As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy’s father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door.
The numbers being repeatedly cited over the past week about the number of former Guantanamo detainees who have “returned to the battlefield” are, in all likelihood, total speculation. It’s propaganda. Don’t believe it.
These men were captured under various circumstances, held at Guantanamo Bay without charge, and then released without ever having been charged with any crime.
Tim Bray: Ravelry. Tim interviews Casey Forbes, the tech guy behind Ravelry, a site for knitting enthusiasts and covers everything from bootstrapping a business to scaling Ruby on Rails.
Hanan Cohen: Spoken Directions to Web Content (aka “Go to page number”). A good, simple idea for improving Web site usability. This approach could also be extended to create a spoken instructions/shortened URL hybrid service for a site.
The Washington Post ran only Dick Cheney could love on the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed today. There’s pushback everywhere. Here’s Andrew Sullivan. Here’s former CIA agent Melvin Goodman. Here’s Glenn Greenwald. Oh, and here’s KSM on the lies he told under torture. Everybody who feels torture was justified is going to be talking about this article next week, may as well be ready.
Here’s a list of the preinstalled versions of the Web stack on Snow Leopard. I was a bit surprised at some of the changes in PHP 5.3.
Nefarious idea of the day: requiring users to view and regurgitate an ad to prove that they’re human. (Microsoft has applied for a patent on this approach.)
Frank Bruni’s final column as the New York Times restaurant critic. I loved his advice for navigating a menu, which ends with, “Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil. Choose among the remaining dishes.”
By way of the Footnotes of Mad Men, a newsreel from the 1964 World’s Fair. Worth watching for the explanation of computers alone.
Andrew Sullivan on the American way of torture. I’m just going to keep linking to this stuff until I stop encountering people who believe that the way we have treated detainees does not constitute torture.
Hypocrisy watch: we send Bill Clinton to North Korea to retrieve US journalists who have been unjustly imprisoned, and we also imprison Iraqi journalists without charging them with any crimes.
Today’s compromise is tomorrow’s landmark legislation. Let’s pass a health care reform bill.
Ted Kennedy was the first member of Congress with an official Web site.
Glenn Greenwald on what all Americans should know about the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report that was released on Monday.
Alex Tabarrok (the more doctrinaire libertarian half of the team at Marginal Revolution) explains why you must have a public option if health care reform will include an individual mandate. Further proof that I was completely wrong in arguing that the public option is not necessary.
Spencer Ackerman explains the insidiousness of torture — once you’ve embarked on a program of torture, the logical response to not getting the information you expect is to order more torture.
If you’re trying to embed Google Maps in your Web site and want to start with a centered map of the United States, Lebanon, Kansas is the spot.
Today I was trying to come up with good ways to avoid mixing JavaScript code with PHP code. Here’s a Stack Overflow question on the topic. I almost wonder whether using AJAX is better than writing PHP that emits JavaScript.
Glenn Greenwald: The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture. In the discussions of torture, the number of people who were waterboarded is discussed frequently, the number of people in US custody who have died almost never is.
The Obama administration is withholding federal money promised to Mexico for fighting drug trafficking because authorities in Mexico torture suspects. As you might imagine, the Mexican government sees this as hypocrisy.
Change.org: Why I Choose Streets Over Shelter. A homeless person explains why one might rationally choose sleeping on the street over going to a homeless shelter.
Matthew Yglesias: China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software. Really smart comments. China’s market power is such that they can demand concessions to authoritarian censorship that other countries cannot. However, those other countries can then take advantage of the anti-liberty “features” that were created for China’s government.
Tim Bray: On Carving Your Initials. More engineers should be invited to give commencement speeches.
James Fallows: Departing questions. A comparison of the rendering of Beijing’s CCTV tower and what was actually built. The concept is much more impressive than the execution.