Minor correction to your sidebar item "Nathan Newman on why Lakoff isn't enough": the post you linked was by guest blogger "RalphTaylor", not Mr. Newman. But you're right that it's a good post, and that Newman is worth reading too.
Patrick,
It was and is rational to cheerlead, to keep people from giving up early. It's rational to feel bad right now about the disappointing results (and they'll be disappointing even if Kerry miraculously runs the rest of the electoral college table -- he'll still have lost the popular vote by a big margin).
Rational people (and me besides) will continue to respect your opinions and check by often to see what you have to say.
Trite but well-meant advice: do something else for a while. Go for a hike, to an art museum, home to the folks, or whatever recharges you, and come back refreshed.
Maxwell Smart Sixpack here: Well, presumably if an alleged terrorist gets pulled it's for using a known/suspected alias that he/she doesn't realize is known. Once apprehended, he/she hopefully won't get another chance to try.
Re repeats, it might be worthwhile to know if [all/many/only a few] suspected political cases have suffered repeat instances of hassling. (I realize at least one person mentioned in the piece has.) The TSA docs seemed to portray an agency at least concerned enough to dislike the bad publicity involved, if admittedly not one willing to share very much of its conclusions with the rest of us.
Again, I agree that safeguards need to be in place, and understand the status quo isn't acceptable. But I guess I'm not sure yet that this is an open-and-shut case of nascent fascism. By which I thought political repression was implied, not lack of adequate accountability.
The lists may seem stupid and easy to evade, but I think it would be even more stupid not to have them.
I think the issue is still mainly one of accountability so far; I agree 100% that there should be clarity about how people get on and off the lists used by the TSA to screen airline passengers.
An Indymedia reprint of a Wall Street Journal article suggests that some of the hassling may have to do with name-similarity issues and old-fashioned software (SOUNDEX, Census 1900s stuff) used to suggest similarities between suspect names and those in line at the ticket counter. Also, if any of a group purchasing a ticket has a false positive, the whole group gets pulled aside. It may be that Gordon or Adams are neither "no-fly" nor "selectee", but "too similar in name+attributes".
This could be, in part, yet another case of weighing the cost of false positives against that of false negatives, in this case when trying to screen out bad guys from planes.
Looking at the ACLUNC press release, I see little to disprove the WSJ hypothesis. Or to prove it. As I said, though, accountability is important to me too, and the burden should be on the TSA to demonstrate it's not abusing the no-fly lists for political purposes, and provide ways for people to appeal/clarify their status to avoid repeated hassling.
I've written about the Gordon/Adams case a few times, most recently here. That doesn't make me an expert or right, of course.
While the TSA docs are heavily redacted, there is a great deal of mention (p26-forward) of the false positive" issue, and of a proposal for "trusted traveller" status. Haven't read far enough to see what became of that.
I agree, Padilla has the right to a lawyer and a proper hearing. I've felt like "I don't know enough about it" too long on this. Of course I don't know enough about it; no one tells me anything. For the US government to treat an American citizen like this is unacceptable.
Ashcroft et al should be forced to explain themselves, and to accept solutions to any valid concerns they may have about the Padilla case: lawyer selected by lottery and/or sequestered, grand jury level security, whatever. Ie, I'm open to some creative modifications of standard procedure. But not this.
That kind of distribution from an urban point release is dubious; either it will fall out of the air faster or travel much further, depending on particle size. (Think of trying to distribute very fine dust evenly over a large area in a breeze. Not straightforward.)
Yes, the authors assume the plume extends about 180km downwind, with a 95% probability of infection inside of a 50 by 1km ellipse, with probabilities declining to 65% in a ~90 by ~2km "tail region". UV kills off the spores that travel further.
Infection probabilities are assumed age and spore count dependent. The authors calculate the spore counts from 1kg anthrax (=10^15 spores)are sufficient to infect 1.5million of the postulated 11.5 million metro population downwind.
Wein et al do seem to assume the attacker would wait for the wind to be in the right direction, and the point release to be positioned for maximum effect in the metropolitan region.
A figure shows that as spore counts climb from 10,000 to 30,000, 15 year olds are assumed to have a ~30-70% chance of infection, while 55 year olds have a ~70-95% chance, etc. I.e., older people show a much steeper rise in infection as spore counts climb.
Most of the paper is about how different public health scenarios work better or worse given these assumptions. The authors assert all their estimates are conservative because of assuming perfect medical decision making re whose lives can and can't be saved.
But the most important thing is what public health plan is followed. If Cipro isn't given to everyone -- not just symptomatics -- in an affected region right away, the base model estimates that the death toll climbs to 660,000.
None of this seems far-fetched or unsubstantiated to me. Coming up with a kg of anthrax spores is no snap, of course, but once you do, you could probably be quite an effective mass murderer.
The primary thing preventing such a weapon from being used is that the expected response is nuclear overkill.
How would you know who released it?
