Eliot of Follow Me Here responds to my item on Ted Rall yesterday. Suffice it to say that I agree with Eliot’s post and I don’t agree with Rall’s cartoon — he’s giving Rall way, way too much credit. In reading the cartoon, I don’t get that Rall is using Tillman as a symbol for the young American taken in by the rhetoric of the day at all. Maybe that was his intention, but he failed if it was.

Oh, and one other thing. Rall is a straight up liar. In his article he protrays a US general as saying, “We’re attacking Afghanistan to get al-Qaeda, which is based in Pakistan and funded by Saudi Arabia.” I’m disgusted by the lies on the pro-war front, but this is just as stupid a lie. Rall may hate how we conducted the war in Afghanistan, or that we even attacked Afghanistan, but to pretend like Afghanistan wasn’t the home base of al-Qaeda and that they didn’t have a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban is just blatant dishonesty.

For more on Pat Tillman the actual person, check out this article.

One of the most troubling aspects of the ongoing controversy of Abu Ghraib is the idea that it was somehow the work of a few bad apples at the prison. The idea is to give cover to our military and political leadership — if it’s just a few bad apples, then certainly they couldn’t have been expected to foresee that we’d be having these sorts of problems. Leaving aside the fact that it is almost certain at this point that the guards were ordered to abuse the prisoners, and that the form of abuse seems to have been designed to maximally humiliate the prisoners, we have the problem of running prisons in general.

I’ve mentioned the Stanford Prison Experiment before, but it bears pointing out again in the context of Abu Ghraib. Even in an experimental context where prisoners and guards were chosen at random, the subjects of the experiment developed a relationship where the guards abused the prisoners, and that experiment lasted only a few days.

For further reference, check out Ted Conover’s book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which describes a year spent as a guard at New York’s Sing Sing prison. The author is a journalist who wanted to report on what goes on inside Sing Sing, who got a job as a prison guard after finding himself unable to gain access to the prison in any other way. In it, Conover describes the relationship between guards and prisoners and the dehumanizing effect of prisons on guards as well as inmates.

When you mix in the fact that in the case of Abu Ghraib, the staff of the prison is made up by people who don’t even share a common language with the prisoners, it becomes that much easier for the guards to see the inmates as subhuman. You can also add in the fact that the prison guards certainly see their jobs as temporary. Survive the rotation, and you get to go home. These factors all but guarantee the brutal suppression of prisoners.

The other problem here is that the purpose of Abu Ghraib went beyond the standard role of prisons in our criminal justice system. Many of the detainees are not there to pay for crimes, but rather to be interrogated for intelligence purposes. When you consider that the people in charge of interrogation see prohibitions on torture as problems to be routed around rather than basic guarantees of human rights, you have a recipe for disaster.

This goes back to the ongoing complaints about extraordinary rendition, the policy of turning suspected terrorists (innocent or not) over to foreign governments that aren’t as squeamish about torture as we are. In many cases, these suspects are interrogated with US intelligence agents present, despite the fact that the interrogation techniques used would not pass muster in the United States. Is it any surprise that these same people, when working abroad, preside over an environment where torture and abuse are systemic? It seems like a small step to me.

If we want to deal with the problems at Abu Ghraib, we need to confront the fact that these abuses weren’t an anomoly, they were all but inevitable. Giving the government the benefit of the doubt on this when there’s a profession of surprise and outrage is a big mistake.

Update: It looks like no charges will be pressed against the contractors partially responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Christopher Hitchens has a piece on the torturers at Abu Ghraib today, and he does righteous anger as well as anyone. Then he takes on the subject of Ahmed Chalabi and reveals his weaknesses as an analyst:

It’s a change, though, from the authorized smear and jeer of last year, which was that Chalabi was an American puppet.

The problem with Chalabi has never been that he was an American puppet, the problem is that he’s power hungry and dishonest, and that the neocons believed him when he led them to believe that he was an American puppet. He has proven over the years to be perfectly willing to sidle up to anyone who can help hin attain his aspirations, whether it’s out of power Iraq hawks at think tanks, New York Times “journalists,” the government of the United States, the government of Iran, or the Shiite leadership in Iraq. I find it odd that Hitchens would cast his ideological lot with Chalabi.

So, (blogging) Roller is now deployed at Sun and people are using it. Something to pay attention to.

Alex Tabarrok offers a bit of sobriety on the issue of whether or not the United States is losing its dominance in the world of scientific advancement.

I want to talk about Ted Rall’s latest effort, not because I want to join the huge chorus of people who love to bash Ted Rall, but rather because I want to bash cynicism. Rall’s cartoon, if you haven’t yet seen it, says that Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who joined the Army in 2002, is basically an idiot who made the fatal mistake of choosing to serve in the military because he believed our lying President. In four short panels, he manages to accuse Tillman of racism as well. Rall’s cartoon isn’t funny — Rall is rarely funny — but it also fails even to serve as pointed commentary. You don’t have to be a very good cynic to come up with ways to disparage Pat Tillman; honestly when I heard that he’d joined the Army a couple of years ago, and again when I heard that he’d died, the bad reasons he might have joined came to mind only a few seconds after the good reasons he might have joined. Ultimately, we have no way of knowing what motivated Tillman to enlist. Any of us can imagine impure motives that may have led to him doing so — it doesn’t behoove us to callously point them out. Sometimes saying things that most people keep to themselves doesn’t make you courageous or iconoclastic, it makes you an ass.

I think that Teresa Nielsen-Hayden’s post on the current situation in Iraq comes pretty close to arriving at the bottom line.

In the open source world, the old saying is something like, “Given thousands of eyes, all bugs are shallow.” A similar truth holds for the blogosphere. A reader of Billmon’s weblog discovered an online diary from a contractor at Abu Ghraib (the prison in Iraq where American soldiers tortured prisoners, perhaps at the behest of intelligence agencies and civilian contractors). That diary mentioned the name of another contractor at the prison, which was noteworthy in that an Army general investigating abuses at the camp had recommended that he be fired two months before he was mentioned in the journal. The story that the abuse was the work of a few, low ranking bad eggs is just BS. Details here. Anyway, without the huge horde of webloggers, and commenters on weblogs, this story would not have broken, at least not as soon as it did.

I’ve held Sun in somewhat low regard for a long time, since before Java was even introduced. I’m eager for Sun to succeed for various reasons, but overall, I’ve lacked confidence in the company, due in no small part to Scott McNealy’s fixation on Microsoft and his sophomoric comments over the years. Anyway, I’ve been shocked at how quickly my perception of Sun has changed since they hired Tim Bray. First of all, the simple fact that they hired him showed a greater level of cluefulness than I would have given them credit for, and second, the things he’s said about Sun since he was hired inspire confidence. At a time when some people are calling on Sun to simply shut its doors, having a guy on the inside talk about the good things going on at the company is extremely valuable.