Kevin Drum has a post today on torture at Camp X-Ray, which was taped. Here’s the thing. Right after 9/11, the White House told us they were going to do a bunch of nonstandard stuff, outside the bounds of international law, like imprison “unlawful combatants” that we captured in Afghanistan far from their homes in Cuba, provide them with no legal representation, try them in secret military courts, and generally create a parallel legal system that would probably be most at home in an autocratic country run by a dictator. Most people who care about human rights were opposed to all of this, but the bottom line is that by doing all this, they implicitly took on the challenge of doing it while maintaining what we like to think of as “American values.” They didn’t. Not only didn’t they, but they tainted other operations with the horrible, illegal tactics that they came up with that were originally supposed to be just for terrorists. I think that at this point, the secret tribunals for terrorists should be completely off the table. Every other phase of this program has been proven to be tainted, why should we let this program to continue? The Bush administration asked for special privileges, and they blew it. Period. We can’t trust them. Some people knew it all along, but anyone who still trusts them to safeguard the constitution at this point is in denial.

The new New Yorker article from Sy Hersh describing the genesis of the torture program at Abu Ghraib and other American detention facilities is a must read. In it he discusses how the program was specially designed to exploit Arab and Muslim mores. As soon as I heard about the pictures that were released initially, I knew that the torture program wasn’t a bright idea arrived at by a bunch of reservist MPs because the nature of the torture was so perfectly targetted. And it wasn’t just the sexual humiliation that clued me in, it was the heavy use of dogs. My next door neighbors are, as I’ve mentioned before, Muslim Arabs. They consider dogs to be impure animals, and because of their lack of experience with dogs, they’re also afraid of them (even goofy, harmless looking dogs). I would guarantee that whoever suggested bringing the dogs into the prison knew just what sort of effect that would have.

Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow loves her iPod a bit too much.

The New York Times has an article on the pschology of conformity and the forces that lead people to participate in wrongdoing and what leads them to reject it and blow the whistle. Interesting stuff.

I’m glad I’m not invested in the argument over Movable Type’s new licensing terms at all, having written my own craptastic weblog software before Movable Type, Blogger, or any other package besides Radio Userland even existed. I read Jason Kottke’s post supporting the new licensing, and thought, that makes sense to me. (Even Kottke says he’s not sure which license category he fits into.) Then I read Ginger Stampley’s real world problems with the licensing terms, and they made sense to me as well. I guess the bottom line is that Six Apart had to make some pricing changes to grow their business, and there’s no way you can do something like this and not screw things up for some of your customers. If they’re smart, they’ll consider the feedback they’re getting and figure out how whether they can mend fences with some of their existing user base.

It strikes me that a lot of this is just inevitable when you’re growing a business. If Six Apart is going to provide a return on the venture capital that they’ve accepted, they have to grow their revenue base a lot, and the way to do that is to sign up bunches of new customers at a reasonable price. Keeping the current base of grumpy customers is less important. I heard on the radio this morning that Rockingham, North Carolina and Darlington, South Carolina are losing Nextel Series NASCAR races (the Nextel Series is the big leagues of NASCAR), leaving Rockingham without a race altogether.

I’m not a NASCAR fan but I do live in North Carolina, so I know how big NASCAR is here. It’s hugely popular, and more than that, this is NASCAR’s home turf. However, with their growing national fan base, they’re finding it expedient to dump the small towns around here and move races to big cities all over the country — that’s where the money is. The races around here draw crowds just as big as they’ll draw anywhere else, but there’s TV, and merchandising, and all that stuff to consider as well. Anyway, my point is that the local NASCAR diehards are sort of like the existing Movable Type user base. There’s no doubt that the people who looked forward to the local races are infuriated by the fact that those races are just going away. From a business perspective, though, the best way to make more money is to go nationwide.

I guess the short story is that paralysis in the face of pissing off old customers is often a surefire way to prevent a business from growing. Hopefully, Six Apart can mend fences with the user base, but even if they can’t, the disgruntled folks will probably find some product that does please them, and Six Apart will probably succeed as well. That’s business.

The horror of Nick Berg’s beheading is perhaps best expressed in the bizarre conspiracy theories that people are taking solace in to convince themselves that he wasn’t just a random victom of brutality and hate. Within the past 24 hours, I’ve witnessed a discussion among left leaning people who are speculating on whether or not the execution was somehow staged to distract the American people from the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. I could try to explain these theories, but I honestly don’t understand them. By the same token, this morning I heard people talking about how Berg was perhaps an al-Qaeda sympathizer who was executed because he made the mistake of trusting the terrorists. I have no idea whether there’s any truth to these theories, but I suspect that the people who are coming up with them don’t know either. Apparently the idea that Nick Berg was what people said he was, a businessman who was on his way out of Iraq when he was abducted by terrorists, is just too much to take.

When I initially saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib, the Stanford Prison Experiment immediately popped into my head. In fact, I think the first item I posted about the pictures linked to the web site that documents that experiment. Yesterday, Slate’s William Saletan wrote a piece explaining how the Abu Ghraib situation differs from the experiment and more importantly why the abuse can’t be dismissed based on the nature of the situation. The Stanford Prison Experiment is instructive, but there’s a lot more to the story.

As you probably know, I’ve experimented with just about every news reader that will run on a Windows box, and more than one server hosted RSS reader as well. (I even used the old Netscape news reader that was part of My Netscape back in the day.) Anyway, after a couple of months with Feed on Feeds, which I really like, I’m considering wholesale migration to Bloglines.

Feed on Feeds is simple, and great, and completely under my control. The problem is that my subscriptions list has gotten rather large, and it takes about 10 minutes to update during the day. The problem is that Feed on Feeds doesn’t have a no-brainer way to mark items read and unread, so what I usually do is update everything, read it all, and then mark all the new items as read. If I set things up so that the feeds were updated in the background via a cron job, it would be a pain to keep track of what I have and haven’t read. Bloglines handles all of this a bit more elegantly.

The Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit is another compelling reason to think about switching to Bloglines. For now, I’ve moved all of my baseball-related subscriptions to Bloglines, and I’m trying that out. (Yes, I subscribe to lots of baseball-specific blogs.) If all goes well, I’ll switch over all my subscriptions.

So the scales have fallen from Tom Friedman’s eyes (to use a Biblical reference that President Bush might appreciate). I’m not sure whether to congratulate him for figuring out what I’ve known since Bush was inaugurated in 2001 or weep for all of the disinformation he’s helped spread in his ongoing role as cheerleader for the Bush administration’s misbegotten foreign policy.

Apparently the CIA has been torturing al-Qaeda leaders. It’s all OK, though, because they say that the torture isn’t torture.