Graydon,
Wein et al assume "weaponized" anthrax akin to that responsible for the accidental Sverdlovsk outbreak -- not the super-duper stuff in the Senate/NBC/etc envelopes, I think. It also assumes a light wind, 5 m/s=~11mph. Not sure what you mean by "perfect" distribution; the study assumes there would be a Gaussian plume across the metro area, with people inside the plume more at risk than those at the edges or beyond the plume. The study does ignore factors like protection from buildings or atmospheric complexities. A terrorist might compensate for such uncertainties by carrying 2kg in his/her knapsack instead of 1.
The delivery system is +/- irrelevant: point release. All the Wein scenario might require is a couple of Fedex pouches and an observation deck or rooftop somewhere.
Anthrax isn't contagious, so Wein et al don't assume that. But it is very, very quick to proceed from infection to death, if left untreated. That's why it's potentially such a devastating weapon: by analogy, the house burns down before the fire truck gets there, especially if the whole city is on fire.
Wein et al argue for mass anthrax vaccinations and/or prepositioning Cipro and training volunteers, not for invading Iraq. But they do imply this threat is greater than you or Gene Healy seem willing to believe.
The Wein et al PNAS article is here, but costs $5. I've printed it to get some of the information in this comment.
Apparently well-conceived, non-patently-stupid Stanford Business School models demonstrate that a kilo of anthrax spores, released from the height of a tall building, could cause 60,000 deaths in a US metropolitan area -- and that's if no one had to wait in line for Cipro.
The more likely scenarios -- neighborhood Cipro distribution centers -- weigh in at ~120,000 dead. I don't think it will do to laugh off the "lesser" WMD threats.
I found a few other links about the study. The principal author is an operations research specialist, Lawrence Wein, here's some background.
Hear, hear.
For a book length case against Mr. Lee, see "Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History", by Alan T. Nolan. Some of that book's charges are questionable: it's not reasonable to have expected Lee to give up after Gettysburg, although pointing out that it wasn't just Grant's armies who suffered high casualty rates is fair game. (The "failure to give up" charge earns a demerit from James McPherson, who gives the book what I'd call a B+ review in "Drawn by the Sword.") The "Lee as traitor" and "Lee as post-war revanchist" sections were new ground to me.
The Amazon 2.5-star rating is a badge of honor. The reader reviews are interesting in their own right; at least one reviewer suggests that Thomas Connelly's "The Marble Man" may be a better historical re-evaluation.
[continue what is maybe a digression] I'll take the human shield report with a grain or two of salt. But isn't what you suggest pretty much shooting the messenger, yehudit? It's conceivable that PNH/TNH are more resigned to than convinced or overjoyed by any of our own comments here. As ever, it's in our enlightened self-interest not to advocate bans based on points of view. [end digression, maybe?]
The more I read about the museum and library, the sadder I get. I don't mean to soft-pedal what happened, and I accept that there may well be American responsibility, even by military standards under the circumstances. I don't know.
Even if the war was "not in our name" -- but especially if we supported it: what, if anything, can we help do about these losses? I imagine none of us want Iraqis permanently associating their new liberties with the loss of their heritage. Even if we "just" care about retrieving the lost artifacts, we should support whatever grass-roots efforts come along to help restore these antiquities to the Iraqi people.
Mark Kleimann is probably not the only one to suggest a combination of payments and amnesty to just get the stuff back, if possible. Money collected for this purpose might also serve as a reward for information helping catch and convict the more organized thieves and fences.
Via Moira Breen, I see that Archaeology Magazine is following the story, of course; maybe they will organize some way for us to help retrieve the looted artifacts.
Tell it to Kanan, Avram. I rate his stature as a spokesman for Iraqis slightly higher than yours, Patrick's, or mine. Patrick bet what Iraq would remember, Makiya says what he and those he believes he speaks for will remember. They're probably both right.
What happened to the museum was sad, what happened to this father is terrible; I think I'd go crazy if that happened to me, and I have just one little girl. This warblogger, if I must accept the term, doesn't feel very triumphant at all. But I'm not impressed by Quiggins' Monday morning quarterbacking about museum security measures either.
Right: tell it to Quiggin. I'm off.
As a minor side note, I'll also suggest that someone who loots a museum or a hospital -- a country's patrimony and health -- may also be someone who helped loot a whole country for the preceding years, more often than would randomly be the case. People who looted Saddam's palaces, or ministries of oppression, on the other hand, may not.
I think what Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya wrote on April 10 is worth reading, both about looting (in passing) and more importantly about what Iraq will remember:Yesterday was also a special day for the people of the United States. Their army triumphed. It fought a just war more or less alone and in spite of opposition from countries that put commercial and other interests before the destruction of tyranny. We will remember those who stood by our side.(I'll take the liberty of correcting Mr. Makiya's oversight in the emotion of the moment, and adding the UK, Australia, and other combatant allies to that list.)
Re museums and hospitals: the war is even now not fully over in Baghdad. To put American troops and vehicles near hospitals and museums too soon might well have drawn combat to those buildings, divided and endangered American forces or both. All of these risks were arguably worse prospects than looting.
