Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The Philosophical Lexicon: quaint diversion or instrument of hegemony? (Hellie)

The 2008 update of the Philosopher's Lexicon is a bit exasperating. A preliminary concern is that the treatment of continental figures continues to be shabby -- contemptuous and dismissive.

Perhaps a bit more distressing is the PL's continued heavy slant toward a certain generation of philosophers. It's hard to find a philosopher on the list born much after 1950 (the sole exception I find being Neander, with Korsgaard and Shapiro born in '52 and '51, respectively).

This isn't plausibly due to the unlikeliness of a philosopher's doing anything worthy of being immortalized in this way until their late 50s. First, the previous edition of the PL was compiled in 1987. At the time, only philosophers born before 1930 were that old, but there are plenty of entries younger than that (Plantinga, AO Rorty, Searle, Stroud, Block, Boyd, Chihara, Follesdal, Dennett, Parfit, Desousa, Donnellan, Dretske, Dworkin, ... just to get through the Ds). And second, just to pull a few out of the sky, surely such entries as the following are as amusing and informative as many current entries: luddite (a philosopher who likes technology), side (an aspect of a time-slice), William (a father of a necessary being), to chalm (to control the behavior of a zombie), to leit (to control the behavior of an academic discipline).

Much more credible as an explanation is that Dennett, the compiler of the PL, was himself born in 1942, and the doctrines, peculiarities, and insider humor of philosophers after his generation have largely eluded his attention. Seen in this light, the PL as currently constituted can be plausibly regarded as a (perhaps somewhat self-congratulatory) joke among the members of Dennett's generation.

The top-heaviness of the PL might be thought to be not entirely without negative consequences. It is natural for an undergraduate major or beginning grad student to regard the PL as a guide to the stereotypical doctrines or styles of the most important philosophers; absence from the list, by contrast, would signal marginality. If so, the PL hegemonizes Dennett's generation and marginalizes those who come afterward.

If the PL were a mere samizdat or internet barnacle collecter (deaths of philosophers, breakup lines of philosophers, and the like), this would not matter much or at all. But as published by Blackwell, the PL has a sort of canonical status as capturing humorously the profession's self-conception. While the 1987 version was an amusing relic or snapshot of the field at the time, the 2008 update takes on a somewhat darker tone.

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Lewis in Harper's -- twice! (Hellie)

The "Readings" section of this month's Harper's magazine features an excerpt from 'Divine evil', a posthumous article by David Lewis, prepared from the Nachlass by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher has done a fine job of rendering Lewis's familiar prose style.

The central premiss of the argument is that -- since he damns the insubordinate to eternal torture -- the god of Christianity is far more evil than any earthly dictator. Worshiping such a god is thus far more evil than admiring, say, Hitler. Unfortunately, those who admire certain Christians, when admirable -- eg Mother Theresa -- also acquire a bit of evil vicariously; and so on. "Leaving aside those who find nothing admirable in humanity, everyone will be tainted with divine evil".

The conclusion manifests a dark streak in late papers by Lewis present also in the posthumous 'How many lives has Schroedinger's cat?' The depressing conclusion of that paper is that -- if quantum mechanics is correct in its fundamentals -- each of us is rationally bound to expect an eternal (earthly) life of extreme torment (without the assistance of the Christian god!).

More brightly, the back page "Findings" section (in which often speculative scholarly theses are juxtaposed, tersely and amusingly presented as fact) ends on a cheerfully Ludovician note: "All possible universes exist".

But is it H2O? (Wilson)

For the first time: water has been detected on a planet outside our solar system.

Music out of context (Wilson)

and philosophers in the Post.  Plato, Leibniz, Hume, Kant (who was "obviously right"... maybe), and Paul Guyer are invoked along the way to understanding this mysterious phenomenon.

The wholly privatized family (Wilson)

Unicef has just released a report assessing the well-being of children in the top 21 wealthiest countries (for which there is appropriate data; see below).

The [report] looks at six dimensions of child well-being: material well-being, health and safety, educational well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's own perceptions of their well-being.

Both the U.S. and Britain were in the bottom two-thirds of five of the six categories, and came in dead last overall, by a considerable margin.  The overall results:

(Note: Australia, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic, South Korea, and Turkey were excluded due to lack of data).The U.S. came in last on health and safety:

While none of the countries studied can claim "mission accomplished" in securing child well-being in every measurement, the United States fared particularly poorly. It ranked last in health and safety, primarily because of high rates of infant mortality, low birth weight, and deaths from accidents and injuries.

No great surprise, given the persistent legacies of Reagan and Thatcher:

One of the study's researchers, Jonathan Bradshaw, said children fared worse in the US and Britain -- despite high overall levels of national wealth -- because of greater economic inequality and poor levels of public support for families.

