonged sleep deprivation , perhaps akin to "Long Time Standing."

-- Threats of violence and death of a detainee and/or his family.

(These are the CIA techniques that have been widely reported, including in this ABC News Report and in Ron Suskind's book [The One-Percent Doctrine]. To the extent some of these techniques are not among those that the President is now euphemistically designating "alternative," or to the extent the Administration is attempting to preserve other techniques currently prohibited by Common Article 3, the burden is on the Administration to clarify the record. They have resolutely refused to disclaim any of these reported techniques, and so I think it's fair for Congress and the public to assume, absent contrary evidence, that these are among the techniques at issue in the current debate. If we're going to authorize conduct currently prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, we ought to know just what we're signing on for.

What about waterboarding? My sense is that the debate is no longer about waterboarding. I have heard scuttlebut from several sources that not even the lawyers in this Administration -- who apparently were able to conclude that waterboarding was not torture -- have been willing to say that waterboarding is legal under the McCain Amendment's prohibition on conduct that shocks the conscience. Therefore, I think (but am not certain) that waterboarding has not been a viable option since December 30, 2005 -- which explains, perhaps, why the Vice President was so insistent on creating a CIA exception to the McCain Amendment, i.e., because he thought that waterboarding could not continue without such an amendment (or a Commander-in-Chief override).)

A bunch of other questions that have been dominating the public debate really ought to fall to the side now.
...

[It's not about] the authority of interrogators to yell at detainees, or subject them to Eminem or the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Nor -- contrary to the Administration and to many press accounts -- is it primarily about the meaning of Geneva's prohibition on "outrages against human dignity," and "humiliating and degrading treatment."

Unfortunately, even the New York Times can't get this straight.  In "Bush Says GOP Rebels Are Putting Nation at Risk" (Sept. 16), the Times repeats the Bush/Rove line:

The dispute centers on whether to pass legislation reinterpreting a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 that bars “outrages upon personal dignity”... Mr. Bush argued that the convention’s language was too vague and is proposing legislation to clarify the provisions. “What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’?” he said at one point.

But, as Lederman points out,

The CIA isn't much interested in the outrageous and inane forms of humiliation -- underwear on the head, religious degradation, etc. -- that the military used at GTMO and in Iraq. Those things may be illegal, they might violate Common Article 3, but they are not what the Administration is tring so diligently to preserve. The Administration is, instead, seeking authority to use threats of violence, and the cruel physical techniques listed above, akin to classic forms of torture.

That is what this current legislative debate is about. 

"Stress positions" and devices to compel them have a long history.  One of the best-known examples is the "Little Ease," a cell barely large enough for its occupant, who was unable to stand upright, sit, stretch, or find any comfortable position.  The 16th century Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion was confined in "Little Ease" in the Tower of London, followed in the 17th century by Gunpowder Plot conspirator Guy Fawkes.  Cells of similar description--4 feet high, 4 feet long and 20 inches wide--were used by US Special Operations in Iraq, according to the New York Times, "Pentagon Study Describes Abuse by Units in Iraq" (June 17, 2006), along with "cold cell" and starvation.  In 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously outlawed the use of stress positions, shaking, and sleep deprivation as interrogation techniques--but, what would the Israelis know about combating terrorism, right?

Of course Rove wants the issue to turn on the meaning of "outrages upon personal dignity," which--hey!--might include hazing the pledges over at Animal House.  What is not understandable is why reporters at the New York Times are falling for it.  Or is that understandable too?

Friday Poem: "A Minor Occurrence"

A Minor Occurrence

Found this morning on my desk, pale even in sunlight, not breathing: a poem, dead.  Help was called and came—investigators and an ambulance team (never before asked to cart a poem away).  Around the room, walls lined with relatives, many seeming quite sturdy, some even jaunty despite the event, others dark and brooding, but all of them still breathing.  And after interviews and photographs, fingerprints and polygraphs, detention of all and sundry, it looked to be the perfect crime—if crime it was.

