One piece of the case against Saddam Hussein that I had accepted unequivocally until now was that he intentionally gassed the Kurdish village of Halabja as an act of genocide. Somehow I missed a New York Times opinion piece from January by Stephen Pelletiere (who has impressive credentials) that states that the Halabja gassing occurred during the course of a battle between Iraq and Iran, and that the citizens of Halabja may have been killed by Iranian chemical weapons. I don’t think this alters the current equation, but I found it shocking enough to mention.

Many people (ahem, conservatives) have criticized former Presidents Carter and Clinton for criticizing President Bush’s approach in convincing other countries that we need to attack Iraq as soon as possible. They can add President Bush (41) to the list.

Update: the full text of Bush Sr’s speech is available, as is a transcript of the question and answer session that followed.

You know, one other reason why we might want to consider not torturing people is that we’ve said we wouldn’t. The US has ratified the UN Convention Against Torture, and we probably ought to live up to it. Granted, some of the countries to which we export people we’ve captured so that they can be tortured are also ratifiers, but you can probably guess that I am opposed to the US torturing by proxy as well as torturing people ourselves.

Yesterday I was reading an article about Jose Padilla, and thought he makes an interesting case for reflecting on one’s on views of torture. Here we have a man who is a US citizen, and who was raised right here in the United States. Padilla is a career criminal who ran off to Egypt in 1998 to become a terrorist and came back to America last year with $10,000 in cash and a plan to set off a dirty bomb. Despite the fact that Padilla is still being held in custody with no access to an attorney nor any hope of even being charged with a crime as an “enemy combatant,” we learned not long after his arrest that his steps to commit a terrorist act didn’t go much beyond coming up with an idea for doing so. At the time, though, people were pretty scared of Padilla, mainly because John Ashcroft appeared on TV to feed us a line about how important it was that we had captured Padilla a month earlier.

Would it have been right to torture Padilla at the time of his capture? If you’re pro-torture and your answer is no, I’d love to know why.

It looks like Iran is the latest country to pull the old uranium/plutonium trick on the rest of the world. Iran has been under pressure for building a nuclear power plant (with Russian help) that produces nuclear waste that can be turned into weapons grade plutonium. In the meantime, they’re almost up to speed with a uranium enrichment program that will produce material for nuclear weapons as well. Should we start calling this the North Korea gambit? I also wonder if Pakistan supplied them with the technology for uranium enrichment just like Sy Hersh says they did for North Korea.

Good news about the Michael Savage show: apparently it sucks. As in, it’s bad television. The fact that NBC felt that in order to be competitive with the scumbags at Fox News, they had to kneel down and scrape up the worst kind of bigoted sleaze out of the bottom of the opportunistic, attention starved, money grubbing, blab for cash conservative crap bucket is bad enough, the fact that the person they chose to do so is not even cut out to attract viewers is worse. By the way, Salon’s bio piece on Savage is not to be missed.

Josh Marshall, who has in many ways been the best of the war liberals in terms of arguing in favor of a military solution to the Iraq problem, has changed his mind. His reasons are worth reading. Like Marshall and many other liberals, I have felt that we may not have a choice other than to go to war with Iraq at some point. My problem with the pure anti-war argument is that our current relationship with Iraq is incredibly unstable. There’s no doubting that the sanctions regime has resulted in cruel circumstances for the Iraqi people, regardless of whose fault that is. There’s also no doubt that enforcing the no fly zones is the only thing that has kept Saddam Hussein from crushing the life out of the very encouraging political development in Northern Iraq among the Kurds. We also know for sure that if Iraq becomes a nuclear power, they will instantly become a far more dangerous version of North Korea. Just as war has consequences, so too does continuing the status quo, or unilaterally disengaging. I don’t know that the right answer is at this point, but I believe that given the Bush administration’s aims, they’ve worked toward achieving those aims in the least effective way imaginable.

Cameron Barrett is back from hiatus and has returned with a bang, expressing his disenchantment with the current state of the United States. Personally, I have no desire to make another country my home (although I wouldn’t mind spending six months or a year overseas for the experience of it), and I believe that people are still clamoring to get into the United States in spite of the current administration and the fact that our economy is in the gutter. What I want to point out is that I admire Cam’s courage in writing what he wrote. It was bound to be unpopular, and to attract unreasoned comments and personal insults. He published it anyway.

In response to a request by a journalist asking when designers of online news sites should abandon other browsers and focus on Internet Explorer, Adrian Holovaty penned a letter standing up for coding to standards. Isn’t coding just to IE so much yesterday’s idea? I didn’t think anyone still spoke of that as a plausible strategy outside the context of an Intranet. Anyway, the deal here is that the piece should probably be written by Adrian rather than Staci, because the odds are great that he knows a heck of a lot more about designing news sites (and explaining how to design them) than she ever will.

Lots of people are discussing torture on their weblogs in light of the capture of Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and the possible capture of Osama Bin Laden. I wrote a long post about torture this morning, thought I’d hit the “publish” button, and found out differently later. Suffice it to say that I oppose torture unequivocally. In the end, ceding to government the right to torture people is ceding them the right to do basically anything. Every government that has ever tortured people did so because they needed to protect the people from danger. The problem is that when people are taken to secret locations, tortured in unmentioned ways, and then the information they provide is kept confidential, government is held to no standard of accountability. And, to put it bluntly, when you condone torture you turn people into torturers, not just the people whose job it is to inflict pain on others, but everyone above them who approves the use of violence against helpless people. That doesn’t have a salutary effect on society, due to cognitive dissonance if nothing else.

Warren Buffett, perhaps the most successful businessman alive today, has made a fortune without engaging in any of the shenanigans and impropriety that have ruined everyone’s confidence in corporate accountability. And every year, when he reports on Berkshire Hathaway’s results, he gives his opinion of the overall business climate. This year, he savaged directors who give CEOs huge bags of loot for mediocre (or downright atrocious) performance and generally don’t provide adequate representation of shareholders, and management teams that are dishonest or incompetent. I have huge piles of seething resentment for the worthless incompetent thieves who run most corporations, but I don’t begrudge Buffett one bit of his wealth. Personally, I think the key to his success has been his ability to be honest with himself and with his shareholders when managing Berkshire Hathaway, and by having the self discipline to ignore pretty much every fad that’s come along over the course of his career.