“What they have in common are very high levels of inequality, very high levels of child poverty, which is also associated with inequality, and in rather different ways poorly developed services to families with children,” said Bradshaw, a professor of social policy at the University of York in Britain.

“They don’t invest as much in children as continental European countries do,” he said, citing the lack of day care services in both countries and poorer health coverage and preventative care for children in the U.S.

More discussion of causal factors here.

Objective: incapacitation (Wilson)

It appears that the U.S. government has successfully driven Jose Padilla insane.

Mary didn't raise no fool (Wilson)

Cenk Uygur argues by analogy that those 25% of U.S.ers expecting the second coming in 2007 are certifiably insane:

Imagine for a second if instead of Jesus, some psycho was waiting for a magical creature named Fred to come save him this year and suck him up into the sky. Now, who doesn't think that man needs serious counseling and perhaps medical supervision? Now, you change Fred into Jesus, and you have 25% of the country.

In the comment thread Freespeach has an induction-based argument that even believers shouldn't believe this:

Jeezus is way too smart to come back in 2007, think about it.

He would probably just go out to speak at some some peace rally. Then he would get arrested, be sent to GITMO with no trial (at least last time he got a freakin trial) where he would be subjected to water boarding and eventually have his balls stomped on.

Would you come back?  No.

Jezzus ain't stupid, Mary didn't raise no fool.

Like it says on those funky bracelets, what would Jesus do?

Jeezus would get the hell out of the USA and fast. This country just isn't tolerant enough for a dude like Jesus. Too bad we could use his help.

New year's baby (Wilson)

Yesterday the first global super-union was born... or anyway conceived:

British, American and German unions are to forge a pact to challenge the power of global capitalism in a move towards creating an international union with more than 6 million members. [...]

Derek Simpson, general secretary of Amicus, said: 'Our aim is to create a powerful single union that can transcend borders to challenge the global forces of capital. I envisage a functioning, if loosely federal, multinational organisation within the next decade.'

Welcome, Internationale!

Happy baby Jesus's birthday (Wilson)

In the last years, and in the nature of the case, we've usually been the bearers of bad news; but alongside the many problems, the world is full of cool, interesting and/or (benignly) weird stuff.   Hence we invite you to occasionally visit off the record to share a bit of what we come across.  Happy holidays.

A new declaration of independence (Wilson)

Last week, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommended to those drafting the 2007 Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (also at NIST) that voting systems be required to be "software independent". Officially, that's a system such that "a previously undetected change or error in its software [assuming it has such] cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome".  Unofficially, that's a system with a voter-verified paper trail.

The take-home line from the report, concerning software-dependent Direct Record Electronic systems:

Potentially, a single programmer could “rig” a major election.

The problem is not just that DRE systems are presently insecure, but that there is no feasible way of making them secure:

[V]oting systems in general are not developed according to rigorous models of secure code development nor tested with the rigor of other security-critical applications. Experts reject that even these measures would be sufficient for reliably detecting all errors or malicious code hidden in a voting systems.

Hence the need for a software-independent audit trail.   Of claims that software independence isn't necessary since "there is no evidence of intentionally-introduced malicious code or fraud in voting systems" and "election procedures are effective at keeping voting systems free of intentionally introduced fraud", the writers note

[These claims] do not hold up against the enormous evidence of computer fraud that has occurred in other areas of IT and that has or is likely to occur in voting systems, given the billions spent on elections as well as the rich history of electoral fraud.

Moreover, claims that everything is A-OK are suspect, given that there isn't any way, independent of the system being tested, to check the results.  As Barbara Samorajczyk put it, after conceding a House of Delegates seat to her marginally-ahead opponent, "there wasn't any meaningful way to do a recount [...] we cannot recount the machine".  (Exit polls can do some work here, of course, but their results are approximate and subject to manipulation.)

The committee in charge of drafting the VVSG 2007 guidelines rejected a proposal adopting the recommendation that all systems be required to be software independent; however, they later unanimously accepted a revised proposal which required that future systems be so.  Existing systems are to be "grandfathered in"; one hopes this doesn't mean Jenna for Prez.

Overall this strikes me as very good news, even though VVSG 2007 is still at the draft stage, and even though these guidelines (hence "requirements") are voluntary.  When word gets out about the need for software independence those forced to vote on DRE machines will rightfully raise hell with their state election officials and representatives, and U.S.ers will slowly but surely free themselves from this new form of tyranny.

Impressive honesty (Wilson)

Jimmy Carter must have known that even the title of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid would draw fire, in daring to implicate Israel in systematic racial oppression of Palestinians.  But evidently he's had it up to here with this particular denial of the obvious, especially as perpetuated by his fellow Democrats:

[Good Morning America host] Robin Roberts told Carter that "many people find surprising that you come down a little hard on Israel, and that there have been some key Democrats who have distanced themselves a little bit from your view on Israel."