Of course, there was an autopsy, which really got us thinking, for when the poem was opened up, other poems were found inside, along with, of all things, bits of prose spread throughout the body as if appropriated from somewhere else and secreted there—borrowed gems to brighten up a drab design.  We found scraps of old texts and documents as well: Whitman, which was no surprise, but Heidegger, Wittgenstein, even Plato, looking not a bit the way we had expected.

From this, the examiner suggested that the poem might have died of bloat, its slight body unable to assimilate so much foreign matter into so fragile a receptacle.  No matter, no certainty was reached and, when done, the poem lying there dismembered, piece by piece, no one had a clue as to what had held it together or, for that matter, how to restore it as it had been found.  For now, the poem was deemed to have died of natural causes, although odd ones at that, and the file left open in the event of new information.

Sadly, one could visualize it when young, trying on new garments, borrowings perhaps from adult’s closets, fancying itself decorative, even sophisticated, proud to parade before the world as if authentic, independent.  But there, on the examining table, it seemed not just a poem, at all, more like the kind of extravagant creation found on the coffee-tables of those affluent but banal.  Yes, one had to admit it seemed like something only dilettantes would find attractive, ‘foggy with philosophy,’ aglitter with borrowings and imitation, mere brass aspiring to be golden, a blondness not of wheat but chaff.

I was present for all of this and felt somehow to blame.  The poem was found on my desk, but it might have perished anywhere.  I even had felt tempted to deny knowing it and, perhaps, there was some truth in that.  Suffice it to say that all I told the carpers and the critics was that I had thought nothing amiss when I looked in on it the night before, although I had to confess I had not examined it closely, had, I acknowledged, taken it for granted.  I couldn’t help feeling culpable, but certainly not suspect.  To be sure, the authorities act as if everyone is responsible even when there is no palpable crime.  Still, if I’d been more attentive, more proactive, more vigilant about the health of poetry, in general, perhaps this episode could have been prevented.

If there be in this a consolation, it is this: its death was no more important than its life.  As to that, everyone knows that poems change nothing—except other poems.  One more or less is not remarkable.

5/16-7/17/96, 2/25-26/97, 6/14/98. 

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.

The Real Story about Eason Jordan the Bloggers Missed

ORIGINALLY POSTED MARCH 1, 2005

=====================================

Details here:

Speaking at an off-the-record panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 27, CNN chief executive Eason Jordan apparently suggested that U.S. forces in Iraq had intentionally targeted journalists. When challenged by members of the audience, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Jordan backtracked, saying that he did not believe that such attacks were deliberate U.S. government policy.

By most accounts Jordan's assertions were wavering and ambiguous.  Not so for the resulting howl from conservative bloggers. Twenty-two days later, under pressure from critics across the political spectrum, Jordan resigned.

Major news outlets jumped for the tried-and-true storyline: public figure makes outrageous statements and is taken down by persistent bloggers. The pajamahadeen, still triumphant from having toppled Dan Rather, had claimed another scalp.

Even Jordan's defenders went out of their way to attack his statements. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who voiced concerns that a "cyber-mob" mentality might chill journalistic free speech, made it a point to call Jordan's comments "manna to Islamist recruiters" and "stupid, even indefensible."

But what's truly indefensible is the American media's failure to examine the substance of Jordan's claims, however clumsily articulated. If they did, they might be surprised.

To be sure, many made superficial attempts. A typical example appears in conservative columnist Cathy Young's Feb. 14 Boston Globe op-ed, "Sliming American Troops." Young, pointing out that Jordan also cited an "uncorroborated tale" of an Al-Jazeera journalist tortured at Abu Ghraib prison, dismisses Jordan's accusations between parentheses:

"All this suggests that intentional targeting of journalists as journalists was likely a part of Jordan's claim. (No such charge has ever been made by any journalists' organization, though disturbing questions have been raised about negligence in the U.S. military's shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in April 2003 in which two journalists were killed.)" (emphasis added)

No such charge? On April 8, Reporters Without Borders issued a press release headlined "Reporters Without Borders accuses U.S. military of deliberately firing at journalists." That Young missed this item from a global media rights group, released the very same day as the Palestine Hotel attacks that she goes on to mention, shows just how blind she is to facts that lay outside the orthodox narrative.