I'm not there, so I'm not in a good position to judge those tradeoffs on an hour-to-hour basis, even if I had the training to do so. Neither, of course, is Mr. Quiggin.
The Blog Community At Work Again
I sat through a Steven Brill popup ad to bring this news to those of us without cable or Salon subscriptions: it turns out, of course, that Laura Miller isn't profiling Jon Stewart in that quote.
Just did a quick search on the discussion so far, and got the message: cannot find "blair."
Lost in the discussion about the Greens (where I agree with Patrick) is any about the inherent contradiction in the Guardian's (and thus Patrick's) point. Whether you find it necessary to believe that the Administration is populated by fools, knaves, and criminals is beside the point of whether they may be right about the threat Saddam poses. Blair illustrates that a reasonable human being, presumably privy to somewhat more information than the rest of us, can in fact agree about that threat.
As Mark Kleiman writes,All of that said, it looks to me as if we have a choice between fighting Iraq before the Iraqis have fully deployed nuclear and biological weapons, or after. And that still looks to me like an easy choice.
The question is still, what is "horrific"? Dangling someone out a tenth story window is horrific. Hooding someone is less so, waking him up at odd hours is less so.
Simply an incidental point of information:
"Terry Jones" rang a bell, and I checked: here's an article of his called "Spare our blushes and put a sack on it", the subtitle is"Taping a bag over the heads of Afghan prisoners stops us feeling anything for them, so we can breakfast in peace"That and his article seem a bit overwrought to me. But given the Bagram deaths, maybe the notion of "slippery slope" applies.
A proposal: log and videotape all interrogations, with copies to independent oversight, say a Congressional office. Doesn't solve everything, but it seems like a decent start. (And we should do something like this in the US, too, as the Central Park jogger case screwup suggests.)
One thing about the debate so far: it seems to be about the "I know it when I see it" definition of torture. What I wonder about is if we move away from the "Marathon Man", electric shocks, etcetera revoltingly etcetera definition, to a wider definition, say this one:For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
Depending on your point of view about "severe," "suffering," and "mental," this might include disorientation via irregular lighting, lack of quiet, sleep deprivation, and so forth.
This debate has come up (I think) because of the Bagram homicide findings, which seem to not be a gray area at all. But what about the "gray areas"? Do we all buy into the proscriptions we've heard about against hooding and so forth? Myself: I admit I'm not sure. These are probably ineffective measures by themselves, but they may help simple trickery be more effective: your buddies already gave you up, etc.
The "pragmatic" objection to any torture -- the information is just what the victim thinks you want to hear -- isn't all that convincing to me, by the way: torturers will generally check what's been screamed, and victims will therefore get it right eventually.
I'm very much with you, Patrick (and others), in your discussion with Oliver so far. But do you think we risk our souls or morals (and I'm not being sarcastic or ironic) when we use [any/high/extreme -- define!] psychological pressure, rather than physical pain, in interrogation?
I once read this, and took the advice:Joshua Micah Marshall reviews Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm here, discussing (and pretty much agreeing with) what Marshall calls "the skeptical case for regime change in Iraq." Important reading for those who (like this weblog) regard the Administration's arguments for war as incoherent. Pollack and Marshall present the arguments that aren't incoherent. They should be read.
Did you? Yourself? What's changed?
Henley takes aim at the Cliff Notes version of Pollack's argument and evidence, not the full version. Even on those terms, he succeeds only if you're willing to forget that Saddam started two major wars and seems unlikely to mellow with age if he acquires nuclear weapons.
There are also better but narrower examples of failed deterrence than Pollack probably wanted to waste op-ed space on. For example, Saddam periodically lobbed missiles at Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War despite Baghdad being much closer to the front than Tehran, and thus certain of much worse retaliation by the planeload. He'd get the retaliation, stop the missile attacks -- but then do it all over again a few weeks or months later. (Not to mention the whole war itself being a colossal miscalculation.)
Deterrence isn't just about WMD, it's about figuring the odds; Saddam is terrible at it, and I don't want to see how bad he is at it with nuclear weapons in his arsenal.
Those weapons are on their way. The German BND estimated about 3 to 6 years in 2001. The Iraqis probably had a workable plan for a nuclear weapon, minus the fissionable material, in 1991. They can go the hard way and stealthily produce their own U235 or plutonium, or just try, try again to smuggle enough into the country from wherever: N.Korea, Byelorussia, Pakistan, who knows. Inspectors or not, the way we'll probably find out about an Iraqi nuclear weapon is when it's exploded.
Luckily, we have UN resolutions sanctioning Iraqi WMD development in general, and referencing the Chapter 7 authority to make a war about it. So the international community will undoubtedly rise to the occasion, find Saddam in material breach, and disarm him by force.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 2 |
| 2003 | 23 |
| 2002 | 15 |
Total: 41 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Thomas Nephew:
Show all comments by Thomas Nephew.