"In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said 'it is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based suppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously,'" Roberts said. "What is your response to that?"

"Well, Robin, I have spent the last 30 years trying to find peace for Israel and Israel's neighbors, and the purpose of this book is to do that," Carter responded. "But you can't find peace unless you address the existing issues honestly and frankly."

Carter said that there was "no doubt now that a minority of Israelis are perpetuating apartheid on the people in Palestine, the Palestinian people."

[...]   

Carter called Israel's occupation the "prime cause" of continuing violence in the Middle East.

"And contrary to the United Nations resolutions, contrary to the official policy of the United States government, contrary to the Quartet so-called road map, all of those things -- and contrary to the majority of Israeli people's opinion -- this occupation and confiscation and colonization of land in the West Bank is the prime cause of a continuation of violence in the Middle East," said Carter.

"And what is being done to the Palestinians under Israeli domination is really atrocious," Carter continued. "It's a terrible affliction on these people."

In his book, Carter argues that "peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens and honor its own previous commitments by accepting its legal borders."

Indeed.  An excerpt from Carter's book can be found here.

UCLA police torture petition (Hellie)

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field has written in calling attention to the following petition to the UCLA PD, concerning their recent public torture of a student by electric shock:

We condemn the recent excessive and unnecessary force used in the case of the Iranian American student abused at the UCLA Powell Library. This is a case of police brutality and warrants immediate action taken against the police involved.

Click here to sign.

UCLA UniCops torture student (Hellie)

Apparently some UCLA cops were doing an ID check at a computer cluster last night; a student named Mostafa Tabatabainejad didn't have his ID, and when the cops grabbed at Tabatabainejad to rush him out, he started loudly complaining. One thing led to another, and the cops ended up shocking Tabatabainejad with tasers five times, at least a few times because he wouldn't, or couldn't, stand up. This was all in full view of at least a dozen other students. Most of this was caught on video, which you can see here.

The cops' self-serving press release is here. Central claims in this press release are contradicted by the witness reports I cite above, but in any case, for chrissakes, why is anything Tabatabainejad did worthy of being tortured? 

If you're interested in giving the folks at UCLA a piece of your mind:

Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams
Telephone: 310-825-2151
Fax: 310-206-6030
Email: chancellor@conet.ucla.edu

UCLA PD: (310) 825-1491

This will lead to a very high level resignation -- any parent becoming aware of this torture video, and they will become aware of it, will fear that their kid will be the next victim of the renegade campus torture cops.

UPDATE: the cops compounded their intimidation by threatening to shock-torture bystanding kids asking for badge numbers -- according to the ACLU, this is an "illegal assault".

UPDATE: Jessica Wilson compiled this list of UCLA admin and cop big shot emails:  

adamsj@ucpd.ucla.edu, paul.schwartz@ucop.edu, cstogsdill@support.ucla.edu, chancellor@conet.ucla.edu, evc@conet.ucla.edu, mgray@conet.ucla.edu, guido@ucpd.ucla.edu, baguiao@ucpd.ucla.edu, walton@ucpd.ucla.edu, garza@ucpd.ucla.edu, nyx@ucpd.ucla.edu,  ngreenstein@ucpd.ucla.edu, devivero@ucpd.ucla.edu, godines@ucpd.ucla.edu
 

Mass abduction targets Baghdad research institute (Wilson)

Between 100 and 150 staff and visitors were kidnapped this morning from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Scholarships and Cultural Relations Directorate in the downtown Karradah district.

Iraq's higher education minister immediately ordered all universities closed until security improvements are made, saying he was ''not ready to see more professors get killed.''

''I have only one choice which is to suspend classes at universities. We have no other choice,'' Abed Theyab said in an address to parliament.

Evidently the 80 or so gunmen, wearing blue camouflage uniforms of the type worn by police commandos, had an easy time of it, closing off the surrounding streets and receiving no resistance from the 4 ministry guards.  The neighborhood police chief is under investigation along with some of his officers.

The abductions were the most brazen attack yet on Iraqi academics, who have often been targeted by insurgents. Recent weeks have seen a university dean and prominent Sunni geologist murdered, bringing the death toll among educators to at least 155 since the war began.

Thousands of professors and researchers have fled to neighboring countries to escape the lawlessness and sectarian strife, robbing the country of its brain trust.

The academics apparently were singled out for their relatively high public stature, vulnerability and known views on controversial issues in a climate of deepening Islamic fundamentalism.

Shut out (Hellie)

CNN warehoused a stock of pink pixels to mark GOP pickups on these three pages. They haven't needed them yet -- but their logistics team was fully taxed in keeping the streams of baby blue flowing through the tubes of the internets.

This marks what, as Bill Montgomery notes, may turn out to be an extremely rare electoral outcome: while not every race in the midterm has been decided yet, it seems that no Democratic-held Senate or House seat or governorship was picked up by a Republican -- apparently such a shut out has never happened before.