Young is one of the few columnists to make any connection between Jordan's comments and the shelling of the Palestine Hotel, which killed two journalists, José Couso of the Spanish network Telecinco and Reuters cameraman Taras Protsiuk, and wounded three others.

A film of the incident, shot by the French TV station France 3, shows that U.S. troops were not under any fire at the time, and that the tank crew took a few minutes to adjust its gun before opening fire on the hotel, which was home to more than 200 journalists and media assistants at the time.

Following a Pentagon investigation in which the U.S. military completely exonerated itself, the International Federation of Journalists denounced the "cynical whitewashing of a horrifying and avoidable tragedy...."

As for the "uncorroborated tale" of torture? According to those who witnessed the remarks at Davos, Jordan discussed the case of an Al-Jazeera reporter who had been taken to Abu Ghraib prison, where he was forced to eat his own shoes and mocked as "Al-Jazeera boy."

The only reporter from a major paper to look into this tale was the New York Sun's Roderick Boyd, who did so in a display of astonishingly lazy reporting. Boyd writes:

"A man who said he was a producer with Al-Jazeera at the network's headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said he was unaware of any such incident, 'although we have had problems with American troops in and out of Iraq.' The Al-Jazeera producer refused to give his name."

Had Boyd bothered to enter the words "Al-Jazeera boy" into Google or Lexis-Nexis, he would have found a March 11, 2004, story in the Nation, a May 2, 2004, story in the London Observer, and an account from Reporters Without Borders, each of which details the seven-week detention and torture at Abu Ghraib of 33-year-old Al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Hassan.

But Boyd didn't bother. He was happy enough to settle for the anonymous source who told him what he wanted to hear. His "evidence" that the incident never happened has been reprinted throughout the blogosphere, including the influential conservative blog, Instapundit.

The reporter forced by U.S. troops to eat his own shoe was actually a different person: veteran Reuters cameraman Salem Ureibi. On Jan. 2, 2004, U.S. soldiers arrested Ureibi, Falluja stringer Ahmed Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani in Falluja as they were filming the site of a helicopter crash. The three men were held for 72 hours, during which they were beaten, stripped and threatened with rape.

The story was reported by Reuters, the Associated Press, Editor and Publisher, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Raleigh News Observer, the Xinhua news service and many other outlets....

It was not the tales of abuse, however, that most appalled Jordan's critics—such stories are no longer shocking even to casual followers of the news—but the notion that the U.S. military would deliberately target media outlets in Iraq in order to silence them. In the early days of the invasion, they did just that.

In the hours before dawn on March 26, 2003, precision guided bombs struck the headquarters of Iraq's state-run television station, which had days earlier broadcast images of dead and captured American soldiers, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

But the Geneva Conventions also prohibit targeting civilian buildings, unless they offer "definite military advantage." Media organizations and human rights groups were outraged.

"The bombing of a television station, simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda, cannot be condoned," read a press release from Amnesty International, which called the strike a "possible war crime."

"Once again," said Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, "we see military and political commanders from the democratic world targeting a television network simply because they don't like the message it gives out...."

The next time some self-congratulatory, right-wing empty suit with a blog starts blathering about how the blogosphere challenges traditional media, send them this link.  As usual, the right-wing blogosphere missed the real story.

Steward from Oxford to Leeds

Helen Steward (philosophy of mind and action, metaphysics and epistemology), presently Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, has accepted a permanent post at the University of Leeds.

