Dahlia Lithwick and Phillipe Sands write about how the Susan Crawford interview from today’s Washington Post changes the debate about torture. We now have a Pentagon employee stating unequivocally that the United States tortured a detainee, and that torture has prevented us from being able to mount a successful prosecution for his crimes. Now the question is what the Obama administration will do about it.
My friend Andrew Brown on cats (and fishing):
When you think about it, kittens make an extraordinary animal to choose as an example of ethics. We only think they are cuddly because we are so very much larger than they are. If mice or birds could talk, their word for “kitten” would describe a monster of wanton cruelty: an animal which plays with its victims in a way that not even humans do. Fish are cannibals who will eat their own children with as little compassion as any others. They will even eat their own body parts – as a boy, I caught a perch on its own eyeball. They will sometimes kill for the sheer lust of it, as when trout corner a shoal of fry and charge through them repeatedly, leaving the surface littered with dying, crippled victims.
But no fish, not even pike, are ever half as cruel as kittens are almost all the time.
I’ve been convinced for some time that jQuery is the best JavaScript library around. What I am coming to realize is that it’s also one of the best-run open source projects around as well. jQuery 1.3 (released today) has a new selector engine, a key component of any modern JavaScript library. To encourage other projects to adopt their selector engine, the jQuery project has turned it over to the Dojo Foundation, which currently manages the Dojo Toolkit, a jQuery competitor:
More importantly, though, we’re taking a big leap with Sizzle: We’re releasing it as a completely standalone project to be collaborated upon by many library creators and developers. We saw an opportunity to give something back to not just the jQuery community but to the JavaScript development community as a whole; and at the same time be able to collaborate with developers of other libraries on a single, unified, selector engine. We feel that there’s too much competition and not enough collaboration occurring and so we put our coud out on the line as a good first step towards working together.
As a sign of good faith and willingness to collaborate, we’ve turned over Sizzle to the Dojo Foundation (an excellent non-profit well suited for this project, not to be confused with the Dojo Toolkit). We wanted a common meeting ground where all developers would be able to work together and under which there would be a clear long-term copyright holder.
Good things happen to those who blog (well). Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok and fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver will be panel members at TED 2009. One-time hobbyist fashion photographer The Sartorialist has gotten a major book deal. Obviously blogging is this big huge industry now full of professional writers, journalists, and celebrities, but the people who started out doing this for love and made it big will always have a special place in my heart. The people who publish their thoughts and remain relatively unknown do as well.
Ron Rosenbaum in Slate:
In the case of the Letter of Last Resort, the reference turns out to be factual: At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.”
The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub’s missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister’s posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.
Jay Rosen on the role the Internet plays in the media sphere:
Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized—meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.
In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the “echo chamber,” which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what’s really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.
If there’s anything I’ll miss about the Bush administration, it’s Dan Froomkin’s coverage of the White House. Today, he analyzes President George W Bush’s final press conference.
I understand Froomkin will remain on the job, covering the Obama White House as well. Hopefully he’ll not be forced to spend as much space as he does now correcting the White House’s misrepresentations.
The Daily Beast has a list of anonymous college admissions administrators discussing the criteria they apply to winnow out applicants. Let’s face it, our cultural fixation on merit is quaint at best.
Back in May I mentioned that Porsche is more a hedge fund than a car company. Little did I know that Porsche is actually a hedge fund that kills. That link is to a great explanation of how Porsche acquired Volkswagen and managed to earn billions of euros playing the financial markets in the process.
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The ticking time bomb
The New York Times asked a number of big name lawyers to suggest questions for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s confirmation hearings. UCLA professor and right wing blogger Eugene Volokh offers this question:
I’m going to go ahead and answer this for Holder. Hopefully he reads my blog.
The correct answer is to reject the hypothetical. First of all, I don’t know that the “ticking time bomb” scenario has ever occurred in the history of our nation. Let’s say that we do have special rules for dealing with terrorists in a ticking time bomb scenario. How do we apply these rules.
Not only must we capture a terrorist, but we must already have reason to suspect that the terrorist has sufficient knowledge of an impending attack. When does this actually happen? It’s far more likely that authorities attempt to invoke the time bomb rules whenever they capture a suspected terrorist and wind up subjecting them all to the “time bomb” treatment.
Chances are we will never have both the right captive and the knowledge we need to know that we have the right captive. In the end you wind up torturing all sorts of people, just as we do today. (Make no mistake, the essence of Volokh’s question is to see if he can get Holder to agree that torture is necessary in some cases.)
Here’s the real point, though. Let’s assume that we have captured a terrorist who has operational knowledge of an impending attack, and that we know this terrorist has such knowledge. So the task is to somehow get this terrorist to disclose what he knows, enabling us to prevent the attack.
In this situation, it does not matter what the terrorist says. They only need to buy time for the people who will be executing the attack. I learned this on an episode of 24.
In one episode, Jack Bauer captured a terrorist who knew about an attack that would occur at the top of the next hour. With 10 minutes left, he shot the guy in the leg, and he immediately spilled his guts. For some reason, he told the truth. But given that he only had to stall for 10 minutes to enable the attack to be launched successfully, he could just as easily have lied.
So I would propose that for any time frame short enough to qualify for the “time bomb” scenario, it is impossible to extract truthful information from all but the dumbest terrorists, regardless of the means used.
Ignore the question.
Update: Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn (this idiot) asked Eric Holder this question today. I’ll post the transcript when it’s available.
Update II: Here’s the transcript and video of Cornyn presenting his hypothetical to Holder.