Pre-election weekend linky post (Hellie)

• A cheering reflection on the cultural underpinnings of the left blogosphere political movement. Especially cheering when read as a sort of "happy face" take on the value of bricolage in response to Thomas Frank's depressing doctrine of the context of cool. Also most excellently proceeding from the core Lennon-ist exhortation to "try something new".
• Vids: good natured people and one fucking psycho. (Though I note that Big Time manifests a bit of stung-ness in response to a huge dis from his long time bud Ken Adelman.)
• Ramsey Clark, former USAG and Saddam's lawyer, worries about "victor's justice".
• There's a good deal to read on the incredibly hilarious "101st fighting keyboarders fuckup" reported by the Times over the weekend; most cheering is that Bush considered it a pet project and even engaged in a bit of sympathetic interpretative prediction of the predicted reaction to the sweet cherries that the 101st would pluck from his document treasure trove: "Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war." " Note that this anecdote is from last March's Weekly Standard! [Backstory; more: apparently Laurie Mylroie and some other crazies, worried about the evaporating WMD justification for the Iraq invastion, enlisted PowerLine's moronic "Big Trunk" Mirengoff and others in pressuring a pair of congressmen to pressure Bush to pressure Bush's third CIA boss, Negroponte, to release 2 million pages of captured Iraqi docs on line, against standard intel procedure (and fucking boneheaded common sense!). Or something like that. The goal was for an "army of Davids" -- in InstaIgnorance's asinine phrase -- to open-source translate them out of Arabic to provide the retrospective propaganda that would induce the war critics to shut up. Because we know how the right wing blogosphere is so knowledgeable about other cultures and so public spirited. For months, the IAEA was warning the Cheney Admin to take the docs down since they tell you in detail in Arabic how to build a nuke, info that the IAEA suppressed from the public for decades -- until last March. Needless to say, the Cheneyites paid no attn until the NYT broke the story over the weekend. The national security party at work. I've been rotflmao all weekend!]
• A very cool formula to predict the outcome of a given congressional race without polls.
• The Clinton folk wargamed an Iraq takeover in 1999 and predicted that even with 400K troops, the likely outcome would be chaos. Rummy's New Model Army tried to do it with a third of that. Result? Chaos! (Incidentally, I've never seen a decent explanation of just why Rummy digs the light military so much. Maybe his thought is just as straightforward as this: with the same manpower a light military can fuck up a lot more places than a heavy military.)
• Excellent! Daniel Ortega, a true peoples' hero, appears poised to make his comeback. Caveat: he used to be a Good Guy, overthrowing one of the more vicious Central American caudillos, and valiantly stood up for years against a ruinous US proxy war, dunno what he's been up to these days.

Run away! Run away! (Wilson)

Oh, couldn't it have been predicted.  In the face of the coming Democratic onslaught (more of a motivation, evidently, than the ongoing Iraqi slaughter) many big-name cheerleaders for the war on Iraq have suddently gone anti-war, anti-Bush, and more generally anti-Republican.  Three days ago, invasion evangelists Sullivan and Hitchens outdid each other in overt sneering at Bush, having special fun with Bush's claim that things were going "fantastic" in Iraq, with Hitchens suggesting that Bush is a hallucinating incompetent, and Sullivan saying that Bush's claim indicated that he was "unhinged" and had "lost his mind".  Hitchens, coming out strong with his lee to port, rejected his characterization as a "conservative", stating that he "has no [dinner?--ed.] party affiliation"; Sullivan advised voters to take Bush's failure into account and indeed, spoke of the election as "an intervention".

As of yesterday, we learn that neo-conmen Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and David Frum have decided that invading Iraq wasn't such a good idea, after all:

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'

Not that Perle et al. disclaim their PNAC policies, of course.  The fault lies in the implementation, you see: they just didn't count on Bush's [sic] admin being so incompetent, nor on the viciousness of the resistance.  Neo-cons don't seem to realize that such extrinsic failures don't get them off the hook; even putting aside the ludicrous and murderous tenets of the PNAC agenda, neocons are specifically responsible for the disaster in Iraq in their vision of invasion's failing to incorporate the likely contingencies.

UPDATE: A particularly outrageous cowardly lion denial is discussed here.

Military papers to call for Rummy's head on Monday

That's the day before the election. link:

An editorial scheduled to appear on Monday in Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times, calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The papers are sold to American servicemen and women. They are published by the Military Times Media Group, which is a subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc.

Here is the text of the editorial, an advance copy of which we received this afternoon.

----------------

Time for Rumsfeld to go

"So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth."

That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

But until recently, the "hard bruising" truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "mission accomplished," the insurgency is "in its last throes," and "back off," we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples.

Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.

Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."

Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on "critical" and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for the security of their new government and their nation.

But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.

 

For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.

And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.

Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.

This is a mistake.

It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.

These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.

And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:

Donald Rumsfeld must go.

1+1=387K (Wilson)

So that's where Joe's petty cash is going.

Why does Joe Lieberman have a paramilitary brigade? (Hellie)

Read all about it.

Fish (Hellie)

The Decider annoyed a lot of people with his dog-whistle claim that Iraq's current descent into chaos will in the fullness of time look like a historical "comma". I've concluded he's right: human atrocities at nearly any level of badness look exceedingly trivial in comparison to the end of fish -- apparently on schedule to occur some time in my seventies. The benign and familiar, relaxing and graceful, beautiful and tasty fish, metaphor for revolutionary organizing, occupant of our planet for half a billion years, incubator of the bone, is -- if present trends continue -- on the way out, as a result of a mere 100 years of superexploitation, or so sez a team of fancy scientists. (I got the impression their focus was merely on fishing, and didn't account for, e.g., the acidification of the seas due to increases in atmospheric CO2, which imperils shellfish and their plankton; so my armchair estimate is that the collapse could occur even faster. But what do I know.)

Half a billion years is about 10% of the age of the earth -- hard to miss on a really big historical scale; by comparison humans have been around for what, .01% of the age of the earth, and the industrial assault on fish doesn't show up until the seventh decimal place.

The good news: protecting fisheries can bring their populations back, and at present "only" about 30% of species are in a "state of collapse" (at 10% or less of natural populations). One hopes that around Jan 2009 there will be a US govt with priorities that are not utterly insane, and thinking people of the world will start to organize to prevent this calamity.

Lieberman's "street money" starts to get press in CT (Hellie)

Backstory: the "endlessly hypocritical" Joe Lieberman reported $387K in undifferentiated "petty cash" expenditures in his September campaign expense disclosure. Petty cash is by FEC ruling limited to 100 bucks or under. What a huge lot of burgers and gas fillups that is! By comparison Ned spent under $500 in the same period (no cite, I don't recall where exactly I saw that latter figure). Also such disbursements are to be carefully itemized. So Joe's breaking the law. For a while, the story languished in the press.

Now apparently the CT press is getting on the stick. That's great. The most reasonable suspicion is that the missing $387K has gone for machine-politics style "street money". As the just cited blogger puts it, "street money is wrong. The public knows that instinctively"; so that if word gets out to the general public, "it would tank his campaign".

Spread the word.

Linky post (Hellie)

• Talk about reaction formation! This story is a real treat for lovers of one of Brian's favorite concepts. Apparently Ted Haggard, one of the fathers of the contemporary American Taliban, and the major player behind the theocratization of the USAF (his megachurch is right across from the Air Force Academy), has been involved in a sexual relationship with a male prostitute for the last three years, apparently also engaging in "p&p" or enhancing the experience by smoking crystal. Dude, stay off the crystal, that stuff will make your teeth fall out. UPDATE: I first learned about Haggart in a Harper's story last year -- I'm now reminded of the most kitchily theoerotic big paintings they have hanging in the lobby. Click the link, they're hysterical.
• Why is Stanford University, my alma mater, the lying right-wing propagandist Thomas Sowell -- who has recently lied about the anti-terrorism positions of a leading member of California's congressional delegation? Answer, Sowell a "fellow" -- translation, on a sinecure post -- at the Hoover Institution. Hoover certainly performs some worthwhile services -- eg their archives are tremendous. Still, providing Sowell and the even more odious and stupid Dinesh D'Souza with the sheen of a Stanford association damages Stanford's good name, as well as blurring the line in the public mind between serious scholarship and propaganda. (Incidentally, if you haven't yet read James Wolcott's devastating D'Souza dis, do so: it's archived here.) Financial pressure obviously won't do anything to get SU to disgorge this pair of goons: Hoover is self-funding -- or rather owned by the corporate and elite paymasters that benefit from its propaganda (ADM "supermarket to the world"; big oil and their auto buddies; big war; big FIRE; assorted individual plutocrats). Still, maybe moral pressure would induce Stanford, if not to pressure Hoover to get rid of these jerks, at least to issue a strong statement deploring their lies and distinguishing what they do from what Stanford is supposed to do. Maybe after the election ...
• US determined to be an "extensive surveillance socieity", with privacy protections just above those of China, Russia, and Malaysia.
• Last night I got round to reading Matt Taibbi's terrifying Rolling Stone piece on the historically dreadful 109th congress. If you haven't read it yet, please do. I found I learned a great deal about legislative mechanics -- also, in grueling detail, how the Republican party has utterly destroyed this central system in US democracy.