Extending war without a draft (Hellie)

Long-time readers of this of this blog are familiar with Brian's series of posts on the probability of a US military draft: the war plans of the Cheney administration -- which it seems determined to carry out -- it would seem, can't be pushed any further without additional forces.

However, these two posts indicate a frightening loophole: who needs manpower to subjugate say, Iran, when you can nuke them instead?

[Bush] has been consistent from the earliest days of his regime - consistently incompetent, delusional, and violent. He does not bluff. He does exactly what he wants to do. And there is nothing he wants more right now than to use nukes on Iran. It's not merely because he's a kid with a cool popgun, but one shouldn't misunderestimate his impulsiveness and immaturity. It's also because he, and the other rightwing lunatics genuinely believe that since 1945, liberals have severely crippled America by making such a big deal out of nukes. By all means, check out Curtis Lemay's "America is in Danger" for an historical example (late 60's) of this delusion. How are we crippled? Well, according to them, by refusing to use nukes, America fights bloody prolonged conflicts that are difficult to conclude with decisive victories.

Bush and his pals wants to save America from liberals that will once again deny America a critical victory, crucial to its safety and security. Bush wants to break the nuclear taboo.

I gleaned a pretty good sense of long-term right-wing dogma from years of reading the National Review, American Spectator, Human Events, and other such birdcage liners -- Cheney admin policy seems designed to actualize many of the therein articulated crazed fantasies. Why not this madness as well?

Loose Lips (Edmundson)

The International Atomic Energy Agency has condemned the House Staff Report on Iran's nuclear-weapons capabilities;  Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has condemned the Bush effort to get Congress to legalize torture; the conservative Cato Institute has condemned the institutionalization of Orwellian double speak in the "war on terror"; and Turkish and Pakistani government officials have condemned the Pope for diss'ing Mohammad as a bringer of inhumanity and evil.  Don't these people know there's a war on?

Another Great Awakening? (Edmundson)

Relaxing in the midst of like-minded folk, the President let on yesterday that he sees himself as leading a third great religious awakening.  So says the Washington Post, in "Bush Tells Group He Sees a 'Third Awakening'" (Sept. 13).  Lest the Great Crusader be misunderstood,

aides said Bush was not casting the war [against Islamo-fascism] as a religious struggle but was describing American cultural changes in a time of war . "He's drawing a parallel in terms of a resurgence, in dangerous times, of people going back to their religion," said one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was not open to other journalists. "This is not 'God is on our side' or anything like that."

Of course not.  The Post also relates that

On another topic, Bush rejected sending more troops to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas to find Osama bin Laden. "One hundred thousand troops there in Pakistan is not the answer."

One hundred thousand troops in Iraq is the answer?  No?  What then is the answer?  The President continued:

"It's someone saying 'Guess what' and then the kinetic action begins," he said, meaning an informer disclosing bin Laden's location.

The Post's English translation is helpful if incomplete.  It suggests Bush's presumable answer to neoCon William Kristol's call for a further infusion of troops to rescue the former Iraq.  Kristol has a point: If "the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad," as the President told the nation on Sept. 11, 2006, wouldn't it make sense to send reinforcements when that battle is being lost?  Or do you suffer defeat "with the army you have"?  Surely some bold journalist will someday ask Bush this question.  Until then, we may surmise that more troops there aren't the answer: the thing to do is to wait for the "Guess what" that means an informer has disclosed the location of,....well, you know, the evildoers.  Then you'll see some kinetic action, maybe of the kind that began when bin Laden was cornered in Tora Bora.  Which was...sending a hundred thousand troops to Iraq?

Meanwhile, the Vice President has disclosed that at least part of his job is to "think about the unthinkable" --you know, the out-of-the-box stuff Herman Kahn dug but John Nance Garner never was much into.  Wilde's foxhunters have now turned to quail, and the unspeakable are in full pursuit of the unthinkable.  Somebody wake me when the kinetic action begins.

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