Violent suppression in Oaxaca (Wilson)

Events in Oaxaca have taken a turn for the worse (see here and here).  A brief summary:

In a state in Mexico with little money, and not much of that going to public services, teachers hold their annual strike for better wages and against the imposition of fees on children who go to school.

The state government is less tractable this year, and has police attack the teacher's encampment on the zocalo in Oaxaca.  The teachers, without guns, repel this attack.

A huge, loose network of popular groups pledge solidarity with the teachers, and the central demand of the movement - a demand supported by the majority of people in the state - becomes the resignation or removal of the corrupt governor.

At the same time, they begin setting up new forms of self-government, many directly based on or inspired by indigenous forms of local self-government, and creating a democratic coalition called the APPO, to push for broad changes in state and local government to begin respecting, and meeting the needs, of the population, which is majority indigenous and where many have long been excluded from exercising power and left in poverty.

The state government, while ceasing to function in almost all normal respects, wages a low-intensity dirty war against the rebellious population through police officers in plain clothes and, well, thugs. They kill at least thirteen people over the course of the half-year since the people's uprising began, and the government ceased to function (while the governor who precipitated the rebellion refuses to leave).  Meanwhile, the protesters, who have put up barricades in the city of Oaxaca to fend off these attacks, kill no one.

A central part of the struggle, from the start, is control of and access to information. The police destroyed the teacher's small mobile radio station in the initial attack, and student allies soon began broadcasting from a public university.  Supporters of the movement took over a number of government and commercial radio stations, and while state and private security forces have struck back and knocked some stations off the air, the movement is giving voice to a people long excluded from public conversation.

The thirteenth person that the ruling PRI-affiliated attackers kill is an independent, activist journalist from the United States, Brad Will of Indymedia.  Days later, the Mexican federal government sends militarized police into the state.  They do not go after the murderers, but instead use tanks and force to try to dislodge the nonviolent social movements from the city of Oaxaca.  At least one boy is killed by a federal police tear-gas canister.

This disaster has been going on for months, but only recently have a couple of reports shown up in the U.S. media (no doubt because the violent invasion has caused Mexican stocks and the peso to drop); as per usual the reporting (see this article by Mark Stevenson) is misleading in the extreme.  You know the routine by now.  First, follow the "he said she said" blueprint---in particular, for God's sake, don't explicitly contrast the number (in the dozens) of (relatively) wealthy elite bemoaning the lack of tourist income with the number (in the thousands) of protesters willing to put their lives on the line today for a decent and unharrassed life in the future.  Second, leave out crucial information---in particular, don't say who was responsible for the killing of Brad Will, which killing is being cited as grounds for "stopping the violence" by sending in the riot troops.  Third, last but not least, paint the protesters (appropriate subtext intact, of course) as crazed wackos, silly kids, and Dark Others on a tear:

The protests began as a teachers strike but quickly spiraled into chaos as anarchists, students and Indian groups seized the plaza and barricaded streets to demand Ruiz's ouster.

This video of the invasion tells a more accurate story.  Cast your eye upon the row upon row of Darth Vaderian riot police, inexorably marching down upon the unarmed and unresisting protestors, beating their shields with their clubs in unison and backed up by a row of tank-like vehicles each as big as a two-story house.  We've seen those outfits before, of course, in Palestine, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and elsewhere where those in power have realized that when metal meets flesh, the laws of physics are typically on their side.

Among the more pathetic scenes are women pleading with the riot police ("No puedes massacre a su jente!"---"You can't massacre your people!").  These pleadings seemed to have little impact, perhaps because, following recent global trend, the "police" might well be mercenaries who could care less about the people they are violently oppressing.  Still, for the moment, the thugs at least are human. Imagine what protest will be like when their jobs get outsourced---in five, ten years?---to robots of war.

I, Elephant (Wilson)

Elephants pass the "mirror test" for self-awareness:

In a series of experiments, the elephants first explored the mirror -- reaching behind it with their trunks, kneeling before it and even trying to climb it -- gathering clues that the mirror image was just that, an image.  

That was followed by an eerie sequence in which the animals made slow, rhythmic movements while tracking their reflections. Then, like teenagers, they got hooked.

All three conducted oral self-exams. Maxine, a 35-year-old female, even used the tip of her trunk to get a better look inside her mouth. She also used her trunk to slowly pull her ear in front of the mirror so she could examine it -- "self-directed" behaviors the zookeepers had never seen before.

Moreover, one elephant, Happy, 34, passed the most difficult measure of self-recognition: the mark test. The researchers painted a white X on her left cheek, visible only in the mirror. Later, after moving in and out of view of the mirror, Happy stood directly before the reflective surface and touched the tip of her trunk to the mark repeatedly -- an act that, among other insights, requires an understanding that the mark is not on the mirror but on her body.

This is pretty extraordinary.  Besides bottle-nosed dolphins (who also use mirrors to perform self-examinations), elephants are the only non-apes to exhibit such behavior.

"There's too many philosophers in Washington" (Hellie)

So sez the Decider:

Max and I have a philosophy: We believe that you know how to spend your money far better than the federal government does.  (Applause.)  We believe that when you have more of your own money in your pocket to save, spend or invest, the economy benefits. (Applause.)  Democrats believe they can spend your money better than you can.  So over the past five years we have acted on our philosophy and passed the largest tax relief since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. (Applause.) In other words, we just didn't talk about philosophy -- there's too many philosophers in Washington -- we acted.  We got the job done.

Nice in a way to be a paradigm of the "reality-based".

 

Why has Bush bought 150 square miles in northern Paraguay? (Hellie)

Paraguay is a landlocked country in South America, with a population of 6 million. It's one of the least densely populated countries, and has a super-high Gini index. Back in the day, its economy was dominated by a small number of landlords, with big loads of the population squatting on the fringes of their huge estates. The Gini index (the standard measure of income inequality) is predictably high -- 56, by comparison the US is at 45, France at 32, Brazil at 59.

Sounds like a great place for disgraced dictators to hide out.

Apparently also the US has been planning to put up an air base near the Bolivian gas fields, near to Mariscal Estigarribia, close to the Brazilian and Bolivian borders.

Which of these facts best explains this intriguing news item?

An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.

D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."

The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.

Spread the word: doing it is good (Wilson)

Some women talk about their first time.

More memoirs here.

600,000 war deaths in Iraq (Hellie)

Link

Nuclear North Korea (Hellie)

The good folks at the National Security Network need to update their North Korea page:

Under President Bush significant ground has been lost. When he took office, North Korea was adhering to a negotiated freeze on plutonium and may have possessed enough plutonium for one nuclear device. Since then, North Korea may have more than quadrupled its stock of weapons-grade plutonium and breached all previous constraints on its program. Under the Bush administration, North Korea has expelled international nuclear inspectors, withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and produced enough new weapons-grade plutonium for a number of nuclear weapons.

President Bush and Congress have largely neglected the issue of North Korea’s nuclear program, presiding over a significant increase in the threat to the United States and its allies. The administration has rejected any effort to negotiate a freeze and instead insisted upon immediate disarmament. The U.S. effort to create a multilateral negotiating group — known as the six party talks — has been a total failure. These nations have met only five times over four years and produced no significant results, and North Korea is now boycotting the discussions. The United States is seen by states in the region, including China and South Korea, as contributing to the standoff by having recently imposed increased measures to deter North Korean counterfeiting operations, a secondary but important concern.

. . . my jaw dropped when I read the NYTimes's language here:

But the explosion was also the product of more than two decades of diplomatic failure, spread over at least three presidencies. American spy satellites saw the North building a good-size nuclear reactor in the early 1980’s, and by the early 1990’s the C.I.A. estimated that the country could have one or two nuclear weapons. But a series of diplomatic efforts to “freeze” the nuclear program — including a 1994 accord signed with the Clinton administration — ultimately broke down, amid distrust and recriminations on both sides.

Three years ago, just as President Bush was sending American troops toward Iraq, the North threw out the few remaining weapons inspectors living at their nuclear complex in Yongbyon, and moved 8,000 nuclear fuel rods they had kept under lock and key.

Astounding that they're pre-emptively spreading blame to Clinton and being vague about the lines of causation. Clinton's "Agreed Framework" (in which Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs", and in return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations") was as successful as might be hoped for -- NK's nuclear program was on hold during the reign of Clinton. If the Agreed Framework "ultimately broke down", the causation is clear. In August 2002, Bush proclaimed to Woodward "I loathe Kim Jong Il. I've got a visceral reaction to this guy", calling Kim a "pygmy" -- shades of "fuck Saddam, I'm taking him out" -- which could not have possibly been lost on Dear Leader. Bush bizarrely included NK in the "Axis of Evil", then "just as" he proceeded to invade one of the members of this "Axis" -- lo and behold!, no one could have anticipated that! -- NK decided bargaining is no longer in their interest.

Krugman was typically astute here, writing in early '03:

Moreover, there's every reason to take Mr. Bush's viscera seriously. Under his doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. can attack countries it thinks might support terrorism, whether or not they have actually done so. And who decides whether we attack? Here's what Mr. Bush says: "You said we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you." L'état, c'est moi.

So Mr. Bush thinks you're a bad guy — and that makes you a potential target, no matter what you do.

On the other hand, Mr. Bush hasn't gone after you yet, though you are much closer to developing weapons of mass destruction than Iraq. (You probably already have a couple.) And you ask yourself, why is Saddam Hussein first in line? He's no more a supporter of terrorism than you are: the Bush administration hasn't produced any evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Maybe the administration covets Iraq's oil reserves; but it's also notable that of the three members of the axis of evil, Iraq has by far the weakest military.

So you might be tempted to conclude that the Bush administration is big on denouncing evildoers, but that it can be deterred from actually attacking countries it denounces if it expects them to put up a serious fight. What was it Teddy Roosevelt said? Talk trash but carry a small stick?

Your own experience seems to confirm that conclusion. Last summer you were caught enriching uranium, which violates the spirit of your 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration. But the Bush administration, though ready to invade Iraq at the slightest hint of a nuclear weapons program, tried to play down the story, and its response — cutting off shipments of fuel oil — was no more than a rap on the knuckles. In fact, even now the Bush administration hasn't done what its predecessor did in 1994: send troops to the region and prepare for a military confrontation.

So here's how it probably looks from Pyongyang:

The Bush administration says you're evil. It won't offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It won't even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.

The incentives for North Korea are clear. There's no point in playing nice — it will bring neither aid nor security. It needn't worry about American efforts to isolate it economically — North Korea hardly has any trade except with China, and China isn't cooperating. The best self-preservation strategy for Mr. Kim is to be dangerous. So while America is busy with Iraq, the North Koreans should cook up some plutonium and build themselves some bombs.

Again: What game does the Bush administration think it's playing?

What game does the NYTimes think it's playing? The first draft of this bit of history badly needs redrafting.

. . . Especially scary time for this considering these revelations about the Decider's current state of mind:

The President is mad, really, really mad according to the NY Daily News. He and Laura thought things were going well after they exploited "September the 11th" again. Now, between the Foley Republican child sex predator scandal and the Woodward book "State of Denial," W is having a melt-down:

Now, however, friends, aides and close political allies tell the Daily News Bush is furious with his own side for helping create a political downdraft that has blunted his momentum and endangered GOP prospects for keeping control of Congress next month.

Some of his anger is directed at former aides who helped Watergate journalist Bob Woodward paint a lurid portrait of a dysfunctional, chaotic administration in his new book, "State of Denial."

In the obsessively private Bush clan, talking out of school is the ultimate act of disloyalty, and Bush feels betrayed from within.

"He's ticked off big-time," said a well-informed source, "even if what they said was the truth."

The Daily News reports that "steam coming out of [Bush's] ears" over the Foley scandal.
Our president sounds like he is coming unglued.

Foley and the authoritarian mind (Hellie)

This post makes the case that the Foley revelations may mark a deep turning point for the GOP:

Red-state women are the ones who have to deal most intimately with overentitled authoritarian men who regard women as their property. They get to call cops who will decline to take reports or refer for prosecution; face down bosses who think that sexual access comes with the paycheck; and live their lives in the company of men -- even those in their own families who should know better -- who will do whatever it takes to convince themselves that "I know him -- he'd never do that" and besides, "she had it coming."

In this hostile environment, the only defense a woman has is bind herself to the contract that defines the conservative view of male-female relationships. She gives a man her devotion and submission. In return, he promises to provide for and protect her and her children -- even at the cost of his own life. That's the honor code "traditional families" live by, and the only safety women in authoritarian systems have.

These guys broke that contract. Conservative women put their trust in guys like Hastert. They gave him their devotion and support. According to the code, these guys were honor-bound to put themselves on the line for the women and children under their protective care. But when the bad guys came to town -- the very same bad guys they'd been specifically hollering about for decades as the number one reason that we all absolutely must submit to their protection -- our chicken-livered heroes were nowhere to be found.

Partisan favoritism sinks to disgusting new low (Hellie)

You're doubtless familiar with the K Street Project, in which the GOP encouraged business groups to fire Dem lobbyists and replace them with Republicans; with the GOP's purging  of Dems from the CIA; with the GOP's political requirements on working for the Coalition Provisional Authority; with the GOP's differential response to hurricane protection for blue and red areas; etc.

Now we learn that Republican, but not Democratic, congressional pages were warned against child sex predator ex-congressman Mark Foley. How disgusting is that?

When Woodward attacks (Hellie)

Apparently the Washington establishment is washing its hands of the GOPs insanity, corruption, and chaos, and pushing for a return to sane (if of course always elitist!) policy. Watch Bob Woodward's brutal series of revelations on the flagship 60 minutes here: the Bush gang is revealed to be constantly lying to the public, totally self-deluded and out of touch, paralyzed by infighting and misplaced loyalty (viz Cheney's famous "gratitude" to his first boss, Rumsfeld), disconnected from the military, etc. Not like that's news to us of course. Certainly this sort of rhetorical fusillade against the Cheney adminstration has not been seen before in such a high profile setting, to my knowledge -- especially not from the author of the hagiographic and enabling Bush at War. Perhaps Woodward has recently started reading this blog.

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.

Oo, this is fun (Hellie)

Watch Clinton pulverize Fox News scum here.

"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."